NJIT Community Updates and Announcements 10/19/20-10/23/20
Here you will find a weekly listing of updates and announcements for members of the NJIT campus community. Announcements are to be submitted through the form found at https://forms.gle/V6PBxUy5b3jkErMc8. Those submitted by each Thursday will be included in the following week's Updates and Announcements email.
Faculty and Staff
New Parent Website Hub — Office of Enrollment Management
NJIT.edu/parents is a new one-stop hub on the website for parents to access important information from across the university. Important information for parents such as financial aid, bursar and payment, public safety, health and wellness, and dining are quickly available through this site. Please share in all your parent communications.
Leir Research Institute (LRI) Weekly Seminar Series — Martin Tuchman School of Management
In this week’s virtual seminar at 1–2 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21, the LRI hosts a discussion on the paper “Shrinking Against Sentiment: Exploiting Behavioral Biases in Portfolio Optimization” by NJIT’s Alberto Martin-Utrera, assistant professor of finance. The paper details that high sentiment demand on subjective beliefs predicts low market returns due to overpricing and high returns of arbitrage strategies exploiting stock mispricing. This empirical evidence has important implications for portfolio optimization. Martin-Utrera shows that its performance is the sum of two components: a market and arbitrage component. Using a shrinkage covariance matrix that shrinks the sample covariance toward the identity in the construction of mean-variance portfolios gives more relevance to the market component, and its relevance increases with the degree of shrinkage. Shrinking more when sentiment is low and less when it is high generates substantial economic gains to mean-variance investors.To join, go to https://njit.webex.com/meet/rroy. Upcoming seminars can be found at https://centers.njit.edu/leir/Fall-2020-and-Spring-2021-Seminars/.
NJIT Faculty Author Teaching Methodology Caused by Pandemic Disruption
Current and former NJIT faculty members have come together to address the impact of COVID-19 on higher education on a global scale. Howard Kimmel, Gale Spak, Ronald Rockland, and John Carpinelli authored “A Methodology for Retaining Student Learning during the Pandemic,” the lead chapter in the recently-published book Educational Practices During the COVID-19 Viral Outbreak: International Perspectives. This book brings together a variety of studies and scholars in an effort to demonstrate how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the learning and teaching processes in different countries, emphasizing the context of broader global effects. The chapter reviews the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education teaching and learning, the challenges faced by educators, approaches for dealing with the impact on the educational process and the transition to remote learning, with a focus on engineering education. The book is available here.
Students
CEE Graduate Seminar Series — Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
On Monday, Oct. 19 at 4 p.m., the CEE Graduate Seminar features Clemson University's Sudeep Popat's virtual talk: "Anaerobic treatment technologies for energy recovery from wastewater: Unraveling the missing links within the anaerobic food web." To join, follow the webex link here or use meeting number:120 563 5561 and password: CEEseminar1019