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NJIT’s annual Scholarship Luncheon is meant to celebrate donor generosity. This year, it also pointed to what comes next.The event brings together scholarship benefactors, alumni and student recipients, creating space for the kinds of conversations that remind people what scholarship support really does.

Students at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have again achieved an impressive amount of prestigious awards this year with 16 students earning nationally competitive scholarships and fellowships. Their achievement continues an NJIT run, with Highlanders amassing 47(and counting) of these awards in the past three years.

For Naketa “KET-A” Williams ’26, artificial intelligence is not just about what systems like ChatGPT can do — it is about whose stories, languages and values they carry.That idea will soon take Williams to Jamaica as a Fulbright recipient, where she will join a national initiative advancing culturally grounded AI development.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) historian and master teacher Neil Maher has been named a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, becoming the first faculty member in university history to receive the national honor.Selected from more than 380 nominees nationwide, Maher is one of only 24 scholars chosen for the fellowship this year, which awards up to $200,000 to support original research in the humanities and social sciences.This year’s fellowship theme focuses on scholarship examining political division and civic cohesion in American life.

Freshman Blake Piscitiello has been named the 2026 America East Rookie of the Year, headlining a group of six NJIT Highlanders who earned All-Conference recognition, the league office announced Wednesday.

Students won the Real World Impact award at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s spring 2026 Artificial Intelligence Exploration Day not for what they built, but for how they built it.The team of Bartek Broclawik, Matthew Sudol, Pola Szwaczka and Om Vaghasiya knew that autonomous vehicles are an established technology. Yet in designing one of their own, in the form of a toy-sized model, they employed heavy use of AI to develop it and created a trail of lessons for anyone in the NJIT community to learn.

NJIT alumni and students are assisting with construction of New Jersey’s newest state park, a nine-mile greenway that will convert a former Norfolk Southern rail line into a linear state park spanning from Montclair to Jersey City in Essex and Hudson Counties. AECOM Tishman is the construction manager for the first phase of the project, a nearly one-mile stretch in Newark.

With nearly $1 million in state funding, NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources (CNR) is leading a team of engineers, modelers and construction designers who are developing rain gardens in public areas of flood-prone Paterson, N.J., such as parks, schools and community centers.

A team of Engineers Without Borders students who designed a gravity-driven piping system to bring clean water to houses in a remote village in Ecuador is the 2025-2026 winner of the Outstanding Student Chapter Award, presented at the 28th annual Newark College of Engineering’s Salute to Engineering Excellence.

A Q&A with Mohammad Khalid, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineeringHow would you summarize your research?