NJIT celebrated its undergraduate Class of 2026 at Prudential Center in Newark, honoring baccalaureate degree candidates from across the university’s colleges in a ceremony centered on service, achievement, alumni connection and the responsibility to use an NJIT education with purpose.

NJIT celebrated its master’s and doctoral graduates in two commencement ceremonies that joined academic tradition with messages about resilience, uncertainty, knowledge and the responsibility to use advanced education in service of others.

Solar flares are among the most violent events in the solar system, releasing energy equivalent to millions of hydrogen bombs and propelling particles to near-light speed in seconds.

Yet only a small fraction of those particles ever escapes into interplanetary space. Why do so few make it out of the Sun’s atmosphere — and what happens to the rest?

Those questions have driven Meiqi Wang’s research since she arrived at NJIT as a Ph.D. student in 2019, years of work that earned her NJIT’s Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award at Commencement 2026.

NJIT men's swimming and diving senior Zac Kuzak and women's soccer senior Mikayla Balio have been nominated for the 2025-26 America East Man and Woman of the Year awards, the conference office announced Thursday.

Childhood friends from Bergen County — two seniors and an alumnus — are jointly forming a startup company, MechSense Labs, to apply what they’ve learned at New Jersey Institute of Technology in designing emergency rescue equipment.

MechSense’s first invention is a robotic rover called NodeRover, employing artificial intelligence to make its own decisions and ad-hoc wireless mesh networking to stay in touch, especially in dangerous situations or hard-to-reach locations that are too risky for human responders.

Jessica Dineen did not arrive at NJIT expecting to become an interior designer. But over time, she found a field that matched the way she wanted to think, create and solve problems.

Now, as the Bronx native and first-generation college graduate prepares to begin her next chapter as a junior designer at Fogarty Finger in Tribeca, Dineen is leaving NJIT with more than a degree. She is leaving with a stronger sense of purpose, a sharper professional vision and the confidence to trust herself when the path ahead calls for both ambition and risk.

Avanish Kulkarni got his dream job right out of college.

Kulkarni, an Albert Dorman Honors College member who calls East Brunswick home, is graduating with a B.S. in computer science and will move to Silicon Valley this summer to become a software engineer at videogame platform company Roblox.

He scored the coveted position at Roblox after interning there in summer 2025 — and even that was highly competitive, with around 50,000 applicants whittled down to just a couple of hundred students selected.

Continuing our Senior Success Series, we’re spotlighting undergraduate seniors honored at the 2026 HCSLA Awards as they prepare for Commencement.

Like many computer science majors in the NJIT class of ‘26, Jonathan Malave hoped he might land a job at a name-brand software company such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Google.

But when an opportunity appeared on LinkedIn to work for WMG Inc., which makes software for the nuclear waste industry, Malave decided to apply. “I came across this out of nowhere, just applying for some jobs and trying to make anything stick. And then I saw that it was nuclear waste. That’s really cool! I didn't think anything was going to come of it.”

Before she ever toured NJIT, Natalia Peña had already made up her mind.

A scholarship offer from the Albert Dorman Honors College changed what college looked like for Peña and her family, easing the biggest question hanging over her future. “For the first time, my worries about how I would afford college faded,” she recalled in remarks this spring at NJIT’s Scholarship Luncheon.