College science and liberal arts csla

Undergrad Aiden Finley Lim ’29 woke up the morning after participating in the nation’s toughest undergraduate math competition with a number stuck in his head — one that, as it turned out, he would surpass on his way into NJIT record books.

Lim, a mechanical engineering major in the Albert Dorman Honors College with a minor in applied mathematics, entered the 86th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition back in December — a six-hour exam widely regarded as the most daunting collegiate math contest in North America.

As baseball fans celebrated Opening Day, one NJIT mathematician has already played out the entire 2026 season — on paper.

Bruce Bukiet, a mathematics professor in NJIT's College of Science and Liberal Arts, has released his annual statistical projections for Major League Baseball's 162-game regular season, a tradition he has maintained since 1998. Nearly three decades in, the model remains as sharp as ever.

If you wanted to see how AI and research across the humanities and sciences are reshaping each other in real time, NJIT’s Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts (HCSLA) offered a front-row seat during the university’s first AI Exploration Day.

The all-day AI takeover of campus highlighted the college’s diverse faculty and student research — covering everything from what the future holds for ethical AI design and robotics, to the latest AI-assisted efforts to alert Earth of eruptions on the Sun.

A student proposal focused on restoring biodiversity, strengthening the Second River edge and deepening community engagement at Branch Brook Park was selected as the winning concept in NJIT’s latest Albert Dorman Honors College biodiversity initiative. 

The proposal, “Living Parks by Parks for People,” emerged from a presentation session in which six student teams each delivered five-minute proposals shaped by field research, biodiversity data and conversations with park visitors.

In an analysis of nearly three decades of solar acoustic data, NJIT physicists report evidence that the solar dynamo — the magnetic engine powering the Sun’s 11-year cycles and eruptive events — operates nearly 200,000 kilometers beneath the Sun’s surface.

Every eleven years, the Sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots — dark, cooler regions on the Sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions —appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a butterfly-shape pattern before fading as the cycle resets.

On a normal day, Trooper Zoe Welch ’24 pulls out of her station and steers her cruiser along the pine-lined highways and backroads cutting through southern New Jersey. For Welch, it’s a routine patrol — but also a very different path from NJIT peers who graduated with STEM degrees alongside her just over a year ago.

In fact, Welch is the first graduate of NJIT’s forensic science program to join the exclusive ranks of New Jersey’s State Police.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named two NJIT faculty members — Cesar Bandera, master teacher and Leir Endowed Chair for Entrepreneurship, and Sara Zapico, assistant professor of forensic science — to the 2026 class of Senior Members. They are among 230 emerging academic inventors from 82 member institutions selected for demonstrated success in producing technologies that have been patented, licensed, commercialized, or possess strong potential for real-world impact. 

Richard Calbi, director of Ridgewood Water, was astonished to discover the extent of PFAS contamination in New Jersey drinking water when the state adopted pollution standards for the industrial chemicals in 2020. 

“The first thing we did was determine if we were affected and found them in every one of our 52 groundwater wells. We couldn’t find water to buy that didn’t have PFAS in it. We had to reimagine and rebuild our entire system to accommodate new filters,” Calbi said. 

From Leonardo da Vinci to Nam Jun Paik to Lillian Schwartz, art and technology have a long and intertwined relationship. Beginning in spring 2026, all NJIT students will have the opportunity to explore this productive feedback loop.

Solar physicists say they have found a key source of intense gamma rays unleashed when Earth’s nearest star produces its most violent eruptions.