NJIT Research Magazine: Linking Laboratories to Lives

From the Interim Provost

For much of human history, the creation of civil infrastructure has been a top-down affair, the purview of potentates in the ancient world and formidable bureaucrats in the modern era, such as Robert Moses, the fabled power broker who built roadways, parks and public housing throughout New York City.

More recently, however, what, where and how we develop new highways, buildings, factories and power plants has come under increasing scrutiny from a more attuned society. And not a minute too soon. If we’re to achieve resilience in a rapidly changing world, we need the motivation, energy and buy-in from as many of us as possible. These grassroots deliberations must also extend to the products we create. Applied scientists and technologists play a vital role in supporting this engagement. Critically, we provide timely data about vulnerabilities and deficiencies in our systems to partners in government, industry and the community. We’re making an effort, albeit a belated one, to include marginalized groups that have long been left out of the conversation. With our distributed sensor systems, we can let businesses know, for example, when their equipment is operating inefficiently. This capability will be especially important to ensure the acceptance and success of new sustainable technologies, such as the wind farms rising off our coasts. Sensors in the environment, which are progressively more sophisticated,

alert communities to contamination in the water supply and changing natural conditions that threaten the health of ecosystems. With our enhanced modeling capabilities, we can increasingly convey a clearer picture of what awaits us in the future, in a world that is even a half a degree hotter, for example, if we’re unwilling to curb our thirst for power and products. That data must be as relevant and localized as possible, otherwise it’s an abstraction. People need to understand the implications for their own community — what the next hurricane will mean for their property, businesses and ability to move around. We need to step off our campuses to tell them, and listen to the people most impacted. To ensure our own credibility, we researchers must hold ourselves accountable for the technologies we design. The more resilient they are, the less time and money society will spend on recovery, repair and replacement. We also need to make sure that our communities — our campuses — are sustainable. Last year, NJIT was among the top 100 institutions globally in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for our work addressing global issues identified in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our improved rating reflects the university’s commitment to further leveraging our STEM efforts in support

of sustainability, but we have more work to do. We’ve begun by surveying the NJIT community about our practices on campus, modes of transportation and doing more to improve our performance.

The world’s supercharged disruptive events require us to act with urgency. At NJIT, that has meant redoubling our community outreach to identify evolving problems and their underlying causes, finding new ways to spur innovation in our core areas — the environment, health care and data science — and translating that research into technologies that build global resilience and are themselves sustainable.

Atam P. Dhawan Interim Provost and Senior Executive Vice President Senior Vice Provost for Research Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Scientific Innovation for a Sustainable, Equitable Future

The Earth is changing rapidly and indelibly. Warming temperatures are upending ecosystems. Sea levels are rising, while aquifers dwindle. Industrial chemicals permeate every region of the globe, from urban neighborhoods to remote fens in the Arctic tundra. Indeed, geologists are debating whether human-wrought changes over the past several decades are so profound they’ve ushered in a new epoch in planetary history, the Anthropocene, that is etched for eternity in rock and sediment.

IN THIS DYNAMIC WORLD, applied researchers focused on sustainability are can-do masters of complexity. They’re devising new methods to identify, describe and record unfolding, multi-layered impacts at the granular level, as well as the means to temper them. More challenging still, they’re tasked with predicting conditions already in play, but not yet fully apparent — a future of uncertainties and risks that are difficult to quantify — by building into their technologies security, safety, resilience and hope.

Biologist Xiaonan Tai, for example, is shedding light on how the interplay of ecological and hydrological features, such as subsurface water, shapes forest response and recovery from fires. In tracking the transformation of industrial mercury into a neurotoxin in warming Arctic soil, chemist Lijie Zhang is developing models to help policymakers forecast pollution levels under different climate scenarios.

In a world of newly energetic storms, wildfires and pandemics, disaster planners are rethinking what it means to be prepared. Engineer Michel Boufadel is building a “Community Intrinsic Resilience Index” to evaluate a region’s ability across key sectors to respond and recover following disruptive events. Civil engineer Matthew Bandelt is investigating novel construction materials better able to withstand earthquakes and massive storms. Roboticist Petras Swissler is constructing autonomous, self-assembling robots to swarm into disaster areas to support collapsing infrastructure and later repair it. Efforts to mitigate the harm of ongoing human development are gathering momentum. Students in architect John Cays’ design studio are required to conduct a life cycle analysis — an examination of a building’s impact on the environment from the initial extraction of raw materials to its potential dismantling decades later — for each project. Erin Heidelberger ’20, an environmental performance analyst, runs simulations that give designers sustainability options, such as how to orient a building to access more daylight and reduce energy use, in the early planning stages. Environmental engineer Wen Zhang’s boat-mounted device for removing toxic algae blooms from lakes employs microbubbles of air, which also restore oxygen, rather than chemicals. Researchers are also finding new ways to reuse existing infrastructure and products. Architect Georgeen Theodore is developing a toolkit that will give communities in Athens access to now untapped water in a Roman aqueduct and create green pockets to offset heat island effects. Civil engineer Matthew Adams explores the logistical, technical and policymaking hurdles that prevent municipalities from incorporating demolished sidewalks, manhole casings

and building slabs into new structures, rather than mining for raw stone. NJIT students and faculty are developing new uses for manufactured products that are now difficult to recycle, from colored glass, to plastics, to batteries. Because remedies come with a cost and often require new ways of thinking, inventors understand that technology alone will not get the job done. Science and progress hinge on the understanding, participation and assent of stakeholders and institutions.

“I would argue that leading with equity is a way to make climate change actions stick. If they are acceptable to communities, that’s the key to ensuring they’re not voted out at the next election,” says Robin Leichenko, co-director of the Rutgers Climate Institute, at the inaugural forum of NJIT’s chapter of the National Academy of Inventors in late 2021.

Increasingly, NJIT student researchers incorporate community feedback in their projects. Taylor VanGrouw, who is investigating the declining trout population in a New Jersey river, presented his results and remediation proposals to state environmental officials and hopes to work with local governments. Vishva Rana, who is developing a real-time air quality monitoring system to deploy throughout city neighborhoods, wants to empower local citizens, including women and people of color, to push for policy actions. A group of architecture students working with Newark on sustainable homes for the unhoused, solicited feedback from the residents of emergency housing constructed during the pandemic.

Social scientist Yao Sun is using crowdsourcing platforms to help stakeholders in coastal communities share ideas and information about storm preparation. Among other elements, immersive VR technology will allow residents to grasp sustainable architectural design and help researchers, in turn, record their behavioral responses.

To ensure that sustainable technologies come to fruition, electrical engineer Philip Pong is building a scaled-down turbine learning facility so that tomorrow’s wind engineers can gain hands-on experience on dry land.

Lastly, Ph.D. biology student Amani Webber-Schultz understands that without diverse representation, researchers may not even frame problems adequately.

She and three other Black female scientists founded the nonprofit Minorities in Shark Sciences to boost diversity in the field, in part by fully funding hands-on research experiences for gender minorities of color who struggle financially to break in.

Novel Forms for Broken Glass

Lab-Simulated Earthquakes Test the Mettle of ‘High-Performance’ Building Materials

Despite advances in construction design and materials, a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas fault could kill a projected 1,800 people, injure an additional 50,000 and demolish 200 million square feet of commercial, public and residential buildings, according to a recent study. Even the newest, most up-to-date structures would be toppled at a rate of up to 1 in 10.

“Ten percent is not a random figure — it’s the accepted failure rate in today’s building code when weighing the economics of improving construction with the risk of such large events,” says Matthew Bandelt associate professor of civil engineering and co-director of NJIT’s Materials and Structures Laboratory. “The risk is rising, however, as more people move into urban areas. As a result, we now have very concentrated losses when a natural disaster, in any form, hits a major metropolitan area.”

Engineers increasingly use a new class of high-performance concrete to bolster new and existing bridges against harsh conditions, but there has been little push to incorporate them in the construction of buildings.

“We don’t know how buildings would behave with these new materials, including during earthquakes, so it’s difficult to quantify the benefits,” notes Bandelt, who secured a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to assess the seismic response of materials known as high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites (HPFRCC) in structures of various configurations and to develop design criteria for using them.

The HPFRCC materials that Bandelt and his team study have small fibers made of steel or polymers that are one-half to 1 inch in length and range in thickness from that of a

human hair to the tip of a pen. When building components made with HPFRCC materials are subjected to seismic shaking, the fibers help keep the concrete together, potentially making it stronger and more able to deform or bend.

Buildings designed with high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete are also potentially more sustainable, meaning they would require less steel, for example, because the concrete itself bears more of the load. “The beams and columns could be smaller,” Bandelt says, “because less material carries the same amount of weight.” He hopes that his research will contribute to the establishment of LEED-like standards for building resilience.

Earthquake forces push and pull the beams and columns that make up a building. Bandelt uses hydraulic machines that apply up to 220,000 pounds of force to simulate these impacts on individual building components, and to better understand their behavior under the combined effects of axial load and bending. Their studies have shown that HPFRCC dramatically improved the seismic response: increases in strength of 30% to 40%, or even more, are common in comparison to traditional reinforced concrete. But the deformation capacity — the amount a structural component can bend before breaking — requires further consideration.

The team is now building mathematical representations of buildings with different frame configurations, story heights, building layouts, structural element geometries and HPFRCC mechanical properties to test the materials’ performance at the system level. They apply nonlinear dynamic structural analysis, a technique to computationally simulate structural response under loading, to see how much shaking would make the buildings collapse.

“We have component-level information, but not for an entire building, and without it, we’ll never get buy-in,” Bandelt says, adding that part of their research is to perform risk assessments to understand how rates of damage change with these new materials and to analyze cost-benefit scenarios for HPFRCC systems.

They’re investigating methods to engineer and place HPFRCC in key regions of buildings, while quantifying their impact on performance, safety and life-cycle costs. Specifically, Bandelt and his team will study how HPFRCC can be placed in “plastic hinge regions” where damage is expected to occur during an earthquake, with the expectation of reducing

damage while also increasing strength and elasticity. Their goal is to help people understand the relative benefit of using the new composites under different risk scenarios.

“If a building owner asked for their structure to be immediately occupiable after a specific earthquake magnitude, for example, we would tell them how to meet that standard,” he says. “We do this by using our computational models to simulate performance under various earthquake magnitudes and integrating those results with the risk of different earthquake hazards based on how likely they are to occur and how much shaking they cause.”

According to the Federal Emergency Management

Agency (FEMA), about half of the U.S. population, not including residents of Hawaii and Alaska, are at risk of damage from earthquakes. Regions that are most vulnerable to earthquakes are largely uninsured or underinsured against them, Bandelt notes. As of now, the federal government through agencies such as FEMA covers the lion’s share of damage repairs.

“There is a lot of loss in natural disasters, not just in terms of lives and revenues, but also in community,” he says.

“Buildings are places people gather.”

On the roof of NJIT’s Campus Center, speckled slabs composed of recycled glass and plastic bottles have successfully weathered the first leg of a year-long stress test.

“We’re seeing how this composite withstands ultraviolet light, fluctuations in temperature, freezing and thawing cycles, rain and snow,” explains RICHARD MARSH, a master’s student in environmental engineering. “So far, there’s no crumbling or cracking.”

Marsh is part of a team of engineers and architects who hope to develop innovative construction products from mixed-color container glass that “go beyond the tried and tested paving materials or cementitious composites.” Think architectural facade elements or landscaping products such as planters, pavers and retaining wall blocks.

“We’re trying to find a use for mixed-color glass without going through all of the processing that now occurs when it’s ground into fine powder and used as a replacement for sand in concrete,” he says. “We use it as an aggregate.”

Marsh’s group argues that manufacturing new glass products utilizing recycled glass requires 20% less energy and creates 20% less air pollution than glass produced from virgin materials.

Yet only a quarter of the glass Americans use is currently recycled. The reasons range from the logistical, to the aesthetic, to the psychological. To begin with, Americans don’t separate glass. To do so at a recycling facility would require expensive equipment, such as optical sensors and robots.

