Department biomedical engineering

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.

Tara Alvarez, a professor of biomedical engineering who studies the links between visual disorders and the brain and develops novel devices to identify and treat them, has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Optometry (AAO).

Kamela Chandrika, a soft-spoken third-year biomedical engineering major, remembers some of the challenges she faced during her first days at NJIT — like going to the Bursar’s Office to pay her tuition bill, but not knowing how to fill out a check.

One of the enduring puzzles of hearing loss is the decline in a person’s ability to determine where a sound originates, a key survival faculty that allows animals – from lizards to humans – to pinpoint the location of danger, prey and group members. In modern times, finding a lost cell phone by using the application "Find My Device,” just to find it had slipped under a sofa pillow, relies on minute differences in the ringing sound that reaches the ears.

A blow to the head or powerful shock wave on the battlefield can cause immediate, significant damage to a person’s skull and the tissue beneath it. But the trauma does not stop there. The impact sets off a chemical reaction in the brain that ravages neurons and the networks that supply them with nutrients and oxygen.

One is studying computer science at NJIT, the other biomedical engineering, but they both join the university as Mayor’s Honors Scholars.

A five-woman team of undergraduate engineering students is tackling a problem experienced by a diverse and growing population: balance instability. For the elderly, people recovering from strokes and accidents or those living with disorders that affect movement, such as Parkinson’s disease, falls present the risk of grave injury.

With funding from the Hearst Foundations, the team is taking aim at the mechanics that lie at the heart of the problem, determining with precision – and on a step-by-step basis – when, where and how an individual loses stability.

Stephanie Iring grew up in a working-class community in New Jersey, where, she says, social status and educational inequality were closely related and opportunities for success were limited.

Last year, a vision therapy device invented at NJIT with potential as a biomarker for concussion was recognized as “most innovative breakthrough” at the Augmented World Expo Europe.

A campus-based health care startup with a device that employs virtual reality gaming to correct a vision dysfunction – technology designed and developed by a professor and a team of students, now alumni, in a biomedical engineering lab at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) – has received a $500,000 commitment from Foundation Venture Capital Group, LLC, an affiliate of New Jersey Health Foundation (NJHF).