For his senior capstone project, Niyam Shah went big: The civil engineering major and his teammates designed a 40-story commercial tower with a thick concrete core and X-patterned steel bracing for an empty lot on Manhattan’s building-jammed West Side. “The core supports the building, but the higher up you go, the more the building tilts, so we added steel to brace against wind forces,” said Shah, who is this year’s “Outstanding Senior” for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and a keen designer. The team chose a commercial building, with its 15-ft.-high ceilings, as…

U.S. News & World Report has released its 2021 rankings for the nation’s top graduate schools, with NJIT ranked among the best for graduate degree programs in engineering. The university moved up two slots this year to No. 87 — up 24 slots in the past five years — and has been included on the distinguished list since 2003. NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering, which celebrated its centennial in 2019, offers a range of master’s and Ph.D. degree programs. In recent years the college has greatly expanded its laboratory, hands-on and experiential learning components, increased student access…

At the American Institute of Chemical Engineering’s (AIChE) inaugural ChemEsports Competition in Orlando last November, Alexander Olowniuk’s eyes were fixed on the bubbling chemicals in his team’s distillation tower, a cylindrical vessel used in plants to separate volatile liquids into their pure forms at high heat.   “If we had overheated the chemicals, they would have become overexcited and then failed to separate properly. Had we not monitored other disturbances in the process, our distillation tower could have spiraled out of control and the effects been near irreversible,” recalled…

Durgamadhab Misra is the newest member of NJIT's Newark College of Engineering to become a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Misra won the prestigious award for his ongoing research on preventing transistors from leaking electrons. Every time a transistor leaks an electron, it wastes battery life or hurts performance. Specifically, Misra devoted the last 15 years of his career to studying the reliability of what engineers call high-k dielectrics. The term refers to a material's dielectric constant, which is a measure of its ability to insulate…

Vatsal Shah '08, M.S. '09, Ph.D. '14, a civil engineer with Mott MacDonald who oversees the design and construction of foundations – for wind and solar farms, wastewater treatment plants, tunnels and bridges, among others – in starkly diverse landscapes from the East Coast to Texas, is the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) “Young Engineer of the Year” for 2019. The award recognizes “outstanding contributions” to both the profession and the community. Shah’s swift rise in the field is best characterized by the distinctive energy mix that has fueled it: a scholar’s interest in…

Chrystoff Camacho, an inventor and budding entrepreneur who developed an aerial reforestation device while he was an engineering technology student at NJIT, received a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey for his drone-deployed seed capsule. Camacho’s device, a biodegradable packet containing seeds and mineral-rich soil, is loaded into what looks like a tiny missile that is dropped from the air. With its cone tip, it is designed to perforate the ground to implant the capsule, but to also allow water to permeate in dry regions where the…

One of the enduring puzzles of hearing loss is the decline in a person’s ability to determine where a sound originates, a key survival faculty that allows animals – from lizards to humans – to pinpoint the location of danger, prey and group members. In modern times, finding a lost cell phone by using the application "Find My Device,” just to find it had slipped under a sofa pillow, relies on minute differences in the ringing sound that reaches the ears. Unlike other sensory perceptions, such as feeling where raindrops hit the skin or being able to distinguish high notes from low on the piano…

A blow to the head or powerful shock wave on the battlefield can cause immediate, significant damage to a person’s skull and the tissue beneath it. But the trauma does not stop there. The impact sets off a chemical reaction in the brain that ravages neurons and the networks that supply them with nutrients and oxygen. It is the secondary effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI), which can lead to long-term cognitive, psychological and motor system damage, that piqued the interest of a team of NJIT biomedical engineers. To counter them, they are developing a therapy, to be injected at the site…

Mechanical engineering major, Elijah Mathew, spent his summer interning with Stryker. Through NJIT's career fair, Elijah found the operations intern position and has earned a spot on the Top 100 Intern list on nationalinternday.com.  

On a Saturday in late June, 12 surveying engineering technology (SET) students, one adjunct professor and one faculty professor — all from NJIT — headed to the lower lake in Newark’s Branch Brook Park. Outfitted with a 15-foot Jon boat and a range of high-tech equipment provided by SET industry partners, they were there on a very special mission: to determine the volume of water in the lake for possible future dredging, and measure the volume of algae in the lake for removal. The students, classmates from the SET 280 summer-semester marine surveying course, designed the survey-line pattern…