MAGAZINE WINTER/SPRING 2016
NJIT WOMEN IN RESEARCH
CAPTURING CARBON FOR POSTERITY AND PROFIT BUILDINGS AND MEANINGS LOCOMOTION IN THE OCEAN
E X ECU T I V E SU M M A R Y
A MESSAGE FROM NJIT PRESIDENT JOEL S. BLOOM
WOMEN IN STEM
NJIT MAGAZINE
Two decades ago, NJIT embarked on a critically important experiment — the goal of which, as set forth by Albert Dorman ’45, was to create a technology-rich educational environment where the nation’s most talented people could reach their full intellectual potential. Since its inception, the Albert Dorman Honors College has been a pillar of NJIT’s ongoing commitment to academic excellence. This issue’s cover depicts a nighttime view of the Honors College and Warren Street Village, a dynamic environment where our vibrant community of students, alumni, faculty, staff and industry stakeholders collaborate on transformative solutions to issues affecting 21st-century society. As outlined in NJIT’s strategic plan 2020 Vision, we recognize the need to focus on inclusion and diversity for the improvement of our university. The features in this issue highlight three members of the NJIT faculty who, in addition to groundbreaking research in their respective fields, are role models for women who are pursuing careers in the STEM fields. “Capturing Carbon for Posterity and Profit” describes how Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering Selina Cai is developing models for carbon capture and storage that have important implications for pollution control. Zeynep Çelik, who has joint appointments in the College of Science and Liberal Arts and the College of Architecture and Design, is exploring the relationship among politics, social issues and built forms in “Buildings and Meanings.” And, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Brooke Flammang, who joined our faculty in 2014, is taking a multidisciplinary look at nature’s marine propulsion systems and is serving as an advocate for motivating more young women to pursue STEM careers in “Locomotion in the Ocean.” Also included in this issue is an expanded “Giving” section, which provides highlights of the events that took place during the past fall and winter, including the Life Sciences and Engineering Building Groundbreaking Ceremony, the first annual President’s Forum and Faculty Research Showcase, and the Wellness and Events Center Groundbreaking Ceremony, during which we announced the extension of the NJIT NEXT Campaign. You can read more about “what’s next” for the NJIT NEXT capital campaign on page 11. I encourage your review of these articles and welcome your feedback.
Lauren Ugorji Associate Vice President Communications, Marketing and Branding
WINTER/SPRING 2016
Denise Anderson Assistant Vice President Strategic Communications Christina Crovetto M.S. ’03 Editor Tanya Klein Editorial Assistant Shydale James Contributing Editor Dean L. Maskevich, Tracey L. Regan Contributing Writers Babette Hoyle Production Coordinator Brigham & Rago Marketing Communications Design Editorial Advisory Board Kevin D. Belfield, Reggie J. Caudill, Charles R. Dees Jr., Atam P. Dhawan, Urs P. Gauchat, Moshe Kam, Katia Passerini, Marek E. Rusinkiewicz, Michael K. Smullen NJIT Magazine is published by New Jersey Institute of Technology, Office of Strategic Communications. Its mission is to foster ties with alumni, university friends and corporate partners and to report on relevant issues, particularly those in education, science, research and technology. Please send letters of comment and requests to reproduce material from the magazine to: NJIT Magazine Office of Strategic Communications University Heights Newark, NJ 07102-1982 crovetto@njit.edu Joel S. Bloom President Charles R. Dees Jr. Senior Vice President University Advancement Michael K. Smullen Director of Alumni Relations On the web: magazine.njit.edu Cover photo: NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College and Warren Street Village are a vibrant presence within the university community.
MAGAZINE WINTER/SPRING 2016
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FEATURES PAG E 16
CAPTURING CARBON FOR POSTERITY AND PROFIT Selina Cai, an assistant professor of industrial engineering who specializes in operations research, is developing models that demonstrate how the market for a pollution control strategy called carbon capture and storage would work. PAG E 2 0
BUILDINGS AND MEANINGS Distinguished Professor Zeynep Çelik, who has a joint appointment in NJIT’s New Jersey School of Architecture and the Department of History, has dedicated her career to interpreting the meanings buildings communicate about the cultures that create them. 24
PAG E 24
LOCOMOTION IN THE OCEAN Brooke Flammang, an assistant professor of biological sciences, is decoding the mysteries of marine biomechanics one fin at a time.
DEPARTMENTS 2 A BSTRACTS
NJIT news in brief
7 POINT BY POINT Athletics update
10 G IVING
NJIT development news
28 A LUMNI CIRCUIT
Class notes, calendar of events, and more
37 I N CONCLUSION
Leading-edge achievements by faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends of NJIT
ABSTRACTS HONORING EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH
The NJIT Board of Overseers awarded its eighth annual Research Prize and Medal to Distinguished Professor of Physics Haimin Wang, a leading authority on fluctuations of the Sun’s magnetic field that give rise to solar flares and space weather.
John Seazholtz ’59 (left), Chairman of the NJIT Board of Overseers, joined President Joel S. Bloom in presenting the 2015 Overseers Excellence in Research Prize and Medal to Distinguished Professor of Physics Haimin Wang. Photo: Larry Levanti
Wang, who is the chief scientist for NJIT’s Big Bear Solar Observatory and director of the Space Weather Research Laboratory at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, had a key role in NJIT’s acquisition of Big Bear from Caltech in 1997 and its subsequent research efforts. He has secured more than 60 federal grants worth more than $25 million as either a principal or co-principal investigator. He has been funded as a guest investigator for all of NASA’s recent major solar missions. Wang and his colleagues recently produced the first high-resolution images of the magnetic structures known as solar flux ropes at their point of origin in the Sun’s chromosphere, allowing scientists to distinguish between relatively mild manifestations and those severe 2
enough to cause space weather. These observations provide an unprecedented glimpse into the complex dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere as well as insights into massive eruptions on the sun’s surface. In 2013, he was appointed by NASA to lead the flare focus team for Living with a Star, the agency’s program dedicated to studying space weather that affects the Earth and the interplanetary medium. He also heads an international network composed of nine observatories around the world that constantly monitors the Sun. The NJIT Board of Overseers Excellence in Research Prize and Medal is awarded in recognition of a sustained record of contributions that has enhanced the reputation of NJIT. n
NJIT MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2016
SHEDDING LIGHT ON SOLAR FLARES Solar scientists at several institutions, including NJIT, have shed light on an elusive structure known as a termination shock that is believed to play a key role in converting released magnetic energy from flares into kinetic energy in accelerated particles. Through observations captured by Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), a large radio telescope, they have imaged a shock and its time evolution during a long-lasting solar flare, demonstrating its role in accelerating particles. Their findings were published in Science magazine. “Although predicted by theoretical models, this is the first time we have had direct images and movies showing the repeated formation, disruption and reformation of a termination shock, enabling us to link it directly to particle acceleration,” said Distinguished Professor of Physics Dale Gary, one of the authors of the article.
The observations were made possible by the ability of the newly-enhanced VLA in New Mexico to acquire the more than 40,000 individual images per second of observation needed to resolve the rapidly varying emission features produced by the termination shock. “We have been studying the Sun for many years using observations of its light in a broad range of wavelengths, but we have been unable to observe some of its activities in detail, including those related to particle acceleration,” said astrophysicist Bin Chen, who served as the article’s lead author and is an assistant professor of physics at NJIT. “Radio telescopes, which are now able to capture tens of thousands of images per second through various frequencies, are giving us much more information on what was previously hidden.” NJIT is expanding its own solar-dedicated radio telescope, the Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array, to observe the Sun every day with many of the same observational capabilities. Multifrequency imaging with high frequency and time resolution will become a standard method of studying solar flares in the near future. n Image shows the speed of fast plasma outflows produced by a solar flare. The termination shock is shown as a transition layer where the colors change abruptly from red/yellow to blue/green. At the bottom is the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, which captured the termination shock in action using radio observations.
PHOTO: NATIONAL RADIO ASTRONOMY OBSERVATORY AND ASSOCIATED UNIVERSITIES, INC.
PHOTO: UNIVERSITIES SPACE RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
Distinguished Research Professor Louis Lanzerotti
A STELLAR CAREER
In the mid-1960s, just as U.S. space exploration was taking off, a young physicist named Louis Lanzerotti with a newly minted Ph.D. from Harvard University and an eager interest in applied research found himself “at the right place at the right time” to begin tackling some of the fundamental challenges of flying spacecraft in orbit around Earth.
“The space program was new and I saw an opportunity to do engineering and science,” recalled Lanzerotti, who interviewed with several major companies involved in early aerospace research and chose AT&T’s Bell Labs. He set to work immediately on some of the country’s first communication satellites, preparing them for travel in the Earth’s near-space environment, a then little-known realm subject to powerful geomagnetic fields and radiation. “The first communication satellite, Telstar 1, was launched in 1962 and I analyzed data from the detectors flown on the satellite to measure the radiation environment at its orbit altitude. I then worked on the design, construction and calibration of a radiation monitoring package on the ATS-1 test communications satellite, which went up in December 1966. One of the challenges was to prepare the satellite to cope with the electrons and protons that would bombard it at geosynchronous altitudes and potentially burn out its transistors,” he recalled, adding, “The Van Allen radiation belts had just been discovered in 1957 — it was an exciting time.” Over the course of his career at Bell Labs, Lanzerotti was involved in a wide range of research related
to solar influences on communication systems, including longdistance ocean and land cables and wireless systems. Now a distinguished research professor at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research and one of the country’s foremost researchers on space weather and its impacts on both space- and ground-based technologies, Lanzerotti continues to lend his half-century of expertise to efforts by the federal government to better prepare and secure the nation’s expanding, increasingly sophisticated communications and energy infrastructure against potentially catastrophic solar storms. He is currently the principal investigator of data-gathering instruments on the NASA Van Allen Probes spacecraft, which are advancing understanding of Earth’s radiation belts. Late last year, Lanzerotti was the sole academic researcher invited to take part in the panel discussion “Space Weather: Understanding Potential Impacts and Building Resilience,” convened in Washington D.C. under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President of the United States and attended by scientists and engineers from academia and industry, as well as policymakers and elected
officials. At that time, the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy laid out a multi-part action plan to address, as Lanzerotti put it, “civil societal issues related to all aspects of space weather.” In an op-ed piece that followed, he called the federal plan “impressive for its analyses and coverage of the measurements, data and models that will be required to ensure security under space weather events of all types — from huge geomagnetic storm-produced telluric currents initiated by coronal mass ejections to solar radio-produced outages of GPS receivers to radiation effects by magnetosphere, solar and galactic radiation to satellite drag effects from Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere.” He notes that the variety of technologies embedded in spaceaffected environments has steadily increased over the past century and a half since the first telegraph systems experienced “anomalous currents” in their wires following the powerful solar storm of 1859, known as the Carrington Event. Given the susceptibility of modern technologies to solar storms with the power to cause electrical grid blackouts, spacecraft failures and the disruption of GPS systems, Lanzerotti and his colleagues are working to better characterize the physical dynamics of space weather in order to build more robust technological infrastructure. In April, he headed back to Washington to take part in a follow-up symposium, sponsored by the Universities Space Research Association and the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, on emerging opportunities in the field of space weather for both basic science and practical applications. “Going forward, more sophisticated and detailed research is required to understand and anticipate solar-related effects on modern technologies, which are increasingly complex both in themselves,” he says, “and in their relationship to their environment.” n Author: Tracey L. Regan is an NJIT Magazine contributing writer.
NJIT RECEIVES $4 MILLION GRANT FOR CYBERSECURITY EDUCATION
NJIT, home to the largest computer science program among all research universities in the New York metropolitan area, continues to build a critical mass and increase its visibility as a top university for future leaders in the field of cybersecurity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberCorps®: Scholarship for Service, a program seeking proposals that address cybersecurity education and workforce development, awarded a $4,078,362 grant to NJIT’s College of Computing Sciences. “This is a tremendous acknowledgement of both the strength of NJIT’s College of Computing Sciences and our country’s need to educate top-quality cybersecurity experts,” said NJIT President Joel S. Bloom. “We welcome these new scholars who will be able to take full advantage of NJIT’s interdisciplinary research networks and innovation partnerships.” The NJIT Secure Computing Initiative (SCI) will be supported by the funds and capitalize on the premier polytechnic university’s broad range of strengths in cybersecurity to recruit, train and place highly successful cohorts of expert cybersecurity professionals in federal, state and local agency jobs. Students from within and outside NJIT who are citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States funded by the grant will receive three-year scholarships that support them through the last year of their bachelor’s program, as well as two years in one of the two M.S. programs in cybersecurity available at NJIT: the M.S. in Cybersecurity and Privacy and the M.S. in Information Technology Administration and Security. n
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NJIT PRESIDENT RECOGNIZED BY U.S. AIR FORCE AND R&D COUNCIL OF NEW JERSEY NJIT President Joel S. Bloom was recently selected for the Air Force Chief of Staff’s civic leader program — one of only a few national university presidents ever requested to serve in such a role. Bloom joins about 30 business and civic leaders from across the nation. The Air Force Civic Leader Program is an Air Staff-level program whose membership is composed of respected business and community leaders. The Air Force civic leaders are unpaid advisors, key communicators and advocates for Air Force issues. They advise the Secretary of the Air Force, Air Force Chief of Staff and Air Force senior leaders about how missions can best be accomplished and about public attitudes. The program also
“ When the system has a match with someone who appears on camera with someone who isn’t allowed on campus, an alarm is generated and Public Safety is called and will respond.” benefits NJIT by offering visibility, access to Air Force R&D and engagement of civic and business leaders from across the nation. In November, The Research & Development Council of New Jersey named Bloom as Educator of the Year. In his acceptance speech, Bloom discussed how NJIT’s legacy of industry-driven innovation and academic excellence leverages the energy and entrepreneurial spirit of today’s students. Established in 1962, the Council is dedicated to cultivating an environment supportive of the advancement of research and development in New Jersey. n
— NJIT security system director Robert Gjini ‘91
NJIT is home to a cutting-edge, facial-recognition security system.
