Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day at NJIT

Newark, April 20- The girls will come to work with their mother, but instead of seeing sterile offices carved into computer-laden cubicles, they'll see a high-tech lab whose technology can identify deadly bacteria, a lab that can help avoid soldiers from being exposed to biological agents; a lab that can, in a phrase, save lives.

On Thursday, April 26, nationally known as Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day, researchers will give their daughter's an inside view of NJIT's new Keck Lab. The lab is distinguished not only by its technology but also by its director: Dr. Nadine Aubry, the only woman in the state to chair a mechanical engineering department. Dr. Aubry also holds an endowed chair, the F. Leslie and Mildred Jacobus Chair in Mechanical Engineering at NJIT.

Asked how she is able to juggle a family - a husband, two girls and a boy - a research lab and an engineering department, Aubry smiles stoically: "Work."

"I work hard all the time," she adds, her voice inflected with a French accent. "No time for fooling around." That her extended family lives in France makes it even harder for her to raise her children - in today's hectic world of heavy work schedules and no readily available babysitters - as her husband's extended family also lives out of state.

But next Thursday Aubry won't need a babysitter for her daughters, ages 12 and 7.
They'll spend the day with her at the Keck Lab, where they'll observe scientists at work. Some will be working on a project for the U.S. Navy - one that uses electrical fields to clean diesel fuel. United States naval ships now use mechanical filters to clean diesel fuel. But the filters, just like those on your car, cannot filter out minute (micro-sized) particles. They quickly become dirtied by metallic wear and need to be replaced.

New Jersey Institute of Technology received a $500,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, of Los Angeles, to establish the lab; the state later added a New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology grant of $2.7 million to create "the New Jersey Center for Micro-Flow Control."

Cleaning fluids with electrical fields and combating bacteria are just two of the projects that the lab, due to officially open in May, can perform. As lab researchers noted in their proposals: "We have not even imagined some of the science, engineering and medical research and development the lab is going to make possible."

The Keck Lab is located in Room 303 of the Otto H. York Center for Environmental Engineering and Science at the NJIT campus, at 138 Warren Street. Reporters and photographers who would like to tour the lab and interview Dr. Aubry, should arrive at the lab at 10 a.m.