Last month, New Jersey educators and stakeholders met at the Atlantic City Convention Center for New Jersey School Boards Association’s “Workshop 2018” — the state’s largest annual professional development conference for school leaders. The conference staged a record turnout of “Future Ready” certified schools and districts improving digital education practices and resources for New Jersey students. At the convention, Future Ready Schools - New Jersey (FRS-NJ) — New Jersey’s leading initiative to promote digital learning throughout its elementary and secondary public schools — announced it…

New Jersey Institute of Technology has been ranked among the best colleges for biology students in the U.S., according to College Factual’s recently released “2019 Best Biology Colleges” rankings. The new rankings indicate that NJIT’s degree programs in biology place in the top 15 percent of all general biology programs offered in the country, improving the university’s national position 82 slots over the past year. The new rankings also recognize NJIT as having one of the top five biology programs in New Jersey. “I am pleased, but not surprised, because NJIT has invested strongly in…

Physicist Ken Chin, a scientist, author and inventor, received a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award last night from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey for his work on a promising new method for advancing sustainable energy production: next-generation solar cells. Chin focuses on improving the performance and efficiency of thin-film solar cells based on cadmium telluride (CdTe), which are potentially a lower-cost alternative to silicon because they require fewer natural resources to produce electricity and take up much less space on buildings. “What we’re interested in is low-…

What had been a typical summer this past August all changed for Alisa Scivetti ’19 after she came across a social media advertisement browsing through her Snapchat story. The open-call advertisement encouraged applications for a chance of entering a highly selective, once-in-a-lifetime competition — one that would test Scivetti against some of New Jersey’s most impressive young women onstage, in front of a live audience of thousands.  Scivetti took a chance and submitted her information online. The very next day, she received an unexpected phone call, confirming her spot onstage Nov.…

In the 1990s, Jack Kevorkian controversially brought the issue of physician-assisted dying to the forefront of a conversation at the crossroads of medicine, technology, law and morality — known as bioethics.  That conversation has only become more complex today, as scientific advances continue to create new challenges for bioethicists considering the consequences of technology and how it may reshape medicine and society. Some countries have legalized or are now considering legalizing forms of physician-assisted dying for patients seeking to avoid technological death. The rise of new…

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will host a TEDxNJIT event Nov. 8, 2018 in the Jim Wise Theatre on the NJIT campus and via an accompanying live simulcast available to viewers worldwide. The independently organized event, licensed by TED, is themed “ReFraming” and will feature leaders from business, academia and the arts addressing a range of topics. Speakers will explore assumptions that limit solutions to social problems and broadening perspectives to find new opportunities for cross cutting approaches. They will cover a range of disciplines including arts,…

In the face of both natural and man-made threat to city infrastructure, greater pushes have been made toward the planning and design of “resilient cities” — cities positioned to protect and enhance urban life through development of components necessary to respond to terrorism, earthquakes, coastal flooding, solar flares, as well as infrastructure adoption of sustainable energy. In their upcoming NJIT Technology and Society Forum presentation, two experts who have collaborated for the last 15 years on the topic of city resilience — Hani Nassif, professor at Rutgers University, and Kaan Ozbay…

Faced with a formidable list of nominees for the annual Excellence in Research Prize and Medal, the Board of Overseers opted this year for its own brand of novelty and innovation: the prize committee picked three. The sector-spanning winners, all at the forefront of their fields, included a solar physicist, a chemical engineer and a neurobiologist. Dale Gary, distinguished professor of physics in NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, was awarded for his groundbreaking research on solar flares and for the creation of a radio telescope, composed of 15 antennas spread out over two…