“The system is in place and it’s hard to change that,” Marsh says. “If you’re recycling, you think you’re doing a good thing. If we tell you that it’s mostly going to a landfill, you might be demoralized and possibly recycle less.”

Manufacturers don’t use recycled mixed-color glass to make new containers, because when it’s melted together it becomes the color of mud.

While there is a long way to go before commercialization, he is optimistic. The group chose plastic bottles (25% of the mix) as a binder for their new product, because they’re also recycled materials, easily recognizable everyday objects, “and so help raise awareness for recycling,” he adds.

“The material’s surprisingly high compressive strength and durability, coupled with its unique speckled look,“ Marsh says, ”may make it a popular commodity in an environmentallyconscious future.”

Construction Engineering

Matthew Bandelt investigates methods and materials that can reduce the impact of earthquake damage to buildings.

Richard Marsh

Sustainable Design

Top left: Iman Syed ’22 ascends a staircase inside Hadrian’s Aqueduct beneath the city of Athens, while Ebony Payne ’22 looks on.

Bottom left: Ebony Payne ’22 prepares to climb out of the 2,000-year-old aqueduct.

Right: Georgeen Theodore stands near a wellhead in Athens. Theodore is creating a three-dimensional model of the city’s Roman-era aqueduct that could help citizens access its water and offset intense heat island effects.

the water flow, see how it intersects with the existing urban landscape and design public green spaces that can be irrigated. Creating these green pockets will help offset the heat island effects in a metropolis where the temperatures can reach 111 degrees.

Without a visual guide, municipalities have no way to manage or utilize the water, says Theodore, who started researching the underground system in 2017.

“We are using our skills as designers to make visible what is invisible and make it negotiable, and enable residents to help inform the design. We are using the skills of designers to help democratize a big infrastructure project. We want to make it understandable at a glance and create tools to help people see it.”

Mapping an Ancient Solution to a Modern Crisis

thens is dense, dry and prone to drought. Together, rising temperatures, a lack of trees and intense heat island effects are baking the modern metropolis of more than three million people. Researchers think a nearly 2,000-year-old answer to the city’s problems may lie beneath its streets.

In 125 CE, Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the creation of an aqueduct that eventually stretched more than 12 miles. Despite being abandoned decades ago, the aqueduct continues to function — silently collecting groundwater. The missed opportunity, however, is that the water is currently routed to a sewer and dumped into the Aegean Sea.

Georgeen Theodore, a professor at the Hillier College of Architecture and Design (HCAD) and the coordinator of the Master of Urban Design Program, wants the people of Athens to be able to access that water — and have a say in how it is used. She’s building a toolkit that will include a richly detailed, three-dimensional digital model of the aqueduct and its adjacent watershed that will help municipalities access

Theodore, a founder and principal of the architecture, urban design and planning practice Interboro Partners, says the toolkit will include diagrams and infographics that will help local stakeholders understand the Roman-era water system. She’s currently working with two students to “build a digital and a physical model of the aqueduct and prototypical sites where we can test public space interventions that lower temperatures.” The project is part of a collaboration among the city, the regional water authority, the city of Chalandri, the National Technical University of Athens and NJIT.

In 2022, Theodore and two of her students went to Athens for a week and had the “thrilling” experience of entering the aqueduct at multiple spots. Above ground, all one can see are the wellheads.

“It was interesting to study something for a long time from afar and to then finally get to experience it in person. Climbing down into a deep, dark well that was built nearly 2,000 years ago was an extraordinary experience for me and my team. The fact that water still runs through the

A Room with a View

There’s a reason the daylight-filled corner office is a coveted prize for corporate achievers.

tunnels demonstrates the ingenuity of Roman design and engineering.”

Despite its significance as both a cultural artifact and an impressive feat of engineering, the fact that the aqueduct (and how it operates) are virtually invisible also makes it vulnerable to the risks of damage, pollution and depletion from above-ground urban land use. These vulnerabilities have been exacerbated over the past several decades, as urban development has resulted in several blockages in the aqueduct wells. The abandonment of its reservoirs has also led to unsustainable practices. For example, many communities in metropolitan Athens rely on the potable water from the mountains for irrigation, when non-potable water would be a better choice.

The project won’t just close the gaps in understanding the system, but will develop an interactive digital archive to host new visualizations of the aqueduct and the integration of citizen science through community engagement and participation in the project’s development.

Two years ago, Theodore got seed grants from HACD and NJIT for the project. The Athens water and sewer company paid for her students’ travel to Athens. Those two students, Ebony Payne ’22 and Iman Syed ’22, worked with her last semester to build a digital and physical model of the aqueduct and prototypical sites where they can test ideas about cooling.

Theodore, who is also working on a project around cooling stations in the South Bronx with the New York City Health Department, says the research in Athens has applicability to the larger world. “Think about U.N. sustainability goal 11 — to make cities more sustainable. The heat island in Athens is extreme, but the issues we are grappling with are global,” she says.

“A view from a window has a positive impact on emotions, cognitive performance and thermal comfort,” asserts WON HEE KO an assistant professor of architecture. Through experimentation, she seeks to quantify the benefits windows provide and to optimize the amount and quality of natural light that people receive throughout the day.

In her lab, Ko places sensors on the window and at eye and desk levels to measure how the conditions outdoors are filtered through it. She uses a fisheye camera lens to capture incoming visual information, including the level, distribution and color of light, as the human eye would.

“Specific bandwidths in the spectrum are directly related to mental and physical health. In keeping with circadian rhythms, we need more blueish light in the morning and less of it in the afternoon, for example.”

In a randomized study with 86 participants, she and collaborators at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California-Berkeley found that in rooms with windows, people were happier, had increased workingmemory and concentration, and felt cooler and more comfortable, even in slightly overheated spaces. The latter finding has implications for sustainable design.

“If having a view to the outdoors helps occupants increase their satisfaction with a wider indoor temperature range, then we could relax the temperature set points and reduce building energy consumption,” she notes.

In the absence of an established framework for guiding window design, she is developing evidence-based standards for what constitutes window view quality, including the content and clarity of what room occupants can see of the outdoors.

Her goal is to develop models that can simulate design and view to optimize features such as building form, floor plan, orientation and glass selection, at the building and urban planning levels.

“We lack consensus on a unified definition for window view quality that is applicable across occupancies and building types,” she notes, adding, “But I believe windows in everyday spaces should be a minimum design element.”

Won Hee Ko

Photos: Courtesy of Georgeen Theodore

Environmental Chemistry

The Rise of a ClimateTriggered Neurotoxin in

the Arctic Tundra

Climbing temperatures in the Arctic tundra are transforming inorganic mercury deposited by power plants and other industrial polluters, some of it inert for decades, into a neurotoxin that is accumulating in the region’s lake sediments, wetland ponds, soils and food chains.

Certain tiny anaerobic microorganisms are thought to play a role in accelerating the formation of methylmercury (MeHg), a neurotoxin. As the permafrost thaws, researchers posit, decaying soil releases an abundance of nutrients. Those nutrients fuel the metabolisms of anaerobes, which convert inorganic mercury into methylmercury, a form they can excrete.

Lijie Zhang an assistant professor of chemistry and environmental science who studies the transformation of industrial pollutants in the environment, is conducting lab experiments to better understand the biogeochemical drivers of the toxin’s formation, a process known as methylation, in tundra soils.

“By elucidating these mechanisms, we can try to incorporate them into biogeochemical models that allow us to more accurately predict the fate and transformation of mercury in the Arctic under future climate conditions,” Zhang explains.

High levels of mercury that travel on air currents from power plants, mining and metal refining factories, from thousands of miles away in some cases, have been recorded

Monitoring Ecological Change in Real Time

Lijie Zhang conducts experiments to understand biogeochemical drivers of neurotoxin formation in the Arctic. in the tundra, she says. Concentrations of methylmercury, well above U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, have been observed in Northern communities where diets are composed predominantly of traditional foods such as Arctic char, ringed seal and beluga whales. The agency describes methylmercury as a powerful neurotoxin that particularly affects children in the womb, who are vulnerable to developmental impacts to cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, fine motor skills and visualspatial skills. As many as 75,000 newborns in the U.S. each year may have increased risk of learning disabilities associated with in-utero exposure to methylmercury.

“Although the EPA issued regulations in the late 20th century to limit or ban mercury emissions, it had already impaired thousands of freshwater ecosystems in the United States,” Zhang says, noting that most human exposure to mercury is from eating contaminated fish and shellfish.

“Populations with high consumption of fish and marine mammals, such as Northern Peoples, are particularly at risk of elevated exposure to methylmercury that biomagnifies in food chains.”

Zhang’s first step was to identify the principal producers of methylmercury to determine how they are related to geochemical characteristics in specific soils. Using anaerobic incubation, her team studied microbial production of the organic toxin in contrasting Arctic tundra soils collected near Nome, Alaska: an acidic bog soil and a neutral fen soil. She introduced two substrates that methanogens and sulfate-reducing bacteria subsist on — acetate, an organic carbon, and sulfate, a mineral salt, that are formed during the decay of organic matter, precipitation and seawater intrusion — to see how changing levels affected methylmercury formation.

The team discovered that methylmercury production

As seen from a satellite orbiting hundreds of kilometers above, much of the southeastern coast of Texas appeared buried in water after Tropical Storm Imelda struck in 2019. While the images captured the catastrophic damage caused by the state’s fourth-wettest storm, they were not immediately helpful for emergency responders on the ground.

in the neutral fen soil stalled entirely when chemicals that inhibit the metabolic activity of sulfate-reducing bacteria were introduced. Adding sulfate in the low-sulfate bog soil increased production five-fold, however. This suggested, Zhang says, that the bacteria that metabolize sulfate are a key group of methylators in the soil.

“Our results indicate that the dominant groups of methylators are dependent on soil geochemistry, which can be altered by climate change,” she notes. “This is an important step to advance our understanding of the transformation and bioaccumulation of mercury and methylmercury in the rapidly changing Arctic ecosystem due to global warming.”

Zhang also quantified these increases by measuring the methylation rates of the microorganisms she has identified as the predominant producers. Incorporated into geochemical models, this data will be useful to policy makers as they consider managing mercury emissions.

“It is difficult to remediate mercury pollution in the Arctic directly,” Zhang notes. “The best solution is to reduce the release of mercury from sources around the globe that do not currently control it, such as some coal-fired power plants and gold mining operations, among others.”

According to the EPA, some estimates indicate global sources contribute about 70% of mercury deposited in the contiguous U.S., while the percentage varies geographically.

In upcoming experiments, Zhang is planning to study the interactions among the decay of organic soil, the emission of greenhouse gases and methylmercury formation in various other natural ecosystems, including areas affected by wildfires.

HUIRAN JIN who develops remote mapping technology to study changes in land cover, pored over those pictures. She is now training computers to deliver more precise information much faster.

“It’s important to know the location and severity of the damage in real time so we can send rescue and reconstruction crews in right away,” notes Jin, an assistant professor of engineering technology. “Even with just two images, a before and after, the inundated area may be a large region, making it difficult for the human eye to pinpoint every area with flooding.”

Jin first processes raw data — RADAR and other imaging signals sent from satellites and lower flying airplanes that is “not friendly to humans, essentially black and white dots” — and extracts legible features from it. She then feeds them into the computer program, along with training data, so it will learn to quickly pinpoint flooded areas.

“The goal is to process these images automatically,” she says.

The program will be able to apply that training to process images of natural disasters in other parts of the world and in other monitoring tasks, such as assessing forest cover. In another project, for example, Jin is processing 20 years of satellite data of trees along streams and rivers in 27 study sites across the mainland United States to study ecological change.

“Going forward, we will use data taken from airplanes, which are closer to the ground, to see how rising temperatures and sea levels affect these sensitive areas and how that in turn impacts other aspects of the ecosystem.”

Huiran Jin

QA &

Q: WHAT GOT YOU INTERESTED IN RECYCLING BATTERIES?

