Like any talented forensic science student would, Kristen Mogerman ’23 has been using her sharp analytical skills to unlock one opportunity after the next — from an internship with the U.S. Department of Justice assisting its regional violent crime squad, to her post-graduation destination as a credit and risk analyst with Fiserv.

Mogerman has wrapped up a unique internship experience during commencement week. When she wasn’t in NJIT classrooms and forensics labs her senior year, she’s been stationed with a Newark-based task force working on federal criminal cases.

In her second year at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Samantha Augustin made the difficult decision to switch majors.

Biomedical engineering gave way to computer engineering, and now Augustin is poised to pursue a master’s in cybersecurity at New York University. But without the help of an academic advisor “who patiently explained how to do it and helped me transfer and organize my courses,” the major switch could have set her back.

Some of NJIT’s brightest up-and-coming researchers grabbed center stage on campus at the Dana Knox Student Research Showcase, a springtime tradition that continues to highlight student ingenuity and diverse research accomplishments across the university’s six colleges.

For participants of the 18th annual research competition, it was a special opportunity to connect with the campus community by discussing their recent discoveries and innovations, most of which have been years in the making.

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.

Tiny particles in Earth’s atmosphere can have a big impact on climate. But understanding exactly how these aerosol particles form cloud drops and affect the absorption and scattering of sunlight is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in climate models. Ogochukwu (Ogo) Enekwizu, a postdoctoral research associate in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is trying to tame that complexity.

“Our task is to mimic what happens in the atmosphere by making a cloud in the lab,” she said.

Bin Chen, associate professor of physics and researcher at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR), has been awarded the 2023 Karen Harvey Prize from the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) for “significantly advancing” our understanding of the fundamental physics driving the largest explosions in our solar system — solar flares.

A forest’s resilience, or ability to absorb environmental disturbances, has long been thought to be a boost for its odds of survival against the looming threat of climate change.

But a new study suggests that for some Western U.S. forests, it’s quite the opposite.

In the journal Global Change Biology, researchers have published one of the first large-scale studies of U.S. forest land exploring the link between forest resilience and mortality.

A research paper on metal carbides and nitrides is paying dividends for NJIT’s Meng-Qiang Zhao — eight years after it was published.

For the fourth straight year, Zhao, an assistant professor of chemical and materials engineering at NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering, has made Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers. Why? Chiefly because peers continue to cite the paper, which introduced a faster and safer way to synthesize MXenes, a family of novel 2D transition metal carbides and nitrides, according to Zhao.