Department of Biomedical Engineering

Machine Learning Method Finds Therapeutic Targets in Pediatric Genome

Thursday, August 6, 2020
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. DNA methylation is involved in many key cellular processes and is an important component in gene...

Students' Research Project Becomes Award-Winning Device at UPitch Contest

Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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. D’Antonio-Bertagnolli introduced Aftab to Antje Ihlefeld, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and director of NJIT’s Neural Engineering for Speech and Hearing Laboratory, who had a project involving a screening device focused on auditory...

Senior Success: Coder Ayushi Sangoi is Also the Class of 2020's Outstanding Engineer

Wednesday, June 10, 2020
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. As a senior capstone project, Sangoi and her teammates designed an automated eye movement analysis program called RETINAS to process the blinks, saccades (rapid, jerky motions) and vergent movements (coordinated action by both eyes to focus on near objects) the study participants produce....

Senior Success: Amid Pandemic, Soojin Kim Declares She's All In for Emergency Medicine

Monday, June 1, 2020
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.” “I wish I could have been a first-year resident going into one of those hospitals. To be able to help out so much, I gladly would have done it,” said Kim, a biomedical engineering major who heads to Rowan University’s Cooper Medical School this fall, where she plans to...

Students' Unique Platform for Face-Shield Production Hits Close to Home

Friday, May 15, 2020
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. Adé Kolade ’23, an Honors scholar who is studying electrical engineering, is the son of a doctor and a public health nurse-turned nursing professor. And Ruth Fiore ’21, a biomedical...

An Amputee Acquires a Prosthetic Finger From an NJIT Capstone Team

Friday, March 20, 2020
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. A year and a half ago, he decided to restart his search, and began by contacting a friend in medical school for leads. The woman, an NJIT graduate, made this recommendation: present himself as a research project to students in...

Princeton Review Ranks NJIT Among Top Schools with 'the Best ROI'

Tuesday, February 4, 2020
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. “An NJIT...

Juliana Yang Joins the Newest Class of Governor's STEM Scholars

Friday, December 13, 2019
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. She also is a peer tutor in the Writing Center and steers the NJIT North American Disease Intervention (NADI), “a student health organization dedicated to raising awareness of hypertension and diabetes within the NJIT and...

NJIT Opens State-of-the-Art Nanoelectronics Fabrication Facility

Thursday, December 5, 2019
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. “Cancer patients in remission need to be kept informed at all times about the status of their disease, so a point-of-care test that they can administer themselves makes sense,” noted Basuray, an assistant professor of chemical and materials engineering. “We’re designing one that is non-invasive,...

NJIT Biomedical Engineer Tara Alvarez Is a Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry

Monday, November 11, 2019
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). Alvarez joined approximately 300 fellows, who are the leading scientists and clinicians in the field, at an induction ceremony this month at the academy’s 2019 annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. At the conference, she gave a talk on the neural mechanisms underlying a vision therapy that helps patients with a disorder known as convergence insufficiency (CI) to...

Pages