NJIT’s Dana Knox Research Showcase returned in 2025 to once again highlight the innovative and impactful work of students across disciplines. The event celebrated undergraduate and graduate researchers tackling real-world challenges with creative, technical solutions.

Now in its 20th year, the showcase was also its largest — over 150 presentations by 200+ students spanned all six of NJIT’s colleges.

Git, the most common protocol for computer programmers to keep track of their code, is becoming more secure because of software jointly developed by researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology and New York University.

Git underpins services such as GitHub, which alone has more than 100 million active users worldwide. But there have been security concerns over the years, and one problem is that Git-based systems rely on centralized administration requiring users to trust without the ability to verify, NJIT computer science professor Reza Curtmola explained.

The average person is estimated to consume up to a credit card's worth of plastic particles each week. However, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) undergrad Allison Harbolic is now uncovering the effects that our regular intake of nano-sized plastics can have at a critical stage of life — during pregnancy.

Harbolic's latest research into how nanoplastics impact placental health recently won her prestigious honors from the Society of Toxicology (SOT), an international scientific organization with members from more than 60 countries.

Seeing her father struggle through rehabilitation exercises after a stroke made Marina Samuel '25 think, why can’t therapy be more personalized, effective and efficient for the patient?

So, with a central focus on patients, she pursued a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology and after graduation in May, will seek a Ph.D. in the same discipline at NJIT. Her research as an undergraduate fueled this pursuit.

Wherever there’s dirt there’s bound to be ants, but one particular group is so adept at blending in with the ground that they hold the name “dirt ant” (Basiceros) all to themselves.

Now, an ancient fossil has revealed these elusive ants have seen much more of the planet’s dirt throughout their history than scientists previously realized.

We all know how bad smoking is for you, but what about vaping?

A new study at New Jersey Institute of technology (NJIT) led by forensic anthropologist and biochemist Sara Zapico is exploring the potential long-term health risks of e-cigarettes and how they might manifest in young adults at the genetic level, which up until now isn't fully understood.

Soldiers training on heavy artillery and athletes in contact sports are routinely exposed to repetitive mild shockwaves and injuries. Unlike someone who has just dodged a missile explosion or been smacked by a linebacker, they may feel little immediate impact.

The cumulative effects of these low-level blasts can, however, cause neurological problems such as sleep disorders and attention deficits, noted Bryan Pfister, director of New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Injury Biomechanics, Materials and Medicine.

Threaded throughout the body are networks of capillaries so miniscule that red blood cells must contort to squeeze through them one at a time. It is this world that Peter Balogh brings to dynamic, 3D life on computer screens.

Elisa Kallioniemi slides a circular disk over her head, stops above her right ear and clicks. Her left hand jumps. She moves it a couple of inches back, clicks again, and is suddenly speechless, mid-sentence. With a single pulse of electromagnetic energy, her device can activate or inhibit the brain’s major command centers.

What she is now trying to determine is whether multiple pulses in the motor cortex can produce longer-term therapeutic results by retraining neural circuits. Her first focus is people who have lost some control of their limbs following a stroke.

Zhi Wei, a bioinformaticist, was elected to the 2024 Fellows class of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Wei, who joined NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing in 2008 and now holds the role of distinguished professor, also became an IEEE Fellow in 2024.