This month, NJIT’s forensic science program welcomed David Fisher — an expert criminalist previously with New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) — to its faculty ranks.

The announcement sees Fisher appointed as the university’s first-ever “Professor of Practice in Forensic Science” — a position expected to play a leading role in educating the program’s students in current lab techniques and crime scene investigation methods used by active forensic science professionals today.

Known as a chemical manufacturing by-product of many cosmetics and home cleaning products, the industrial solvent 1,4-Dioxane is now considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be an “emerging contaminant” and “likely human carcinogen” that can be found at thousands of groundwater sites nationally — potentially representing a multi-billion dollar environmental remediation challenge. 

This year’s Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) freshman class has already set records. The group is 43 percent female, includes 13 New Jersey Medical School students and boasts an average SAT score of 1475.

Aside from these fantastic figures, the incoming class is noteworthy for its geography. A sizable number of students are coming to NJIT from outside New Jersey, some from as far away as California.  

Let’s meet a few of ADHC’s newest out-of-state students.

KRISTEN ABRAHAM

This month, the work of NJIT’s top student researchers was put on display at the 2018 Knox Student Research Showcase, “A Glimpse Into the Future”. 

The showcase, which annually honors outstanding research done at NJIT by its graduate and undergraduate students, awarded Najmaddin Akhundov first place among this year’s graduate researchers for developing a computational model to track and control invasive species that threaten the environment.

The research that Assistant Professor of Physics Cristiano Dias is pursuing has the potential to expand our knowledge of phenomena that can affect the creation of dangerous obstructions in undersea pipelines transporting natural gas and the formation of protein-based fibers in the brain related to diseases such as Alzheimer’s.