A: As a research associate at Princeton University working in 2018 on renewable energy, electrification was seen as a big opportunity, especially lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries. People first think about making better batteries, but with the environmental and safety issues associated with mining the materials, along with their limited recycling and likely disposal into landfills, I saw recycling li-ion batteries as an underexplored sector. In the U.S., only about 5% of used li-ion batteries are currently recycled. Today, there are about two million electric vehicles on the road, a figure expected to jump to roughly 26 million by 2030! The demand for energy storage for grid stabilization, as well as solar and wind energy is growing rapidly as well. Some experts estimate that over 80 metric tons of li-ion batteries will need to be recycled in the U.S. in 2030 alone. This is just the beginning!

Q: WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO RECYCLE THEM?

A: Unlike more commonly and easily recycled lead-acid batteries, li-ion batteries are extremely complex. The cost of recycling often outstrips the value of recovered battery components. Most current methods use acids to leach out metals — cobalt, nickel and lithium. This process is typically slow and energy-intensive, produces wastewater

New Lives for Discarded Batteries

Chao Yan ’17 Ph.D. Research Associate, Princeton University’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education

contaminated with toxic metal ions, and loses critical battery materials. The cost of then refining the recovered metals is very high and often involves using toxic organic solvents. Additional transportation, material inventory and energy costs complicate traditional recycling processes. Combining these costs with elevated demand and prices of pure materials, we have a critical shortage of materials. This makes recycling — smartly — a true imperative.

Q: HOW DOES PRINCETON NuENERGY TACKLE THIS PROBLEM?

A: Rather than reducing batteries to their source compounds, we use a simpler method to separate valuable materials and advanced plasma technologies to clean them — minimizing impurities for direct return to battery manufacturing. We can produce battery-grade materials that are just like virgin materials.

Q: WHAT ARE SOME NOTEWORTHY MILESTONES IN THE HISTORY OF THE COMPANY?

A: In 2021, we were awarded the U.S. National Grand Prize by CleanTech Open, the world’s largest clean technology accelerator program. We then received grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and formed a partnership with the Fortune Global 500 electronics manufacturer, Wistron Corp., to bring our technology to market. In

Founder, Princeton NuEnergy

October 2022, our 500-ton pilot line with Wistron was launched.

Q: WHAT ARE YOUR NEAR-TERM GOALS?

A: Over the next five years, we plan to build more than five additional discrete recycling facilities containing 10+ production lines with capacity to process over 50,000 tons of spent batteries and manufacturing scrap. Each facility will reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80%, water use by 70% and the overall cost by 50% compared to current industrial recycling processes.

Q: HOW CAN WE IMPROVE THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE LI-ION INDUSTRY?

A: For example, when switching from the internal combustion engine to electric cars, the idea was to reduce emissions and energy use. Recycling was an afterthought. Going forward, we need to think more carefully about technology decisions and best practices we take in recycling li-ion batteries to optimize cost and minimize environmental concerns. We believe that direct recycling and Princeton NuEnergy can make a substantial positive impact to this new electrified world.

Sustainability Modelers Are Reshaping Architectural Design

Erin Heidelberger ’20, M.S. Georgia Tech ’22

Environmental Performance Analyst, Kohn Pederson Fox

Q: WHAT DOES YOUR JOB ENTAIL?

A: As a member of the environmental performance team, I work with designers to improve the performance and sustainability of projects, from individual buildings to urban planning initiatives. By running simulations, I give them options to consider, such as how to orient a building to access more daylight and reduce energy use, or if there’s too much sunlight, how to shade it. More comprehensively, I advise them on ways to minimize the carbon footprint of a building’s operations.

Q: WHAT ELEMENTS OF A BUILDING OR DEVELOPMENT DO YOU EVALUATE?

A: I take a holistic approach to design improvement, such as analyzing the way a building’s shape, orientation and envelope impact energy use; how the thermal properties of windows and window-to-wall ratios affect cooling need; and how to maximize sunlight for longer periods of the year. examine water consumption, including the potential to reuse wastewater on site, stormwater management solutions and flooding risk mitigation. Clients are also starting to look at the embodied carbon content of materials and how to use them more efficiently.

Q: HOW DO YOU ANALYZE A BUILDING’S PERFORMANCE?

A: One of the primary tools I use is a program called Grasshopper within Rhinoceros, the 3D modeling tool. It allows me to manipulate building geometries, which in turn lets me examine the relationship between shape and sun angle, the ratio of grass to pavement with respect to flooding, and to test options for lowering a building’s embodied carbon by varying parameters, such as the type of cladding, room heights and windows, among other simulations. We need to make these calculations in a reasonable amount of time. If an architect asks you how to handle X, Y and Z and you take three weeks to get back, the design may be completely new at that point.

Q: WHEN DO PERFORMANCE MODELS FAIL?

A: We make assumptions in our simulations that can miss entire populations. One example is occupancy schedule inputs to energy models — when people are home — which is typically based on the premise of 9-5 office jobs. This fails to capture a range of living and working situations: people working multiple jobs, part-time, at night and on the weekend. Another is the condition of peoples’ houses. The models are predicated on buildings being up to code in insulation and air tightness, but in lower-income neighborhoods, with lots of deferred maintenance, this is not the case.

Q: HOW DO WE EVALUATE AND IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF EXISTING BUILDINGS?

A: Designers need to focus more on this. Within adaptive reuse, we can upgrade buildings’ envelopes and systems, or we can expand existing buildings, rather than knock them down, and even reuse materials.

Q: HOW HAVE ARCHITECTS’ ROLES CHANGED IN THE SUSTAINABILITY SPACE?

A: There’s a greater sense of urgency around sustainability and architects are starting to take ownership of this. For a long time, we focused on design, leaving the technical aspects of performance to engineers. Because we’re involved in the early stages of design, we can have a big impact — the farther along, the less you can do. As an adjunct at NJIT, I stressed to my students, for example, that if they’re dealing with a building’s embodied carbon, they need to think about it before they’ve selected materials, not after.

Photo: Courtesy of Chao Yan

Water Remediation

Harvesting the Toxic Blooms of Summer

Amid summer’s cornucopia, there is one proliferation that is universally dreaded: the toxic algae blooms that float on lakes and streams, killing fish, gobbling oxygen from the water and chasing away swimmers. Composed of tiny organisms such as single-cell phytoplankton, microalgae and cyanobacteria, the phosphorescent blue-green clusters are impossible to miss, but difficult to capture.

“Compared to weeds and other aquatic plants, microalgae are tiny — between 1 and 10 micrometers in width — and so there is no easy way to remove them mechanically,” explains Wen Zhang, director of NJIT’s Sustainable Environmental Nanotechnology and Nanointerfaces Laboratory, who is working with a team of biologists, engineers and entrepreneurs on a new plan of attack.

Last summer, the team launched a custom-designed boat on New Jersey’s Deal Lake that scooped up algae-laden water for treatment on board. Central to the technology is a device that injects nano- and microbubbles of air into the lake, lifting algae from as deep as four feet to the surface for collection by skimmers.

Researchers have discovered that tiny bubbles have a host of useful properties. Suspended in liquids, they have a high degree of stability against dissolution and collapse. Their high surface area and their random movements allow them to move materials around, including nutrients, to enhance plant growth, ozone used in bacteria disinfection and oxygen needed to aerate hypoxic environments.

“Bubbles that are 100-500 micrometers in diameter rise quickly to the surface, and because they’re negatively charged and adhesive, lift the clinging algae,” Zhang says. “We’re also hoping to use this technology to raise dissolved oxygen levels. We’ve found that even finer bubbles, between 100-300 nanometers in diameter, stay suspended in the water much longer, where they slowly collapse and dissolve, boosting oxygen levels for up to five days. This is much better than

standard aeration. They also remediate anaerobic processes that produce smelly odors and blackish water.”

Zhang’s team, which is funded by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, is working with the Meadowlands Research and Restoration Institute (MRRI) and BRISEA Inc., an environmental and energy services company, to demonstrate their prototype’s effectiveness in clearing algae. They are also developing a long-term strategy to monitor other water quality parameters, such as dissolved oxygen and turbidity, on state lakes.

The team has modified the boat design several times to improve its efficiency and safety, for both operators and the equipment, says Likun Hua a former Ph.D. student of Zhang’s who is now the director of technology validation and prototypes at BRISEA. “We decided on a pontoon boat, for example, which allowed us to locate the equipment inside the hull, lowering the boat’s height to fit under bridges.”

After driving the boat back and forth over sections of Deal Lake, researchers recorded increases in dissolved oxygen levels of more than 300%, and reduced turbidity where algae was removed.

They will also test related technologies, such as iron-based nanoparticles with magnetic properties Zhang developed several years ago to absorb the algae and then separate it with a magnet via a process called electrophoresis.

“We’re seeing more and more problems caused by fertilizer and rising water temperatures,” says Francisco Artigas, MRRI’s chief scientist and co-director. “A mechanical approach to removing blue-green algae from freshwater lakes using micro- and nanobubbles is possible. However, this is not a long-term solution to the problem. The solution is through community education and rules to prevent the blooms from happening in the first place by preventing the discharge of fertilizers and nutrients into natural freshwater bodies.”

Shark Science

As she carves out her own niche in shark science, Ph.D. biology student Amani Webber-Schultz is equally focused on widening the pool of researchers who will join her in scholarly pursuit of the apex predator. Nearly three years ago, Webber-Schultz and three other Black scientists founded the nonprofit Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS) to boost diversity in the field, in part by fully funding hands-on research experiences for gender minorities of color who struggle financially to break in.

“Getting field experience in marine sciences is often payto-play, and it’s very expensive to get your foot in the door. A few days of introductory field training aboard a research vessel can quickly add up to thousands of dollars per person,” says Webber-Schultz, MISS’s CFO, who studies shark tail

Diversity in Science

biomechanics and scale morphology in NJIT’s FluidLoco Lab. The nonprofit began to take shape after she met three other up-and-coming Black female marine biologists — Jasmin Graham, Jaida Elcock and Carlee Jackson — through social media. “None of us had met another Black shark scientist before, so we kind of jokingly said to each other that we should start a club.”

Founded on Juneteenth in 2020, that “club” raised $15,000 in its first two weeks, largely from individual donors, which initially funded all-expenses-paid weekend workshops for two small cohorts that summer in Miami through a partnership with the Field School Foundation. It has since registered as a 501(c)(3).

The organization has since grown to over 400 members

from more than 30 countries, raised $500,000, and expanded field research opportunities in Naples, Tampa and Sarasota in Florida, Woods Hole and North Chatham in Massachusetts, the Bahamas, South Africa, Mozambique, and now California, through a collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the University of California at Merced. MISS pays for participants’ internship and training fees, visas and travel expenses, while also providing small stipends.

“It’s been rewarding to see many of these participants go on to do shark-related projects and get accepted into graduate school,” says Webber-Schultz. “None came to the workshops with previous research experience, but they took their training and ran with it.”

While the field opportunities are currently restricted to those 18 years old and up, MISS has also stepped into the K-12 education space with an array of new programs, including a virtual course on sharks, skates and rays, called Gill Guardians, which pitches units such as shark anatomy, environmental challenges and research techniques to different age groups. The group’s book, “Minorities in Shark Sciences: Diverse Voices in Shark Research,” was published in November by CRC Press.

Global partners such as National Geographic and Nat Geo WILD now feature researchers from MISS’s roster of experts as guest presenters in their television programming.

“I hope we can influence kids out there who get fascinated by these shows, and can see there are scientists in the field that look like they do and who they can look up to,”

Webber-Schultz says.

She studies how sharks’ tails propel them powerfully through the water, how their scales reduce drag forces and how the two anatomical features work together. Because many species are too large to study in her urban lab, she is building models to better understand their biomechanics.

“People understand so little about sharks other than the few facts the media chooses to present,” she says. “There is such a disconnect between what scientists and the public know.

I want to be part of bridging that gap.”

Top: In his laboratory, Wen Zhang tests nano- and microbubble technology designed to bring tiny microalgae to the water’s surface, where it can be scooped up.

