A robotic fleet built to penetrate dark and narrow cave passages, cellular studies into alcohol’s role in hastening neurodegeneration in people with HIV, plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air and new methods for eliminating noise from data searches are a few of the research projects that drew students back to campus laboratories this summer. The students themselves are just as diverse: a team of physics, engineering and industrial design majors from NJIT; a group of eight international students from Kolkata, India’s Heritage Institute of Technology; an aspiring neurosurgeon…

Future Ready Schools - New Jersey (FRS-NJ)—New Jersey’s leading initiative to promote digital learning throughout its elementary and secondary public schools — has recently announced that the number of schools participating in the program has tripled statewide in 2018. The new figures indicate that 265 New Jersey schools from 94 school districts have now officially committed themselves to the FRS-NJ initiative at the close of the program’s second year and certification cycle. In 2017, during the program’s inaugural campaign to assess and ramp up digital resources and educational practices…

July 19 was an especially busy day for NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs (CPCP). Not only was CPCP overseeing its various summer offerings taking place across campus, it was also welcoming educators in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to a special forum that intertwined a bit with students attending the annual Bernard Harris Summer STEM Camp (BHSSC). Before the forum’s keynote speaker and camp namesake Dr. Bernard Harris — a former astronaut, CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) and CPCP Advisory Board member — stepped up to the podium, a foursome…

  Plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air itself? Ujjwala Rai ’19, a chemical engineering major, has spent the summer studying bacteria found in the root systems of plants that can remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs), industrial compounds emitted by ubiquitous products such as paints and fuels, into the atmosphere. To better understand how these bacteria can thrive in a variety of soil-less media, she has worked closely with professors from the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) and the Department of Chemical Engineering. Anthony Yacoub ’19, an industrial…

Traditionally, many engineers and developers of solar cell technology have turned to crystalline silicon — a tried and tested material absorber capable of efficiently converting solar radiation to electricity at just four times the thickness of a strand of hair. At up to a 100th the thickness of a hair strand, nano-thin metal films offer an even more cost-effective and flexible material alternative, holding promise in the future development of everything from solar power to sensor technology.  However, metal nanofilms are currently more complicated to use as material…

When Edward Jheryl Wilson graduated from NJIT in 2011, he did so in heroic fashion — etching his name in university lore by leading the Highlanders to their first winning season since joining the elite ranks of Division I basketball in 2006 — and becoming NJIT’s first Division I 1,000-point scorer in the process. However, Wilson’s successful journey in top-level athletics was not without adversity from the start, nor would his journey be quite over after he left NJIT. “Coming to NJIT from St. Benedicts High School as an 18-year-old kid in ’07, we suffered a winless season my…

NJIT, one of the few public polytechnic institutes in the Northeast, is once again included in the latest edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges — a subjective and selective reference tool that systematically reviews over 300 colleges in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. For more than 30 years, millions of students, parents, and guidance counselors have relied on the Fiske Guide to Colleges to present the best and most interesting schools during their college search. Compiled by former New York Times education editor Edward B. Fiske, the guide features select colleges based on a broad range of…

A solar telescope that captures images of the entire disk of the Sun, monitoring eruptions taking place simultaneously in different magnetic fields in both the photosphere and chromosphere, is now installed beside the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) at NJIT’s California-based Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). The telescope, SOLIS (Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun), collects images from three separate instruments over years and even decades, rather than minutes or hours, giving scientists a comprehensive view of solar activity such as flares and coronal mass…

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is bucking an undergraduate admissions trend. While many universities are failing to hit recruitment targets and/or reducing their standards for admission due to sharp regional and national declines in the traditional college-aged population, NJIT has seen noteworthy growth this year in both applications and the average SAT score of those applicants. In fact, NJIT's applications for undergraduate admission for Fall of 2018 have grown 12% over last year (33% among out-of-state students) and the average SAT score for the incoming class…

In 1964, legendary director Stanley Kubrick met with legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clark to embark on one of the most ambitious films ever made — “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  In a 141-minute cinematic spectacle that would take four years to produce, the two artists uniquely blended aspects of science and art to create a groundbreaking futuristic mythology that is still studied in film schools and debated by global audiences today. Half a century later, contemporary writer, filmmaker and artist Michael Benson, has authored a new and critically acclaimed account of the…