If you wanted to see how AI and research across the humanities and sciences are reshaping each other in real time, NJIT’s Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts (HCSLA) offered a front-row seat during the university’s first AI Exploration Day.

The all-day AI takeover of campus highlighted the college’s diverse faculty and student research — covering everything from what the future holds for ethical AI design and robotics, to the latest AI-assisted efforts to alert Earth of eruptions on the Sun.

In an analysis of nearly three decades of solar acoustic data, NJIT physicists report evidence that the solar dynamo — the magnetic engine powering the Sun’s 11-year cycles and eruptive events — operates nearly 200,000 kilometers beneath the Sun’s surface.

Every eleven years, the Sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots — dark, cooler regions on the Sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions —appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a butterfly-shape pattern before fading as the cycle resets.

On a normal day, Trooper Zoe Welch ’24 pulls out of her station and steers her cruiser along the pine-lined highways and backroads cutting through southern New Jersey. For Welch, it’s a routine patrol — but also a very different path from NJIT peers who graduated with STEM degrees alongside her just over a year ago.

In fact, Welch is the first graduate of NJIT’s forensic science program to join the exclusive ranks of New Jersey’s State Police.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named two NJIT faculty members — Cesar Bandera, master teacher and Leir Endowed Chair for Entrepreneurship, and Sara Zapico, assistant professor of forensic science — to the 2026 class of Senior Members. They are among 230 emerging academic inventors from 82 member institutions selected for demonstrated success in producing technologies that have been patented, licensed, commercialized, or possess strong potential for real-world impact. 

This spring, NJIT students will have the opportunity to gain a richer picture of the complex history and politics of the Middle East that continue to shape today’s headlines, drive foreign policy debates and affect global stability.

A new course opening next semester, “Middle East Conflicts: State Building, Regional Tensions, Peace Processes,” will be taught by Doron Shultziner, an associate professor at Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College and visiting scholar in NJIT’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.

As this month’s string of powerful X-class solar flares sparked brilliant aurorae that lit up skies across an unusually wide swath of the globe — from northern Europe to Florida — researchers at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR) captured a less visible, but crucial, record of the storm’s impact on Earth’s upper atmosphere.