Bottom: Brian Wlodawski, senior geographic information systems specialist, goes for a test-run on the Hackensack River in a prototype of a custom-designed boat that uses nano- and microbubble technology to remove harmful algae blooms from New Jersey rivers and lakes.

Amani Webber-Schultz (left) helped create a nonprofit to boost diversity in the field of shark science.

Photo: Field School/Julia Wester

From City Streets to Waterways, Undergraduates Use Data for Change

Tracking and Tackling Air

Pollution in Newark’s Residential

Neighborhoods

s a first-year college student in a new city, Vishva Rana ’23 quickly became attuned to the world outside her classroom walls. A paper on urban sustainability led her to environmental justice campaigns waged by residents of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, whose ire was trained on a polluting city incinerator and the continual stream of diesel trucks slicing through the heart of their community.

“The problems were so obvious and large-scale, but people seemed powerless to change them. Many of their mitigation proposals were shot down,” recounts Rana. By sophomore year, the mechanical engineering major had joined the fight, winning a $2,000 Moonshot Prize from the Albert Dorman Honors College for her proposal to develop a real-time air quality monitoring system to deliver precise air quality information at any location in the community.

The system consists of sensors connected to small computers with Wi-Fi capability that capture and transmit data to an online database and display it on a heat map.

Color coding indicates real-time levels of pollution around the neighborhood. It monitors what is known in regulatory language as particulate matter 2.5. (PM2.5), tiny particles of soot emitted by combustion engines that are two and a half microns or less in width. The devices can be powered by any building service and connected to a web app or phone app interface displaying the heat map, thus accessible to the public.

“I focus on PM2.5 because it’s the most abundant pollutant in the city and bad for lung health in particular. A quarter of children in Newark develop asthma at a young age and many studies suggest they are linked,” notes Rana.

The state Department of Environmental Protection currently monitors PM2.5, among other pollutants, in Newark, but only from a single monitor.

“Without constant field testing from dispersed monitors, it’s hard to pinpoint the particular spots where you have high levels of air pollution, determine the sources and then develop specific solutions,” she notes. “All of this technology is so intertwined with policy and I’ve become really interested in that side of it. In the Ironbound, it is essential to give organizers, who are often women and people of color, the power to monitor and design their own communities.”

Monitors placed on heavily trafficked roads would measure the amount of pollution emitted by diesel trucks, for example, allowing the community to see which routes are most polluted and divert some traffic away from them. Knowing exactly how much pollution the county trash incinerator is discharging near homes and schools would strengthen arguments for better emission controls.

“Going forward, we should design truck routes, for example, that won’t adversely affect residential areas, that accommodate the existing infrastructure,” she argues. Still in the beta testing phase, she has presented the idea to people in the Ironbound in brief interactions on the street and handed out flyers seeking feedback on residents’ perception of their air quality and her technology’s usefulness. She’s working this year with the Ironbound Community

Corporation, a nonprofit advocating for community justice in the neighborhood, to locate places to install her monitors. “I can’t just stick them up. I’ll need to find private businesses that are willing to host sensors,” she explains.

Rana, who is minoring in entrepreneurship, gauged wider interest in the system in the Highlander Foundry Program at VentureLink@NJIT, a 12-week startup incubator. She was encouraged.

“I spoke to people in logistics and transportation, including the owner of a shipping startup at the port, and found that companies are interested in tracking their own emissions,” she recounts. “I think there is a sense that more regulations are coming, and so private companies want to know how much pollution they’re emitting. They could place a sensor on their trucks, for example, or along their travel routes.”

A Fly Fisherman Diagnoses Maladies on a Beloved River

Wading into a parched stretch of the Pequannock River two summers ago, Taylor VanGrouw got a jarring reminder of the fragility of New Jersey’s smaller waterways: a brown trout stranded in a shallow pool, too lethargic to swim away as he approached.

“As temperatures rise, dissolved oxygen levels decline, in the way a bottle of soda, when hot, can’t hold its fizz. Starved of oxygen, trout can’t feed or reproduce. As temperatures rise, they become more stressed and need more oxygen,” notes VanGrouw, who is now a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering.

An avid angler, he’d been casting his flies up and down the river since he was 15 and had seen their numbers dwindle, even in its deeper sections. He was not prepared to attribute the entire problem to global warming, however, and write it off. “I’ve seen what conservation efforts can do and did not view this as a lost cause. There are factors that can be fixed.” He decided to investigate the trout’s decline by testing a suite of water conditions at 16 places in the river and its tributaries, gathering a broad range of data, while pinpointing major points of stress. Depending on his findings, he planned to present his results to state environmental officials and propose possible interventions.

On a weekly basis in June and July of last summer, he checked pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphates, macroinvertebrate populations and water clarity, according to “Trout Unlimited” guidelines on habitat sustainability. NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College provided research funds — and encouragement. He applied for and won a Moonshot Prize that brought $3,500 to support him over the summer and an additional $2,000 to buy professional equipment, including electronic testing probes, chemical kits, a water clarity device and a fine aquatic net to catch and identify bugs. He found every factor in an acceptable range, except for water temperature. But in a key finding, this was only the case on a stretch of the river in the Macopin Reservoir, a decommissioned dam, and in

the water below it, where temperatures spiked above the 68 degrees essential for trout survival. Temperatures upstream of the reservoir were 10 degrees cooler than 1.5 miles downstream.

Compared to other parts of the river, the old reservoir “has a huge increase in surface area exposed to the sun, with no overhanging tree canopy to shade it. The water is more stagnant, sitting longer to warm up.” A shallow reservoir, it lacks the deeper, colder water that can be released to lower temperatures.

VanGrouw met with a wildlife official from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection who was interested in his results, telling him there were no temperature probes on the river at that time, but that the state would consider installing them in the spring.

As possible remedies, he recommended removing the old dam, while also releasing colder water from larger, deeper reservoirs up the river as needed. Going forward, VanGrouw hopes to work with local governments to create a plan to mitigate the heating effects of the Macopin Reservoir on the river’s ecosystem.

“I saw the Pequannock as a forgotten river that no one was monitoring. Its problems were falling under the radar,” he says, noting that a coalition that had once advocated for cold water releases had fallen silent in recent years.

“The wild trout’s decline is a crucial indicator of water quality degradation in the Pequannock, which supplies water to 500,000 New Jersey residents, including the city of Newark,” he says, adding that hot spots in the river hurt the entire river ecosystem. “Bugs can’t survive, fish and birds can’t eat, and algae blooms increase.”

As a tributary to one of New Jersey’s largest rivers, the Passaic River, the Pequannock sends its problems downstream. “There has been a lot of effort to restore the Passaic and we don’t want to put that in jeopardy by bad water coming in from above.”

Vishva Rana

Taylor VanGrouw

Applying the horror movie trope to global warming, climate-fueled disasters are akin to the moment the monster bursts raucously through the locked door. It’s always a shock, but rarely a surprise. How and when, communities wonder, should they prepare?

In a flurry of new research, sustainability experts are devising tools to understand, track and mitigate these catastrophes before they occur. By modeling ecosystem changes

and forecasting the severity of storms, heat waves and wildfires under different warming scenarios, they aim to minimize uncertainty.

In addition, researchers are quantifying the resilience of existing infrastructures and providing risk-based strategies for upgrading them. Finally, novel technologies that speed rescues, while protecting responders, and repair damages amid logistical challenges, are designed to restore normal life as quickly as possible.

DEFUSING DISASTER

Computing Resilience in an Era of Uncertainty

In an era of frequent, powerful storms, fast-spreading wildfires and global pandemics, communities are discovering their vulnerabilities when they can least afford it.

“We need to rethink what means to be resilient. use the boxing analogy ‘roll with the punches’: the ability to absorb the shocks of extreme events and recover quickly,” says Michel Boufadel the director of NJIT’s Center for Natural Resources. “But to do so, the whole system needs to work together. doesn’t matter if the power stays on, but 90% of the roads are closed.”

With collaborators at Rutgers and Princeton, Boufadel has developed Community Intrinsic Resilience Index (CIRI) that will help cities and regions reduce the potential impacts of natural disasters by making strategic investments in infrastructure. The researchers assess resilience in four key sectors — transportation, energy, health care and socio-economics — they deem important to remaining productive and quickly returning to normal.

The team evaluates disaster-relevant factors in each sector and assigns values to them. In transportation, the amount of roadway per square mile and population, and the availability of public transit are some of the elements; in health care, the number of hospital beds, doctors and nurses per patient population and the percentage of residents with health insurance; in energy, the amount of underground wires and the availability of backup power. By analyzing socio-economic demographics, they can project the number of jobs potentially affected.

“We set thresholds for each sector. Going under one could potentially shut down community,” notes Firas former Ph.D. student of Boufadel’s who is now postdoctoral researcher in computer science at Princeton. director of the Rutgers Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation Group, is another collaborator.

The group recently computed CIRI scores for counties in New Jersey, which ranged between 63% and 80%, based on preliminary data. In the study, post-disaster CIRI calculation following projected major flooding revealed

Uncharted Territory: The Fate of Forests Amid Climate Change Robot Swarms to the Rescue

that the transportation and socio-economic attributes of two coastal counties would fall below specified thresholds due to projected road closures and harm to local economies.

Their goal, Boufadel says, is to help local leaders and other policy makers integrate resilience within the planning and design phases of disaster management. “There not enough money to avoid harm entirely, and decision-makers need numbers in order to prioritize spending,” he notes. “Should they spend money protecting the golf course or the high school?”

The team is currently collecting more energy data from local, nonprofit and government stakeholders so they can better assess energy resilience throughout the state and identify communities in need of both improved capacity and rapidly deployable energy supplies. Suggested solutions include mobile energy storage and megawatt-scale batteries that could be charged off-peak and placed where needed, such as close to commuter lines during weekdays.

“This is a crucial step to tackle energy budget deficits and attain energy equity, particularly in underserved communities within New Jersey,” Boufadel says.

Because natural disasters transcend political boundaries, the group has developed measures to assess resilience on the census tract level.

Gerges explains: “We can calculate CIRI census block by census block and compile that to see how region of a state would perform.”

They are currently developing and validating new model that combines social and engineering concepts to measure the resilience of areas and infrastructures under different degrees of stress and at different temporal scales.

“We want to be able to say what’s resilient for 10-year storm versus 50-year storm,” Gerges says. “Using machine learning, we can predict climate variables decades into the future in New Jersey, such as the amount of precipitation in the Hackensack-Passaic Watershed, wind speed, temperature and solar irradiance. The latter will allow us to locate the best spots for solar farms under different climate scenarios.”

The world’s forests are at the front lines of the climate crisis, absorbing nearly 30% of carbon emitted globally each year. But how are these vital ecosystems responding as climate change-driven wildfires and droughts intensify?

Nearly decade ago, bark beetle infestation tore through Southeast Wyoming, transforming the lush landscape of Medicine

Bow National Forest into tinderbox of dead lodgepole pine. In September 2020 ignited, and what became known as the Mullen

Fire raged beyond the parkland across 176,000 acres over the next month, fueled by the decimated trees and unusually dry conditions.

Xiaonan Tai an assistant professor of biological sciences and director of NJIT’s Ecohydrology Lab, is now investigating the fate of the national forest. She has been developing models used to unravel the complex ecological and hydrological processes taking place in North American forests amid historic climate changes.

“Groundwater flow has been missing from ecosystem modeling and future projections, largely because is difficult to directly observe, and it computationally challenging to solve … But we have better capability now.”

The Mullen Fire touched off in the midst of a 20-year climate trend in the Rocky Mountains — its high-elevation forests are experiencing reduced snowfall and greater wildfires than at any point in the past 2,000 years.

“The disaster reflects clear trend in increasing fires across Western U.S. forests, but the big question now is how these forests recover,” says Tai. “The response of Medicine Bow’s forests could give us window into how the region’s forests respond to other climate changerelated disturbances going forward.”

