Newark College of Engineering

Suraj Ghumwala will soon be the first cadet from NJIT's ROTC detachment commissioned into the U.S. Space Force. The computer engineering major from Rochelle Park said his childhood dream was to be an astronaut, and as the first person in his family born in the U.S. he felt a sense of service to the community, influenced by friends who also joined the military. Ghumwala chose NJIT because of its strong academics, affordability, commuting distance and diversity, and he truly felt a sense of belonging in his second semester when he switched from computer science to computer...

Techies call it the hands-on imperative — that the best learning is by doing — and the concept is something Mark Pothen, a mechanical engineering major, takes to heart. Pothen worked part-time this academic year as a business analyst for health care startup Axuall Inc., where he'll become an associate product manager after graduating from NJIT. Most engineers tell their story of growing up a tinkerer, whether it's electronics, Legos or just taking things apart to see how they work. Not so with Pothen, raised in diverse Teaneck, where his parents pushed him to study medicine and he...

There's Musk-level hype about autonomous vehicles, and then there's NJIT Associate Professor Joyoung Lee working through painstaking and vital research of how self-driving systems should behave at stop lights. He studies transportation systems as a whole, not self-driving cars specifically, but his current research makes traffic lights broadcast their intentions so artificially intelligent vehicles can decide whether to brake, maintain speed or accelerate — as the function of a yellow light is to clear the intersection, not make you screech to a halt. "That's our low-hanging fruit,"...

Swallowing a pill is simple. Developing one the body will absorb into the bloodstream and deliver to the precise location, at the right concentration and in the optimal sequence is complex. The vast majority of pills are composed of powders, materials with properties of both solids and liquids, and they are tricky to design and manufacture because of their sometimes unpredictable behaviors. “Drugmakers face a number of fundamental problems,” says Rajesh Davé, a distinguished professor of chemical and materials engineering at NJIT who specializes in particle design. “Most drug molecules in...