Newark College of Engineering

Wading into a parched stretch of the Pequannock River, Taylor VanGrouw got a jarring reminder of the fragility of New Jersey’s smaller waterways: a brown trout stranded in a shallow pool, too lethargic to swim away as he approached. “As temperatures rise, dissolved oxygen levels decline, in the way a bottle of soda, when hot, can’t hold its fizz. Starved of oxygen, trout can’t feed or reproduce. As temperatures rise, they become more stressed and need more oxygen,” notes VanGrouw, an Albert Dorman Honors student majoring in mechanical engineering. An avid angler, he’d been casting...

Structural engineering is defined as the science of extremely large things — battleships, buildings, bridges — but there’s a new group of researchers, led by New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Fatemeh Ahmadpoor, working to understand the structural engineering of extremely tiny things. If a sheet of copy paper on your desk spontaneously crumpled, it might be time to call Ghostbusters, but if a sheet of a nanoscale structure suddenly crumpled, it would be normal because of the impact of entropic effects from thermal energy. That’s the kind of problem Ahmadpoor is working on, to make such...

Leaders from the wind power industry, state and federal agencies, venture capital firms and higher education will gather at NJIT in December for a conference about the technology driving the development of energy from wind. The two-day conference is part of an inaugural New Jersey Wind Week, which also includes a boot camp for professionals interested in the wind industry — the second that NJIT has offered in six months. Leading the charge are Philip Pong, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, Chad Watson, renewable development manager at Public Service Electric...

The dedication of the lobby of the most popular residence hall at New Jersey Institute of Technology was truly a family affair. While accepting the recognition, Donald Dinallo, a builder whose company, Terminal Construction Corp. in Wood-Ridge, N.J., led the construction of Maple Hall, stood before a crowd that included his wife, children and grandchildren. A contingent of work colleagues, NJIT leaders and students also were on hand. But as well-received as the year-old, eight-story, apartment-style hall has been, that wasn’t the primary focus of the dedication, which included the...