Tai, who three years ago studied the national park’s bark beetle epidemic, is returning to collaborate with University of Wyoming researchers through U.S. Department of Energy grant. The team is conducting full workup of the land that includes the collection of microclimate, vegetation and hydrological measurements over the next three years.

Tai’s ecohydrology modeling is incorporating the field data to paint picture of the interaction between Medicine Bow’s groundwater

and vegetation health, answering questions about how the area’s subsurface water shapes forest response and recovery from the fire.

It’s tricky equation to calculate.

“The park’s wetlands are where the land’s groundwater tends to accumulate most, so we hypothesize that these are likely sites during fire that are critical to the forest’s response,” says Tai. “A big challenge is that this is an enormous groundwater system where water can transport and affect the fate of trees from thousands of kilometers away. Rainwater doesn’t remain local, but travels based on mix of regional factors such as topography and substrate properties.”

In the journal “Environmental Research Letters,” Tai recently established new state-of-the-art ecohydrological model to quantify the impacts of subsurface groundwater on forest mortality risk for the first time. The NSF-funded study highlighted key, unseen mechanism affecting how forests respond to drought and elevated CO concentrations — the way in which water flows laterally beneath the forest floor.

“Past studies focused on solving water fluxes only in the vertical dimension, ignoring the role of lateral subsurface water exchanges. But with this model, we get more complete descriptions of ecosystem water dynamics than ever before,” she says.

Tai says the findings have challenged previously held mainstream expectation by climate scientists — that elevated CO levels ameliorate drought stress experienced by trees.

“We showed that most water stored doesn’t stay local, but rather, begins to travel laterally to areas that may otherwise be dry. … It shows we need to reassess future forest predictions by incorporating subsurface flow.”

As Tai’s modeling charts Medicine Bow’s forest-hydrology connections, ecologists could gain vital roadmap of where and how groundwater influences forest recovery regionally.

“There are similarly impacted forests throughout the Rocky Mountains. It’s our hope that our results will inform effective postdisturbance land management strategies beyond Medicine Bow,” says Tai.

When the Champlain Towers condominium collapsed in Surfside, Fla. in 2021, more than 100 residents were trapped under debris so unstable that rescuers were hampered from entering immediately.

“A common source of danger in disasters is the risk of rubble shifting, endangering both emergency responders and the people they’re trying to rescue. This calls for great caution, slowing efforts and potentially increasing the death toll,” says Petras Swissler robotics engineer who joined the NJIT faculty last fall.

Swissler envisions a far more efficient rescue: rapid-response team composed of hundreds or even thousands of self-assembling robots swarming into the disaster area and using their own bodies to form ramps, support columns and bridges. In the case of a collapsing bridge, teams of robots would serve as both the scaffolding used in construction and the repair force.

What distinguishes these future robots from

current models is their autonomy to determine what structures are needed in particular environment, amid shifting loads and emerging operational needs. They’re given high-level tasks, but no blueprints.

“The robots themselves would decide what structures to build and how best to build them by using their sensors to determine environmental conditions and then converge on an optimal structure based on inter-robot communication,” explains Swissler, who is co-developing hardware-algorithm system to operate them.

A primary challenge, he notes, is enabling robots to attach to each other, while also giving them the ability to move about structure during construction.

The robots he’s currently building look like three black tennis balls arranged in triangle. A novel attachment mechanism called “continuous dock” that Swissler developed as Ph.D. student at Northwestern University allows the robots to attach to each other wherever they come into contact. Microchips in each ball drive motors that enable them to

flip about one another, attaching and detaching with each step. The connections are strong enough to hold the weight of around 60 robots.

Prior work on self-assembling robotic systems has generally focused on the construction of latticed, blueprint-based shapes that include detailed instructions, thus limiting the extent to which robots can adapt structures to conditions. They have other built-in vulnerabilities. When building bridge from both sides of a canyon, for example, it is difficult to achieve the required perfect alignment. Swissler says he’s looking to nature for “messy” construction designs that adapt spontaneously to the shape of the environment they’re in, analogous to the process by which certain species of ants form bridges and rafts. He traveled last spring to an island in the Panama Canal with members of Simon Garnier’ NJIT Swarm Lab to study nomadic army ants that search out new hunting grounds day to day. They form clusters of hundreds of thousands of ants called bivouacs, instead of the more typical underground ant nests.

“With ants, cells and bees, they’re more or less just grabbing onto neighbors arbitrarily, while robots tend to attach at very specific locations on each other’s bodies and with very specific intent,” says Swissler, who is exploring radically different robot designs. “By designing new types of algorithms along with the robot hardware, we’re aiming for what we believe is realistically achievable with current robot technology.”

The robots and algorithms would be particularly useful in resource-constrained and remote environments, such as Antarctica or outer space, where some would form and reform on-demand structures, while others would form tools, such as wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers.

“In Apollo 13, where there was a mismatch between the shape of the CO scrubbers in the command module and the lander, NASA had to scramble to improvise that connection. Future swarms of these robots could have autonomously analyzed the problem and selfassembled into an adapter,” he says, adding, “When you don’t have what you need, when you need it, there’s cost associated with that. Sometimes that cost is monetary, but in disasters, it’s also potentially human lives.”

Michel Boufadel

Converting Yesterday’s Rubble into Tomorrow’s Cities

Matthew Adams Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

On a cold morning in early 2019, I stood at a city transportation facility along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn watching a concrete crusher convert mammoth chunks of former sidewalks, manhole casings and building slabs into walnut-sized bits. Towering several stories above me, the rubble pile would soon float by barge down the East River, a small fraction of it delivered to regional roadway projects, as fill underlying new pavement, but most of it to landfills. As a civil engineer focused on sustainable materials, I asked the question: Can we recycle this razed urban infrastructure at a net benefit to the environment?

Here’s the problem: Concrete, the world’s most pervasive man-made material, has a colossal impact on energy and natural resources consumption. In 2020, 3.66 billion tons were manufactured worldwide, the equivalent of over 4,000 Hoover Dams. The production of its core component — cement — is estimated to be responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. Nearly all of it incorporates newly mined rock.

Yet in the U.S. alone, we send more than 134 million tons of concrete waste from demolition each year to landfills. Among other benefits, reusing these materials would reduce the pollution, energy use, habitat destruction and massive costs associated with mining and the construction of new landfills.

In my lab at NJIT, which looks more like a miniature construction site than a laboratory, researchers make and test new types of concrete that include novel materials such as recycled concrete aggregate, waste from the coal and steel industries and pulverized recycled glass. We squeeze, pull and bend the concrete until it breaks to assess how strong

it is; we freeze, heat and dry it, and spray it with de-icing salts and other corrosive chemicals to see how resistant it is to environmental degradation. Our goal is to reduce the embodied carbon content of concrete without compromising its ability to withstand heavy loading, natural disasters and long-term wear.

Despite its promise, however, building codes at the local, state and national level are slow to permit the mixture of new engineered compounds in building materials. What’s more, local agencies lack the resources to develop regulations to support the use of more sustainable products that already have regulatory approval. It’s clear we need to do a better job addressing concerns over durability, while also publicizing the benefits.

As a public policy fellow with the Rockefeller Institute of Government since 2020, I investigate the barriers that hinder the adoption of sustainable concrete. One of the main stumbling blocks is the lack of accessible, easily digestible information about how these new technologies perform. The state agencies that write and control materials specifications need to know what happens when we mix them with local rock. An official in New Jersey familiar with granite is rightly skeptical, for example, about research performed on limestone in Texas.

We need to develop education campaigns that inform these officials and construction engineers about up-to-date research, testing and real-world case studies, while emphasizing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the greening of concrete — no single mixture that works in every scenario.

Recycled concrete mixtures that are sturdy enough for a house foundation or a sidewalk, for example, might not be suitable for a bridge deck. Therefore, we need to develop design tools that help engineers decide which sustainable materials are best suited to their construction projects. Finally, many public agencies and engineering companies are afraid to embrace new methods without strong proof of their long-term durability. While laboratory testing can show that novel sustainable materials are strong enough to withstand structural loading, our methods for predicting their — or any concrete’s — ability to last for 50 to 100 years are less accurate. There is risk in using novel materials that have not been subjected to real-world conditions for decades. Fortunately, there are opportunities to ease these concerns, and they start in towns and cities. While policies on sustainability at the national level are mired in political division, a significant amount of concrete is purchased with state and local tax dollars. As such, municipalities and states can write rules that encourage the use of approved sustainable construction materials.

One great example is a resolution adopted in 2020 by Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. that directs the village to provide education and support to community stakeholders about lowembodied carbon concrete, while encouraging them to use it and other novel, sustainable materials. By agreeing to accept the risk of durability failures if the concrete does not last as long as predicted, the village is able to mandate low-carbon materials in project specifications. It has since been used in walls, sidewalks and even the new Hillside Elementary School. When it comes to sustainable construction, the adage “change starts at home” has never been more accurate. When enough municipalities decide to hold their contractors to higher standards, states are more likely to adopt them, and then we’ll begin to see significant improvements in the sustainability of our concrete infrastructure. In the meantime, my team of engineers will be busy in the lab designing the next generation of materials that are both durable and green. We invite sustainable communities to help us spread the message.

Matthew Adams in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., where walls, sidewalks and a school use low-carbon materials.

Power Electronics

Philip Pong is building a scaled-down turbine learning facility so tomorrow’s wind engineers can get hands-on experience.

Boosting Computer Power Chip by Chip

Working the Wind

New Jersey has only six wind turbines, but that will soon change. Within two years, some 500,000 homes will be powered by a new wind farm located off the state’s southern coast. Before a single turbine in this multi-phase project can begin generating renewable energy, however, NJIT is tackling a secondary problem in the clean energy space — the need to nurture a new generation of engineers and managers who can operate and maintain these facilities.

The Ocean Wind farm, a project of Ørsted North America, will be the first offshore wind farm in the Garden State.

Philip Pong an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is developing new ways to efficiently maintain turbines and train the staff needed to service them.

“The offshore wind industry is a new thing to the United States. Europe has been doing this for 20 to 30 years, and we have just started,” explains Pong, who operates the Sensor Research Laboratory alongside the Green Technology Research and Training Laboratory.

“The power engineers that we train right now are still based on the power system that we developed 100 years ago — Edison, Westinghouse — so our textbooks are still talking about those transformer-based power systems. But now with renewable energy, it’s turning into power-electronicsbased systems. It’s a totally new technology concept, but our education is not catching up with that yet.”

Pong and his research team are working on several fronts to update the power industry and its workers.

In the sensor laboratory, he’s working with students to

develop monitoring systems in which turbine operating data is acquired by contactless transmission through sensors and evaluated with machine-learning software. The lack of physical contact between sensors and the turbines means easier installation and lower costs, not to mention a reduced chance that staff will have to travel 15 miles offshore and climb up the imposing structures to fix broken sensors. The vibrations induced by mechanical faults in the gearbox, bearings and other components in the turbine’s drivetrain will alter the behavior of the wind turbine generator. Electrical faults in the system will also change the performance of the wind turbines; those faults and anomalies will be detected through remote monitoring of sensors in the generator, explains

Akhyurna Swain a Ph.D. student.

Working with Pong, Sindhu Sai Sree Parimi, a graduate student, and senior Salma Alami Yadri will make use of sensor data and machine learning to model and predict the performance of the wind turbines. This can help determine what parts might break

and where in the system.

Pong is building a scaled-down turbine learning facility so that tomorrow’s wind engineers can gain hands-on experience. The turbine will be approximately two meters tall and move air at 33 miles per hour, which isn’t that speedy outdoors, but is substantial in an enclosed space. Server racks will emulate a power grid so that students can study how the grid reacts to a gamut of conditions, such as energy spikes. They can

The energy usage of 75 billion internet-connected devices could be reduced 1,000-fold if they could do more thinking for themselves, rather than continuously calling on cloud servers for help. The incorporation of artificial intelligence into complex applications such as distributed sensors, medical imaging and customer research, as well as in everyday devices at home and work, will ratchet up computing demand substantially.

adjust the grid’s current, voltage and power flow to carry out numerous experiments. New research projects and courses will be developed around this facility. “I think students will be excited to see that,” Pong notes.

