New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) hosted the second annual Nexus of Excellence Awards Oct. 8 in the Campus Center Atrium, celebrating the university’s faculty and staff whose achievements exemplify NJIT’s mission and values.

Building on last year’s inaugural ceremony, the 2025 event recognized honorees across categories that reflect NJIT’s Innovation Nexus 2030 Strategic Plan — spanning excellence in teaching, advising, mentoring, research, diversity and community engagement.

Girlhacks 2025 continued its legacy of providing a place for women and non-binary students in technology to take the lead in bringing ideation to realization through its annual 24-hour Major League Hacking (MLH) sanctioned hackathon where everyone — including the men — are invited to compete.

Assistant Professor Shantanu Sharma and Ph.D. student Komal Kumari in the Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Computer Science have devised a solution to secure document systems beyond standard encryption. The research has been published in VLDB Conference (Very Large Data Bases), a premier forum for data management, scalable data science, and database researchers.