PHOTO: JED MEDINA ’16
FACE TO FACE
EYE-OPENING RESEARCH Tara Alvarez, a professor of biomedical engineering at NJIT, has received an Edison Patent Award from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey for a novel test she and a colleague designed to help eye doctors predict how well their patients will adapt to progressive lenses. In collaboration with Bérangère Granger, an optometrist with French optics company Essilor International, the world’s largest manufacturer of corrective lenses and the creator of the first progressive lens, Alvarez invented a device that measures how quickly people optimize their vision at various distances. The pair’s research shows the correlation between two visual systems — the ability to adapt to near or far distances and the speed with which a person’s eyes coordinate and converge to see a single image — to the capacity to adjust to progressive lenses. “Progressive lenses require a sizable investment of money and time and it is helpful to both the patient and the clinician to know who will be able to adapt to them,” said Alvarez, director of NJIT’s Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory. “For some people, objects appear larger than they actually are, which can be a problem on stairs and curbs. For others, periphery vision may blur when they turn their head from side to side.” Alvarez and Granger received their award at the 2015 Edison Patent Awards Ceremony last November at the Liberty Science Center. n 4
NJIT MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2016
For over a year, the security systems team at NJIT has worked with Panasonic on the implementation of FacePro, a facial-recognition, serverbased analytics technology that captures face images of people walking in and out of the Robert W. Van Houten Library. As students, faculty and alumni stroll through the field of view of the cameras, FacePro captures pictures of their faces using real-time video streams taken by four Panasonic 6 series 1080p i-PRO cameras that hang in the corners of the entryway of the library. The images are then juxtaposed against those stored in a database populated with people allowed on the NJIT campus and another database that catalogs snapshots of those who are barred from campus for a number of reasons. “When the system has a match with someone who appears on camera with someone who isn’t allowed on campus, an alarm is generated
and Public Safety is called and will respond,” explained NJIT security system director Robert Gjini ’91 who, alongside the NJIT Department of Public Safety, set out on a crusade to tighten up security when the library reported an uptick in property theft. Since FacePro was installed and the pilot program began on a cloud network last winter, there have been no library thefts reported on campus. “With the help of our partners at Panasonic, FacePro has proven to be a sound choice to help overcome some security challenges, identify persons of interests on our college campus and drastically lower incidents of theft in the library,” said Gjini. “It’s fitting that this modern, cuttingedge security system would play a crucial role in upholding the value we place on safety at NJIT, where sophisticated technology permeates all aspects of student life.” n
TWO DISTINGUISHED PROFESSORS “ Building a structure out of cans for NAMED NAI FELLOWS an entire day piques the curiosity
of those walking by who may not find out about the CANstruction effort to fight hunger otherwise.”
— Monica Gomez ‘99
PHOTOS: JED MEDINA ’16
CAN-DO SPIRIT
Distinguished Professors Atam Dhawan (top) and Somenath Mitra (bottom).
Somenath Mitra, a Distinguished Professor of chemistry and environmental science, and Atam Dhawan, a Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering, were named 2015 fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) for diverse technological innovations that have had impacts in areas like environmental monitoring and point-of-care devices in health care. They were inducted as part of the Fifth Annual Conference of the NAI at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Mitra, who has been issued 11 patents, has achieved global prominence for his work in several areas, including trace measurements and diverse nanotechnology applications ranging from flexible batteries, to solar cells, to seawater desalination. “There is a huge and growing demand for potable water coming from developing nations that are modernizing their infrastructure to improve living conditions. At the same time, droughts caused by climate change are reducing supply in many regions of the world, including parts of the U.S.,” said Mitra. “Our hope is to expand the supply of water in places that really need it, while also reducing costs for industry.”
Dhawan’s patent on low-angle transillumination technology for examination of skin lesions has led to the formation of two startup companies with Veinlite and DermLite products that are now being used, respectively, for treating spider vein diseases and the examination of skin lesions for diagnosis of skin cancers. The health IT inventor and advocate is also vice provost for research and founded and directs NJIT’s Undergraduate Research and Innovation program, which provides guidance and academic and corporate mentors to students conducting research on real-world topics, such as smart information systems for social networking and biofuel energy. “We wanted to create a platform for students that will allow them to try their hand at inventing and even commercializing innovative devices without the risk,” said Dhawan, who is also an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) Fellow and the founding co-Editorin-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine. His four issued patents also include cybersecurity and secured data-communication systems inventions. n
College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) alums and Gensler job captains Jesus Marmol (B.Arch. ’08) and Monica Gomez (B.Arch. ’99, M.S. Civil Engineering ’01) helped to design and construct a mailbox made of over 6,000 canned goods to help feed the nearly 900,000 New Jerseyans who rely on food banks each year. For 17 years, the Newark and Suburban section of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Institute of Architects has participated in CANstruction, an annual, international design exhibition to benefit local food bank programs. Team Gensler, in its fifth consecutive year participating in the competition, fashioned the iconic blue mailbox used to snail mail missives. The structure, which stood 72 tuna cans high (7 feet 6 inches) and 3 feet wide by 3.5 feet deep, was on display at the Livingston Mall, where it was critiqued by judges before being dismantled by the Community Food Bank of New Jersey and shipped to a network
of churches, food kitchens and other vendors in need of food. “It brings attention to an important issue in an unconventional way,” said Gomez, who worked on the Revit model to help develop the design plan of the mailbox, which took home awards for Jurors’ Favorite and Best Use of Labels. “Building a structure out of cans for an entire day piques the curiosity of those walking by who may not find out about the CANstruction effort to fight hunger otherwise.” As a graduate of NJIT, where faculty and staff take great care to nurture students who are concerned about humanity, Marmol feels that it is his responsibility to use his architecture and design talents to give back to the community. “We have a creative platform to use our unique skillset to shed light on the unheard voices of concern and solve them through the power of problemsolving design,” he said. “We have the opportunity, so we must take on the challenge.” n
CoAD alumni helped to design and construct a mailbox made of over 6,000 canned goods. Photo: Gensler
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END NOTES Nirwan Ansari, distinguished
professor of electrical and computer engineering, was invited to serve on the panel, “Opportunities and Challenges of Globally Networked Sensors and Cameras” at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, an IEEE premium conference on cloud computing. He was one of the five expert panelists, and he delivered the panel talk, “Mobile Edge Computing by Cloudlet Networking.” He also presented two other papers: “Green Energy Aware Avatar Migration Strategy in Green Cloudlet Networks” and “Renewable Energy-Aware Inter-datacenter Virtual Machine Migration over Elastic Optical Networks.” Theologos Homer Bonitsis,
associate professor of finance in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, was the first keynote speaker at the International Conference on Applied Business & Economics of the International Strategic Management Association, held in November at the University of Piraeus in Greece. His presentation was on “Economic Competitive Inversion: The Greek-German Heuristics.” In November, Bonitsis participated in a panel discussion on “What Are the Future Prospects for the European Union and Eurozone?” and served as Chair of the Finance and Investment Session at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Northeast Business and Economics Association in New York City. He also was part of the “Have Your Research Published Before You Perish” special session of academic journal editors. 6
Yi Chen, associate professor and The Henry J. Leir Chair in Healthcare in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, was named a recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award. Dr. Chen is the PI, and Songhua Xu, assistant professor of information systems, is the co-PI. The highly prestigious Google Research Awards are given to world-class faculty members at top universities around the world conducting groundbreaking research in 23 fields, including computer science, engineering, neuroscience and economics. P. Ben Chou and Cesar Bandera, senior university
lecturer and assistant professor, respectively, in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, gave a presentation about their working paper “A Game Theoretical Model for Compatible and Incompatible Standards: As Applied to Short and Multimedia Message Services” at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Northeast Business and Economics Association in November in New York City. James Geller, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, presented a paper in December at the seventh International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development in Lisbon, Portugal. The paper, titled “Identifying Pairs of Terms with Strong Semantic Connections in a Textbook Index,” was co-authored by Shmuel T. Klein of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Yuriy Polyakov, a research professor at NJIT. In November, Geller delivered a keynote address at
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the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Eastern Conference held at Stockton University. Moshe Kam, dean of the Newark College of Engineering, was selected to receive IEEE’s 2016 Haraden Pratt Award. One of the global engineering organization’s most prestigious honors, the award is bestowed annually by its board of directors for outstanding service to IEEE. Kam, a former president and CEO of the organization, was chosen for his “original and highimpact contributions to IEEE’s educational activities, expanding IEEE’s global reach and effectiveness” over the course of three decades. His efforts to promote engineering education cover a broad range, from introducing engineering to pre-university students to developing advanced continuing education programs for longtime practitioners. Raj Sodhi, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, has co-authored Kinematics and Dynamics of Mechanical Systems; Implementation in MATLAB and SimMechanics (Taylor and Francis). The two co-authors of the book, Dr. Kevin Russell and Dr. Qiong Shen, both received doctoral degrees from NJIT. Sodhi was a guest speaker at Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology University, Patiala, India, on January 14, 2016. The topic was “Graduate Studies and Research at Newark College of Engineering, NJIT.” Ellen Thomas, assistant profes-
sor of marketing in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management,
presented a paper titled “The Impact of Knowledge Type and Environmental Dynamics on Producer-Supplier Collaborations in New Product Development” at the 2015 Product Development and Management Association’s annual global conference on product innovation management, a premier conference for product management academics and professionals. Troy West, associate professor
emeritus of architecture, exhibited his work as part of the “HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern” experimental presentation at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center. The exhibit explored Pittsburgh’s complex history of postwar architecture and urban design. Stephen Zdepski, professor in the College of Architecture and Design, has received an honorary commission of Kentucky Colonel by Governor Steven Beshear, State of Kentucky. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The Commission of Kentucky Colonel is given by the governor to individuals in recognition of noteworthy accomplishments and for their outstanding service to a community, state or the nation. Haisu Zhang, assistant professor
of marketing and entrepreneurship in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, presented two research projects at the research forum of the Product Development and Management Association’s Product Innovation Management Global Conference in Anaheim, California.
POINT BY POINT
THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT NJIT SPORTS:
njithighlanders.com
BASEBALL
ALUM JOINS PRO RANKS
Mike Rampone ’15, who starred for the NJIT baseball program for four seasons ending in 2015, has signed a professional contract for 2016 with the Tucson Saguaros, a first-year team in the Pecos League. Rampone, who ended his career with 197 games played and 197 games started — both school records — received a B.S. in business from NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management. His career-best .317 average as a senior left him with a .295 career average in 753 college at-bats. His 222 career hits are a school record and he also scored 130 runs and hit 47 doubles, three triples and nine home runs, while producing 102 RBI. With 87 career walks and 16 hit-by-pitch, his on-base percentage was an impressive .377. n
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Martina Matejcikova
BASKETBALL ALUMNAE MAKE WAVES OVERSEAS
8
Nicole Maticka
Martina Matejcikova ’15 and Nicole Maticka ’15 have signed professional contracts to continue playing basketball overseas for the next year while Rayven Johnson ’13 is back in Hannover, Germany, in her third year as a professional player with TK Hannover. Matejcikova is playing in Manchester, England, for the Manchester Mystics, whose team competes in the highest league in the Women’s British Basketball League (WBBL). She is pursuing her master’s degree in Procurement Logistic and Supply Chain Management at the University of Salford and will also play for the university and serve as an assistant coach for the team. Maticka, NJIT’s school leader in career, single-season and single-game blocks, is playing in Oberhausen, Germany, for the evo New Basket Oberhausen, whose team competes in the
NJIT MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2016
Damen-Basketball Bundesliga (DBBL) premier league. She closed out her four-year career as NJIT’s school leader in career blocks (238), single-game leader with nine blocks versus Colgate University (2/15/13) and Longwood University (2/26/12) and single-season leader with 83 blocks in 2011-12. Johnson, who led NJIT to the 2013 women’s basketball championship of the Great West Conference in her final college game, is in her third season with TK Hannover in Germany. Last year, Johnson ranked second in four categories for Hannover — scoring (11.4 ppg), free throws
Rayven Johnson
made (75), three-pointers made (22) and rebounding (5.6). The website Eurobasket.com named Johnson to its all German 2.Bundesliga (national league) North 2nd team and German 2.Bundesliga (national league) North All-Imports team following the 2013-14 season. Johnson was named 2013 Great West Conference Tournament Most Valuable Player following NJIT’s title win and completed her college career with 1,248 points (second all-time in NJIT’s Division I era and fourth overall for a program that competed in Division II and Division III before moving to the NCAA’s top level in 2006-07). Her 852 career rebounds are tops in the Division I era and second overall. n
FIRST-EVER ECAC CHAMPIONSHIP AND CSCAA ALL-AMERICA TEAM HONORS FOR MEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING The NJIT men’s swimming and diving team captured its first-ever ECAC Championship in program history at the ECAC Winter Championships held at the Nassau County Aquatic Center. The Highlanders finished first among 11 men’s teams in the three-day event and the gap between NJIT and second-place Pace (1,436 points to 1089.50 points, 346.50 points) was the largest between any two consecutive spots in the team standings. Sophomore Scott Quirie* was honored as Swimmer of the Meet, while Michael Lawson ’10, ’11, coach of the Highlanders and a former NJIT swimmer as an undergraduate, was named Coach of the Meet. During the third and final day of competition, Quirie broke yet another NJIT school record in the 200 individual medley, finishing first with a time of 1:53.70. The 400 freestyle relay team of freshman Edward Parks, junior Maxim Tillman, junior Michael Sungurov and senior Brian Capozzola placed first and broke
the NJIT school record, finishing in 3:07.23. In the 500 freestyle, senior Richard Seffrin placed first, finishing in 4:43.14, while Capozzola placed first in the 50 freestyle with a time of 20.77. The 400 medley relay team of Quirie, freshman Alex Danielson, sophomore Collin Moore* and Parks finished in second place, swimming in 3:31.26. Additionally, the team was honored by the College Swimming Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) as a Scholar All-America team for academic excellence during the 2015 spring semester. To be selected as a CSCAA Scholar All-America Team, programs must have achieved a grade-point average of 3.00 or higher over the spring semester. One of 65 Division I men’s swimming and diving teams named to the All-Academic team, the Highlanders finished the spring semester with a 3.10 GPA. Eighty percent of the swimming and diving team was involved in a STEM major, 13 team members received honor roll and five enrolled in
NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College. The Highlanders finished the 2014-15 season 8-4 overall, their best record as a Division I program (first season 2006-07). The team completed an undefeated home season (4-0) in 2015 and placed fourth at the CCSA Championships, breaking 16 school records. Founded in 1922, the College Swimming Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) — the oldest organization of college coaches in America — is a professional organization of college swimming and diving coaches dedicated to serving and providing leadership for the advancement of the sport of swimming and diving at the collegiate level. n
* Dorman honors scholars
NJIT ATHLETICS DIRECTOR RECOGNIZED BY ECAC Assistant Vice President/Director of Athletics Lenny Kaplan was recognized by the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) as its 2015 Division I Male Administrator of the Year. Kaplan, who has led NJIT’s division of physical education and athletics since August 2000, has been instrumental in guiding the program’s growth, first at the NCAA Division II level and, since late 2002, through its successful reclassification to NCAA Division I and, most recently, into membership in the Atlantic Sun Conference. Throughout Kaplan’s tenure, NJIT has enhanced the athletics program, particularly in areas that benefit the student-athletes directly. Today, the university’s sports offerings have expanded to the current 19 varsity programs. NJIT’s growing success in Division I competition has been accompanied by a continued commitment to excellence in the university’s rigorous academic environment. The combined grade-point average of Highlander student-athletes has been above 3.0 for 12 straight semesters through spring 2015. n Photos: Larry Levanti
Richard Seffrin
Brian Capozzola
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GIVING CELEBRATING AN EXTRAORDINARY ALUMNUS AND COLLEGE
Two decades ago, a special venture in academic achievement and social engagement was launched with the opening of Albert Dorman Honors College. On Nov. 13, 2015, NJIT commemorated both the 20th anniversary of the college — the latest in a yearlong series of events — and the exceptional alumnus for whom the Honors College was named at Celebration 2015, the university’s annual black-tie fundraiser held at The Pleasantdale Chateau in West Orange.
