Newark College of Engineering

New Jersey Institute of Technology served up a full day of fanfare as its advanced degree graduates walked across the stage in the Bloom Wellness and Events Center in three commencement ceremonies. The 2025 master’s and doctoral class exemplifies the institution’s commitment to research and scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines. Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs John Pelesko called the ceremonies to order. Pelesko, himself a 1997 alumnus of NJIT as the very first Ph.D. graduate in mathematical sciences, implored students to both soak in this moment as they...

Fibroblasts are the body’s building blocks. Among the most abundant human cells, they help form the structure of organs and tissues and hold them together. They are also its repair crew. After an injury, they migrate to the damaged area, cover it with collagen and exert strong forces that bring the edges of the wound together, closing it up. But these repairs can go awry if their force is not moderated. “If fibroblasts continue secreting collagen over a wound that’s closed and pulling on the tissue, it can overlap in thick, disorganized layers, which can lead to excessive scarring and...

New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Aliza Mujahid, a senior biomedical engineering student, along with mechanical engineering Ph.D. student and research assistant Mohammad Jafari, reached the final round-of-eight in the 2025 U.S. Hult Prize competition for social-minded startup founders. The duo, with Assistant Professor Farid Alisafaei and colleagues at Washington University, represent a new company called DermaMech that aims to better understand the science of human skin grafting and develop technology that will reduce infections, rejections and scarring. Mujahid, however, is equally...

A robotic alarm clock that hides from you, so you have to get out of bed anyway if you wish to silence it, was the star Highlander entry in the spring 2025 edition of the MakeNJIT hardware hackathon. The clockmakers earned third place overall among 47 teams from several universities. Members of Team Daniel knew that many tinkerers have built such devices, but they designed their own version just for the fun and education of it. Daniel’s roster included mechanical engineering major Jiro Dela Cruz, his fraternal twin brother Juno who studies computer science, Andrey Diaz-Ortega also in...