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For the students behind The CommonHealth Project — a collaborative, community-based initiative aimed at rallying volunteers for production and distribution of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) — the pandemic is deeply personal. Mark Pothen ’22, a mechanical engineering major at NJIT, for example, hears stories from his mother, a physician working on the front line at Mountainside Hospital.

As a third-generation Highlander, mechanical engineering student and Albert Dorman Honors Scholar Greg Tanis looks forward to joining L3Harris as a systems engineer and takes a minute to reflect on his time at NJIT. Congratulations, Greg!

For his senior capstone project, Niyam Shah went big: The civil engineering major and his teammates designed a 40-story commercial tower with a thick concrete core and X-patterned steel bracing for an empty lot on Manhattan’s building-jammed West Side.

Ten public universities and colleges in New Jersey have joined forces and issued a call for the over 100,000 state residents who attend higher education institutions out-of-state to return home, enroll in New Jersey institutions, and help rebuild the state as part the New Jersey Scholar Corps program.

When Jeremy Bedient was navigating Career Development Services’ (CDS) Spring 2019 Career Fair, seeking a co-op with Johnson & Johnson was nowhere on his radar. But at the moment he passed by the company’s supply-chain booth and saw there was no line, he figured “why not” and took advantage of the opportunity to network with the recruiter. They wound up engaging in a great conversation about Six Sigma, and Bedient was invited to interview for a spot later that week.

Class of 2020 graduates have until this Tuesday, May 5, to order their Commencement regalia and have it shipped to them. Wearing Commencement regalia is necessary to participate in NJIT’s virtual Commencement ceremony, to be held Friday, June 12.

Students are urged to visit the Commencement website for details on ordering Commencement regalia. The website provides additional important information, including the deadlines for students to submit the correct pronunciation of their name, as well as photos and videos.

NJIT undergrads continue to earn the nation’s top academic honors, the latest being a new university record of four students named Goldwater Scholars this year by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The scholarship is recognized among the country’s most prestigious for STEM undergraduates pursuing research careers.

A team of environmental engineers at NJIT is developing a new way to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, by combining advanced statistical methods with models that incorporate environmental conditions, such as wind speed, temperature and social distancing.

It all started with an email sent by NJIT/Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) alumnus, Biren Bhatt, M.D., to Louis Hamilton, ADHC dean, as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading with lightning speed throughout the New York-New Jersey area. Dr. Bhatt, an attending emergency physician at Hackensack Medical Center (HMC), asked the dean to put out a call to Dorman Scholars to design and create a prototype for a face shield, vital personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers.

For doctoral student Gayani Gunarathna, the Ph.D. Professional Development Series of seminars offered by NJIT’s Graduate Studies Office (GSO) has been a boon as she gets set to launch her career. Gunarathna, who will be a geotechnical engineer in New York City for WSP USA, a global engineering professional services firm, said she has a lot of useful information to draw upon from the series.