NJIT Community Members,
I hope you are enjoying a productive semester and that you have been engaged in some of the many exciting things happening at NJIT. It has been a busy semester, and much has been accomplished.
We welcomed our outstanding freshman class in September. The Class of 2022 came to us with an average high school grade point average of 3.58 and an average SAT score of 1288—3.9 and 1475 for those enrolled in the Albert Dorman Honors College.
NJIT earned several prestigious rankings:
- NJIT rose 34 spots—third most in the nation—from #140 to #106 in the 2019 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges national universities rankings and is now a top 50 public national university. Additionally, NJIT was named on the Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs, Best Value Schools, and Most Ethnically and Economically Diverse lists compiled by U.S. News in the 2019 edition.
- NJIT also is one of only four New Jersey schools to be named in the U.S. News and World Report Best Global Universities ranking that was released this week. The list includes 1,250 top universities from 75 countries.
- The Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) program at NJIT now ranks second in the nation, according to College Factual, an outcomes-based data analytics and research company. NJIT jumped six places from last year, landing behind Georgia Tech (1) and ahead of MIT (3), on the list of the 206 programs evaluated. The university's CEE program ranked in the top 20 in multiple areas, including education for veterans and graduates’ earnings, among others.
Our campus hosted a number of important events this Fall, including the following and many others:
- The MetroLab Network 2018 Annual Summit - Municipal leaders; academic presenters; and chief technology, information and analytics officers from across the country gathered in our Wellness and Events Center on October 15 and 16 to explore and leverage city-university partnerships that deliver technology, data and analytics to local governments while driving civic innovation. The MetroLab Network has grown to include 44 cities, 5 counties and 59 universities nationwide, which make up 40+ partnerships (NJIT and the City of Newark are one such partnership). More than 100 research and development projects are in progress through the network.
- The New Jersey Black Issues Convention - On October 4 and 5, leaders from across the state assembled at NJIT for the 36th Black Leadership Conference sponsored by the New Jersey Black Issues Convention (NJBIC), an organization founded in 1983 to establish a network of communication and cooperation among predominantly Black organizations in New Jersey. Governor Philip Murphy and Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka were among those who spoke on issues affecting the community, especially economic issues.
- NJIT’s 2018 Fall Career Fair welcomed 215 employers and featured a new career services management platform called Handshake, designed to optimize the job search experience for students and expose them to roughly 200,000 companies across the country, including every Fortune 500 corporation.
Several noteworthy achievements have been realized:
- JD.com, China’s largest retailer online or offline, has launched a joint research lab for blockchain technologies with NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing and the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS). The joint lab, which was announced at a launch event in Beijing last week, will focus on solving efficiency and stability challenges that are the most significant bottlenecks restricting the wider application of blockchain, and explore new applications of the technology. This will include multi-year collaborative research efforts into fundamental consensus protocols, privacy protection and security in decentralized applications, among other areas.
- We honored three faculty members with the NJIT Overseers Excellence in Research Award. They are Dr. Edward Dreizin, distinguished professor in the Otto H. York Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering; Dr. Dale E. Gary, distinguished professor in the department of physics and director of the Owens Valley Array in Big Bear, California; and Dr. Farzan Nadim, professor of neurobiology in the Department of Biological Sciences.
- An NJIT-led team of engineers, game designers, artists and clinicians won two major international awards for its vision therapy platform, including “most innovative breakthrough,” at the 2018 Augmented World Expo Europe (AWE EU), the leading industry conference for augmented reality technology. The competition pitted NJIT against 114 teams from design programs at MIT, Caltech, NASA and other leaders in the field. Tara Alvarez, professor of biomedical engineering, was the team’s leader. Other NJIT community members involved in the effort included John Vito d’Antonio-Bertagnolli '16 H, MS '17 and Chang Yaramothu '13 MS, '14 Ph.D., '17.
- Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Materials Engineering Rajesh Davé was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
We, clearly, are enjoying a good start to this academic year, but there is a great deal of work that remains to be done. In the midst of your busy schedules, though, I strongly encourage you to make time to cast your vote next Tuesday, November 6, 2018. The Murray Center for Women in Technology has compiled a voter education and information guide at http://womenscnter.njit.edu/voter-registration-2018/, which may be useful to you.
NJIT also will provide two vans to transport voters to Newark polling places between 1:30 pm and 6 pm. Faculty and staff members can contact the Office of the Dean of Students at 973-596-3470 to sign up for rides; students should already have received an email with sign-up information. The right to make your voice heard through your vote is not one that should be squandered, so inform yourself and make it a priority to get to your polling place.
Thank you for all you do for NJIT and what you bring to our community. I wish you continued success during the remainder of the semester.
Joel S. Bloom
President
New Jersey Institute of Technology