A New Center for Translational Research at NJIT – and $6M from NSF – Will Help Commercialize Campus Inventions

A $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help NJIT translate science and engineering discoveries into market-ready technologies tackling problems in areas ranging from health care, to sustainable energy, to data privacy. 

Awarded by the agency’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, the grant will accelerate the development of promising prototypes and enable market validation and other commercialization activities. It will also strengthen the university’s entrepreneurial culture by funding and organizing training workshops in technology translation for undergraduates, Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty through the newly created Center for Translational Research at NJIT. 

Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research and the grant’s principal investigator, explained that the grant is designed to bolster NJIT’s Technology Innovation Translation Acceleration (TITA) program, which drills down on the potential commercial benefits of university research at earlier stages of the translation and market validation process. Launched by his office last year, TITA provides seed grants of up to $75,000 per project over three phases of development, as well as guidance and feedback from an industrial advisory board composed of inventors and entrepreneurs. Inventors must have external partners. Over the next four years, the new NSF grant will enable seed funding of $50,000 to $100,000 per project for up to 10 TITA research teams to help them develop and validate translational research and identify pathways to commercialization. Such funding can help developers move past the initial proof of concept, including determining interest and acceptance by potential users, to identify purchasers of the technology, such as clinicians, businesses or communities.

So far, nine projects have been awarded TITA grants under the current NJIT program. Sagnik Basuray, an associate professor of chemical engineering, for example, is developing a modular, point-of-care microfluidic device capable of quickly detecting multiple animal-borne diseases, including infectious diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans. Salam Daher, an assistant professor of informatics, is working on software and hardware that will measure irregularly shaped wounds accurately and create customized wound dressings. “Healthcare workers are still using rulers and Q-tips to measure wounds,” Daher noted. “We use 3D-tracking technology. We can also simulate the progression of healing.”

Two TITA teams are also developing technologies that will detect and destroy the industrial compounds per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The first is a highly sensitive and selective portable sensor capable of detecting and quantifying PFAS at current federal limits in treated water. It will be extended to detection in field samples in the future. The second is a reactor that uses ultrasound and argon nanobubbles to disintegrate the contaminants, among others.

_Photos:

_{Top: Left to right: Nick DeNichilo ’73, ’78, co-vice chair of the NJIT Board of Trustees and former president and CEO of Mott MacDonald; Judith Sheft, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology, New Jersey Economic Development Authority; Brian Kiernan ’70, chair of the NJIT Undergraduate Research and Innovation Advisory Board and former executive vice president and chief scientist of InterDigital Communications Corp.; Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research and director of the Center for Translational Research; Robert Cohen ‘83, ‘84, ‘87, chair of the NJIT Board of Trustees and president of Digital, Robotics and Enabling Technologies at Stryker; Teik C. Lim, president of NJIT; Gina Lim, first lady of NJIT; John Pelesko, provost of NJIT; Craig B. Arnold, vice dean for innovation at Princeton University and the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; Andrew Christ, senior vice president for real estate development and capital operations}

_{Top-right: Salam Daher, assistant professor of informatics}

_{Bottom-right: Chemical engineer Sagnik Basuray (right) is working with Ph.D. student Niranjan Haridas Menon and postdoctoral researcher Charmi Chande to commercialize a point-of-care device that detects low levels of animal-borne diseases.}

Fast Facts

• Among public universities in N.J., NJIT awards 62% of all the engineering degrees earned by African Americans and Hispanics.
•  “A third of New Jersey computing professionals graduate from NJIT,” said Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC) Interim Dean Ali Mili. “Our industrial relations program funnels students to places such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google.”
• NJIT offers one of the only undergraduate Forensic Science programs in the state and has built relationships with the state Public Defender’s office. The program has been awarded full accreditation from the Forensic Science Education Programs Accreditation Commission (FEPAC) of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
• Grace Wang, YWCC associate dean for research, serves on the New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on AI and the Courts. 
• Serving more than 3,000 students each year (grades 4-12), NJIT’s Center for Pre-College Programs offers a variety of programming for New Jersey students, educators and families to nurture STEM learning.
• Students from the class of 2023 volunteered at 214 different community-based organizations.