For much of human history, the creation of civil infrastructure has been a top-down affair, the purview of potentates in the ancient world and formidable bureaucrats in the modern era, such as Robert Moses, the fabled power broker who built roadways, parks and public housing throughout New York City.

More recently, however, what, where and how we develop new highways, buildings, factories and power plants has come under increasing scrutiny from a more attuned society. And not a minute too soon. If we’re to achieve resilience in a rapidly changing world, we need the motivation, energy and buy-in from as many of us as possible. These grassroots deliberations must also extend to the products we create.

Applied scientists and technologists play a vital role in supporting this engagement. Critically, we provide timely data about vulnerabilities and deficiencies in our systems to partners in government, industry and the community. We’re making an effort, albeit a belated one, to include marginalized groups that have long been left out of the conversation.

With our distributed sensor systems, we can let businesses know, for example, when their equipment is operating inefficiently. This capability will be especially important to ensure the acceptance and success of new sustainable technologies, such as the wind farms rising off our coasts. Sensors in the environment, which are progressively more sophisticated, alert communities to contamination in the water supply and changing natural conditions that threaten the health of ecosystems.

With our enhanced modeling capabilities, we can increasingly convey a clearer picture of what awaits us in the future, in a world that is even a half a degree hotter, for example, if we’re unwilling to curb our thirst for power and products. That data must be as relevant and localized as possible, otherwise it’s an abstraction. People need to understand the implications for their own community — what the next hurricane will mean for their property, businesses and ability to move around. We need to step off our campuses to tell them, and listen to the people most impacted.

To ensure our own credibility, we researchers must hold ourselves accountable for the technologies we design. The more resilient they are, the less time and money society will spend on recovery, repair and replacement. We also need to make sure that our communities — our campuses — are sustainable.

Last year, NJIT was among the top 100 institutions globally in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings for our work addressing global issues identified in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our improved rating reflects the university’s commitment to further leveraging our STEM efforts in support of sustainability, but we have more work to do. We’ve begun by surveying the NJIT community about our practices on campus, modes of transportation and doing more
to improve our performance.

The world’s supercharged disruptive events require us to act with urgency. At NJIT, that has meant redoubling our community outreach to identify evolving problems and their underlying causes, finding new ways to spur innovation in our core areas — the environment, health care and data science — and translating that research into technologies that build global resilience and are themselves sustainable.

Atam P. Dhawan
Interim Provost and Senior Executive Vice President
Senior Vice Provost for Research
Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering