Tulika Das, a biomedical engineer who aspires to discover new treatments for traumatic brain injury, confronted her own health care conundrum this summer just as she was making the leap from master’s to doctoral student: She lost her job in the pandemic-driven shutdown, landed in the hospital after suffering an allergic reaction and found herself short of funds to cover her co-payment.
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.
As it embarks on clinical trials at children’s hospitals across the country, a novel vision therapy device developed by NJIT engineers is generating streams of data on eye movements in need of rapid and precise analysis. Enter Ayushi Sangoi ’20*, coder par excellence, to the algorithmic rescue.
In 2019, Owais Aftab was in search of a summer research project to meet his degree requirements for independent study. The biomedical engineering/pre-health Albert Dorman Honors College scholar, then a first-year student, found what he was looking for after a conversation with one of his teachers, John Vito d'Antonio-Bertagnolli ’16, M.S. ’17.
Footage of emergency room workers managing overflow crowds of gravely sick patients with deftness, humanity and visible emotion has been nightly, gut-wrenching viewing for millions of Americans over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For senior Soojin Kim, those often-harrowing scenes prompted one thought: “I’m in.”
For the students behind The CommonHealth Project — a collaborative, community-based initiative aimed at rallying volunteers for production and distribution of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) — the pandemic is deeply personal. Mark Pothen ’22, a mechanical engineering major at NJIT, for example, hears stories from his mother, a physician working on the front line at Mountainside Hospital.
After a table saw severed the top of his right index finger, Adam Zanellato, a 20-year-old cabinet-maker at the time, had to relearn basic hand maneuvers, such as how to write and hold a fork. There were no affordable prosthetics on the market to help him regain dexterity. Several years later, he still found it hard to pick up coins from a table.
New Jersey Institute of Technology is one of the nation’s best colleges for students seeking a superb education with great career preparation and at an affordable price, according to The Princeton Review®.
The education services company profiles NJIT in the recently published 2020 edition of its annual guide, The Best Value Colleges. In order to make the list, institutions must demonstrate a stellar academic program and affordability, and offer strong opportunities for career prospects after graduation. A return on an academic investment is a highly sought-after quality.
To say that third-year biomedical engineering major Juliana Yang is busy is an understatement. In addition to staying on top of her course work, the Albert Dorman Honors College student is director of public relations for the university’s Student Senate, academic chair of the Beta Eta Chapter of Delta Phi Epsilon and publications coordinator at the Office of Student Life.
Sagnik Basuray is developing a device the size of a dollar coin that will detect cancer biomarkers in patients in remission by sampling a tiny drop of blood with a dip stick. His sensor is groundbreaking not only in its simplicity, but also in its portability. It’s meant to be used at home.
