NJIT Awarded $6 Million from the National Science Foundation to Commercialize Campus Inventions

NJIT has secured a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to translate science and engineering discoveries into market-ready technologies that will improve quality of life in areas ranging from health care, to sustainable energy, to data privacy.

Awarded by the agency’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships, the grant will accelerate the development of promising prototypes and enable market validation and other commercialization activities. It will also strengthen the university’s entrepreneurial culture by funding and organizing training workshops in technology translation for undergraduates, Ph.D. students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty, through the newly created Center for Translational Research at NJIT. 

“NJIT’s goal is to become a regional leader in research translation,” said Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research and the grant’s principal investigator. “We have many game-changing technologies in the pipeline that are on the cusp of commercialization. This grant provides crucial backing for these projects.”

The grant, Dhawan explained, is designed to bolster NJIT’s Technology Innovation Translation Acceleration (TITA) program, which drills down on the potential commercial benefits of university research at earlier stages of the translation and market validation process. Launched by his office last year, TITA provides seed grants of up to $75,000 per project over three phases of development, as well as guidance and feedback from an industrial advisory board composed of inventors and entrepreneurs. Inventors must have external partners.

Over the next four years, the new NSF grant will enable seed funding of $50,000 to $100,000 per project to up to 10 TITA research teams to help them develop and validate translational research and identify pathways to commercialization. It will provide, for example, backing to help developers move past the initial proof of concept, including determining interest and acceptance by potential users, to identify purchasers of the technology, such as clinicians, businesses or communities.

So far, nine projects have been awarded TITA grants under the current NJIT program. Sagnik Basuray, an associate professor of chemical engineering, for example, is developing a modular, point-of-care microfluidic device capable of quickly detecting multiple animal-borne diseases, including infectious diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. He noted that 75% of emerging pathogens originate in animals. “If we can measure them in the field easily inexpensively and quickly, we can prevent spillovers,” he said.

Salam Daher, an assistant professor of informatics, is working on software and hardware that will measure irregularly shaped wounds accurately and create customized wound dressings. “Healthcare workers are still using rulers and Q-tips to measure wounds,” she noted. “We use 3D-tracking technology. We can also simulate the progression of healing.”

Two TITA teams are also developing technologies that will detect and destroy the industrial compounds per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The first is a highly sensitive and selective portable sensor capable of detecting and quantifying PFAS at current federal limits in treated water. It will be extended to detection in field samples in the future. The second is a reactor that uses ultrasound and argon nanobubbles to disintegrate the contaminants, among others.

The Center for Translational Research, directed by Dhawan, will serve as a hub for commercialization training and development on campus, but also as a meeting place to receive feedback on homegrown ideas and to generate new ones.

“Through workshops, forums and demonstration events, we will draw external collaborators, advisors and investors, as well as people in the community with their own thoughts about what’s needed,” Dhawan said. “We intend to listen.”

Princeton has been named as the mentor university for the NSF program involving NJIT and the University of Delaware, which also received funding.

“Princeton’s involvement underscores the importance of partnerships and collaboration to raise the bar for everyone,” said Princeton’s Vice Dean for Innovation, Craig B. Arnold, who is also the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “We are excited to collaborate with NJIT and the University of Delaware to drive forward an initiative that benefits the entire northeast region.”

The center includes such facilities as the Microfabrication Innovation Center for making prototypes and the Microdevices Translational Research Center in NJIT’s VentureLink complex. The latter will include patient beds for healthcare device testing and an observation room for investors. Through the center, the grant will fund postdoctoral researchers who provide technical support to projects and students in NJIT’s Undergraduate Research and Innovation program who help advance them over the URI summer session.

The NSF award is the latest milestone in a recent string of research awards and honors.

A multidisciplinary team of biomedical engineers, chemists and biologists recently received $5.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to fund a biomedical research program designed to propel undergraduates into high-powered scientific careers focused on healthcare. The NIH training grant, the university’s first, will provide nine sophomores – three per year for the next three years – with full tuition and stipends, individual mentoring and career development experiences as they conduct high-level research, including writing a thesis, in preparation for top Ph.D. programs. One of the initiative’s goals is to diversify the scientific workforce by recruiting talented students from underrepresented groups.

Earlier this year, NJIT’s chapter of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) received the organization’s inaugural Chapter of Excellence Award for programs that nurture and support inventions from their inception to translation, drawing on talent throughout the community: from undergraduates, to graduates students, to faculty.

In a statement, the organization said, “The mission of the NJIT Chapter is to recognize and promote invention in translational research and technology. The chapter's activities foster opportunities for faculty and student inventors to facilitate acquisition of intellectual property assets and learn entrepreneurial pathways from research and innovation to translation to market and commercialization, thereby impacting economic growth. For these worthy goals and programs that support them, the Chapter Excellence Award was awarded to the New Jersey Institute of Technology.”

Founded in 2021, the NJIT chapter quickly took on a larger role, as a regional hub to bring together researchers from other universities, policymakers and business leaders to share and disseminate ideas and forge partnerships to take on complex problems of national and international scale. At its meeting this past spring, for example, the chapter drew together for the first time the heads of research and innovation programs at eight universities in the metro region, including Princeton, Columbia and Rutgers, to discuss the benefits of collaborating on ideas, expertise and resources.

On campus, the chapter promotes translational research and its commercialization through campus R&D programs, grants, clubs and acceleration programs; offers invention-focused networking and educational activities, such as workshops and seminars on innovation and intellectual property development; and provides mentoring and advising services to faculty and student inventors on further development of IP assets.

Dhawan, the chapter president, also recently co-chaired the National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting “Research and Innovation Translation Partnerships in Point-of-Care Technologies Conference and Technology Showcase.” He encourages researchers and inventors at NJIT to not only focus on scientific breakthroughs, but to consider the societal and economic conditions that may stand in the way of their implementation.

“Inclusion is all,” he said. “We must inform and engage the larger community as we develop new technologies. Without broad awareness and acceptance, we could just be spinning our wheels.”

From its inaugural meeting that focused on climate change, NJIT members and attendees from other institutions stated emphatically that success in slowing global warming will depend on a web of motivated and productive partnerships among distinct groups: scientists modeling changes and devising the means to curb them, nimble enterprises and a workforce able to translate inventions into tools, informed policymakers and, perhaps most importantly, engaged communities.

Chapter members must hold patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Jamie Renee, the executive director of the NAI, gave the keynote address at the NJIT chapter’s induction ceremony for new members earlier this year.

Since 2014, 11 NJIT inventors have become NAI fellows, academic inventors who have demonstrated a “prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.” They include Nirwan Ansari ’82, Rajesh Davé, Atam Dhawan, Craig Gotsman, Somenath Mitra, Yun-Qing Shi, Kamalesh Sirkar, Gordon Thomas, MengChu Zhou, Treena Arinzeh and Tara Alvarez. NJIT President Teik C. Lim is also a fellow.

In awarding NJIT’s chapter with the inaugural excellence prize, the NAI organization noted, “Their President is Dr. Teik Lim, an NAI Fellow who has been an active supporter of the Academy for many years. Under his leadership, the Institute’s national reputation and its ranking as one of the top engineering schools in the country is assured. This year, Money magazine rated them as one of the best colleges in the United States. So it is no surprise that they have one of the best NAI Chapters as well.”