From left: NJIT President Emeritus Saul Fenster; Albert A. Dorman ’45, ’99 HON, recipient of the 2015 President’s Medal for Lifetime Achievement; and NJIT President Joel S. Bloom. Photos: GradImages
Since 1995, many of NJIT’s most generous supporters have gathered annually for Celebration, which has raised more than $5.5 million in scholarship endowment funds for students. New Jersey’s own Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes provided the evening’s entertainment. The event was chaired by Richard Schatzberg, the chief commercial officer of NEST Technologies, Inc. who is a 1993 graduate of NJIT 1 0
and serves on the Albert Dorman Honors College Board of Visitors. Schatzberg thanked those in attendance for their ongoing commitment to the future of the promising young individuals who attend NJIT. “For 21 years now, Celebration has made a clear statement about the exceptional concern that numerous individuals and organizations have for the highly talented, high-achieving young men and women who choose to pursue their educational
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aspirations at NJIT,” Schatzberg said. “The generosity of those who have gathered for Celebration over the years has made it possible for these outstanding students to work toward their goals undeterred by financial barriers that are becoming increasingly difficult to overcome.” A 1945 graduate of Newark College of Engineering, Albert A. Dorman has maintained a strong and supportive bond with his alma mater over the years and has noted that his success was rooted in his Newark College of Engineering (NCE) education. In accepting the 2015 President’s Medal for Lifetime Achievement, he thanked NJIT President Joel S. Bloom, “who is literally transforming NJIT into an internationally renowned research institution,” as well as “the extraordinary young people who have fulfilled the college’s purpose by transforming the world.”
PAYING IT FORWARD One of those extraordinary young people is Anna Jezewska ’16, a mathematics major with a concentration in mathematics of finance and actuarial science and an Albert Dorman Honors College Scholar, who was the student speaker. Jezewska and her family immigrated to the United States from Poland when she was a preschooler. A longtime resident of Wallington, she is the middle of three children and her older sister, Martyna, graduated from NJIT as an Honors Scholar in 2014 with a degree in chemical engineering. Jezewska currently serves as the president of NJIT’s Actuarial Society, the co-editor in chief of the Honors Newsletter and as an Honors ambassador, helping to spread the news of Honors students’ accomplishments to the NJIT community and prospective students. A recipient of the NJIT Faculty and Honors Scholarships, the Schering-Plough Scholarship and the Board of Trustees Scholarship, Jezewska said that NJIT’s “incredibly generous” financial assistance has significantly defrayed the cost of attending college, allowing her to focus on her studies and active engagement in the NJIT community. In keeping with the tradition of giving back established by Dorman, she announced a surprise donation of $4,000 collected over the past four weeks from current Honors College students which she described as a “symbolic commitment to the future of the Honors College.” “Your belief in us keeps us driving forward,” Jezewska said. “I hope to take an active role in making someone else’s dreams a reality.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR NJIT PASSING THE TORCH
Dorman is founding chairman and chief executive officer of AECOM, one of the Forbes top 100 largest public U.S. corporations and a leading provider of program management and diversified technical and professional services. He earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from NJIT in 1945, graduating at the top of his class, followed in 1962 by an M.S. in civil engineering from the University of Southern California and an honorary doctorate of science from NJIT in 1999. His outstanding contributions to architecture and civil engineering have been duly recognized by his peers. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and is an Honorary Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), as well as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) — the only individual ever to have simultaneously achieved this dual distinction. In 2000, Dorman received the ASCE’s inaugural OPAL Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Leadership. He has described his momentous experience as an Olympic torch bearer on its journey through Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympic Games as symbolic of his effort to pass the torch to the next generation. Over the years, Dorman gained very significant
insights into the educational and social foundation that young men and women will need if they are to aspire to the same level of accomplishment as his own, and to surpass it — not only for personal fulfillment but for the benefit of people everywhere. In addition to the Honors College Passing the Torch Mentor Program, which provides every first-year Honors student an opportunity to be assigned an upper-class Honors peer mentor, the college hosts the annual Board of Visitors Roundtable during which honors students meet with members of the College’s Board of Visitors — representing business, industry and academia — for conversations about careers. One of the Honors College Scholars who attended the Roundtable Nov. 13 was Ryan Merluza ’16. Merluza, who was seated with representatives of AECOM at Celebration, is a U.S. Navy veteran whose sister Johanna received a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 2012. After receiving his B.S. in mechanical engineering technology in May 2016, he plans to pursue a career in sustainable design or renewable energy. He said that he appreciated NJIT’s smaller class sizes as well as the accessibility to faculty members. “This has been a positive experience in terms of my personal growth,” he said. n
In what has become the largest philanthropic fundraising effort in university history, the NJIT NEXT comprehensive campaign surpassed its $150 million goal by raising $160,808,622 or 102 percent as of February 15, 2015 — two years ahead of schedule. This achievement solidifies a transformation of the NJIT campus that has received national attention. “The NJIT NEXT campaign has been a keystone in a decade of significant growth and development. The tremendous success of this campaign sustains and advances the University’s leadership in education, research and economic development,” said President Joel S. Bloom. “These historic gifts show strong belief in our students, faculty, programs and community, while providing them with the necessary tools to help solve some of the world’s difficult problems. Our donors understand that we are preparing for what is NEXT in a technology-based economy.” The campaign, which raised $9,006,727 in private funds in FY2015 alone, supports NJIT’s transformation and provides a solid foundation for 2020 Vision: A Strategic Plan for NJIT. Since the campaign’s launch, NJIT’s endowed funds surpassed $100 million. Some 125 new student scholarships have been established, providing opportunities that attract the brightest students to the university. “We are deeply grateful for the engagement of our alumni, the commitment of our donors and the tireless efforts of campaign volunteers and staff,” said Charles R. Dees, Jr., president and chief operating officer of the NJIT Foundation and senior vice president for university advancement. “This support has helped NJIT become the first choice for so many highachieving students and faculty superstars, all of whom contribute to the vitality of this campus.” For more information or to make a donation, contact the NJIT NEXT Campaign Office at 973-596-3429 or campaignoffice@njit.edu. n
* These grants are for initiatives and programs throughout the university that are consistent with the goals and funding priorities of the NJIT NEXT Campaign.
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JIT’s mission “is to educate N technologists to impact society in a positive way.” — Vincent DeCaprio ’72
FACILITATING INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION Julian Goldman, M.D., the medical director of biomedical engineering for Partners HealthCare, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the director of the multi-institutional Program on Medical Device Interoperability, was the keynote speaker for the inaugural President’s Forum, a featured event in the Albert Dorman Honors College Colloquium Series. Dr. Goldman’s talk focused on major initiatives, including technology development, in two key areas: Life Sciences and Engineering and Data Science and Technology.
Vincent DeCaprio ’72, co-vice chair of the Board of Trustees and a supporter of the new President’s Forum series
Goldman’s talk was a fitting debut for the President’s Forum, described by Vincent DeCaprio ’72, co-vice chair of the Board of Trustees and a supporter of the lecture series, as focused not just on technology itself, “but on how the world is affected by technology.” NJIT’s mission “is to educate technologists to impact society in a positive way,” said DeCaprio, a prominent biomedical engineer himself, who called his alma mater a hub for global dialogue and collaboration that enriches the curriculum. In the second part of the forum and showcase, new faculty members presented their work in research areas ranging from nextgeneration construction materials,
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to the use of artificial intelligence in robotic manufacturing, to the impact of human interactions and relationships in accounting practices. The 18 new faculty members and 20 research teams recently funded by NJIT faculty seed grants — many of them interdisciplinary collaborations between fields as diverse as architecture and computer science — presented their research on posters displayed throughout the Gallery. The research showcase gives the wider NJIT community — students, faculty, alumni, external partners from academia and industry and friends of the university — a window on the pioneering, applications-focused scholarship taking place on campus, as well as the opportunity to form new research partnerships and generate new ideas. New faculty, who number nearly 70 over the past four years, and NJIT-funded interdisciplinary projects are key components of the university’s far-reaching plan to make substantial contributions to society in areas ranging from neuroscience, to intelligent computing, to advanced manufacturing, to space weather. n
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A GROUNDBREAKING SEASON This past fall, NJIT broke ground on two new facilities that are part of a $300 million campuswide capital building program that is transforming research, teaching and campus life.
On Oct. 1, the NJIT community celebrated the groundbreaking of the Life Sciences and Engineering Building, a $19 million state-of-theart research facility designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in fields ranging from biomedical engineering and the biological sciences to electrical engineering and health care technologies. Slated for completion in 2016, the fourstory Life Sciences and Engineering Building will house 24,500 sq. ft. of new wet and dry laboratories, offices and collaborative spaces that are connected at each level to the adjoining Otto H. York Center for Environmental Engineering and Science. About $13.5 million of the cost was funded by the State of New
Jersey Higher Education Capital Facilities Grant Programs. On November 12, more than 300 individuals witnessed the groundbreaking of the Wellness and Events Center (WEC), a $102 million building that is the centerpiece of the university’s campaign to revamp the campus. Once completed in the fall of 2017, the 200,000-square-foot building will be equal parts a fitness center, a study space, a gathering spot and a sports arena that will double as a conference and events center. WEC will offer students a place to stay fit; athletes a place to practice and play games; and the university a place to host on-campus events and professional conferences.
