Department of Biomedical Engineering

Tulika Das, a biomedical engineer who aspires to discover new treatments for traumatic brain injury, confronted her own health care conundrum this summer just as she was making the leap from master’s to doctoral student: She lost her job in the pandemic-driven shutdown, landed in the hospital after suffering an allergic reaction and found herself short of funds to cover her co-payment. “This is the first time I’m living outside of my family’s house and I’m far from my home in Kolkata, India. As an international student, you arrive in a new country and have to figure out how to manage all...

In 2019, Owais Aftab was in search of a summer research project to meet his degree requirements for independent study. The biomedical engineering/pre-health Albert Dorman Honors College scholar, then a first-year student, found what he was looking for after a conversation with one of his teachers, John Vito d'Antonio-Bertagnolli ’16, M.S. ’17. D’Antonio-Bertagnolli introduced Aftab to Antje Ihlefeld, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and director of NJIT’s Neural Engineering for Speech and Hearing Laboratory, who had a project involving a screening device focused on auditory...

Footage of emergency room workers managing overflow crowds of gravely sick patients with deftness, humanity and visible emotion has been nightly, gut-wrenching viewing for millions of Americans over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For senior Soojin Kim, those often-harrowing scenes prompted one thought: “I’m in.” “I wish I could have been a first-year resident going into one of those hospitals. To be able to help out so much, I gladly would have done it,” said Kim, a biomedical engineering major who heads to Rowan University’s Cooper Medical School this fall, where she plans to...

After a table saw severed the top of his right index finger, Adam Zanellato, a 20-year-old cabinet-maker at the time, had to relearn basic hand maneuvers, such as how to write and hold a fork. There were no affordable prosthetics on the market to help him regain dexterity. Several years later, he still found it hard to pick up coins from a table. A year and a half ago, he decided to restart his search, and began by contacting a friend in medical school for leads. The woman, an NJIT graduate, made this recommendation: present himself as a research project to students in...