Finally, NJIT will re-train existing energy workers on the technical aspects of offshore wind technology. “For that, we are working closely with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) and with stakeholders in offshore wind energy, such as New Jersey energy company PSEG and Ørsted, to make sure we produce the right type of talent they need to work in the industry,” Pong says, noting that NJEDA sponsors Swain’s research. “In the near future, over one-third of the electricity in New Jersey will be generated by offshore wind power. It is imperative to start training that new talent now.”

He is developing bootcamp training, to begin this summer, for workers in the power industry, as well as people with a background in the physical sciences who are interested in offshore wind technology. He’s also putting together an offshore wind power technology conference that NJIT will host to apprise potential jobseekers and other stakeholders about the latest offshore wind power technology and employment opportunities in the state.

“Inadequate preparations for an unexpected extreme event are what caused blackouts in Texas in 2021, when more than 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power,” Pong says, adding that through research, simulation and training right now, “New Jersey can ensure its infrastructure is ready for new challenges.”

”The greatest challenges in the semiconductor industry right now are the power wall and the memory wall. We’ve put so many transistors on chips to add functionality that our power budget is reaching capacity,” says SHAAHIN ANGIZI, an assistant professor of computer engineering. “The problem that needs more investigation is how we can resolve this at the architecture level.“

Angizi believes the answer is to make new kinds of computer chips that restructure the traditional CPU layout, which has separate areas for processing and memory. He is funded by two National Science Foundation grants to study in-memory computing and in-sensor computing, respectively. Rather than performing computation inside the main CPU, he says, they would instead do the Boolean logic, for example, inside cache memory, or even directly inside physical sensors with carefully placed transistors. This would be faster and more energy-efficient than waiting for a device-to-cloud-toserver connection, and back again.

Angizi and his collaborators at Arizona State University presented their ultra-fast, in-memory computing prototype last year at the IEEE 52nd European Solid-State Device Research Conference in Milan, Italy. It was 1,000 times faster than the average personal computer and 200 times more power-efficient.

“Now we are targeting applications in different domains,” he says, including encryption systems and the deep neural networks used in medical and environmental sensing devices. An emergency room worker, he notes, could potentially scan a patient’s wound with a handheld device that would use in-sensor computing to evaluate the image and in-memory computing to perform artificial intelligence on possible actions to take.

Shaahin Angizi

Singing Lessons

In the highly social world of the zebra finch, every male has a unique song: a brief motif resembling the squeak of a mechanical toy that he chirps, often in rapid succession, in courtship and communal gatherings. These songs are not innate. Pubescent finches develop their signature sound by listening to adult male birdsong which they then individualize with subtle variations in frequency, tonality and rhythm.

In Julia Hyland Bruno’s research, fathers have been replaced by virtual tutors in laboratory-based studies designed to examine the birds’ vocal development under controlled conditions. In one type of experiment, the young finches have a device in their cage with a red button that, when pressed with their beaks, releases the pre-recorded song of a mature adult. They are given the freedom to activate it whenever they like; some tap over and over, while others pause more frequently.

“There is such variability in these self-lessons: when and how often the birds listen and whether they vocalize with the recordings. How often they play the song gives us an indicator of how motivated they are to learn,” says Hyland Bruno, an assistant professor of humanities and social sciences who studies communication development in animals. She adds that marked fluctuations in demand for song

playbacks — quiet periods and sudden bursts of activity — coincided with vocal changes, such as the emergence of new song syllables.

Hyland Bruno is interested in the roles that self-teaching and social interaction play in language development across species, particularly as digital devices encroach on spoken and nonverbal exchanges and attention more generally.

“Digital technologies are rapidly altering the ways we relate to one another across both space and time, from the reach and topology of our social networks to the rhythms of our social interactions,” she says. “We know social interactions are important to early language development, and I’m interested in what it’s like to grow up and learn how to

communicate in such an environment.”

For zebra finches, birdsong is part of a dynamic communication system which also includes innate vocalizations that birds of both sexes use to maintain contact with each other, coordinate parental care and express aggression. Male song is not territorial and song “lessons” require interactions between pupil and tutor, unlike certain other species where birds pick up their songs simply by listening to adults around them.

To better observe these interactions, she’s developing a model system, initially focused on birds, to study the effects of vocal interactivity. In the next phase of her studies, she’s building a virtual bird that will initiate songs and also respond to the young bird. It will allow her to observe the impact of varied response scenarios: adults that sing proactively, reply quickly, pause at length before answering or don’t respond at all.

“In this controlled environment, where we mimic the natural system, but also perturb it, we can study what happens when we alter the learning environment, by introducing, for example, the extremes of high interactivity and non-responsiveness,” she explains.

“We know that isolated birds with no tutors develop a song, but it is atypical and generally not accepted by other birds. But we don’t know how early social interactions might affect birds’ ability to communicate as adults.”

Young birds begin to babble when they leave the nest, but it takes months for the song to achieve a

Infusing Equity into Community Disaster Planning

The people who are hardest hit by natural disasters are often the least involved in their community’s emergency planning and response.

To harness their ideas, YAO SUN an assistant professor of humanities and social sciences, is developing technology-based methods to pull them into the discussion.

“We know everybody knows something. But now we have to make sure that knowledge is expressed and then make it transferable — from one brain to another,” Sun says.

repeatable structure. Their song crystallizes at sexual maturity, with no further changes thought to occur. However, Hyland Bruno and her colleagues have observed subtle vocal changes beyond this “sensitive period” for vocal learning, including added ornamentation and changes in rhythm, that seem to depend on different social contexts. Indeed, adults familiar with each other may align the pitch and tone of their songs in the way people adapt to others’ speech, immediately repeating catchy words and adjusting their intonation, volume and phrasing.

She intends to study the interactions of the laboratorytrained birds as adults to try to understand the downstream effects of their early development under varying conditions.

Hyland Bruno says she is also interested in the ways in which language development relies on elemental, nonverbal cues, such as tone of voice, rhythm and responsiveness, and how technology may be disrupting these patterns. Technology, including screen time, is changing the dynamics of our interactions in significant ways, she notes. Digital devices are causing more distraction, for example, as parents spend more time on them and less time paying attention to developing infants and, while immersed in devices, may respond to them more slowly or less fully.

“Bird studies are useful,” Hyland Bruno says, “because they allow us to process how communication develops in individuals and how patterns are transmitted across generations. We can alter learning conditions in ways that would be unethical in humans.”

One method under development is an open forum on the internet that integrates AI moderators and chatbots into crowdsourcing platforms to help stakeholders share ideas and information about vulnerability, risk and strategy. Sun is recruiting participants from a cross-section of the community in Tampa, Fla. — representatives from local government, NGOs, utilities and residents, particularly from minority groups — to test it out.

She’s also designing a role-play session in which the stakeholders will take each other’s positions in a face-to-face discussion about a hypothetical hurricane.

“It’s really important for people to understand each other’s perspectives,” Sun explains. “Through these interactions, we want to give people a sense of belonging to the community and the assurance that their voices are heard and can make a difference.”

She is using immersive VR technology to help people visualize the way that drainage, transportation, electricity and communication systems can work together to support sustainable communities and to demonstrate how they can play a part. For example, the design will show how individuals‘ energy-saving behaviors can contribute to reducing carbon emissions and strengthening preparedness for future hazards, she notes.

The researchers, including collaborators at the University of South Florida and the University of New Hampshire, will record the VR participants’ behavioral responses and incorporate them into suggestions for making storm strategies and policies more people-friendly, inclusive and effective.

“Those who experience huge losses are often from economically vulnerable groups. They have a lot to say about the resources they need to recover. But unless we can engage them and improve their status, then I won’t say that technological advancement is 100 percent successful,” says Sun.

Julia Hyland Bruno studies the development of language and communication in birds and other animals. Shown: She holds a finch retired from experiments.

Yao Sun

Paying Mother Nature a Fair Wage

As communities debate the merits of preserving, developing or restoring natural features in the landscape, ZEYUAN QIU,a professor of environmentalscience and policy, is helping themplace a monetary value on thecontributions of forests, streams and meadows.

Tracking a Deadly Rise, Historic Fall of Insect Populations

n estimated 10 quintillion insects are on the planet, a staggering number that is at the center of a data crisis for entomologists. Researchers are struggling to understand historic shifts taking place among insect populations amid climate change and other environmental threats, from deforestation to pesticide use.

Nearly 40% of all insect species are declining globally, while a third of them are now considered endangered. And yet, some deadly populations are on the rise.

Associate Professor of Physics Benjamin Thomas is developing new laser-based instruments to better study what is occurring among the world’s most diverse animal population, which accounts for roughly half of Earth’s animal biomass today.

“Because of their size and great diversity, it’s been difficult to collect data on insect populations to the point that entomologists talk about a data crisis in their field,” says Thomas. “Population trends we do have show great variance between insect families or groups and regions. For example, terrestrial insects seem to be more at risk of joining this insect decline than freshwater insects, which are increasing in some cases as climate conditions grow warmer and wetter.

“We are developing optical sensors to monitor our environment and provide better data to understand the situation. The goal is a diagnostic tool that can be widely deployed for surveying insect populations autonomously.”

With funding from the National Institutes of Health,

Thomas has been establishing such a tool to track the planet’s most dangerous animal, responsible for over a half a million human deaths each year — mosquitoes.

For the past four years, he has been collaborating with the Hudson Regional Health Commission’s mosquito control program in Secaucus, N.J., where he is deploying his sensors. His approach employs a scanning technology found in newer smartphones, LiDAR, which involves a laser wavelength in the near-infrared spectral range that is invisible to insects.

“We are sending a laser beam across open fields more than 50 meters, about 2 inches in diameter and about a foot above the ground. When insects fly through the beam, our optical receiver measures the backscattered light,” explains Thomas. “By studying those optical signals, we retrieve a lot of information on any insect entering the beam, such as its wingbeat frequency, wing and body size, unique wing movements and more.”

Thomas says his instruments registered more than a million insect observations last mosquito season, from April to October.

These observations could help Hudson County health officials track the abundance of deadly populations such as the mosquito species Culex, for example, which brought West Nile Virus to Queens, N.Y. nearly 20 years ago and is growing in the New York City-Metropolitan region today.

Specifically, Thomas is tracking unique light signatures

produced by females, which unlike males, can transmit disease using mouthparts capable of puncturing human skin.

“Females average 350 wing beats per second, compared to males at 500 a second,” says Thomas. “The instrument has a temporal resolution down to the minute so not only can we track population density over the season and potentially over years, but we can look at the behavior and peak of activities of groups each day.”

“While still being developed, I believe this technology

will offer several advantages over traditional methods of adult mosquito surveillance,” says Gregory Williams, Superintendent of Mosquito Control at Hudson Regional Health Commission. “It will reduce the turnaround time for gathering data from the field, allow us to track the impact of our insecticides on non-target species and eliminate the sampling biases inherent in our current mosquito traps. Even now, the current systems could be an excellent early-detection tool for invasive species or for monitoring specific disease

vector species.”

Beyond tracking mosquito populations, Thomas says his research may give scientists much-needed data insights into insects in rapid decline, such as bees and other pollinators.

“What we do with mosquitoes can be done with pollinators, though it’ll take more instruments and continuous effort,” says Thomas. “We can identify them using a machine learning classifier we’ve been refining since we began working with mosquitoes … we first collect species data in the lab to train our models, allowing us to then identify and track activity of these insects in the wild.”

The work could be of significance to preserving vital agricultural landscapes — roughly 35% of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators to reproduce, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Thomas plans to study pollinators locally in Secaucus and Newark, eventually scaling up to cover regions of rich wildlife such as New Jersey’s wetlands, to track how pollinator populations evolve over years.