“ The new $50 million will support financial aid for students, new faculty, as well as research and academic centers. NJIT is better than ever and this will allow us to push the bar even higher.” — Steve Cordes ’72
“In its design and function, WEC is an iconic building that will serve the university and the community well for many years,” said NJIT President Joel S. Bloom. “It’s the game changer in our capital campaign to revitalize our campus.” During the ceremony, NJIT also announced the extension of the NJIT NEXT Campaign, the goal of which is to raise an additional $50 million. Steve Cordes ’72, vice chair of the NJIT Board of Trustees, said the university already raised $150 million. “So let’s keep it going,” said Cordes, who co-chairs the NJIT NEXT campaign. “The new $50 million will support financial aid for students, new faculty, as well as research and academic centers. NJIT is better than ever and this will allow us to push the bar even higher.” The new leaders of the campaign leadership committee were formally announced by President Bloom. They include: Henry Dobbelaar ’66, ’68; Barbara Littman ’94; Steve Kalafer, a member of NJIT’s Board of Overseers; Cynthia Pruett ’55; and J. Malcolm Simon; former director of Physical Education and Athletics. Senator Paul Sarlo ’92 ’95, the deputy majority leader for New Jersey, was the keynote speaker. In his remarks, he praised Bloom for being an effective advocate for both NJIT and for higher education in the state and said he owes much to his alma mater. “I’m the CEO of a large construction company; I’m the deputy majority leader and I chair an appropriations committee,” said Sarlo. “I’ve truly been blessed. And all of the success I’ve had in life I owe to what I learned at NJIT. I’m proud to be a part of NJIT.” n
Life Science and Engineering Building Groundbreaking. Photo: Scott Jones Photography
Wellness and Events Center Groundbreaking. Photo: Larry Levanti Photography
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SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT OFFICIALLY RENAMED FOR MARTIN TUCHMAN ’62 For the first time in the school’s 27-year history, NJIT’s School of Management now bears a formal name — Martin Tuchman School of Management. The official naming ceremony and colloquium in honor of distinguished alumnus, philanthropist and entrepreneur Martin Tuchman ’62 was held March 3, 2016, in the Campus Center Atrium and was attended by more than 300 members of the NJIT community, including President Emeritus Saul K. Fenster. Reggie J. Caudill, dean of the Martin Tuchman School of Management, provided welcoming remarks in which he described how the university is actively engaged in transforming its business focus with technology and mentoring the next generation of innovators. “Martin Tuchman exemplifies what the School of Management is all about: Business with the power of STEM,” said Caudill. “We’re honored to be the Martin Tuchman School of Management.” Caudill introduced NJIT President Joel S. Bloom, who underscored the university’s impact on the economy of the state, region and world, its growth trajectory, and its emphasis on educating students in the STEM fields who receive multiple job offers upon graduation. “How fortunate we are that STEM is in the lexicon,” he said. “Martin Tuchman exemplifies the power of STEM. He is the quintessential alumnus of NJIT.” A video tribute, unveiling of a dedication plaque and remarks from Martin Tuchman followed. Tuchman recalled that when he graduated with his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Newark College of Engineering, he did not realize that one of his first management projects would “call upon all that he learned in school,” thus attesting to the importance of management education. “Each set of management courses allowed me to see the essential connection between engineering and management,” said Tuchman, who will be mentoring students on campus. “I want to thank you for this honor.” Fadi P. Deek ’84, ’86, ’97, provost and senior executive vice president, introduced keynote speaker David McQueeney, vice president of corporate technology and community at IBM. McQueeney, who has held leadership roles at IBM at home and abroad, explained the public’s fascination with human-machine interactions. Citing popular IBM projects, including Deep Blue and Watson, he noted that the science behind those projects has realworld impact on advancing social systems, including medicine, technology, transportation and others. Ultimately, he concluded, computers “augment” not replace, human experts and the “union” creates better outcomes. A luncheon for invited guests followed, with a welcome by Martin Tuchman School of Management Board of Advisors Chair Raymond 1 4
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From left: Fadi P. Deek ’84, ’86, ’97, provost and senior executive vice president; Joel S. Bloom, president of NJIT; Martin Tuchman ’62; and Reggie J. Caudill, dean, Martin Tuchman School of Management. Photo: Larry Levanti
Cassetta ’70, who introduced speakers Fadi P. Deek and Emmanuel Tselentakis, a senior guard for the NJIT men’s basketball team. Tselentakis, who is a student in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management, credited the school with giving him the opportunity to develop his work ethic as well as the personal qualities of leadership, integrity, resilience, teamwork and loyalty. “All of my experiences here as a student-athlete with my professors, advisors and coaches have allowed me to expand my technical knowledge; to mature in character, prepare for life and pursue the virtue which will contribute to the legacy of NJIT,” Tselentakis said. “I am proud to be a member of such an astounding family here at NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management and from the bottom of my heart I would like to thank you for all your hard work, commitment, your time and your patience.” Steve Adubato, anchor at Thirteen/WNET (PBS) and author of Lessons in Leadership, served as moderator for “A New Era of Business with the Power of STEM,” which covered topics including strengths of interdisciplinary/diverse teams and needed qualities in the new business era, such as emotional intelligence, collaboration, active listening and strong communication skills. Colloquium panelists included Tony Crincoli ’86, executive director and head of global engineering services, Bristol-Myers Squibb; Bill Quinn, retired vice president, Johnson & Johnson; Misha Riveros, former general manager, GE Plastics, Latin America; AJ Sutera, executive vice president and chief information and technology officer, The FinishLine; and Kevin Uckert, partner, Northeast market sales leader, Mercer. The day’s events concluded with a reception and faculty/student research and innovation showcase. Tuchman started his career as an automotive engineer at Railway Express Agency, where he and a team developed the current standard for intermodal containers and chassis still used today. In 1968, he co-founded Interpool, one of the nation’s leading container leasing corporations, and in 1987, just a year before NJIT’s School of Management was founded, he formed Trac Lease and developed it into the largest chassis leasing company in the United States. Today, Tuchman is the chief executive officer of Kingstone Capital V, an investment firm with holdings in real estate, banking and international shipping. He also serves as chairman of The Tuchman Foundation, an umbrella company for the Tuchman Foundation and Parkinson’s Alliance, which works closely with Parkinson’s research organizations that seek grants and approval from the National Institutes of Health. A distinguished alumnus who has served and supported NJIT throughout the years, Tuchman was the recipient of the Alumni of the Year Award (1996), served as a member of the NJIT Board of Trustees (19962002) and is currently a member of the NJIT Board of Overseers. He shares his passion for business and technology with the faculty and students of the newly named Martin Tuchman School of Management. n
Make a decision today that will create a better tomorrow.
R. Cynthia Pruett ’55 had originally planned
and included New Jersey Institute of Technology
to go to MIT, but it wasn’t admitting women
in her will.
in the 1950s. However, an excellent institute
“My estate will mostly go to charity — and my education piece will go to NJIT,” Cynthia said.
of technology closer to home was — and in gratitude the retired engineer has established a scholarship, created a charitable gift annuity,
Become a lifelong 1881 Society member by including NJIT in your will.
“I feel I need to give back something because I got such a great education.” To learn more, visit njit.edu/giving or contact Monique Moore Pryor, Esq., assistant vice president of planned giving, at 973-596-8548 or mpryor@njit.edu.
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CAPTURING CARBON FOR POSTERITY AND PROFIT
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More than 170 world leaders gathered at United Nations headquarters on Earth Day in April to sign the Paris treaty on climate change, which calls for sharp reductions in carbon emissions linked to global warming. Despite their united appeal for action, however, there is little consensus so far over how best to meet the aggressive targets spelled out in the agreement. The Obama administration’s proposed Clean Power Plan, for example, focuses on capping emissions from electrical generation plants, among other measures. The U.K. has proposed replacing power plants nearing the end of their operational lives with low-carbon alternatives and heating its homes and businesses more efficiently. China’s leaders have targeted coal and heavy industry. While their approaches will differ, each nation faces a similar balancing act: figuring out how to curb greenhouse gases while minimizing the impact on the economy and energy supply.
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“ THERE IS NO SINGLE TECHNOLOGY OR POLICY THAT CAN COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE ALONE, AND SO WE WILL NEED A PORTFOLIO OF METHODS TO BE USED JOINTLY TO GET TO WHERE WE NEED TO BE.”
Assistant Professor Selina Cai
Selina Cai, an assistant professor of industrial engineering who specializes in operations research, is working on one possible approach: a pollution control strategy called carbon capture and storage (CCS) that separates CO2 from the waste streams of coal and gas-fired plants, compresses it into liquid and injects it deep into the ground under layers of rock. Backed by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, Cai is not, however, devising capture methods. Rather, she is developing models that demonstrate how the CCS market would work. “Many scientists are actively working on improving the technology to be more efficient and less costly to deploy,” she says. “Gaining a better understanding of how market incentives would affect deployment would smooth its adoption should these technologies come to fruition.” Cai’s model would help power plant operators choose from a menu of contract options — for example, the optimal amount of carbon to emit and how much to capture under various regulatory schemes, from a flat tax, to an incremental tax, to a cap-and-trade program. She takes into account the capital costs of capturing carbon and the expense associated with constructing pipeline networks that an emerging sector of service providers would need to build to transport the liquid gas first to the storage site and later to end-users should a robust market emerge for CO2 reuse, as a feedstock to produce chemicals, for example. “The idea is to make carbon capture more attractive. Whether emitters are willing to participate will likely depend on the menu of options they are offered by service providers and how economically feasible they are,” 1 8
she explains. “The emitters would select the best contract based on their emissions profiles and the distance between them and the sequestration site. If a plant is very remote, and far from a storage site, then the plant may choose to participate in a different CCS network or to buy pollution permits under a cap-and-trade policy from another plant that can more easily make steeper reductions.” Unlike low-carbon energy alternatives such as solar panels, for example, the focus of CCS is not on the consumer, but rather on the collaboration among the key players — emitters, regulators and service providers, a business sector that does not yet exist. Her model would help CCS storage operators looking to enter the market decide, for example, which emissions sources to serve, what pipeline capacity to build and what contract prices to offer to induce power plants to participate. It also looks to optimize market logistics, figuring out how and where providers would build a network and how large its pipelines would be, she said.
“If businesses do this individually, it’s very costly, but if a CCS storage operator provides the service to many businesses, then it becomes more affordable,” she explained, adding, “The goal is to bring down the overall cost so that more emitters are incentivized to participate and are willing to capture more carbon.”
INJECTING FOSSIL FUELS BACK INTO THE GROUND Cai’s primary focus is on coal plants, which emit 1,800 megatons of CO2 or more, depending on their efficiency, for each megawatt of electricity produced, as compared with 1,100 megatons from plants running on natural gas. While the more polluting coal industry has taken a beating recently in the midst of a natural gas boom, coal still accounts for about a third of the country’s energy supply, she notes. Under current technologies, CO2 is captured, or separated from other emissions, by injecting chemicals into the gas stream, and it is then compressed before Carbon dioxide uptake by forests, biomass plantations and degraded mine lands that are restored
Dispersed CO2
Capture and separation
Pond with bacteria
Soil amendments CO2
Pipelines Coal bed methane formations Geological formations
Depleted oil gas reservoirs
Deep aquifer
A schematic showing both terrestrial and geological sequestration of carbon dioxide emissions from a coalfired plant. Rendering by LeJean Hardin and Jamie Payne. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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it is transported to what is called “geological storage,” where it is deposited into deep underground rock formations. There are currently 15 large projects in operation and seven more coming on line, associated primarily with manufacturing facilities and power plants, according to the Global CCS Institute, an organization that promotes carbon capture. Since 1996, oil companies in Scandinavia have been injecting CO2 into the seabed beneath the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, which has an estimated storage capacity of up to 600 billion tons. “These are largely individual demonstration projects, attempts to see how feasible and costly it is to capture carbon. There is very little collaboration as yet,” Cai notes. The market for CO2 reuse is also currently small, she says, and is mostly limited to “enhanced” oil and gas recovery, where it is injected into the ground to displace these fossil fuels. While its use in recovery operations has a revenue component, it is not ideal as a pollution control, she says, as only 40 percent stays in the ground and 60 percent escapes. “For now, the thinking behind CCS is that if it’s stored in the ground, it’s there for good,” she says. “But there are potential future markets, such as a feedstock for algae in the development of biofuels.”
ENGINEERING REMEDIES THAT ANTICIPATE POLITICAL ONES To date, only a small number of countries have adopted carbon regulations, but they are for the most part either weak or loosely enforced. “Chinese coal plants now have carbon scrubbers, but they don’t use them, because without a meaningful carbon tax, there is little financial incentive to do so,” Cai said. “Europe’s emissions trading program is weakly effective because the cap is too high.” The U.S.’s Clean Power Plan, which would set the first-ever national standards to address carbon pollution from power plants, includes a flexible, state-based program for curbing emissions from existing plants and a federal program that sets performance standards for new, modified and reconstructed power plants. Just months after the plan was
Cady Kagume ’16 discusses her student research with Selina Cai
announced last August, however, it was stayed by the Supreme Court pending judicial review. “There is no single technology or policy that can combat climate change alone, and so we will need a portfolio of methods to be used jointly to get to where we need to be. CCS is one of those strategies,” she says. “A lot of work is happening on technical aspects of the problem, but there is little research to date on the economic side and so there is a knowledge gap. Figuring out implementation strategies that will bring down the cost is how I hope to contribute to solving this problem.”
THE RISE OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH Cai, who received a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, is collaborating on the CCS project with Dashi Singham, a classmate at Berkeley who is now a research assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. “The field of operations research was launched during World War II, with the use of applied mathematics to solve logistics and supply problems, and the Navy has a lot of expertise in this field and a deep interest in the country’s energy future,” she says. “After the war, researchers in the field focused on manufacturing and increasing efficiency in the supply chain. As manufacturing declines, however, the field is shifting toward the service sector. We use principles from economics and operations research to solve businessrelated problems in operations management, such as responding to customer demand.” Cady Kagume ’16, an industrial engineering major from Carlstadt who is also an operations research enthusiast, has spent the past several months working on Cai’s model.
“We start with the general idea that we could build a pipeline to transport the gas and store it that would be more economical than paying a penalty for emitting carbon. Then we look at the constraints, the costs, the logistics, such as the optimal location for a storage facility, and variables such as fluctuations in demand that might present themselves in the real world,” she said, adding, “This is an important project, but I’ve also really enjoyed it as a complex problemsolving exercise. We take seemingly disparate factors — cost, geological constraints and human factors like the technical expertise needed to implement CCS — and put them all into a mathematical formula.” Kagume, who presented her research at the Dana Knox Student Research Showcase in April, will be heading out into the real world herself this summer — to Hannibal, Mo., to be precise — where she will be solving production management problems at a General Mills snack foods production facility. “I’ll be working on optimization projects, managing production and demand, working on a warehouse management system for rotating stock at the facility’s warehouse, and leading projects to implement technologies to improve the facility’s efficiency in food production,” she said. “This research project has allowed me to practice techniques needed in improving the production processes that I’ll be working with later on.” n
Author: Tracey L. Regan is an NJIT Magazine contributing writer.
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BUILDINGS AND MEANINGS
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Structures such as the iconic Chrysler Building in New York City, which are part of the fabric of everyday life, communicate many messages about the values and aspirations of the people who create and use them.
INTERPRETING CULTURAL EXPRESSION IN ARCHITECTURE PAST AND PRESENT
Distinguished Professor Zeynep Çelik is an internationally honored interpreter — of buildings. Çelik, who has a joint appointment in NJIT’s New Jersey School of Architecture and the Department of History, is an architectural historian whose career has been dedicated to interpreting the meanings buildings communicate about the cultures that create them. Çelik joined NJIT in 1991, following a professional path that began at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, where she earned a degree in architecture. Although she did qualify as a practicing architect, she says that she was especially attracted to architectural history. “There were many directions for me to follow in architecture, and I had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she explains with a smile. “My heart was always in history, and the school of architecture I attended had a very strong history department, so the decision was easy.”
are attracting increasing interest among students — understandable given the critical ways in which the world’s cultures interact today. Çelik, whose work has garnered significant recognition beyond the NJIT community, has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the
American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the recipient of the Vehbi Koç Foundation’s Award for Culture and the George Sarton Medal awarded by the School of Engineering and Architecture of Ghent University. She also holds an honorary doctorate from Bogaziçi University.
Growing up in Istanbul, a city rich in history, was a major factor predisposing Çelik to architectural history, as well as to her subsequent focus on the architectural identity of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. At its height, this multinational, multilingual empire was a cosmopolitan crossroads of East and West, incorporating territory in Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus and North Africa. Beginning with her first book, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century, Çelik has engaged in a nuanced exploration of the relationship among politics, social issues and built forms. It is a relationship that she has examined over several decades in many subsequent publications, expanding from the Ottoman to the French colonial context. Her publications include five single-authored and four edited books. She has also curated exhibitions at major museums. Although Çelik says that her blend of interests and disciplines might be considered somewhat atypical for a school such as NJIT, she adds that her work has been enthusiastically endorsed at all levels of the university. And the perspectives on multicultural interconnections that she offers
PHOTO: LARRY LEVANTI
AT A COSMOPOLITAN CROSSROADS
Distinguished Professor Zeynep Çelik NJIT MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2016 21
“ FOR ME, THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO UNDERSTAND CITIES AND ARCHITECTURE AS POLITICAL CONSTRUCTS AND TO SEE THEM AS SPACES WHERE SOCIAL INTERACTIONS HAPPEN, WHERE IDEOLOGIES ARE TESTED, AND WHERE POWER STRUCTURES MANIFEST THEMSELVES.”
