Skin Graft Research Leads Students to Top 8 in Hult Pitch Competition

New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Aliza Mujahid, a senior biomedical engineering student, along with mechanical engineering Ph.D. student and research assistant Mohammad Jafari, reached the final round-of-eight in the 2025 U.S. Hult Prize competition for social-minded startup founders.

The duo, with Assistant Professor Farid Alisafaei and colleagues at Washington University, represent a new company called DermaMech that aims to better understand the science of human skin grafting and develop technology that will reduce infections, rejections and scarring.

Mujahid, however, is equally passionate about business and is currently serving as the acting CEO of DermaMech as the team works toward securing funding and establishing the company. She joined the student Entrepreneurs Society and began taking courses in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, studying under professors Cesar Bandera and Michael Ehrlich, along with Kathy Naasz, director of the Center for Student Entrepreneurship that opened in 2024. Her team also participated in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, where startup skills are honed.

Of thousands of teams that apply each year, Mujahid’s group marks the first time a Highlander team reached that level. There may be still more to come — the team is now eligible to apply for a digital incubator and possibly the international competition, where a million-dollar prize will be awarded this fall to one team of 10,000 that originally entered the annual event.

“It was a true honor to participate in the national competition among such highly innovative ideas. The experience itself was incredible — an intense, nerve-wracking day moving from the preliminary round to the finals. As an NJIT student entrepreneur, it meant so much to represent our university on a national stage,” Mujahid said.

The accomplishment also represents an achievement for the university itself, CSE’s Naasz added. With many of NJIT’s startup training elements being brought together, “These are the types of achievements that validate everything we do to help our NJIT students think and lead like entrepreneurs,” she said. CSE works on services such as internships, pitch preparation, digital badges and AI-powered business model assistance.

Mujahid, who is also a member of NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College, said her mother works as a pharmacist and was her inspiration to pursue a career in the medical field.

“I joined Dr. Alisafaei and then with that, I had the opportunity to work independently on the project based on skin grafting, which is how we can make it more effective. There is a failure rate of up to 77% — your body rejects the new skin and a lot of times it just detaches,” or it becomes infected or has severe scarring, she explained. “If you have a patient with more than 40-60% of skin burned, it can take around 20 years for them to heal with multiple skin surgeries happening over and over again.

“My focus was on the meshing part, what goes on, what kind of mechanical aspects go on in the cells that really affects it, that makes it go crazy later on,” she continued. By applying mechanical engineering simulations and stressors, and even by studying ancient origami methods, their technique achieves perfect graft measurements. It allows doctors to predict accurate skin graft measurement with maximum skin graft expansion to cover the wound site. Currently, most grafting surgeries are a manual process without standardization, Mujahid said.

Participating in the Hult event on a national scale, which happened in March at Hult’s Cambridge, Mass. headquarters, led to her team learning that their best interest is to sell the software itself and let existing medical device companies deal with the hardware. That’s a much faster route to approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The team also received a U.S. provisional patent, with assistance from Bandera and NJIT’s Intellectual Property and Technology Licensing office.

Mujahid said the pitch competition gave her a firsthand lesson that communications, confidence and networking are as important as scientific research if you want a successful company. “When you meet individuals who appreciate the work that you are doing, it really gives you confidence that you're doing something right,” she said. “Things like this really make me want to work harder. I don’t want to stay on this level, I want to do more.”

“If you have a passion, if you have a dream, then pursue them. Avail every single opportunity that is there for you, because you never know where it's going to take you, who you're going to meet and what stage you're going to be on next,” she noted. “It might be hard. Initially, it might be daunting. Even if you don't want to do it, do it anyway, and you never know where it ends for you. … Be honest to yourself, and don't be shy to seek out help, especially professors.”

Mujahid cited Honors College advisor Paul Hoyt-O'Connor as another inspiration to her. Following graduation this spring, she’ll attend Columbia University for a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, focusing on tissue engineering, and will continue working on DermaMech.

“This is exactly the kind of opportunity we strive to create in the mechanobiology and biomechanics lab,” Alisafaei said, “engaging students like Aliza in cutting-edge research while preparing them to tackle real-world challenges at the intersection of science, medicine and engineering.”