Announcement: NJIT FY2024 Faculty Seed Grant Award Winners

Memorandum

Date: April 25, 2023
From: Atam P Dhawan, Senior Vice Provost for Research
RE: Announcement: NJIT FY2024 Faculty Seed Grant Award Winners

The faculty and student success are the strategic priorities in the NJIT Strategic Plan. Increasing external funding with collaborative synergy and partnerships for basic, applied and translational research is one of the strategic objectives to enable enhanced faculty and student success and professional development. The purpose of the NJIT Faculty Seed Grant (FSG) initiative is to promote collaborative research in the core and interdisciplinary areas by providing seed funding to obtain preliminary results for developing future grant proposals for submission to external funding agencies. The FSG initiative specifically seeks seed funding proposals from faculty to launch new initiatives in core, collaborative and interdisciplinary emerging areas aligned with NJIT strategic tactics to develop critical research mass. It is expected that the FSG funds will be used to promote on-campus collaborative seed research with faculty and students.

We are very pleased to announce 28 FY24 Faculty Seed Grant awards this year.

Congratulations to all FY24 Faculty Seed Grant Winners!

NCE:

Principal Investigator: Tara Alvarez
Department: BME
Project Title: Measures of cerebral blood flow in patients with post-concussion convergence insufficiency
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Stephanie Iring-Sanchez
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Gennady Gor
Department: CME
Project Title: Assessing the State of Health of Li-Ion Coin Cells by Ultrasonic Testing
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Alexei Khalizov (Chem)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Jin Huiran
Department: SAET
Project Title: Towards Closing the Education Gap and Workforce Development for 4IR in the AEC Industry
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Laramie Potts (SAET)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Elisa Kallioniemi
Department: BME
Project Title: 3D printed sensing patch for measuring transcranial magnetic stimulation evoked electrical signals
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Amir Miri (BME)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Eun Jung Lee
Department: BME
Project Title: The Effects of Microgravity and Hypoxia on the Heart
Co-Principal Investigator(s):
Funded Amount: $7,500

Principal Investigator: Angelo Tafuni
Department: SAET
Project Title: Electric Capacitance Tomography for Cryogenic Flow
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Samuel Lieber (SAET)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Ying Li
Department: BME
Project Title: Repetitive low-level blast TBI induces hyper-excitability of granule cells of hippocampus in rat
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Bryan Pfister (BME)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Jay Meegoda
Department: CEE
Project Title: Stability of Rock Formations with Hydrogen Storage
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Oladoyin Kolawole (CEE)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Roberto Rojas-Cessa
Department: ECE
Project Title: Drone-based Sensor Network for Water Quality Monitoring of Rushing Rivers and Analysis with Integrated Learning
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Cong Wang (ECE), Wen Zhang (CEE)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Bo Shen
Department: MIE
Project Title: Physics-informed Modeling and Learning for Process-Structure-Property Relationships in Metal Additive Manufacturing
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Yao Ma (CS)
Funded Amount: $10,000

CSLA:

Principal Investigator: Shahriar Afkhami
Department: MATH
Project Title: Computationally Fast and Robust Approximation of Differential Geometry Operators on Discrete Surfaces
Co-Principal Investigator(s): David Bader (CS)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Miriam Ascarelli
Department: HSS
Project Title: Mapping Urban Transformation: How Newark Became Newark
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Laramie Potts (SAET)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Brooke Flammang
Department: BIOL
Project Title: Underwater Energy Harvesting to Extend Tag Life in Marine Mammal Biotelemetry Applications
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Lin Dong (MIE)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Lou Kondic
Department: MATH
Project Title: Acoustofluidics for Cleaning Contaminated Fluids
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Linda Cummings (MATH)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Enkeleida Lushi
Department: MATH
Project Title: Confined Collective Motion of Bristle-Bots: Modeling and Experiments
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Externals
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Eliza Michalopoulou
Department: MATH
Project Title: Detection Theory, Simulations, and Experiments in Time-Dispersive Underwater Environments with a Multi-Sensor Architecture
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Ali Abdi (ECE)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Yeldo Semizer
Department: HSS
Project Title: Breast Tissue Synthesis to Improve Cancer Detection
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Externals
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Benjamin Thomas
Department: PHYS
Project Title: Monitoring Pollinator Abundance: A Novel Approach Based on Near-Infrared Optical Sensors
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Gareth Russell (BIOL)
Funded Amount: $10,000

YWCC

Principal Investigator: Michael Houle
Department: CS
Project Title: Understanding and Managing Deep Learning through Local Intrinsic Dimensionality
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Vincent Oria (CS)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Margarita Vinnikov
Department: INFORM
Project Title: Hidden in Plain Sight: Reconstructing Lost Histories in Istanbul and Rome
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Burcak Ozludil (ADHC), Ersin Altin (HCAD), and Louis Hamilton (ADHC)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Lijing Wang
Department: Data Science
Project Title: Towards Improving the Generalization and Robustness of Large Pretrained Language Models
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Mengnan Du (Data Science)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Zhi Wei
Department: CS
Project Title: Computational methods for selective inference with application to single-cell genomic data analysis
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Wenge Guo (MATH)
Funded Amount: $10,000

HCAD

Principal Investigator: Hyojin Kim
Department: HCAD
Project Title: Measurement and Verification of Energy and Indoor Environmental Quality Performance for Personalized Environmental Control Systems
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Won Hee Ko
Funded Amount: $10,000

MTSM-RETDIC

Principal Investigator: Rayan Assaad
Department: CEE
Project Title: An Intelligent Cloud-Based IoT System for Automated Water Quality Assessment and Leak Detection in Smart Real Estate Facilities
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Aichih (Jasmine) Chang (MTSM)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Carrie Bobo Gibbs
Department: HCAD
Project Title: Commercial Conversions Investigating the Viability of Converting Large Floorplate Commercial Office Buildings into Mixed Rate Residential Buildings
Co-Principal Investigator(s):
Funded Amount: $7,500

Principal Investigator: SangWoo Park
Department: MIE
Project Title: Electricity Consumption by Real Estate: Learning Heterogeneous Elasticity and Dynamic Pricing of Rewards for Demand Response
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Jim Shi (MTSM)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Yao Sun
Department: HSS
Project Title: The Network Effect in Crowdfunding for FinTech and Real Estate Startups
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Ajim Uddin (MTSM)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Principal Investigator: Ming Fang Taylor
Department: MTSM
Project Title: Exploring the Role of Real Estate Assets and other Moderators in Corporate Innovation
Co-Principal Investigator(s): Shanthi Gopalakrishnan (MTSM)
Funded Amount: $10,000

Atam P Dhawan, PhD
Senior Vice Provost for Research
Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering