Dhiraj Shah, a transformational business leader, high growth investor and passionate entrepreneur who founded global IT services company Avaap, has joined NJIT’s Board of Trustees.

Shah is executive chairman of Avaap, a technology and management consultancy that provides software services to help organizations modernize and transform their operations for the digital world. Its clients are concentrated in healthcare, higher education and government. Shah founded the Edison-based firm in 2006.

Parth Agrawal, a 2021 biomedical engineering graduate and Albert Dorman Honors scholar, was accepted to the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. But he’s not going – right away, at least. He deferred admission for a two-year fellowship with Venture For America, a nonprofit organization that trains recent college graduates to work in startups in cities across the country.

When the COVID-19 pandemic put an indefinite pause to how local bricks-and-mortar businesses serve their communities, an NJIT student and his friends stepped in to help small companies take the concept of shopping local online.

Franklin Tan said his website development business, Tartan Technologies, formed in 2018 and became much busier as small businesses, many of which never even had a website, needed to quickly catch up to the times with online storefronts because regular customers could no longer shop in person.

Vrushti Dalal, an Albert Dorman Honors College and computer science student from Sayreville, won the new University Innovation Challenge, a pitch-style competition sponsored by the Guardian Life Insurance Company.

For young entrepreneurs, pitch competitions are a popular way to present concepts, hone essential business skills and make industry connections, which can help transform their creativity and talent into viable, real-world business ventures.

Yashwee J. Kothari, an Albert Dorman Honors College and computer science student from Parsippany, placed first among student competitors at this year’s New Business Model Competition for her innovative work supporting patients living with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The annual competition was hosted virtually by NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Acceleration Center Dec. 7, marking its twelfth year.

Students in a new NJIT course that delivers the experience of planning a business on campus appreciate the latitude that instructors give them to make decisions.

A team of NJIT entrepreneurs was among those recognized by TiE Global, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship around the world, at the organization’s second annual TiE University Pitch Competition this fall, which included 13 teams representing TiE chapters from India, Israel, UAE, Israel, the U.S. and Canada. 

Ranked at No. 43, the university offers a unique entrepreneurial experience.

Communicating by sound underwater works great for dolphins and whales, so an NJIT expert decided to try a new variant of this method for autonomous vehicles, divers and sensors, too.

Radio signals used by traditional wireless devices become too weak underwater, explained Ali Abdi, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Advanced Communication and Signal Processing Laboratory, in NJIT’s Center for Wireless Information Processing.

When Mike Amegashie ’09, owner of Clyver Interview Prep, was invited to attend InnovateNJ’s inaugural “happy hour” for New Jersey entrepreneurs, he jumped at the opportunity to participate.