Matthew Cherrey never traveled overseas — no high school trip to Europe, no semester abroad as an undergrad, no spring breaks in exotic, far away locales — but he always wanted to do so, particularly to Germany where his family has roots. Now he's getting an opportunity, representing NJIT next year as a Fulbright Research Award Scholar.

As students return to campus this fall, NJIT and universities around the country face the challenge of adhering to COVID-19 preventative measures such as social distancing and mask use, while also maximizing the usage of the available resources and learning spaces on campus. One of the techniques deployed at NJIT is converged learning, where only a fraction of the students enrolled in a course are physically present in a classroom while the remainder participate online.

Voluminous amounts of data can be overwhelming to even the most experienced professional. That was the experience of Roberto Rivera, a senior research analyst with NJ TRANSIT. Spending his days immersed in large data sets, Roberto realized that continuing his education would provide him with additional skills and training to help him manage the increasingly data-intensive nature of his work.

Communicating by sound underwater works great for dolphins and whales, so an NJIT expert decided to try a new variant of this method for autonomous vehicles, divers and sensors, too.

Radio signals used by traditional wireless devices become too weak underwater, explained Ali Abdi, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Advanced Communication and Signal Processing Laboratory, in NJIT’s Center for Wireless Information Processing.

A team of researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed an algorithm through machine learning that helps predict sites of DNA methylation – a process that can change the activity of DNA without changing its overall structure – and could identify disease-causing mechanisms that would otherwise be missed by conventional screening methods.

The paper was published online by the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.