LEADING INTO THE FUTURE
RESEARCH
University leaders, trustees, faculty and student researchers opened NJIT’s Microfabrication Innovation Center in December 2019. (From left): Lisa Axe, chair, Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering; ChairElect of the NJIT Board of Trustees Robert Cohen ’83, ’84, ’87, vice president, Global Research and Development, and chief technology officer, Stryker Orthopaedics; Marjorie A. Perry ’05, president and chief executive officer of MZM Construction & Management and chair, NJIT Board of Overseers; Joel S. Bloom, president of NJIT; Fadi P. Deek ’85, ’86, ’97, provost and senior executive vice president, NJIT; Atam P. Dhawan, senior vice provost for research, NJIT; Pedro Moura ’20; and Peter A. Cistaro ’68, NJIT Board of Trustees.
NJIT Opens State-of-the-Art Nanoelectronics Fabrication Facility
I
t was with great fanfare that NJIT opened its newest research facility, the Microfabrication Innovation Center (MIC), where technologists will be able to create their own nano- and microelectronic sensors and microfluidic devices on campus. Faculty and students will be able to
test, validate and translate innovative medical device and biosensor technologies to improve diagnosis and treatment of critical diseases and advance detection and remediation of pollutants. Housed in the former Microelectronics Research Center, the MIC features a series of rooms where researchers will print their designs on silicon or plates of glass, fabricate and test them. Because the parts they are making are micro- and nanoscale, the rooms will be free of potentially contaminating particles larger than a micron. The highest-level cleanroom will be
limited to 100 1-micron particles in a cubic meter of air. Other devices that will take shape in the facility include powerful diagnostic sensor systems, including electrochemical DNA sensors, that are miniaturized down to the size of a single molecule and a device that uses on-chip electrochemical mass spectrometry to elucidate protein structures and determine protein quantities. n
NJIT to Establish New Institute for Data Science
C
ontinuing its mission to lead in computing technologies, NJIT announced in July that it will establish a new Institute for Data Science, focusing David Bader, distinguished on cutting-edge professor and director of the interdisciplinary Institute for Data Science research and development in all areas pertinent to digital data. The institute will bring existing research centers in big data, medical informatics and cybersecurity together with new research centers in data analytics and artificial intelligence, cutting across all NJIT colleges and schools, and conduct both basic and applied research. The Institute for Data Science is directed by Distinguished Professor David Bader. He recently joined NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing from Georgia Tech, where he was chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering within the College of Computing. n
2 2019 President’s Report
NJIT Conducts the Largest-Ever Simulation of the Deepwater Horizon Spill
I
n a 600-ft.-long saltwater wave tank on the coast of New Jersey, a team of NJIT researchers conducted the largest-ever simulation of the Deepwater Horizon spill to determine more precisely where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil dispersed following the drilling rig’s explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Led by Michel Boufadel, director of NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources (CNR), the initial phase of the experiment involved releasing several thousand gallons of oil from a one-inch pipe dragged along the bottom of the tank in order to reproduce ocean current conditions. His team’s research, conducted at the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Ohmsett facility at Naval Weapons Station Earle in Leonardo, N.J., was detailed in the article, “The perplexing physics of oil dispersants,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In a second phase of the experiment, they applied dispersants to the oil as it shot into the tank to observe the effects on droplet formation and trajectory. Their goal is to glean insights they can apply to a variety of ocean-based oil releases. n njit.edu
