Engineering

There is no sustainable cure at present for osteoarthritis, the most common chronic musculoskeletal disorder of the joints. And while joint replacements are successful treatments for older patients with already reduced mobility, they hold less promise for younger patients, with failure in the long-term nearly guaranteed. Biomaterial engineers propose another solution: restoring the damaged tissue itself.

Two pioneering researchers, Rajesh Davé, a distinguished professor of chemical and materials engineering, and MengChu Zhou, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, were recently elected fellows of National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Davé and Zhou join 173 other academic innovators, together representing 115 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes, in this year’s class of fellows. Collectively, the group holds more than 4,700 issued U.S. patents. Davé has 15 U.S. patents and Zhou has 14.

When Jeffrey Jude-Ibe ’20 flew to Dallas in September to begin work as a quality engineer at Texas Instruments, Kelvin Siebeng ’19, the person who put the semiconductor giant on his job-search horizon, picked him up at the airport. With 3 full-time offers from major corporations and another from the FBI at his choosing, Siebeng also cemented the deal.

NJIT’s Chem-E-Car team, developers of the self-driving, hydrogen-powered Hy-Lander, won first place this past weekend for their poster in the championship round of the international student competition.

A team of NJIT engineers won a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in the sustainability category from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey for a resilient water treatment system that can run on waste heat or low-grade energy.

The team was among 60 honorees at the Council’s virtual awards ceremony Friday night, themed “Transforming Hope into Action.” 

Chang Yaramothu '13H MS '14 Ph.D. '17, a biomedical engineer who develops diagnostic and therapeutic devices for concussion-related vision disorders, was named a fellow of the American Academy of Optometry just two months after joining the NJIT faculty as an assistant professor of engineering technology.

In a robotics lab spilling over with 3D-printed parts, engineering students are gutting toy trucks, SUVs, sedans and two-door Mini Coopers and refitting them with custom-designed systems: laser-cut side mirrors, wheels that can parallel park and a braking system that employs algorithms to control an electric motor, thus enabling soft and hard breaking, idling and taxiing.

Since the end of March, Rukayat Balogun has been working remotely for Facebook as a site logistics analyst, overseeing staff that maintain the servers and the facility, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. She will move to the Atlanta area in July for this position, which came her way last fall when a fellow student in NJIT’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) introduced Balogun to a visiting Facebook recruiter. The company flew her down south for what turned out to be a series of video interviews, followed by a bit of a wait.

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.

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.”