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.

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.

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).

Whether they’ll be soaking up cultures abroad in the coming year or advancing research in science, health care and other fields, all of the NJIT students receiving prominent and highly competitive scholarships and fellowships in 2019 are, in a word, impressive. In fact, two university records were achieved: For the first time, an NJIT student earned the David L.