COUNTERING MISCONCEPTIONS
“I look at cross-cultural exchanges in architecture, in urban forms, in visual culture,” Çelik says. “For me, the important thing is to understand cities and architecture as political constructs and to see them as spaces where social interactions happen, where ideologies are tested, and where power structures manifest themselves. I’ve pursued these themes since my doctoral dissertation, which became my first book, on the urban transformations in 19th-century Istanbul.” For many years, the conventional view in America and Europe was that the Middle East was averse to the projects representative of modernity that were reshaping the Western world. Not so, says Çelik. “I think the history of modernity in the Ottoman Empire, in the Middle East, is very much misunderstood. It is not a recent phenomenon. Modernity was there since the 19th century, and I’m not talking about the end of the century. Beginning in the 1830s, there was a very pronounced shift in the administration of the empire, accompanied by modernizing reforms.” “Modernity,” Çelik says, “accommodates a certain level of comfort for large numbers of people, with the help of new technology. With respect to built forms, it encompasses major infrastructure projects, such as transportation networks, and public buildings that include schools and hospitals.” Çelik’s new book, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, turns to a late 19th-century issue that is very much alive today. By the 1890s, as part of its wide modernization initiative, the Ottoman Empire had expanded the Museum of Antiquities in Istanbul and exerted legal control to prohibit the export of ancient artifacts. Appropriation of antiquities into the cultural identity of the empire marked a historic shift, and the Ottoman commitment to scientific archaeology underlined its claims to contemporary Western scholarship.
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Çelik finds an interesting parallel between the Imperial Museum in Istanbul and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in that both were new institutions as opposed to their well-established European counterparts. The Imperial Museum, dedicated to archaeology in the city once known as Constantinople, was endowed with a new building in an impressive neoclassical Greek style. It was expanded twice and acquired its final form in 1908.
MONUMENTAL MESSAGES Just as the architecture of the Ottoman Empire invites social interpretation, so does the built environment of other eras and regions. It’s a discussion that Çelik carries on in both her writing and her classes, ranging from the cityscape of ancient Athens, the great cathedrals of medieval Europe and comparably iconic present-day structures, to the ordinary buildings and everyday spaces created throughout the ages. In the course of this discussion, she takes a broad, analytical look at modern utilitarian structures as monuments, emphasizing the social and cultural messages they imbue. While Çelik continues to assess this aspect of the Ottoman experience in her scholarship, she applies the same analytical acumen to the “monumental” messages expressed by the U.S. built environment. Towering buildings dedicated to business and massive venues for casino gambling; new schools, expanding college campuses and gated residential communities: These are some components of the country’s evolving built environment that send diverse, often conflicting signals about our values and aspirations. In Çelik’s words, the national portrait to be discerned underscores that we are a “very big and a very complicated country.” And like the Istanbul Museum of Antiquities in the 19th century, U.S. museums have special significance for Çelik in the current century, especially those built in recent years or still under construction. In her estimation, examples such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the even newer National Museum of African American History and Culture affirm an attractive cultural trait — our capacity for collective introspection and historical reevaluation.
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Reflective of the positive attitude toward modernity in the Ottoman Empire, this 19th-century illustration celebrates the railway connection with Hijaz, a region in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia.
As Americans, we are even inclined to reassess the meaning of objects that once would have been put on display in a museum in a very different light — for instance, the B-29 bomber “Enola Gay,” the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Not too long ago, it would have been presented as not only a technological triumph, but also as symbolizing justified retribution against one of the nation’s World War II enemies. Some 10 years ago, the National Air and Space Museum’s announcement that it would display the restored bomber generated intense public debate about the messaging of the exhibit. Many urged that it should convey very mixed emotions, that we should be reminded of the atomic bomb’s toll on the people of Hiroshima and the terrible destructive potential of nuclear conflict.
“ IF THERE IS ONE GENERALIZATION THAT I CAN MAKE ABOUT AMERICANS, IT IS THE FLEXIBILITY OF THEIR THINKING. THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST THINGS ABOUT AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL INTROSPECTION AND REFLECTION. AMERICANS LISTEN TO NEW IDEAS.”
SHARING THE MEANINGS OF WHAT WE BUILD In addition to her classes, Professor Zeynep Çelik has shared the cultural nuances of architecture through museum exhibitions that include “Walls of Algiers” at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and “Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914” at Salt in Istanbul.
This image will be featured on the cover of Distinguished Professor Zeynep Çelik’s new book, About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire.
Such willingness to reconsider the significance of concrete manifestations of our constantly shifting values is clearly a positive characteristic for Çelik. We display objects in one way and then 10 years later we change our minds, she says. “If there is one generalization that I can make about Americans, it is the flexibility of their thinking. This is one of the best things about American intellectual introspection and reflection. Americans listen to new ideas.” n
Her extensive list of publications includes — • The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (winner of the Institute of Turkish Studies Book Award, 1987) • Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs • Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (co-editor) • Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule • Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914 (winner of the Society of Architectural Historians Spiro Kostof Book Award, 2010) • Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image (co-editor) • Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 ( co-editor) • About Antiquities: Museums, Their Publics, and Life at the Digs.
LINKS http://csla.njit.edu http://architecture.njit.edu http://history.njit.edu http://www.njit.edu/news/2016/2016-011.php Author: Dean L. Maskevich is an NJIT Magazine contributing writer.
Construction of the Imperial Museum in Istanbul was a significant indication of the Ottoman commitment to scientific archaeology and its role in defining the cultural identity of the empire. NJIT MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2016 23
STUDYING
IN THE OCEAN
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Assistant Professor Brooke Flammang takes a multidisciplinary look at nature’s marine propulsion systems.
A
lthough her lab is located in a very urban setting, in NJIT’s Central King Building, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Brooke Flammang is embarked on a scientific and technological quest that delves into the world’s oceans — and for that matter, potentially every environment inhabited by fish.
Flammang, who came to NJIT in 2014 after a postdoc at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology, is the founding director of the Flammang lab at the university, which focuses on fluid locomotion. With the enthusiastic assistance of a postdoc, NJIT undergrads and graduate students, and STEM-focused high school students, she is taking a multidisciplinary look at nature’s marine propulsion systems. The work integrates comparative anatomy and physiology, biomechanics, hydrodynamics, and the use of biologically inspired robotic devices to investigate how organisms interact with their environment and drive the evolutionary selection of morphology and function.
In other words, as Flammang puts it, the lab is dedicated to exploring how fish — and there are more than 35,000 species — “do really cool things, especially with their fins.”
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“ IT’S BIOLOGY PLUS PHYSICS PLUS MATH PLUS ENGINEERING.” — Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Brooke Flammang
A TREADMILL FOR FISH Very few researchers have studied fish from this perspective, Flammang says. At NJIT, research in this area is moving ahead with equipment that includes a stationary flume tank in which fish such as the spiny dogfish, a small shark, swim against a current that holds them in place, allowing close examination of fin movement. “Think of it as a treadmill for fish,” Flammang explains. This tank was specifically designed for Flammang so that it would be large enough to accommodate these small sharks. In addition to expanding basic knowledge of how fish propel themselves and the evolutionary imperatives involved, the understanding to be gained can be applied to the propulsion of submersible vehicles. For example, Flammang has conducted research relating the hydrodynamics of flexible-fin fish to the design of a fully autonomous underwater vehicle for the U.S. Navy. Similarly, her continuing research into the amazing adhesive mechanism of remora fishes, which has yet to be recreated mechanically, could have significant practical applications in biology, medicine and national defense. Using elements of friction, suction and viscoelasticity, as well as a hydraulic differential factor, she is uncovering how remoras can stick fast even to the flexing bodies of whales swimming very fast in drastically changing conditions of temperature and pressure.
ENTICING MYSTERY While Flammang does not plan to limit her lab’s research horizon to a particular species of fish, much of the work she has already done and intends to pursue involves sharks. It’s an interest, she admits, that began as a child when she saw the film Jaws. Not only did Jaws spark an interest in sharks, it also helped to start her along the path to becoming a scientist. “Many of us, perhaps most humans, like to be near the ocean. But we’re out of our element in water, and that can be scary. It’s a world of enticing mystery. “We’re both fascinated and frightened at times, especially when we think about what could be lurking below the surface that we can’t see — like sharks. They have a menacing, ‘prehistoric’ look that’s part of their mystery, and our fascination with them.” 2 6
Assistant Professor Brooke Flammang studies the complex biological mechanism that allows the remora fish to cling securely to swift-moving hosts such as sharks and whales and yet release quickly when survival necessitates.
And are shark attacks on humans becoming more common, as some news stories would suggest? Perhaps, Flammang says. Although the chance of a dangerous encounter with a shark remains extremely slight, climate change may be increasing the possibility of contact with humans as sharks follow the creatures, including seals, on which they normally feed into new, wider areas.
A MUSCULAR DISCOVERY Flammang is widely recognized for her knowledge of sharks in both academia and popular media. In 2014, Scientific American named her
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“one of the best shark biologists” to follow. It’s a hands-on relationship with sharks — and their “structural engineering” — that began to evolve toward her coming to NJIT when she was working on a master’s with an emphasis on classical ecology at California State University Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and looking at the egg cases of deep-sea catsharks. Although Flammang was also studying the reproductive ecology and geographic distribution of catsharks, she became especially interested in the fluid dynamics of the egg cases, which need to be ventilated during the period
the Flammang lab. Investigator Suvarnaraksha is a member of the faculty of Fisheries Technology and Aquatic Resources of Maejo University in Thailand. Speaking of the unique anatomical structures seen in Cryptotora thamicola, Flammang says, “It possesses morphological features that have previously only been attributed to tetrapods. The pelvis and vertebral column of this fish allow it to support its body weight against gravity and provide large sites for muscle attachment for walking.” With respect to evolutionary significance, she adds, “This research gives us insight into the plasticity of the fish body plan and the convergent morphological features that were seen in the evolution of tetrapods.” Clockwise, from left: Assistant Professor Brooke Flammang sets up equipment at the Fluid Locomotion Laboratory’s stationary flume tank; Cryptotora thamicola, a waterfall-climbing cave fish; an anterolateral view of the pelvic girdle of Cryptotora.
before the sharks emerge, typically one to two years. “I realized that I was looking at the egg cases from an engineering perspective, and soon after I came to feel that traditional training in ecology would not take me to where I wanted to be as a researcher.” This conclusion about her direction in science was one of the reasons Flammang subsequently took a summer biomechanics class at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories, where a standard key assignment was partial dissection of a spiny dogfish — just the head. “I finished the assignment early and, quite frankly, dissected the rest of my shark out of a combination of curiosity and boredom,” she relates. That anatomical exploration led to the discovery of a tail muscle no one had ever seen before. Flammang says, “People had been studying this fish for hundreds of years, so I don’t know how the muscle I found could have been missed. But it was.” Further study of the newly discovered muscle in the small shark became the focus of Flammang’s work for the balance of the course, and carried over into her initial investigation of locomotion in sharks as a Ph.D. student and postdoc at Harvard University. Now, as a
CONNECTING WITH WOMEN IN STEM
member of the NJIT community, Flammang says that the university offers an environment uniquely supportive of her multidisciplinary research. “Our work in fluid locomotion is an exciting collaboration. It’s biology plus physics plus math plus engineering.”
FROM FINS TO LIMBS Recently, Flammang’s expertise in investigating how fish do “cool things” with their fins contributed to a very significant finding when she collaborated with Assistant Professor Daphne Soares, a colleague in the Department of Biological Sciences who had been studying a rare species of blind, walking cavefish in the field in Thailand. Their collaboration led to the identification of unique anatomical features in Cryptotora thamicola that enable the fish to walk and climb waterfalls in a manner comparable to tetrapods, or four-footed mammals and amphibians. The discovery of this capability, not seen in any other living fishes, also has implications for understanding how the anatomy that all species need to walk on land evolved after the transition from finned to limbed appendages in the Devonian period, which began some 420 million years ago. This research was reported in a March 24 Nature Scientific Reports article, “Tetrapodlike pelvic girdle in a walking cavefish,” by Flammang, Soares, Julie Markiewicz and Apinun Suvarnaraksha. Flammang and Soares were assisted with the research at NJIT by Markiewicz, an NJIT post-baccalaureate research volunteer in
Beyond the NJIT campus, Flammang is an engaging advocate for greater awareness of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and for the many STEM career opportunities available to young people. Motivating more young women to pursue STEM careers is particularly important for her. Flammang’s outreach activities include sharing her experiences and achievements in science as a STEM mentor for the Ultimate Mentor Adventure in association with STEM Women on Fire. This online community connects young women with information about STEM education and careers, and with mentors like Flammang. Among the initiative’s supporters are the Girl Scouts of America, the National Academy of Sciences and Marvel Comics. Information, actually the lack of it, is a major factor in attracting women to STEM fields, Flammang says. “If you don’t know that someone like yourself is doing interesting science, you feel that it’s out of your league, beyond your capabilities. “On TV, a very high percentage of the people seen doing fascinating work in science continues to be male, even in fields where an equal number of women are doing the same work. That has to change.” n
Author: Dean L. Maskevich is an NJIT Magazine contributing writer.