“We started making measurements on species of wild bees in the lab already so we can more accurately identify them in the field,” says Thomas. “We think our observations can offer important new data on their peak of activity and behavior as it relates to weather and temperature, and hopefully, we can eventually begin to study things such as the impact of pesticides on pollinators, which may inform new strategies for protecting them.”

“Despite being so essential, ecosystem services, the benefits that human society receives from nature, are not commercial products that are properly priced in a marketplace. Most ecosystem services are free gifts of nature and, therefore, are often overused and underappreciated because of the lack of a price tag,” he notes. “If we’re to preserve our natural capital, we need to provide the evidence for it in common measurements people can understand and appreciate.”

In 2021, Qiu and NJIT students volunteered with the Princeton Environmental Commission to determine the value of maintaining old-growth forests in the town. Among other calculations, they estimated contributions to carbon sequestration, oxygen production, carbon storage, water retention, air pollution removal and assigned these contributions a monetary value. The figure, which has not been published, helped guide the decision to preserve a 153-acre old-growth forest, protecting the land of over 10,000 trees from a proposed housing development.

“Old-growth forests like that are very rare and integral to an area’s natural heritage,” Qiu says. “They provide recreation and other benefits for people and habitat for some unique plants and animals, including a species of frog found only in New Jersey.”

He is currently collaborating with colleagues at Rutgers University to develop a watershed restoration plan to reduce pollution loads to Barnegat Bay-Little Egg Harbor streams and improve the health of Southern Barnegat Bay. He is also working with the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium to develop a national strategy for deploying green infrastructure and low impact development techniques to mitigate runoff and pollution impacts on freshwater systems. These include natural and man-made features, such as cisterns, rain gardens and riparian buffers, among others, that mimic nature’s functions.

“Given the extent of human disruption on natural landscapes through intensive urbanization and agriculture,” he notes, “there is also plenty of repair and design work to do.”

Benjamin Thomas used LiDAR in Secaucus, N.J., to survey mosquito populations.

Zeyuan Qiu

Jasmine

plastic recycling habits in order to design a sustainable platform for reusing this household waste.

New Futures for Old Plastics

In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” the protagonist is advised by a family friend to pursue a career with a great future: “plastics.” Decades later, as waste from the now ubiquitous material fills landfills, leaches microparticles and clutters oceans, a growing number of students and professors are focused instead on ways to recycle and remediate it.

On NJIT’s campus, the business of plastics is taking off in scientific and entrepreneurial circles. A law passed in 2022 by the New Jersey legislature requiring increasing use of recycled materials in beverage bottles, reaching 50% in 2044, is injecting urgency into these initiatives. At the same time, demand for 3D printing filament is growing steadily. Both trends are spurring research on campus.

“The supply chain for recycled plastic is immature and the supply unstable. When the legislature designed the policy, they probably didn’t look at the supply. They only saw that more people are environmentally conscious,” says Jasmine Chang, an assistant professor in the Martin Tuchman School of Management. Passage of the new state law, she says, prompted her to investigate different ways to track and analyze the public’s recycling habits.

Her research team, including Jim Shi an associate professor of supply chain management and finance, will use data science, including data mining of social media and assorted databases, to gauge public sentiment about recycling. “We want to know, for example, peoples’ perception of recycling policies and practices, as well as the plastic crisis. A better understanding would enable us to design a feasible and sustainable platform for recycling.”

In a potential pilot project, the team has proposed testing whether installing a drop-off container that keeps track

Taking on a Pervasive Toxic Chemical

There are few industrial chemicals as ubiquitous as phthalates. Designed to make plastic compounds more durable and flexible, they’re found in medical equipment, PVC piping, food packaging and even hairsprays. Yet they’ve been prompted health concerns since the 1960s, when they were identified as suspected developmental toxicants — endocrine disruptors in today’s terminology.

of bottle deposits and issues redeemable tokens would incentivize people to recycle. The tokens would allow students, for example, to buy coffee and other items on campus. After crunching the data, the team would fine-tune pricing.

“People in the U.S. now recycle out of good will and the results are that we’re not doing a good job. I think we should try incentives,” Chang says. “We’d use blockchain to track these transactions.”

Data from the pilot project would also help researchers better understand supply patterns to improve market forecasts and design workable policies. She explains, “Suppose the policy requires 50% of products must be produced from recycled plastic, which requires 100 tons of recycled plastic, but the supply is only 90 tons.”

Today, recycled plastic generally costs more to refine and buy than new plastic. The cost of new plastic rises in response to the cost of oil, because it’s a petroleum product, so when oil prices increase, recycled plastic becomes more appealing to manufacturers. Providing transparency about a bottle’s lifecycle would be one way to increase peoples’ comfort level with “used” bottles. She notes, “We should employ blockchain to track the materials throughout the production cycle so consumers are assured that what they’re drinking out of is clean and safe, knowing the materials can be traced.”

Student entrepreneurs at NJIT are approaching recycled plastic in new ways. Computer science major Anthony Caruso ’25 and computer engineering major John Holck ’24 took first place in the university’s 2022 New Business Model Competition for their startup, ReFilament, which aims to

produce and market recycled material to feed into 3D printers. If it’s possible to use recycled paper in regular printers, they argue, then it makes sense to use recycled plastic for the output of 3D products.

Ph.D. student Jitendra Kewalramani who studies geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering, took second prize in the contest for his invention to remove so-called forever chemicals from water by using ultrasound purification technology. Such chemicals, known as PFAS or polyfluoroalkyl substances, are often found in plastic. The existing purification methods are complex and costly, Kewalramani says.

“On the other hand, ultrasound is easy to operate, just requiring electricity, and can break down PFAS completely into benign products,” he says. His work already has attracted interest from environmental engineers in the U.S. Department of Defense, Air Force, Navy and NASA. He’s currently developing a field treatment trailer for an Air Force project in collaboration with an engineering firm.

NJIT is providing seed funding for all of these earlystage projects.

“The obvious option to reduce plastic pollution is to not use it. However, for many reasons plastics have become an inevitable part of our lives,” observes NJIT’s Prabhakar Shrestha, assistant director of sustainability. “To repurpose it, we must be innovative, and businesses are limited in what they can do. Coming up with new ideas is our contribution to solving the problem. As an institution, we’ll continue to seek solutions to fight climate change on many fronts.”

“A half century later, there is still much to learn about their mechanisms of action and their impact on women’s reproductive health, as most of the early studies were conducted on males,” says GENOA WARNER an assistant professor of chemistry and environmental science, who is studying their effects on the ovary.

Warner says animal studies show that the chemicals disrupt hormone production, cause changes in cell growth and disrupt fertility. They are particularly toxic after enzymes in the body have transformed them into metabolites with a slightly different chemical structure.

“If we can figure out what cells phthalates target in the ovary and the ways in which they are toxic to different cells, we could develop novel therapies to prevent harm,” she notes. Some manufacturers have responded to consumer concerns by developing alternatives to phthalates. Warner is studying some of these compounds and she is not encouraged.

“They’ve changed the structure, but only slightly. In some cases, they’re isomers,” she says, adding, “They’re showing up in human blood and urine at even higher levels.”

Phthalates, Genoa notes, are “unavoidable.” They’re added to PVC to make it more flexible and can account for up to half the weight of the plastic, but they are not bonded and so “leach right out.”

Because the compositions of fragrances in hairsprays, shampoos and creams are trade secrets, the amount and chemical structures of the phthalates in them remain unknown. As of now, manufacturers are allowed to self-report their usage to federal regulatory agencies.

Another goal, she says, is to provide regulators with precise detail about their impact on cells and animals, and design safer alternative chemicals to prevent damage to sensitive reproductive organs.

Genoa Warner

Chang tracks and analyzes

Community-Engaged Architecture

The undergraduate designers of “Resilient Hope,” a community of FHA-compliant dwellings for unhoused residents of Newark, N.J., presented their plan to city officials last December. They are flanked by adjunct professors of architecture Erin Pellegrino (far left) and Charles Firestone (far right) who oversaw its design.

the original Hope Village. They were urged to make it “a model for future villages.”

To guide the design, the class established a set of principles gleaned from a questionnaire put to Hope Village residents and conversations with city officials: privacy, storage, safety and dignity. They added community and connectivity.

The resulting “Resilient Hope” includes 12 two-bedroom homes situated around a ring of open space with plantings, tables and benches, and communal buildings at the center, including a pantry, a clinic with privacy for telehealth meetings, a counseling room, a laundry and a multi-resource room with computers. There’s also a large kitchen, a meeting space and a lounge to encourage social gatherings.

“We wanted to build something that would feel more like a typical home to people who may not have had one in a long time. Dignity was the driving force, which is something we often take for granted,” says Cooper Schipske a fifth-year student who said he was struck by the care Hope Village residents took for their apartments.

Tiny Home Designs Offer Big Community

s urban dwellers adapted to living and working behind closed doors in the early days of the pandemic, life for those sheltering on the street became even more isolated and precarious. In response, the city of Newark assembled a popup village, a cluster of mini-apartments fashioned from six shipping containers, to house them. They quickly found takers. “People who had rejected everything else — as many as 200 times that year — said yes. A lot of them didn’t like sharing space in congregate shelters. They valued the safety, peace

and privacy of Hope Village,” recounts Luis Ulerio, director of the Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services. The 20-person community, initially intended as temporary shelter, was built in three months. Mayor Ras Baraka quickly called for more supportive housing communities, with instructions to improve upon each new iteration.

The ad hoc community piqued the interest of architects Erin Pellegrino and Charles Firestone, adjunct professors at NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, who

were moved by the initiative, and decided to pose the challenge to their Fall 2021 studio design class to build a prototype with an even smaller budget. Within 15 weeks, the class unveiled a light-filled, energy-efficient cabin with a sleeping loft, sitting area and storage spaces that felt larger than its 120 square feet. Built for $10,000 donated by Tom Wisniewski of Newark Venture Partners, it cost roughly half the price per unit of the container housing.

Their tiny house in turn got the attention of Newark planning officials and an ambitious new mandate for the Fall 2022 studio: to design a community of Federal Housing Administration-compliant dwellings for a vacant, city-owned lot that would offer more services, amenities and comfort than

The units, clad in wood and corrugated metal, expanded upon the more rudimentary Hope Village by providing separate bedrooms with doors in place of bunk beds, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a small living area and even more storage. Inside the units, the students used “a lot of natural wood to create a warm, welcoming feeling” and neutral palettes throughout “for a brighter, more open feeling that encourages mental wellness,” notes Nicolas Boneta, a fifthyear student. “Accented walls in the unit provide a splash of color, and by varying the color choices in each home, a sense of individuality and ownership.”

To connect people inside the community, the students included covered porches on the houses that face each other

Shades of Green

Architect JOHN CAYS has a ready response to nebulous sustainability marketing: “There are no green products, only greener ones.”

Indeed, his students are required to quantify just how green their projects are by calculating the environmental impact of each of their design decisions. It’s an exhaustive task.

and large glass walls on the communal buildings. In designing the compound, they also considered how the residents — individuals, paired companions and couples, many over 50 years old with chronic health issues who would stay varying lengths of time — would be seen by the neighborhood, as well as their consciousness of public perceptions. They tucked the security desk behind a wall so the residents would not be viewed checking in, for example. They treated the fence around the village, which Hope Village residents had called an essential security feature, as an aesthetic and protective element. Aiming for a look that projected “more mediation than barrier,” they came up with a thin mesh screen overlaid with spaced wooden slats, on which artwork could be painted.

“We want the village to allow people to live and build their lives in the community,” notes Elizabeth Kowalchuk a fifthyear student, who says the next step would be “to engage the community to discuss ways to integrate the village into the neighborhood aesthetically and socially.”

Pellegrino and Firestone laud the class for also tackling what they called the “unglamorous” features of any development: budget, security, waste management and accessibility, noting that one student immersed himself in dumpster design.

After the presentation to city officials this past December, Baraka pronounced the design “brilliant, beautiful, efficient and effective.” He commended the students’ efforts “to make people feel comfortable.”

