Board Members

Elisa Charters ’92, M.S. ’93, member of the NJIT Board of Trustees, founder of Juego.Juegos Mobile App and  president of Latina Surge, was named a 2023 Top 40 Women in Business Influencer by ROI-NJ. Charters also presented the welcoming remarks to the Murray Center for Women in Technology annual Women Designing the Future Conference.

Norma Clayton ’81, co-vice chair of the Board of Trustees, was elected to the board of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. She is retired from Boeing, where she was the vice president for Learning, Training and Development and the first African American and woman to hold a senior manufacturing position.

Robert Cohen ’83, ’84, ’87, chair of NJIT Board of Trustees, was named a Fellow of the National Academy
of Inventors. Cohen is president of Digital, Robotics and Enabling Technologies at Stryker.

Paul Profeta, a member of the Foundation Board of Directors, was recognized with the Special Friend of the University Award at Celebration 2023.

NJIT Trustee Dennis Toft topped ROI-NJ’s inaugural list of influencers on the environment, which also featured Trustee Gary Dahms and Colette Santasieri, executive director of NJIT’s Center for Community Systems (CCS). Toft is chair of environmental law at Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi in Roseland, N.J. Dahms was honored for his work as CEO, president and chairman of T&M Associates, an engineering and environmental consulting firm, and Santasieri, for her leadership of a key unit of CCS: the New Jersey Brownfields Assistance Center.

Kim Vierheilig ’99H, ’00, member, Foundation Board of Directors, is a registered architect and president of STV’s Buildings Team. STV was recently recognized for its work at the Terminal A Building at Newark Airport. Vierheilig was also featured in an interview done by Hays honoring Women in Construction Week.

Faculty

Bin Chen, Associate Professor of Physics, and researcher at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research was awarded the 2023 Karen Harvey Prize from the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society for “significantly advancing” our understanding of the fundamental physics driving the largest explosions in our solar system — solar flares.

NJIT Biology Associate Professor Eric Fortune and a team of scientists, known as “Limelight Rainforest,” reached the final stage of a five-year, $10M XPRIZE Rainforest Competition. The team traveled to the rainforests of Singapore to compete in the semi-finals of the global competition, which challenged teams to develop new technologies for mapping the vast biodiversity of the world’s tropical forests.

NJIT Mathematics Professor Linda J. Cummings was named a Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS) for her “outstanding contributions to physics.”

Fatemeh Admadpoor, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, received a $530,000 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program. She is developing theoretical and computational models to understand the structural engineering of extremely tiny things. Since 2014, 25 NJIT researchers have won CAREER awards.

NJIT Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Omowunmi Sadik was named a Fellow by one of the largest scientific organizations globally, the American Chemical Society.