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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
It 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
Continuing 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
In 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
Images from NJIT Big Bear Solar Observatory Peel Away Layers of a Stellar Mystery
An international team of scientists, including three researchers from NJIT, has shed new light on one of the central mysteries of solar physics: how energy from the Sun is transferred to the star’s upper atmosphere, heating it to 1 million degrees Fahrenheit and higher in some regions, temperatures that are vastly hotter than the Sun’s surface.
With new images from NJIT’s Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the researchers have revealed in groundbreaking, granular detail what appears to be a likely mechanism — jets of magnetized plasma known as spicules that spurt like geysers from the Sun’s upper atmosphere into the corona.
In a paper published in the journal Science, the team describes key features of jet-like spicules that are in solar terms small-scale plasma structures, between 200 and 500 kilometers wide, that erupt continuously across the Sun’s expanse. The researchers also, for the first time, show where and how the jets are generated and the paths they travel, at speeds of around 100 kilometers per second in some cases, into the corona.
Images captured in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrum by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft were used to track the transportation of energy in the corona. These observations showed that it is also common for spicules to be heated
(From left): A multi-layered view of solar spicules: observations of the corona from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, followed by images from NJIT’s Big Bear Solar Observatory of the chromosphere, photosphere and associated magnetic fields.
to typical coronal temperatures.
Invisible to the human eye except when it appears briefly as a fiery halo of plasma during a solar eclipse, the corona remains a puzzle even to scientists who study it closely. Beginning 1,300 miles from the star’s surface and extending millions more in every direction, it is more than a hundred times hotter than lower layers much closer to the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core.
Solving what astrophysicists call one of the greatest challenges for solar modeling — determining the physical mechanisms that heat the upper atmosphere — requires highresolution images that were not available until BBSO’s 1.6-meter telescope, the largest operating solar telescope in the world, began capturing images a decade ago.
Scientists at Big Bear have also captured the first high-resolution images, for example, of magnetic fields and plasma flows originating deep below the Sun’s surface, tracing the evolution of sunspots and magnetic flux ropes through the chromosphere before their dramatic appearance in the corona as flaring loops. n
Dealing a Therapeutic Counterblow to Traumatic Brain Injury
Ablow to the head or powerful shock wave on the battlefield can cause immediate, significant damage to a person’s skull and the tissue beneath it. But the trauma does not stop there. The impact sets off a chemical reaction in the brain that ravages neurons and the networks that supply them with nutrients and oxygen.
It is the secondary effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI), which can lead to longterm cognitive, psychological and motor system damage, that piqued the interest of a team of NJIT biomedical engineers. To counter them, they are developing a therapy, injected at the site of the injury, which shows early indications it can protect neurons and stimulate the regrowth of blood vessels in the damaged tissue.
The challenge is that brain cells don’t regenerate as well as other tissues, such as bone. There is presently no effective treatment for restoring damaged neurons. The body’s protective mechanisms make it difficult to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, which hampers the delivery of medications.
The team’s treatment consists of a labcreated mimic of ependymin, a protein that protects neurons after injury, attached to a delivery platform — a strand of short proteins called peptides, contained in a hydrogel — that was developed by Vivek Kumar, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and director of NJIT’s Biomaterial Drug Development, Discovery and Delivery Laboratory. After injection, the peptides in the hydrogel reassemble at the localized injury site into a nanofibrous scaffold that mimics extracellular matrix, the supporting structure for cells. These soft materials possess mechanical properties similar to brain tissue. They promote rapid infiltration by a variety of stem cells which act as precursors for regeneration and may also provide a biomimetic niche to protect them.
“The idea is to intervene at the right time and place to minimize or reverse damage. We do this by generating new blood vessels in the area to restore oxygen exchange and by creating an environment in which neurons that have been damaged in the injury are supported and can thrive,” Kumar says. n