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ALUMNI CIRCUIT A MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT In the last edition of the NJIT Magazine, I wrote about the unbelievable transformation of the NJIT campus. A couple of weeks after the publication was distributed I was pleased to get a letter from Ronald (Ron) Van Meerbeke, class of ’60 and ’62. Ron was quick to point out that the campus has “always” been in a state of transformation. Ron stated that he had his Machine Tool Lab in Central High School and he also had several classes in the “new” Weston Hall! Cullimore Hall was also built when Ron was on campus so the concept of transformation is not new to him. Ron has returned to visit the campus over the years and enjoys seeing the electrical and mechanical labs as well as the collection of Dr. Weston’s instruments. He states that, “I witnessed some of that incredible growth personally.” After getting that letter from Ron I had to pick up the phone and call him. We had a great conversation. We talked about the ongoing transformation and what life is like on the campus today. His views of NJIT are great memories. I know that our students today are also building such memories. All I can think of is the phrase, “It is all relative.” Ron, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us and thanks for caring about NJIT. I have to agree with Ron that the transformation has been ongoing over the years. At the end of my undergraduate studies NCE was beginning the transformation to NJIT. Since then, NJIT has continued to grow and expand its academic programs as well as the campus profile. When I returned from the winter break, I came face to face with the latest step in the evolution of the campus. As soon as I walked up the stairs from the Newark Light Rail at the Warren Street exit I saw that construction has started on the new Wellness Event Center. The Lubetkin Field at J. Malcolm Simon Stadium was gone and the construction vehicles have moved in to launch NJIT’s latest move toward the future. Later that day, I learned that 2 8
the NJIT School of Management was going to become the Martin Tuchman School of Management. The naming ceremony took place on March 3. The School of Management was established in 1988 and added a much needed element to the NJIT curriculum. However, just like all other parts of NJIT, the School of Management has also been evolving over the years. Last year, Dr. Reggie Caudill was named the dean and he kicked off a strategic planning process that has resulted in revised programs for the SOM. People often ask “why” does NJIT need a School of Management? Dr. Caudill’s revised strategy answers that question with the following statement: “Business with the Power of STEM.” That is the Martin Tuchman School of Management’s role in the NJIT ecosystem. The linkage between business and technology continues to grow in the experience economy. The Alumni Association has also hit the ground running in 2016. In January we hosted a meeting of the Alumni Council where over 80 alumni and campus leaders gathered to focus on how the resources of NJIT alumni could be used to drive the activity in the following cohorts: Admissions, Career Development Services, Greeks,
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At the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Wellness and Events Center, slated for completion in fall 2017.
Honors, the Martin Tuchman School of Management, CSLA/CCS and the New Jersey territory. This kickoff event was well received and there is an ongoing plan in place to drive this activity. If you are interested in helping in these efforts, please contact us. We are always looking for new ideas and people who are willing to help define the future of NJIT. We will also be at the NJIT “Speed Networking” event working with the seniors to help them craft their interviewing techniques. That will be followed by the Speaking of Careers night in NYC where our young alumni can gain insight from other alumni based upon the twists and turns of their careers. The work has already started to pay off. The Alumni Association was at the recent NJIT Open House and will be at all future sessions. Imagine having alums at the Open House talking to prospective students and parents about their days at NJIT and the careers they have had since graduation! That approach was very well received and the parents had many questions, and it was great to have our alumni talking to them throughout the day. These are great examples of our “Connect – Benefit – Engage” strategy. The 2016 NJIT Alumni Events
calendar is now published, so take the time and look for activities where you can get involved. It would be outstanding to see everyone at the Alumni Weekend, which is scheduled for May 20-22. This is a fun family event with wine and beer tastings, networking, alumni awards and a gala dinner celebration. Take this opportunity to come back to the campus and see for yourself that transformation that is taking place. I think you will agree with Ron Van Meerbeke and Simon Schwarzschild that the campus is always changing, but from where I sit, seeing is believing! As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any question or if you want to get involved in NJIT activities. I hope to see you at Alumni Weekend.
Jack W. Wagner ’74 President, NJIT Alumni Association
SHE HELPS BUSINESSES CRUSH THE MAKING WAVES ON SPORTS BOX: HEATHER MARTIN ’07 JEOPARDY!: VINAY VARADARAJAN ’11
Heather Ruth Martin
Heather Ruth Martin has a long history of transforming small businesses and helping them achieve the next level in their revenue, profitability and growth. A 2007 graduate of the Martin Tuchman School of Management’s Executive MBA program, which she completed while helping to run a small business in New Jersey, Martin has been consulting with business owners, executives, sole proprietors and entrepreneurial salespeople for more than a decade. She recently launched Heather Martin, Inc., a consulting firm designed to help small and midsized companies with their strategy and sales and also provide career consulting and resume writing services for individuals. While the profit motive is critical to business success, Martin strongly believes that there is “something beyond money” that must drive the business forward to success. Her motivation is to help business owners strategize from a new perspective that helps propel them to the next level. “I like to help business owners do more than just think outside the box; I help them Crush the Box,” she says. “I do this by working with them to understand their business, sales process and their limitations in both processes and belief systems that keep them from moving forward. Once we’ve figured that out, we can unlock and unleash a tremendous amount of positive energy toward developing the growth of the business.” In addition to launching her consulting firm, Martin recently published her first novel, Reclaiming Konia: A Tale of Love,
Loss and the Armenian Genocide, a work of historical fiction based on the life of her great-grandfather, Melkon Jenanyan, who fled Turkey before the genocide in 1915. It takes place against the backdrop of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s as her great-grandfather becomes an ordained Christian minister and missionary. Around 1894, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II massacred upward of 300,000 Armenians in one of the first waves of violence over the next 20-plus years. Melkon married his wife Semma in Philadelphia, yet even with the awareness of violence, returned to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century to preach the word of God and open the first Protestant church. As they grow their family in a turbulent environment, they must decide to remain or flee, and inevitably determine the values that drive their life’s meaning. Martin says the EMBA program’s intimate class size, flexible scheduling and affordability allowed her to forge alliances and continue working full time while pursuing a graduate degree. “The EMBA program helped me in two critical ways,” she explains. “First, it created a set of relationships with intelligent people in many industries who I could reach out to at various stages in my career for input, advice and assistance. To this day, I am still in touch with a handful of my colleagues to discuss ideas or business ventures. The second thing it gave me was a set of tools for thinking, framing conversations and understanding a wide breadth of businesses —from small entities to large corporations, as well as the lingo, skills and methodologies being used in those companies to drive a business toward success.”
As a young boy growing up in Fords, New Jersey, Vinay Varadarajan watched Jeopardy! with his family every evening at 7 p.m. He began to answer a few questions correctly at first and then more questions as the years went by. A longtime New York Yankees and baseball fan, his interest in transportation and civil engineering was sparked during his regular trips on the New York City subway to Yankee Stadium to watch his favorite team in action. More recently, Varadarajan has parlayed his ongoing passion for sports trivia into a remarkable 14-game winning streak on Season Two of Sports Jeopardy! and a total $70,000 to date in prize money. “I’ve always found sports facts easy to remember and usually was the go-to guy during pub trivia nights (including while at NJIT!)” Varadarajan said. “I found out about the show while watching a sports program and thought, ‘Hey, I know sports trivia, let’s give it a shot!’” Sports Jeopardy! is streamed every Wednesday on the Crackle digital-only network for a total 52 episodes each year. Varadarajan applied to become a contestant when the show just started, so the process began with registering online in July 2014 and then traveling to New York City to complete a 30-question test. Those who passed the test played a mock game with buzzers and participated in a personality interview. After passing the initial test, Varadarajan was tested on his sports wits and buzzer reflexes, but was not called to be a contestant for Season One. “I thought it wasn’t meant to be,” he recalled. “One year later (July 2015), I got a call from the show to fly to Los Angeles for the second season and pack my sports knowledge with me!” How does he prepare for the show? “It’s really the culmination of all the sports facts you’ve learned over the past years,” Varadarajan explained. “Being a big Yankees and baseball fan, I began to learn about the history at a very young age. Safe to say, I used to make the commute from NJIT to Yankee Stadium quite a few times!” As an NJIT student and Albert Dorman Honors College scholar, Varadarajan was active in the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and also was a member of the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, which gave him an opportunity to meet other students interested in performing service around the Newark community along with building leadership skills for the future. During his sophomore year, he participated on the Steel Bridge Team, where seeing how a bridge was designed, fabricated and built allowed him to learn about structures in a practical fashion before taking more civil engineering-specific classes. In addition, he participated in the Study Abroad program during his junior year, where he studied in Hong Kong for a semester. After completing his B.S. in civil engineering in 2011, Varadarajan worked in New Jersey for a year and a half and then went on to attend graduate school at Purdue University and complete his M.S. in transportation engineering last year. He is now employed as a transportation engineer in Washington D.C. and still follows the Highlanders basketball team. “I am forever grateful for the opportunities I was given at NJIT,” Varadarajan says. “The Honors College allowed me to concentrate on my studies rather than finances and the hybrid setup of taking classes from professors who were practicing engineers gave students like me a practical understanding of civil engineering.” Varadarajan’s goal still is to make it on the original Jeopardy! “But I’m thrilled with how Sports Jeopardy! has turned out!” he says.
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CLASS NOTES MAL & FRIENDS
NJIT Magazine invites new correspondents to join Mal Simon in sharing news about class members and alumni organizations. Professor emeritus of physical education and athletics, Mal was director of physical education and athletics, and men’s soccer coach, for 30 years. In 1993, he received the Cullimore Medal for his service to the university. If you would like to be a regular correspondent, don’t hesitate to send an e-mail to the editor of NJIT Magazine: crovetto@njit.edu First, the latest news from Mal –
My column is dedicated to Ed Cruz ’62, and Betty Wallace, partner of Hank Krauss ’54. Both have attended the Florida Soccer Alumni Reunions. Ed, who passed away in 2015, and his wife, Sharon, hosted two of the reunions at their home in Boca Grande. Betty, a gracious lady, fit in immediately with our band of raucous revelers and was liked by everyone. The success of the NJIT men’s basketball team brought out considerable alumni support. Among them was AJ Nayee ’93, ’96, who I first met at the 2014 Alumni Weekend. I was sitting in the stands at a playoff game when AJ surprised me with a cordial hello and took the selfie included with this column. AJ earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from NJIT and an MBA from Dowling Institute, Dowling College in Long Island, New York. Before taking on his current position as deputy chief engineer at Amtrak, AJ was president of Ashoka Consulting LLC. He began his professional career with NJ Transit, where he had an engineering internship while at NJIT. His positions at NJ Transit included deputy project director/ program manager for the $8.7 billion ARC Trans-Hudson Express Tunnel Project. He had design and construction oversight responsibility for other projects, among
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With AJ Nayee ’93, ’96
them the $70 million right-of-way improvements for the Main and Pascack Valley Line, the $60 million Bergen Tunnel Rehabilitation project, the $450 million Secaucus Transfer program and the $995 million Southern New Jersey Light Rail Transit System project. Prior to starting Ashoka, AJ held senior positions with several international consulting firms, including AECOM Technology Services and T.Y. Lin International, and was involved with projects throughout the United States and South America. AJ is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and has been a leader in the New Jersey ASCE organization. In recognition of his ASCE service, he was named Young Civil Engineer of the Year. AJ also held the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Seabees, serving as an engineering officer for the Naval Mobilization Construction Battalion. In 2004, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps
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Achievement Medal for implementing an improved method of monitoring personnel data and other information. He received the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal for exceptional public service to ASCE. AJ and his wife, Krina, live in Edison, New Jersey. Charlie Wiercinski ’68 wrote that he was sorry to read about the passing of Dr. Ed Monahan. He had Ed for Soil Mechanics and said he was a great guy. Charlie believed that Ed was such a devoted Yankees fan that he would have given up teaching if he could broadcast their games. Charlie was on the NCE bowling team and active in intramural sports, especially as a pitcher on his Civil Engineering softball teams that won championships in 1967 and 1968. After college, he worked for Gannett-Fleming in Pennsylvania before moving to Maine in 1977 to work as chief civil engineer for Wright-Pierce, a consulting firm. In 1989, Charlie started his own firm, Sitelines, P.A., working primarily with developers providing surveying, planning and engineering services for commercial and residential projects. He retired in 2012 and sold his business to his senior staff. Charlie and his wife, Jane, live in Brunswick, Maine. Their four sons were collegiate soccer players — Brian at Colby College, Kevin at Franklin and Marshall, Keith at East Stroudsburg and Scott at Middlebury College. Charlie’s younger brother, Mike ’71, worked for Gannett-Fleming for 25 years in construction inspection, administration and management, followed by another 10 years with other consultants. Mike has lots of fond memories of his days at NCE, most related to athletics, including volleyball (intramural,
Brothers Charlie Wiercinski ’68 (left) and Mike ’71
club and varsity) and intramural softball, basketball, flag football and soccer. Mike continued the “Wiercinski brothers” softball dominance by pitching for the intramural softball champions from 1967 to 1971 (see the photo from The Vector). Mike also wrote that Professor Monahan was his Soil Mechanics professor, saying, “The last conversation I had with him occurred as I handed in a final test, assuring him that while I did have a younger sibling, she was my sister, was not a softball pitcher or coming to NCE.” I am sure Professor Monahan was relieved that there was not another Wiercinski to pitch against. Currently retired, Mike and his wife, Nancy, live in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Another player on the 1970 intramural championship softball team in the photo is Art Kaiser ’71. Art was on the championship softball teams all four years and was the intramural softball director for two years. After graduating, he served seven years as a USAF pilot, after which he spent the next 27 years as a pilot for Delta Airlines. Taking early retirement, he went to Macao for two years as a pilot. Art, and his wife, Elaine, now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and snowbird in Lake Worth, Florida, where he continues playing softball twice a week in a senior league.
