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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.” 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.

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.

“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!”

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