Research Lives! Undergraduates Take on Neurotoxins, Cave Disasters and Other Challenges

A robotic fleet built to penetrate dark and narrow cave passages, cellular studies into alcohol’s role in hastening neurodegeneration in people with HIV, plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air and new methods for eliminating noise from data searches are a few of the research projects that drew students back to campus laboratories this summer.

The students themselves are just as diverse: a team of physics, engineering and industrial design majors from NJIT; a group of eight international students from Kolkata, India’s Heritage Institute of Technology; an aspiring neurosurgeon from Biotechnology High School in Freehold; and an NJIT chemical engineer hoping to devise breakthrough methods to combat climate change.

They joined more than 120 other undergraduates who spent the summer on campus working with NJIT professors in their labs; the majority of these students discussed their results and took questions from faculty, students and other campus visitors at NJIT’s recent 11th International Undergraduate Summer Research Symposium, a showcase jam-packed with applied research across more than a dozen sectors.

“We came up with a distributive system composed of deployable robots carried by a ‘mothership’ that would allow us to go deeper into caves,” recounted Oliver Budd, an industrial design major who worked with an interdisciplinary crew in Martina Decker’s Idea Factory on the robotic fleet.

“You can’t have a Swiss Army knife-type robot that would be responsible for all functions,” noted Nicholas Warholak, a fellow design major, who pointed to the variety of sensors and capabilities the different devices carried, including the ability to sense radioactivity. “The distributed approach drew on our creativity.”

Mansi Shah, the high school student from Biotechnology High who worked with Ricardo Garcia ’19 in James Haorah’s Laboratory of Neurovascular, Neuroinflammation and Neurodegeneration, called her experience “insight into what I’ll be seeing in the future.” What inspired her, however, was the plight of a grandfather who succumbed to a brain disease before she was born.

She and Garcia studied the degenerative effects of alcohol and HIV-related proteins on the blood brain barrier (BBB), the highly specialized vascular system that regulates the transport of molecules and leukocytes into the brain’s microenvironment, keeping out neurotoxic viruses and other infectious agents under normal conditions. They looked closely at mechanisms by which the brain’s guardians – a group of endothelial cells and tight junction proteins – that are weakened by alcohol.

“Alcohol increases permeability of the membrane to large macromolecules and macrophages in which under normal physiological conditions would not appear in such quantities,” Garcia noted in his proposal for funding.

Ujjwala Rai ’19, a chemical engineering major, has spent the summer studying bacteria found in the root systems of plants that can remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs), industrial compounds emitted by ubiquitous products such as paints and fuels, into the atmosphere. To better understand how these bacteria can thrive in a variety of soil-less media, she has worked closely with professors from the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) and the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The team from Kolkata, composed of computer science and engineering majors, worked on a variety of projects to optimize software and data searches.

“Our idea is to eliminate irrelevant data from query results, to come up with a system that would detect and remove it,” said Soumita Das, a member of the team.

“This summer, many student groups focused their research on developing healthcare technologies to either advance our understanding or address unmet needs, including devices and therapies for critical diseases such as diabetes, autism, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Brain health and drug interactions were also popular research areas,” notes Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research. “In addition, several projects addressed sustainability across sectors, from energy, to water, to the environment, while others explored challenges in data science and materials for diverse applications.”