Joe Picciano ’71, also a 1970 intramural champ, received an Outstanding Alumnus Award in 2002 for his work supporting emergency management and for his service during the 9/11 disaster. He earned a master’s in environmental engineering from NJIT in 1976 and is a professional engineer licensed in New Jersey. Joe had a 30-year career with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He was the director for FEMA’s Region 2 New York City office from 1999 through 2000. In that capacity, his office oversaw the World Trade Center federal recovery effort. He also held the position of deputy director for the State of New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness from 2007 until retiring in 2015. Joe and his wife, Beth, live in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Robert Finnerty ’65 became a Golden Highlander at his 50th anniversary alumni reunion last May. We spent time chatting at the reunion dinner and again at the 2015 Cornerstone Society Luncheon that honors those who have contributed to NJIT for five or more consecutive years. Bob played junior varsity basketball for NCE when I was the coach. He earned membership in Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies. After graduating from NCE, Bob went to business school at Carnegie-Mellon. After receiving his MBA, he worked for Touche Ross, now Deloitte Consulting, until being drafted into the Army. He worked in shock and blast physics in Canada and southern Utah recording the results of large explosions. After his Army service, Bob went to work for CBS as a financial
analyst. He then moved to NBC, working there for 28 years and moving up in the organization to head operations and finance for one of NBC’s divisions. At NBC, he was fortunate to be able to bring clients to five Summer Olympics and other sporting events. Bob retired from NBC in 2000, and in 2002 went to work for Fox News, where he started a radio news operation and talk channel on Sirius radio. He retired from Fox in 2014. Bob and his wife, Mary Helen, have lived in Scarsdale, New York, for more than 42 years. Another alumnus at the 2015 Cornerstone Society Luncheon was Michael H. Armm ’80, ‘84, PE. Mike had difficulty fitting physical education into his class schedule and we worked out a deal where he earned the required credit by teaching one of my Jamaican soccer players how to swim. Mike had been
a lifeguard and swim instructor in high school and loved teaching non-swimmers, so this was a winwin deal. He was an active member (vice president) of the American Society of Civil Engineers and took part in concrete canoe racing. He also served as president of Chi Epsilon (the civil engineering honor society) and was a member of Omicron Delta Kappa (the national leadership honor society). After graduating in the spring of ’80, he returned at night to complete a master’s in civil engineering in the spring of ’84, when he also became a professional engineer in New Jersey. Mike has worked mostly in site/real-estate development. He has served as municipal engineer for the Borough of North Plainfield, New Jersey, and as county engineer for Albemarle County, Virginia. Mike and his wife, Jill, reside in Culpepper County, Virginia. Marty Hammer ’80 bicycled 325 miles in this year’s California Climate Ride and exceeded his fundraising goal of $5000 for the California Straw Building Association (CASBA). Along with 160 cyclists, he pedaled for five days down the northern California coast and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Marty continues his efforts to develop and maintain methods of sustainable building in the model building codes. His efforts are beginning to show results as Maryland is the first state to adopt straw-bale and straw-clay construction appendices, and New Jersey is poised to follow suit along with California, New Mexico and the City of Denver, Colorado. CASBA has also supported sustainable rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Pakistan and Haiti, and is planning to help rebuilding efforts in Nepal.
I’ll end the column with some reminiscing from Jim Morgan ’56, who ran track and cross-country and was in the Air Force ROTC program. Jim wonders if anyone remembers a musical revue put on by NCE students and professors in 1951 or 1952, consisting of singing, playing musical instruments, skits, telling jokes and the like. He has a strong memory of Fred Bauder, professor of chemistry and basketball coach, doing a great imitation of Jimmy Durante. With a Durante hat and a bass fiddle, Coach Bauder looked just like Durante, and when he sang Durante’s signature song “Inka Dinka Doo,” the audience loved it. Jim also reminded me of a fun “assignment” he gave to Bob Swanson, Paul Hausser and me at the 1956 AFROTC Military Ball to aid him in selecting the Queen of the Ball and her court. He hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “I kinda think with some pre-dance imbibement these three very popular men had a great time, dancing and smiling all night, and handing out special slips to six lovely ladies later crowned Queen and Court.” Keep the news coming to mjs@njit.edu.
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1950 Shimon Schwarzschild shares his personal reflections on the significant transformation of NJIT’s campus
below. Read more about Shimon at njit.edu/features/alumni/shimon.php. NJIT Then & Now: A 1950 Graduate Likes What He Sees Today
Recently I revisited the NJIT campus as a returning alumnus, after a 60-year absence. I discovered a gigantic transformation — an engineering college that during my absence had grown up and transformed itself into a full-blown university with a global reputation! During my enrollment as an electrical engineering student, from 1946 to 1950, my classes seldom included even one female! To describe the impact that this lack of social or romantic opportunities had on us, I authored a humorous article, appearing in NCE’s then student newspaper, The Technician, titled “Lost in the Wilds of a Coed Campus.” I described my experience as a slide rule-proficient, but romance-deficient NCE engineering student on the loose in the wilds of a real coed campus! This gender disparity was certainly real. Of the 379 graduating students, all but two were males! The other serious disparity was the class’s ethnic makeup. My personal recollection and scrutiny of student photos in the Yearbook confirms that all my class students were white. While WWII had Shimon Schwarzschild received the caused an impetus toward Alumni Achievement Award in 2013. ethnic integration in the armed forces, and the postwar “GI Bill of Rights” was beginning to open up educational and job opportunities to all returning veterans, the ethnic and gender makeup of my class, predominantly veterans, did not yet reflect this shift toward ethnic diversity. As a Jewish childhood refugee whose family escaped the Holocaust by fleeing Germany in time, the free education I was offered as a returning military veteran through the GI Bill of Rights allowed me to enroll for a college education at NCE. I had known that before WWII, Jewish engineering graduates, along with other minorities, were virtually banned from most engineering jobs. Undaunted by this past, I decided to move ahead anyway with my dream of obtaining an engineering degree. NCE provided that opportunity. Today, when I periodically visit the NJIT campus, I am amazed by the diversity of courses, degrees and fields of study available. I am also impressed by the ethnic, religious, national and gender diversity of today’s student body, a virtual “rainbow” assembly from more than a 100 countries. To gain a more personal insight into this dramatic change, I sat in (i.e., monitored) a current electrical engineering class. I selected university lecturer Oksana Manzura’s class because I also wanted to visit and monitor my first female teacher, since during my time at NCE no women teachers existed on the faculty. A lovely young woman wearing a colorful hijab graciously guided me to my destination when I asked her for directions. I watched with admiration how Ms. Manzura skillfully engaged and challenged her 18 students and how they responded. Again I was struck by the ethnic and gender diversity. Afterward, I briefly visited the Campus Center and observed the students there; I felt like I was at a U.N. assembly instead of a campus in the Newark heartland! I left the class and the school that day, feeling proud of my alma mater and lucky that I had lived long enough to have personally witnessed an exciting educational transformation! I invite other alumni from the distant past to revisit the past as I did. An upcoming opportunity to reconnect as I first did in 2010 is coming up: the 2016 annual Alumni Weekend, May 20-22 (njit.edu/alumniweekend). You will find me there.
1964 Martin Ustin (Mechanical
Engineering) has been appointed to the board of directors at South Beach Spirits, Inc. Since 2009, Ustin has been a founding partner and principal at Principal Charlestowne Premium Spirits, Inc. (CTPS), a distilled spirits 3 2
industry consulting company based in South Carolina. Before founding CTPS, from 2004-2009, Ustin was vice president of sales at Terressentia Corporation, a manufacturer of select spirit brands, private label spirits and bulk spirits for export. He joined this company at its inception and was an equity
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owner and member of its board of directors.
1968 Peter D’Amico (Industrial Engineering, M.S. ’70) has been named the 2015 Macricostas Entrepreneur of the Year by Western Connecticut State
University. D’Amico is the founder and president of SCB International Materials, a supplier of products to the global cement industry. He was one of the first to import raw materials into the U.S. from international sources.
1977 Martin Pietrucha (Civil Engineering), professor of civil engineering and director of the Thomas D. Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute at Penn State, was recently elected president of the research and education division of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). His appointment began Sept. 28 at the ARTBA national convention in Philadelphia. As president of the division, Pietrucha will provide strategic direction for division activities and act as a member of the overall ARTBA Executive Committee. Pietrucha has been involved in ARTBA activities for more than 15 years. He is also a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and was president of the Council of University Transportation Centers, an organization of university-based transportation research, education and outreach units. Additionally, he served as chair for the Transportation Research Board’s Traffic Control Devices Committee, ASCE’s Traffic and Highway Safety Committee and ITE’s Education Council.
1979 Ralph Cherrillo (Chemical Engineering) has received the George V. Dyroff Award of Honorary Membership from ASTM International Committee D02 on Petroleum Products, Liquid Fuels and Lubricants. The Dyroff Award is presented for outstanding achievement in the field of petroleum products and lubricants. Committee D02 presented the award to Cherrillo for his many accomplishments over the course of his distinguished career, and his contributions to ASTM standards development since he joined in 1996. The committee has honored
him in the past, with the Lowrie B. Sargent Jr. Award in 2013 and the D02 Award of Excellence in 2011. Cherrillo is recently retired from Shell Technology Co. in Houston, Texas.
1980 Kevin Gallagher (Chemical Engineering) has retired from Croda International Plc after nearly 40 years in the global personal care industry. Gallagher was at the forefront of the industry’s move from animal- to plant-derived ingredients in the early 1990s and Gallagher spearheaded many of the activities that have made Croda a leader in both sustainable chemistry and operations in the global personal care industry. Gallagher will be keeping up with the industry with Kevin Gallagher Consulting LLC, where he will help companies, including Croda, develop strategies in the personal care space. He remains an independent director on the board of P2 Sciences, a renewable specialty chemicals firm. In addition, Gallagher remains on the chemical engineering advisory board at NJIT.
1981 Kenneth J. Fox (Architecture),
president and senior architect of Fox Architectural Design P.C., in Roxbury Township, New Jersey, has been named the 2015 Certified Green Professional (CGP) of the year by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The CGP designation recognizes builders, remodelers and other industry professionals who incorporate green and sustainable building principles into homes — without driving up the cost of construction. Fox and other leading industry professionals were recognized on Jan. 18 at the Designation Achievement Reception just before the 2016 NAHB International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas.
1986 Jeffrey A. Beck (Mechanical
Engineering) has been appointed president and CEO of Astrodyne TDI. Beck joins Astrodyne TDI
from Presstek, LLC and previously served as chief operating officer for iRobot Corporation where he architected and implemented strategies that created the world’s leading pure play consumer robotics company. Before joining iRobot, Beck worked at AMETEK Corporation, serving as senior vice president and general manager of the aerospace and defense division and earlier as vice president and general manager of the Power Systems and Instruments Division. Preceding his time at AMETEK, Beck served as a division president with Danaher Corporation. He also worked at Kollmorgen Corporation and Emerson Electric Corporation early on in his career.
1987 Robert Rokicki (Chemical Engineering) has been appointed senior vice president, head of Onshore Energy & Construction for the Americas at Aspen Insurance. Rokicki will focus on driving targeted growth across the Americas. With nearly 30 years of experience as both a chemical engineer and underwriter, Rokicki most recently served as senior vice president in the Oil, Gas, Petrochemical, and Chemical business unit at Liberty International Underwriters (LIU), responsible for profitable growth across the U.S. and Latin American portfolios.
1988 David Lyons (Electrical Engineering Technology) has been appointed vice president of PSEG Long Island Business Services. Lyons joins the Long Island team after 34 years with the utility’s parent company, PSEG. As the vice president of business services, Lyons will coordinate the shared services functions, acting as a primary point of contact internally and for the Long Island Power Authority. The increased responsibilities capitalize on his experience with PSEG Long Island, where he served as the director of corporate integration, responsible for managing the integration of PSEG Long Island’s back-office operations into PSEG’s corporate functions.
Lyons previously served as director of treasury operations at PSEG, with the responsibility for PSEG’s headquarters facilities, corporate real estate, and survey and mapping. After joining PSEG in 1981, Lyons has held a variety of seniorlevel positions in PSEG, including director of medical services, director of workforce planning and development, director of IT business solutions, director e-business strategy, and general manager of IT operations and client services.
1989 Rowena Choudrie (Mechanical
Engineering, M.S. ’91) has been appointed to the position of senior director, pharmaceutical product development at Actinium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Choudrie has over 20 years of pharmaceutical industry experience with roles of increasing responsibility in product development. At Actinium, Choudrie will be responsible for clinical trial material supply, drug product process scale-up to support commercial supply and final product formulation. In addition, she will support Actinium’s regulatory efforts particularly in the area of chemistry, manufacturing and control (CMC). Most recently, Choudrie worked at NPS Pharmaceuticals as senior director, pharmaceutical development, global technical operations, where she directed formulation development, process development and clinical manufacturing while managing contract research organizations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs). Joseph G. Pulicare (Civil
Engineering) has been named president of the U.S. transportation and infrastructure sector at WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff. As president he will oversee planning, design and construction services for highways, bridges, transit and rail, aviation, as well as ports and marine. He will be based in the firm’s U.S. headquarters in New York City. Before joining WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff, he was executive vice president and chief executive for transportation for the
Americas operations of an international consulting engineering organization. He also held senior executive positions with several other consulting engineering organizations and previously served as a program manager and principal engineer with New Jersey Transit.
1992 Glenn Arbesfeld (Architecture) has been promoted to associate at SSP Architectural Group. With over 10 years at SSP, Arbesfeld has developed a broad body of work. He has amassed extensive experience in the design and implementation of complex projects throughout New Jersey. He has worked on both the design and management sides associated with educational, civic, corporate, and commercial projects throughout the state. He is a USGBC Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional in Building Design + Construction (LEED AP BD+C) with expertise in the design and construction phases of green building.
1994 Deputy Chief Quovella M. Spruill (Engineering Science) was sworn in as chief of detectives at the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, becoming the first AfricanAmerican woman to serve as the highest ranking officer in the department’s police unit. Spruill joined the county prosecutor’s office in 1998 as an investigator and has steadily risen through the ranks, serving in a number of units, including homicide, special victims and the professional standards bureau.
1995 Andre Grebenstein (Civil Engineering) has joined The Martin Group, LLC (TMG), a New Jersey based general contractor, as a partner within the firm. Grebenstein spent the first 15 years of his career working for the nation’s largest builder in jobsite supervision, project management and procurement capacities. Grebenstein joined TMG in
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2008 as a project executive, and over the course of the last seven years has been an integral part of TMG’s continued growth in the commercial interiors and mission critical markets. Grebenstein has held the position as project executive, director of operations and most recently, president, where he worked with notable clients such as Telx, fifteenfortyseven Critical Systems Realty (1547), The LeFrak Organization, United Business Media and Wipro. Grebenstein will continue to manage the day to day operations of TMG, and work closely with the founding partners to set strategic direction for the firm. Charles Shanley (M.S. in Management) has been sworn in to Florham Park’s Board of Education for the grades K-8 school district. Shanley, who has been a resident of the borough since 2003, retired early from a Fortune 50 company after 23 years of service, and is now self-employed as a managing partner in a real estate development company, with experience in marketing, negotiations, facilities management and budgeting. Shanley has been active in Florham Park as a member of the PTA, as a recreation basketball coach and with youth theatrical productions at the Ridgedale Middle School.
