NJBIZ recognized two professors from New Jersey Institute of Technology and a division of the university’s New Jersey Innovation Institute in its latest lists of Healthcare Heroes.

The annual recognition salutes excellence, innovation and individuals who are “making a significant impact on the quality of health care in New Jersey,” NJBIZ noted in a story about this year’s honorees.

The Highlanders were honored in three different categories. Here’s a closer look at each.

A marquee event during Inauguration Week was the Scholarship Reception and Networking event, which invites generous benefactors who have created scholarships at the university to engage directly with the student beneficiaries at a celebratory luncheon.

The event humanizes and demonstrates the impact of giving back and removing a financial burden to those who may need it most, as President Teik C. Lim told his own story of how a scholarship changed his, and subsequently his family’s life.

Some of NJIT’s brightest up-and-coming researchers grabbed center stage on campus at the Dana Knox Student Research Showcase, a springtime tradition that continues to highlight student ingenuity and diverse research accomplishments across the university’s six colleges.

For participants of the 18^th annual research competition, it was a special opportunity to connect with the campus community by discussing their recent discoveries and innovations, most of which have been years in the making.

Two NJIT undergraduates won prestigious fellowships. Olivia Kolakowski ’24 was awarded the Brooke Owens Fellowship, and Milan Patel ’23 has been selected as an Amgen Scholar at Columbia University. 

The Fellowship is designed to serve both as an inspiration and as a career boost to capable young women and other gender minorities who, like Dawn Brooke Owens (1980-2016), aspire to explore the sky and stars, to shake up the aerospace industry, and to help their fellow people here on planet Earth.

The CEO of an NJIT-born startup made NJBIZ’s list of the Next Generation of Leaders.

John Vito d’Antonio-Bertagnolli, who holds both a bachelor’s and master’s in biomedical engineering from NJIT, where he was an Albert Dorman Honors College Scholar, leads OculoMotor Technologies (OMT), a vision therapy company that launched in 2018.

Next up for NJIT biomedical engineering graduate Amal Shabazz: the Ph.D. program in bioengineering at the University of Maryland. But first, the Albert Dorman Honors Scholar has a 10-week summer internship at Pfizer in Andover, Mass.

Her four years in University Heights were filled with helpful mentors, key internships and welcoming peer groups that collectively helped opened the door to graduate school. In an interview, she shares what she gained and where she hopes it leads.

Ayushi Sangoi, 23, a Newark, N.J., resident and researcher at New Jersey Institute of Technology has been named one of 2022’s MLH Top 50 – a list compiled each year by Major League Hacking (MLH) of the organization’s most inspiring community members. The recipients are recognized for their exceptional contributions to the tech ecosystem and STEM education.

Sreya Sanyal ’22 is right where she wants to be in the fight against cancer — at the cutting-edge of medical research. She’ll soon be using the breakthrough gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, often described as “genetic scissors”, to study human disease as a post baccalaureate researcher with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after graduation.

For Sanyal, whose parents met and graduated from medical school in India, her journey toward a career as a physician-scientist specializing in cancer biology has deep roots, beginning at the age of 10. 

NJIT’s student newspaper, The Vector, continues making its journalistic voice heard — the paper is the recipient of several awards from U.S. college media contests recently.

The Vector was named the Corbin Gwaltney Award winner for “Best All-Around Student Newspaper” (among large universities) at the Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards, beating out competition from the likes of Hofstra University and Boston College. 

NJIT has landed some unexpected residents recently, and they’ll be getting plenty of “airtime” as they settle into their new home. In fact, they’ll have their own channel where you can check them (and their new crib) out, 24/7. 

Two red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) have begun a rare urban nest on a sixth-story ledge of the campus’s Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) Residence Hall on Colden Street.