Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

In the highly social world of the zebra finch, every male has a unique song: a brief motif resembling the squeak of a mechanical toy that he chirps, often in rapid succession, in courtship and communal gatherings. These songs are not innate. Pubescent finches develop their signature sound by listening to adult male birdsong which they then individualize with subtle variations in frequency, tonality and rhythm. In Julia Hyland Bruno’s research, fathers have been replaced by virtual tutors in laboratory-based studies designed to examine the birds’ vocal development under controlled...

Two NJIT undergrads and an alumnus have landed prestigious awards from the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists (NJ-SPJ) for their outstanding contributions to the university’s student newspaper, The Vector. Albert Dorman Honors students Mrunmayi Joshi ’25, Yukthi Sangoi ’24 and Ethan O'Malley ’23 were announced winners in the NJ-SPJ’s 2023 Excellence in Journalism Contest, which “recognizes the best coverage of the Garden State by outlets in New Jersey, New York City and Philadelphia.” Each were feted by the Society during its recent award ceremony in Lyndhurst, N.J. Joshi, a...

A new project led by New Jersey Institute of Technology researchers is underway to help New Jersey’s lower-income homeowners take advantage of the state’s clean energy programs. The initiative arrives in support of the state’s recent commitments to the Clean Energy Act outlined in the New Jersey Energy Master Plan: Pathway to 2050, which includes “developing a community solar program that allows more state residents to benefit from solar energy, especially low- and moderate-income (LMI) families.”  The community outreach project involves a year-long study of the attitudes and...

Stuti Mohan, a senior biomedical engineering student, was the winner of the top Dr. James F. Stevenson Innovation Award at the 2023 Undergraduate Summer Research and Innovation (URI) Symposium at NJIT. Her project sought to identify a non-invasive yet precise method to diagnose the tapping foot of a subject. Mohan’s research area in the Sensorimotor Quantification and Rehabilitation Lab (SQRL) is the ongoing pursuit of improving concussion management.  “Concussion management can be a pretty subjective process. We are leveraging objective approaches like sensorimotor quantification...