Each spring around Commencement, NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts holds its very own celebration, awarding its standout student and faculty stars from across the college’s diverse academic spectrum of art, history and humanities to physics, biology and chemistry.
As a kid growing up in Omaha, Neb., Chloe Jelley ’20 had a major aversion to insects that many can relate with.
“I was one of the more careful kids and I was not into bugs at all when I was young … actually, I was really afraid of all bugs,” recalled Jelley.
Biochemistry senior Alejandra Lopez-Diaz hasn’t wasted much time during her past three years at NJIT. Outside of class, she’s spent most of her free hours inside the university’s labs researching an aspect of time itself — our circadian clock, or the internal biological clock that helps takes us through various phases of the day from morning to night.
A five-woman team of undergraduate engineering students is tackling a problem experienced by a diverse and growing population: balance instability. For the elderly, people recovering from strokes and accidents or those living with disorders that affect movement, such as Parkinson’s disease, falls present the risk of grave injury.
With funding from the Hearst Foundations, the team is taking aim at the mechanics that lie at the heart of the problem, determining with precision – and on a step-by-step basis – when, where and how an individual loses stability.
On May 1, the annual springtime celebration of NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts (CSLA) kicked off, marking a year of highlights throughout the arts and sciences at the college during the 2019 CSLA Awards Ceremony.
This week, nearly 50 of the year’s most promising NJIT student-researchers gathered to present their work to the campus community at the university’s annual year-end research competition — the 2019 Dana Knox Showcase “A Glimpse Into the Future.”
KARINA DSOUZA ’20
MAJOR: Biomedical Engineering
HOMETOWN: New Milford, N.J.
MARY McGUINNESS ’20
MAJOR: Chemistry
HOMETOWN: Spring Lake, N.J.
Plants that absorb pernicious pollutants from the air itself? Ujjwala Rai ’19, a chemical engineering major, has spent the summer studying bacteria found in the root systems of plants that can remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs), industrial compounds emitted by ubiquitous products such as paints and fuels, into the atmosphere. To better understand how these bacteria can thrive in a variety of soil-less media, she has worked closely with professors from the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) and the Department of Chemical Engineering.
Undergraduate architecture student Laura Gould '22 spent her summer on the NJIT campus participating in the inaugural Honors Summer Research Insititue, where she used Google Street View to study the correlation between architecture and the use and creation of sacred space in Italy.
JENNIFER CALLAGHAN ’21
Major: Chemical Engineering
Hometown: Nutley, N.J.
