In mid-June, NJIT joined the America East conference, a 10-team league now including schools from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. But as a Division I program for more than a decade already, the university has achieved many athletic triumphs. Here, in this fifth of a six-part series looking back at the past few summers, we highlight just a few. Click the headlines below.

Voluminous amounts of data can be overwhelming to even the most experienced professional. That was the experience of Roberto Rivera, a senior research analyst with NJ TRANSIT. Spending his days immersed in large data sets, Roberto realized that continuing his education would provide him with additional skills and training to help him manage the increasingly data-intensive nature of his work.

Tulika Das, a biomedical engineer who aspires to discover new treatments for traumatic brain injury, confronted her own health care conundrum this summer just as she was making the leap from master’s to doctoral student: She lost her job in the pandemic-driven shutdown, landed in the hospital after suffering an allergic reaction and found herself short of funds to cover her co-payment.

NJIT students can now access a free digital subscription to the Barron’s in Education Program from Dow Jones. The online offering provides entry to Barron’s, which includes its renowned financial portal and magazine, experiential learning and networking opportunities, and more.

Science fiction sometimes shows us the future, but really just shows us ourselves, asserts Associate Professor of Humanities and sci-fi aficionado Nancy Steffen-Fluhr. She was teaching the 2014 novel Station Eleven, about a troupe of actors and musicians struggling for normalcy after a global pandemic kills most of the world's population, in spring 2020 right as COVID-19 formed in Asia, reached America and found its way to Newark.

Reading took center stage Aug. 9 when Book Lovers Day was celebrated throughout the country. The unofficial holiday honors reading and literature, and urges people to spend the day transported by a book. Many members of the NJIT community are published book authors, with works ranging from historical accounts and scientific manuals to career handbooks and children’s stories. In observance of Book Lovers Day, here we highlight just a few of the recent page-turners by Highlander faculty and alumni (in alphabetical order).

NJIT men's volleyball rising senior Alvaro Gimeno will represent the Spanish National Team for the third straight summer. The national team will compete from August 30 to September 6 in Cyprus. The qualifier games will consist of three days of games, two days of rest and three more games against Cyprus, Moldavia, Latvia and Spain. The champion qualifies for 2021 EuroVolley.

A fossil recently recovered from the age of the dinosaurs is giving scientists the most vivid picture yet of how one of the most enigmatic and fearsome groups of ants to exist once used their uncanny tusk-like mandibles and diverse horns to successfully hunt down victims for nearly 20 million years, before vanishing from the planet...

Communicating by sound underwater works great for dolphins and whales, so an NJIT expert decided to try a new variant of this method for autonomous vehicles, divers and sensors, too. Radio signals used by traditional wireless devices become too weak underwater, explained Ali Abdi, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Advanced Communication and Signal Processing Laboratory, in NJIT’s Center for Wireless Information Processing.

A team of researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed an algorithm through machine learning that helps predict sites of DNA methylation – a process that can change the activity of DNA without changing its overall structure – and could identify disease-causing mechanisms that would otherwise be missed by conventional screening methods. The paper was published online by the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.