From laptops to cars, society has come to rely on rechargeable batteries — and the demand is only growing. This surge means researchers are racing to figure out the most efficient ways to manage this type of energy storage.  While current designs utilize microparticle-based technology, it’s insufficient for the most affordable, safe and efficient batteries possible. Given advances in nanotechnology, Dibakar Datta, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is interested in deploying nanoparticles as battery electrodes. The…

It has been close to 50 years since Bob Medina ’75 graduated from NJIT as an engineer, and when he looks back at his journey, he marvels at how NJIT gave him the tools to excel. In fact, he still has the slide rule he used in class, in the days before calculators were allowed and laptops existed. “I was the first in my family to attend college, and many of our students, 50 years later, are still first-generation students at NJIT,” said Medina. “And what that does is it allows somebody like me, first in their family to attend university, to be able to find a career. My father emigrated from…

A new committee aims to accelerate gender equity among faculty members at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The Women Faculty Advisory Committee, chaired by Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, will hold peer forums to examine key issues based on the testimony of junior faculty members. It also intends to poll women faculty to gather quantitative data. Both will fuel an action plan and create a foundation for measuring progress toward faculty gender diversity.  Women are particularly underrepresented among full-time faculty at NJIT, most starkly at the level of professor, where they represent just…

Hundreds of students in NJIT’s introductory engineering course, Fundamentals of Engineering Design 101, are having a greater shared experience during the fall 2023 semester than any incoming class since the 1990s. Back then, Newark College of Engineering began customizing the FED syllabus for each major field. Chemical engineering students may have learned more about compounding and processing, while civil engineering students learned the basics of surveying and transportation systems. Now the FED sections are unifying once more. With so many fields of engineering sharing overlapping…

Alina Emeilianova worked right up to her Ph.D graduation ceremony. Appearing as first author in a paper in Langmuir, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Chemical Society, it is fitting that she snuck in one more notch of success in the twilight of her research career at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Technically this was submitted after her defense — some people just can’t turn it off. Success is a byproduct of hard work and dedication, both of which were abundant during Emelianova’s time as a doctoral student at NJIT. Driven by a passion for computational methodologies…

In an era of frequent, powerful storms, fast-spreading wildfires and global pandemics, communities are discovering their vulnerabilities when they can least afford it. “We need to rethink what it means to be resilient. I use the boxing analogy ‘roll with the punches’: the ability to absorb the shocks of extreme events and recover quickly,” says Michel Boufadel, the director of NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources. “But to do so, the whole system needs to work together. It doesn’t matter if the power stays on, but 90% of the roads are closed.” With collaborators at Rutgers and Princeton,…

Wading into a parched stretch of the Pequannock River, Taylor VanGrouw got a jarring reminder of the fragility of New Jersey’s smaller waterways: a brown trout stranded in a shallow pool, too lethargic to swim away as he approached. “As temperatures rise, dissolved oxygen levels decline, in the way a bottle of soda, when hot, can’t hold its fizz. Starved of oxygen, trout can’t feed or reproduce. As temperatures rise, they become more stressed and need more oxygen,” notes VanGrouw, an Albert Dorman Honors student majoring in mechanical engineering. An avid angler, he’d been casting his…

A record number of students and alumni attended New Jersey Institute of Technology’s latest Career Fair — 3,300 — with some 240 companies looking to fill more than 1,000 jobs, internships and cooperative education experiences. The macro numbers were impressive — for the third straight fair — but it was smaller moments that students appreciated most, such as the opportunity to talk one-on-one with representatives of companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Mars and Campbell Soup.  Walter Ader, a civil engineering major in his third year, learned about construction company J.…

Structural engineering is defined as the science of extremely large things — battleships, buildings, bridges — but there’s a new group of researchers, led by New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Fatemeh Ahmadpoor, working to understand the structural engineering of extremely tiny things. If a sheet of copy paper on your desk spontaneously crumpled, it might be time to call Ghostbusters, but if a sheet of a nanoscale structure suddenly crumpled, it would be normal because of the impact of entropic effects from thermal energy. That’s the kind of problem Ahmadpoor is working on, to make such…

New Jersey Institute of Technology and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on a $399,000 project to create two offshore wind graduate certificates.  The funding approved in the MOU will establish two graduate certificates in wind power system operation and maintenance and wind power economics and management, bolstering offshore wind workforce training opportunities for college students. Associate Professor Philip Pong and Sotirios Ziavras, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the graduate faculty, will lead the…