1996 Rick Ybarra (Architecture), along
with two others, has been chosen by Cresa to head up the corporate real estate advisory firm’s recently launched consulting division, Cresa Consulting Group (CCG). Ybarra brings more than 17 years of experience to CCG. He has spent most of his time in program/project management and consulting. Previously, Ybarra was an executive for a Big Four international professional services firm. He also served as an executive for a FORTUNE 500® scientific, engineering and technology applications company.
1998 Paul G. Mudd (M.S. International
Business, MBA Management of Technology ’07) has joined MAX 3 4
USA as eastern regional sales manager. Mudd’s career includes 25 years of experience in sales of power tools and hardware through distribution into many market segments including commercial, DIY, OEM, government and residential. He has 20-plus years of experience in sales management and distribution development.
1999 Christopher Tully (M.S. in
Management) has been named interim superintendent of Bergenfield schools. Tully, who has worked for the district for 10 years, runs its technology department. He has been instrumental in steering it on a path toward sustainability, keeping track of the output of copiers and going paperless at school board meetings.
2000 Tom Brynczka (Electrical
Engineering, M.S. Engineering Management ’06) has been sworn in as a member of the Wallington Board of Education. He is filling a one-year term and said he will run again when the term is up. Brynczka has worked for Siemens Industry for the past 15 years as a certified project manager on large commercial construction projects. Md Shoaib Chowdhury
(Transportation Engineering) has been elected a Fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Board of Direction. Chowdhury has more than 18 years of experience combining research, academia and consulting. As a researcher he has contributed in several areas of transportation, including funding, financing and institutional issues; transit network modeling and scheduling with timed transfer; advanced mathematical and simulation modeling of traffic and transit operations; sustainable transportation development; and highway safety. Abir Thakurta (Transportation Engineering) has joined Havertys, a full-service home furnishings retailer, as vice president, supply
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chain. Thakurta joins Havertys with considerable experience in cross-industry supply chain strategy and operational design. He was most recently with GT Nexus as a director in their supply chain consulting practice where he implemented performance improvement programs with retailers worldwide.
2007 Scott Graham (Architecture)
became principal at Muhlenberg Greene Architects, Ltd. Graham has been an integral team member of Muhlenberg Greene’s premiere projects since coming to the firm. He participates in all aspects of project design and documentation, including LEED project certification. His experience on projects, ranging from traditional residences to modern commercial office buildings, has fostered a capacity to create aesthetically pleasing and functional spaces. Graham brings a decade of BIM expertise to MGA’s design team. Graham was also the project architect for the recently completed retirement community Keystone Villa in Ephrata. Kyle Rendall (Architecture) was
named 2015 American Institute of Architects (AIA) NJ Young Architect of the Year for his dedicated professional and community achievements. An associate at KSS Architects, where he has worked for six years, Rendall has contributed to the growth of the firm’s focus on pre-K-12 education, taking a lead role in construction administration phases of team projects such as a mixed-use housing building for Teachers Village and an urban high school for KIPP NJ, and actively participating in marketing for future work.
2008 Shawn Michael Connolly Shawn Michael Connolly
(M.S. in Engineering Management) has been appointed vice president for university facilities at Montclair State University effective Jan. 1, 2016. In his new role, Connolly, who has served as the associate vice president for university facilities at Montclair State since 2012, will be responsible for oversight
of the university’s physical plant, energy and utility infrastructure and transportation systems. He will also oversee the planning, development and management of new construction and renovation projects, as well as the maintenance of university campus buildings, land and infrastructure. Vatsal Atulkumar Shah (Civil Engineering, M.S. ’09, Ph.D. ’15) has been named one of New York’s top 20 under 40 young professionals making a significant industry impact in their developing careers by Engineering News-Record. During his tenure at Hatch Mott MacDonald, Shah founded and led a geotechnical group that successfully completed work on more than 200 projects. His expertise ranges from tunneling and bridgerelated geotechnical and structural engineering to underground storage tank and site remediation environmental design.
2010 Lisa Peterson (Survey Engineering Technology) has been hired by Dewberry, a privately held professional services firm, as a transportation services manager in the firm’s Mount Laurel, New Jersey, office. Peterson has more than 13 years of experience in transportation engineering and project management. Her expertise includes bridge replacements, high-way drainage improvements and interchange design improvements. During Peterson’s previous tenure with Dewberry, she was involved with the awardwinning New Jersey Turnpike Interchange 6-9 widening project, as well as the Route 3 over the Passaic River project. She is currently working on a number of transportation improvement projects in New Jersey, including preliminary engineering for the Route 49 Buckshutem Road intersection in Cumberland County, the ADA South pedestrian curb ramp improvement project in Camden County, and the final design for the Route 70 Red Lion Road to Dakota Trail in Burlington County.
2011 Abhishek Prasad (Biomedical
Engineering) is a recipient of the 2015 New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health. Prasad is an assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Miami, Florida. The goal of his laboratory is to develop brain and spinal cord machine interfaces to restore communication and control in paralyzed individuals. Toward enabling these neuroprosthetic technologies to interface the nervous system with devices, his laboratory uses electrophysi-ology, computational tools, and functional electrical stimulation in both healthy and injury models. His laboratory is also involved in neural probe development by understanding and mitigating various abiotic and biotic mechanisms in neural electrode failure. Melissa Salsano (Civil
Engineering) has joined Riker Danzig Scherer Hyland & Perretti’s Commercial Litigation Group as associate. Salsano previously held the position of law clerk to the Honorable Yolanda Ciccone, A.J.S.C., New Jersey Superior Court in Somerville.
HAMILTON V. BOWSER: 1929-2016 A LEADER AND ADVOCATE IN THE NATIONAL MINORITY BUSINESS COMMUNITY Hamilton V. Bowser, Sr. ’52 ’56 (Civil Engineering), a distinguished trustee, businessman and community leader who provided more than a decade of dedicated service to the university, died at the age of 87 on January 16 at his home in Annapolis, Maryland. “Hamilton was a true pioneer and advocate for minority businesses for decades, leading national organizations and assisting these businesses in obtaining the skills and expertise to compete in the marketplace,” said NJIT President Joel S. Bloom. “NJIT is a better place because of his leadership and commitment and we extend our sincerest sympathies to his family.” A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Bowser received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from Newark College of Engineering in 1952 and 1956, respectively. He served on the university’s board of trustees from 1988-2004 and chaired NJIT’s Building Committee during a growth of new facilities exceeding $100 million. An accomplished fencer, he was inducted into the Newark College of Engineering Athletic Hall of Fame and fenced in the national championships while in graduate school. He received the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the NJIT Alumni Association in 1984. In the early 1970s, Bowser joined the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC), where he served as a member of its board of directors for more than 25 years. He was elected to the NAMC Hall of Fame for his professional accomplishments, demonstrated leadership and contributions to the organization. He was recognized by Black Enterprise magazine and as a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business. Additionally, the SBA honored him with its National Advocacy Award for the development and inclusion of small and minority businesses in local, regional and federal contracting. A licensed professional engineer in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, he was a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute.
MICHAEL J. PAPPAS: 1932-2016 INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED CO-INVENTOR OF THE “NEW JERSEY KNEE” Michael J. Pappas ’59, ’64 (Mechanical Engineering), an internationally recognized expert in advanced biomechanical design, died at the age of 84 on October 25, 2015. Dr. Pappas earned B.S.M.E. and M.S.M.E. degrees from Newark College of Engineering in 1959 and 1964, respectively, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and computer-aided structural design from Rutgers University in 1970. For more than 25 years, Dr. Pappas taught mechanical engineering at NJIT until he became involved in the design of replacement joints. Shortly after the New Jersey Medical School opened in Newark more than four decades ago, he was asked to teach a course in biomechanics. One of his students, Frederick Buechel, would go on to become an orthopedic surgeon and collaborate with Dr. Pappas in creating a series of innovative prosthetic joints, including the first mobile bearing knee, the New Jersey Low Contact Stress (LCS) Knee, which has been implanted in thousands of patients around the world. Dr. Pappas and Dr. Buechel were inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998. “The amazing knowledge and mentoring Dr. Pappas provided me set my foundation for a now-successful 33-year career in orthopedic implant R&D,” said Robert Cohen ’83, ’84, ’87, vice president and general manager, R&D, of Stryker Orthopaedics’ Reconstructive Division, who worked with Pappas in his senior year as an undergraduate mechanical engineering major and then as his thesis adviser for his master’s degree. “I am forever indebted to Dr Pappas, NJIT, orthopedic patients, and myself have greatly benefited from his unique vision, his inventions, and his desire to make healthcare better.” Dr. Pappas was a founder of Endotec, a privately held medical device firm based in Orlando, Florida, widely recognized as a global leader in the safe application of advanced technology for human implants and implantation instruments. He published over 60 scholarly publications and was awarded over 50 United States patents resulting from his work in computer-aided design and orthopedic biomechanics. In 1996, he received the NJIT Alumni Achievement Award. “Dr. Pappas was my master’s thesis adviser, first employer, and first engineering mentor,” recalled Jerry D’Alessio ’93, ’95, chief engineer, Stryker Corporation. “I only hope he knew how much of an important and influential part he was in my life. I will always cherish the teachings, mentorship and the fact that I personally worked for such an incredible innovator, engineer and human being. He will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.”
IN MEMORIAM Norman Pickering ’36 Robert Smith ’48 Frederick Schneider ’49, ’59 Alexander Apostolina ’52 Hamilton V. Bowser, Sr. ’52, ’56 Louis Carl Ripa ’52 Donald B. Wood ’52
Lewis Belof ’56 John McMonagle ’56 Robert Spengler ’56 Robert F. Ruth ’58 Anthony Zotti ’58 Michael Pappas ’59, ’64 Roland Barth ’60
Robert Gere ’62 Diann J. Walldorf ’63 Robert Hart ’64 William Cowie ’65 Ronald Krenzel ’65 Lloyd Kovacs ’65, ’70 Robert Fredericks ’67
Joseph Orlando ’68 Karl Seiler ’75, ’78 Ralph Helmut Storz ’77 Michael Rafferty ’84 John Gonnella ’88 Joseph W. Kearney Jr. ’90
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CALENDAR OF EVENTS S AV E T H E DAT E !
YOUNG AND NEW ALUMNI SHORE REUNION
Saturday, June 25, 2016 Bar Anticipation Lake Como, N.J.
METS VS. PHILLIES BASEBALL GAME AND ALUMNI PREGAME RECEPTION Sunday, July 17, 2016 Citizens Bank Park Philadelphia, Pa.
QUICKCHEK BALLOON FESTIVAL Saturday, July 30, 2016 Solberg Airport Whitehouse Station, N.J.
MONMOUTH RACETRACK Saturday, August 13, 2016 Oceanport, N.J.
SOMERSET PATRIOTS GAME Sunday, August 28, 2016 Bridgewater, N.J.
For the most current information about Alumni Association activities, visit njit.edu/alumni.
CORPORATE CLUBS
REGIONAL CLUBS
NJIT’s Corporate Clubs provide valuable networking opportunities for alumni in the workplace while also assisting NJIT students and faculty. Current Corporate Clubs include Hatch Mott MacDonald, PSE&G, Schering-Plough, Turner Construction and United Parcel Service.
NJIT Regional Clubs are planning events across the country.
For more information: njit.edu/alumni/clubs
For more information: njit.edu/alumni/clubs
YOUNG ALUMNI CLUB The Young Alumni Club organizes social, networking and educational events for alumni and their families. For more information: njit.edu/alumni/clubs
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CONCLUSION IN
CROCODILIAN CONNECTIONS Some 100 million years ago, the world’s biggest land predator, Spinosaurus, competed for dominance among a host of equally voracious species inhabiting parts of Northern Africa. Although Spinosaurus roamed a lush riverine landscape very different from the current environment in that region, life was still intensely competitive, and obtaining the food needed to sustain the enormous creature’s 15-foot height, 50-foot length and 22-ton bulk was a definite challenge. Paleontologists who unearthed Spinosaurus fossils were hardpressed to explain how a dinosaur of such size could thrive in a “land of giants,” as one of the investigators said. Daphne Soares, assistant professor of biological sciences, had the most likely answer, which first came to her when she was doing research involving crocodiles and sharing the back of a pickup truck with an alligator in Louisiana. As presented in a program filmed for the Smithsonian Channel, World’s Biggest Beasts, Spinosaurus may have had a sensory advantage. While working on her doctoral dissertation, Soares showed that crocodiles and alligators are able
to sense minute disturbances with their skin, despite being heavily armored. Computerized tomography (CT) scans of a Spinosaurus skull revealed that a series of foramina, or small windows, along the jaw seem to be the openings for nerves connecting the skin to the brain. These are features of a unique sensory system found today in alligators and crocodiles, both often referred to as “crocodilians.” The sensory research that attracted the attention of the Spinosaurus investigators began in that pickup truck when Soares noticed a series of dark, raised dots along the upper and lower jaw of her appropriately restrained alligator companion. Eventually, Soares devised a series of experiments integrating behavior, physiology, anatomy and paleontology to test her hypothesis that the dark dots in the crocodilian skin are sensory organs. She tested the behavior of relatively small alligators by harmlessly covering the dots with a plastic elastomer and blocking their ears. Then, while they were in a tank in a dark room, she let drops of water fall into the tank to simulate vibrations caused by prey entering the alligators’ natural
environment. With all of their senses neutralized, the alligators did not respond in any way to the falling drops of water; however, they did respond vigorously when just the elastomer over the dots was removed, confirming Soares’ discovery of a sensory modality that for millions of years has given crocodilians an important advantage by detecting and locating prey in or near their aquatic environment. The connections between Soares’ crocodilian insights and the mystery of Spinosaurus highlight the breadth of her research, which has been published in prominent journals including Nature and BioScience, and brought to the attention of a wider audience in popular media produced by the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic Society. For Soares, the research she plans to pursue and the questions she will ask about sensory adaptation and evolution will undoubtedly lead in new and unexpected directions — in the classroom and laboratory at NJIT, in other countries and in the distant past. biology.njit.edu
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