NJIT Leaders Featured on NJBIZ's Business Influencer List

Joel S. Bloom, president of New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and Donald H. Sebastian, senior vice president of Technology & Business Development at NJIT and president and CEO of New Jersey Innovation Institute (NJII), have each earned a spot on The Power 100, NJBIZ’s annual ranking of the most powerful people in New Jersey business.

NJBIZ states of Bloom, “as president of NJIT, Bloom advocates for STEM education, especially for underrepresented groups. Toward that end, he joined with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Newark School District Superintendent Roger Leon in February 2019 to unveil the NJIT/Newark Math Success Initiative and the Mayor’s Honors
Scholars Program. The Math Success Initiative seeks to increase the number of Newark residents who enroll at NJIT for undergraduate education. 

“The Scholars Program is designed to create a pipeline from Newark Public Schools to NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College by granting three scholarships and paid internships to Newark Public School graduates. And to put some institutional heft behind that push, Bloom is responsible for NJIT partnering with the industry to make higher education more accessible to nontraditional students. ‘Every company today is a technology company,’ Bloom said. ‘You want a job that pays well. STEM is difficult and takes a lot of hard work.’ Success of this endeavor would go a long way toward strengthening the state’s workforce and economy.”

NJBIZ said of Sebastian, “Sebastian became CEO of NJII, a corporation of NJIT, after 15 years leading research at NJIT, during which time the R&D enterprise grew to over $110 million. That figure was good enough to place NJIT fifth among all polytechnic universities in the country and fourth among all universities in patent productivity. NJII is providing government grant-funded research to local companies to help improve operations. As an example, it provided a detailed report from Fraunhofer MarketExplorer, a German provider of affordable applied research that small- and medium-sized firms could not otherwise afford. NJII is assisting 140 New Jersey companies in this capacity.