“My goal is to make this happen,” says Ulerio. “The city has committed the land and funding, and we need to leverage private dollars to fill the gaps.”

“We look at the total impact a building or product will have on the environment over its lifetime, starting with the raw materials, their extraction and their manufacture into products. We then measure the environmental cost of their distribution, maintenance throughout their life, possible material replacement and end-of-life disposal,” explains Cays, the associate dean for academic affairs at NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design.

He is an early adopter and authority on what’s known as life cycle assessment (LCA) as it relates to architecture. His 2021 book, “An Environmental Life Cycle Approach to Design,” provides guidance on optimizing individual designs to address ecological challenges. He emphasizes sciencebased perspectives and techniques to produce high quality data for clarity and public accessibility.

In the classroom, his students use software programs to evaluate not only the impact of different material choices for beams and columns, for example, such as wood compared with steel, but also the manufacturing process that produces them. “They all have different profiles,” he notes. Their calculations go beyond quantifying a project’s carbon footprint. They also take into account such factors as the amount of pollution and nutrients their building will deposit into the environment over its lifetime. He reminds his young designers to be mindful of “burden shifting.”

“If we improve one aspect, it can impair another. For example, if we replace concrete with wood, we must account for the fertilizer used to grow the trees.”

Cays notes with satisfaction that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, for the first time ever in federal legislation, provides support for life cycle assessment of some building products.

“LCA digital translation tools that integrate into the designer’s toolbox have been available for the last 10 years or so,” he says. “The time is now to use these tools and learn how to interpret the results!”

John Cays

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND LIBERAL ARTS

Julia Hyland Bruno assistant professor of humanities and social sciences, researches learned communication systems, such as birdsong and human language. In parallel studies, she explores how social animals learn to be social; what patterns, structures and norms characterize their relationships; and how these processes may be uniquely influenced by machines and technology.

Lindsay Goodwin assistant professor of physics, researches ionospheric plasma dynamics and coupling from the sun to the Earth’s ionosphere. Goodwin studies how energy from the sun cascades into the ionosphere and thermosphere, driving ionospheric structures and redistributing plasma. Additionally, they examine how space plasmas and neutral particles interact and exchange charges amid changing ionospheric conditions.

Chong Jin assistant professor of mathematics, develops statistical and machine learning methods to integrate multiomics data. These data, multilayer molecular characterizations of biological systems, offer new opportunities in mathematical modeling to reveal cell types and states underlying the diagnosis and treatment of complex human diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

Thi Phong Nguyen assistant professor of mathematics, develops new ways to solve inverse problems and imaging, focusing in particular on numerical methods to determine the characteristics of an object based on how it scatters incoming electromagnetic waves. Applications include non-destructive evaluations to detect defects and medical imaging to identify cancers.

Yao Sun, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences, studies collective intelligence, open science and innovation, virtual communities and social and semantic networks, as well as peoples’ social behavior in VR environments and the ways in which AI shapes collective actions. She is currently researching online community-based communication and equitable decisionmaking to further sustainability.

Kristina Wicke assistant professor of mathematics, studies mathematical phylogenetics, researching the evolutionary history of groups of species and their relationships. These methods can be used, for example, to develop measures of phylogenetic diversity to rank species for conservation, based on their position in an underlying phylogenetic tree or network.

NEWARK COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Elisa Kallioniemi, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, works on neural engineering and noninvasive electromagnetic brain stimulation. She is developing nextgeneration therapeutics for psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as depression and stroke, as well as methods that use brain stimulation as a diagnostic and neuroscientific tool for the same disorders.

Oladoyin Kolawole assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, investigates how rocks and rock-like materials deform or fail in response to changes in stress, pressure and temperature. He has also devised new methods that use microbes to change rock properties to store carbon dioxide or enhance oil and gas extraction.

Marcos Netto assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, researches the dynamics of electric power grids to enable integration of renewable energy sources at a significant scale. He develops streaming algorithms to process sequential data streams to estimate power systems’ dynamic states and control power grids.

SangWoo Park assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, designs and analyzes computational algorithms for complex, large-scale problems in electric power, transportation and health care systems, among others. He uses mathematical tools from optimization theory, control theory, graph theory and machine learning to help operate large systems reliably, securely and sustainably.

Bo Shen, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve advanced manufacturing processes. He develops advanced machine learning methods to monitor additive manufacturing online, ensure quality control and discover fabrication improvements, using real-time sensor data from cameras, scanners and microscopes.

Jongsang Son assistant professor of biomedical engineering, investigates inefficient muscular contractions and movement impairments in broad clinical populations, such as stroke patients and the elderly. Using experimental and computational methods, he quantifies neuromuscular properties and human movements and studies neuromuscular adaptations to various sensorimotor stimulations to develop interventions to bolster motor functioning.

Petras Swissler assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, researches robotic self-assembly, a process analogous to how ants form bridges using their own bodies, to build devices for use in humanitarian efforts. The goal is to quickly and inexpensively rebuild critical infrastructure, as well as temporary construction scaffolding that can self-disassemble for reuse.

MARTIN TUCHMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Ajim Uddin, assistant professor of financial technology, applies machine learning to finance with a special focus on financial networks: the connections among companies through personnel, investments, supply chains and market return. He explores the latent representation of these networks to understand how network connections influence the market price of financial assets.

Jinghua Wang, assistant professor of finance, uses machine learning methods and time series models to evaluate connectedness — causality relationships among financial assets in equity, bond, energy and cryptocurrency markets — and to forecast prices by analyzing such factors as interest rate fluctuations that destabilize markets and cause price shifts for particular assets.

YING WU COLLEGE OF COMPUTING

Mengnan Du assistant professor of data science, studies the explainability, fairness and trustworthiness of AI. To enhance confidence in AI, he develops tools that show, for example, how the machine learning models behind recommender systems and medical diagnoses make predictions. He also develops mitigation algorithms to reduce models’ bias toward underprivileged groups.

Martin Kellogg assistant professor of computer science, focuses on making software verification — proving facts about what a program will do when run — practical for every developer, by making it a standard part of every developer’s toolkit in the way that most developers today use techniques such as unit testing or code review.

Sooyeon Lee, an assistant professor of informatics, researches human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction, with the goal of expanding inclusion in social and personal spaces for people with a range of abilities. At Uber, for example, she worked on an accessibility foundation for deaf and hard-of-hearing people to enable them to work as drivers.

Cong Shi, assistant professor of computer science, researches security vulnerabilities and enhancements for mobile computing and sensing devices and for machine learning and artificial intelligent systems. These include the use of smartphones and TVs to sense users’ movements and unique behaviors and security vulnerabilities in augmented and virtual reality platforms, such as headsets.

Lijing Wang assistant professor of data science, works on computing methods to solve problems in domains ranging from epidemics, to health informatics, to public health, including work on COVID-19 forecasting for the CDC. She developed deep-learning techniques to forecast disease trajectories, including shortterm predictions of case count, peak time and peak intensity.

Mengjia Xu assistant professor of data science who specializes in medical imaging and computational neuroscience, uses novel machine learning methods and deep neural networks, for example, to better understand cardiovascular disease. She has also used probabilistic graph embedding methods to identify biomarkers for the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION CAREER AWARDS

Matthew Bandelt, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, studies the behavior of novel infrastructure materials for improved life cycle performance, sustainability and resiliency. Through experimentation and modeling, he’s currently assessing the seismic response of materials known as high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites in structures of various configurations to develop seismic design criteria for using them.

Phillip Barden, assistant professor of biology, studies the evolution and ecology of social insects, including the development of complex behaviors. He is currently focused on identifying convergent trends in genome evolution related to advanced social behaviors; quantifying links among phenotype, ecology and extinction; and maximizing data collection from fossil amber.

Qing Liu associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, develops new methodologies and software tools to accelerate knowledge discovery on large scientific instruments, including supercomputers, and at experimental and observational facilities. He’s currently exploring ways to mitigate data storage problems with new methods of compression that do not sacrifice data integrity.

ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY FELLOWS

David Bader distinguished professor of data science and director of the Institute for Data Science, works at the intersection of data science and high-performance computing, with applications in cybersecurity, massivescale analytics and computational genomics. He played a key role in the development of Linux-based massively parallel production computers and is recognized for his pioneering contributions to scalable discrete parallel algorithms for real-world applications.

Craig Gotsman distinguished professor of computer science and dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing, focuses on 3D computer graphics, geometry processing, animation and computational geometry. His inventions include software technologies for manipulating 3D geometric data, enabling their use in a variety of applications, including computer-aided design and manufacturing, architecture, visualization and gaming.

ROYAL SOCIETY OF CHEMISTRY FELLOW

Kevin Belfield, dean of NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts, specializes in research on organic photonic materials, especially two-photon absorbing materials in 3D optical data storage. He also applies two-photon-based imaging technology to improve early cancer detection and study the development of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

AIChE PD2M AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO QBD FOR DRUG SUBSTANCE

Rajesh Davé distinguished professor of chemical engineering, focuses on research in particle and materials engineering and materials science to advance knowledge of drug particle formation and cost-efficient manufacturing. He has developed methods for raising the absorption rates of poorly soluble drugs and increasing patient compliance through medication taste-masking.

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING FELLOW

Ecevit Bilgili professor of chemical and materials engineering, designs advanced particulate formulations and processes for various high-value-added product sectors, such as the pharmaceutical, flavors and fragrances, nutraceuticals and cement industries. Broadly, his goal is to develop engineering science for delivering and manufacturing poorly soluble drugs cheaper, faster and more efficaciously.

INFORMS PRIZE FOR TEACHING ORMS PRACTICE

Jim (Junmin) Shi, the Leir Chair Professor, focuses on supply chain management, logistics and transportation, financial technology and health care operations management. He examines the effects of disruptive technologies such as blockchain on the supply chain, including plastic recycling, and ways to help particular industries, such as small-scale coffee growers in Kenya, through operational improvements.

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF INVENTORS FELLOW

Tara Alvarez professor of biomedical engineering, studies the links between visual disorders and the brain and develops novel devices to identify and treat them. She currently seeks to establish guidelines that will help clinicians diagnose and treat concussion-related convergence insufficiency, an eye coordination disorder that causes blurred and double vision, headaches and difficulties concentrating.

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF INVENTORS SENIOR MEMBERS

Murat Guvendiren associate professor of chemical and materials engineering, designs biomaterials that train stem cells to differentiate in the proper sequence to form functioning organs and tissues. He is currently developing biomaterials that would enable the production of fully functional, human-scale tissues and organs to replace failed ones. A current focus is a treatment for osteoarthritis, the most common chronic musculoskeletal disorder of the joints.

Mengyan Li, associate professor of environmental science, develops sustainable water remediation techniques to biodegrade organic pollutants of emerging global concern, such as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). He also researches interdisciplinary methods for improving urban water treatment technologies, including the use of nanotechnology to disinfect supplies contaminated with pathogens.

Carnegie Classification® Research University

12 fellows of the National Academy of Inventors

162 patents and intellectual property assets held by NJIT faculty top 100 institutions globally in addressing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals

- 2022 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings

400 people from 30 countries joined Minorities in Shark Sciences, the diversityfocused nonprofit founded in 2020 by an NJIT graduate student and collaborators

1 foldable solar panel that provides electricity to buildings, while also serving as a shading device

- National Science Foundation I-Corps project

Since 2013:

150 research institutes, centers and specialized labs top 20 university in the United States for graduating Black engineers

- Minority Engineer magazine (2021)

$21 million amount raised in 2022 by companies in VentureLink@NJIT

“To ensure our own credibility, we researchers need to hold ourselves accountable for the technologies we design. The more resilient they are, the less time and money society will need to spend on recovery, repair and replacement.

We also need to make sure that our communities — our campuses — are sustainable.

Atam P. Dhawan

Interim Provost and Senior Executive Vice President Senior Vice Provost for Research Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

107% increase in external research funding

23 winners of National Science Foundation CAREER awards

$7.5 million spent on undergraduate student research stipends