Wading into a parched stretch of the Pequannock River, Taylor VanGrouw got a jarring reminder of the fragility of New Jersey’s smaller waterways: a brown trout stranded in a shallow pool, too lethargic to swim away as he approached.

“As temperatures rise, dissolved oxygen levels decline, in the way a bottle of soda, when hot, can’t hold its fizz. Starved of oxygen, trout can’t feed or reproduce. As temperatures rise, they become more stressed and need more oxygen,” notes VanGrouw, an Albert Dorman Honors student majoring in mechanical engineering.

Several new aeronautical opportunities will provide hands-on training for New Jersey Institute of Technology students who look to the sky.

Starting this fall, NJIT will establish an official group of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary University Program, known as a flotilla. It will meet at Caldwell Airport and it's only the fifth air station out of 79 flotillas in the Auxiliary's first district, southern region, which covers metropolitan New York and beyond.

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.

Undergraduates Nora Mahgoub ’25 and Victoria Pirog ’25 are already solving complex ethical dilemmas of today’s engineering world, and doing so on a grand stage, as the first NJIT students to compete at Lockheed Martin’s annual Ethics in Engineering Competition.

Mahgoub and Pirog recently joined other two-student teams from more than 70 U.S. colleges and universities at Lockheed Martin’s fifth annual case competition, held at its Center for Leadership Excellence in Bethesda, Md., Feb. 27 through March 1.

Techies call it the hands-on imperative — that the best learning is by doing — and the concept is something Mark Pothen, a mechanical engineering major, takes to heart.

Pothen worked part-time this academic year as a business analyst for health care startup Axuall Inc., where he'll become an associate product manager after graduating from NJIT.