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As towering cranes and forklifts shuttled brightly colored containers from ships to trucks in Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal last week, Cameron Bennett ’22 was also busy inside the port loading human-scale cargo to go back out to sea.

“Providing Dorman Scholars with unique educational opportunities has always been our mission,” noted Professor Louis Hamilton, dean of NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC). “And the scholars we admit to the college are highly capable and motivated young people who crave challenges and hands-on learning experiences.”

When NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs held its annual closing ceremony for the Bernard Harris Summer STEM Camp (BHSSC) this past July, an unplanned reunion made the event all the more sweet. Damilola Ojoye ’18, a participant of the very first camp in 2007, was in attendance to witness the campers’ presentations, and wound up reconnecting with Bernard Harris, who was there as well.

KARINA DSOUZA ’20

MAJOR: Biomedical Engineering

HOMETOWN: New Milford, N.J.

MARY McGUINNESS ’20

MAJOR: Chemistry

HOMETOWN: Spring Lake, N.J.

A robotic fleet built to penetrate dark and narrow cave passages, cellular studies into alcohol’s role in hastening neurodegeneration in people with HIV, plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air and new methods for eliminating noise from data searches are a few of the research projects that drew students back to campus laboratories this summer.

JENNIFER CALLAGHAN ’21

Major: Chemical Engineering

Hometown: Nutley, N.J.

July 19 was an especially busy day for NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs (CPCP). Not only was CPCP overseeing its various summer offerings taking place across campus, it was also welcoming educators in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to a special forum that intertwined a bit with students attending the annual Bernard Harris Summer STEM Camp (BHSSC). Before the forum’s keynote speaker and camp namesake Dr.

Plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air itself? Ujjwala Rai ’19, a chemical engineering major, has spent the summer studying bacteria found in the root systems of plants that can remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs), industrial compounds emitted by ubiquitous products such as paints and fuels, into the atmosphere. To better understand how these bacteria can thrive in a variety of soil-less media, she has worked closely with professors from the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) and the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Traditionally, many engineers and developers of solar cell technology have turned to crystalline silicon — a tried and tested material absorber capable of efficiently converting solar radiation to electricity at just four times the thickness of a strand of hair.

At up to a 100th the thickness of a hair strand, nano-thin metal films offer an even more cost-effective and flexible material alternative, holding promise in the future development of everything from solar power to sensor technology. 

Chemical engineering major Jennifer Callaghan is spending her summer on the NJIT campus working to help define the next generation of ballistic materials. Laura Gould, an architecture student, is also at the university during the summer break, using Google Street View to study the correlation between urban infrastructure and the use and creation of sacred space in Italy.