The starting point for the investigation was an extensive literature review that Arvan described as eye-opening. After more than forty years of publishing papers on program comprehension, the field, he said, has apparently been built on shaky foundations, lacking explicit standard definitions and reliable measurement methods. That gap matters because program comprehension is not an abstract curiosity. Software engineers and programmers spend a considerable amount of their working time simply trying to understand code, whether written by colleagues years earlier or generated moments ago by an artificial intelligence system. If researchers cannot measure comprehension accurately, they cannot reliably evaluate new programming languages, teaching methods, documentation tools, or development environments designed to make code easier to digest. Every downstream conclusion inherits the weaknesses of the measurement instruments used to produce it.

The NJIT-led team imported a technique from social science to bring order to this uncertainty: the Delphi method. As the researchers noted, the Delphi method is widely used for building expert consensus under conditions of uncertainty in other domains such as medicine and national-security forecasting, but to their knowledge this is its first application to code comprehension research. The procedure is iterative and structured. Over multiple rounds, participants ranked Java code snippets by how difficult they were to comprehend, and the group iteratively resolved disagreements through written feedback and discussion. By converging on a shared expert judgment about which snippets were genuinely hard or easy to understand, the method produced a calibrated reference point, a ground truth of sorts, against which the field’s common shortcut measurements could be tested.

With that consensus baseline in hand, the researchers presented dozens of students with several evaluation methods commonly used in the literature. These included assessments of syntax, timed input/output questions in which participants had to determine what a program would print, and self-evaluations in which participants rated their own understanding of the code. The design allowed the team to compare each proxy against the expert-derived difficulty ranking and ask a deceptively simple question: does this measurement actually track whether a person understands the code? The results separated the proxies sharply. Some widely used instruments proved to be poor indicators of real comprehension, while others performed considerably better, offering the field its first systematic evidence about which shortcuts can be trusted.

The clearest finding concerned what actually signals understanding. Simply asking someone to explain what output a piece of code would produce turned out to be the best indicator of whether they truly understand it, according to the study’s analysis of how experienced developers work in the real world. Measuring how long someone takes to determine that output is the next-best approach, Arvan said. The emphasis here is on the bottom line of a code snippet, what it does, rather than on its surface form. Arvan drew an analogy from linguistics: in everyday life, non-native speakers are judged by how well they get their message across, not by their grammar or spelling. In the same way, comprehension of code should be judged by whether a reader can correctly state the program’s behavior, not by whether they can parse its syntactic details.

That distinction between behavior and syntax carries practical weight for anyone who writes or reviews software. A reader who can recite the rules of a language but cannot say what a loop or a conditional will actually produce has not understood the program in any sense that matters to engineering. Conversely, a developer who can predict the output, and predict it quickly, demonstrates the kind of working mastery that real-world maintenance and debugging demand. By anchoring measurement to output prediction and response time, the NJIT team offers researchers a more defensible instrument than self-reports or syntax checks, both of which can diverge substantially from genuine understanding. The timed variant adds a graded dimension, capturing not just whether comprehension occurred but how effortful it was, which matters when comparing alternative code designs for readability.

The motivation is not purely academic. Arvan pointed to the rise of large language models, which are generating a great deal of code but whose output remains uncertain in many respects, including whether it is reliable, secure, understandable, and verifiable. The team’s idea, he explained, was to see whether they could propose and create a tool or a system that can automatically detect whether a given piece of code is understandable to humans. Such a capability would address a well-documented pain point: because engineers already spend a considerable share of their time trying to understand code, any automated gauge of human readability could steer both human and machine-generated programs toward forms that are easier to comprehend from the start. The researchers’ ultimate goal is to teach programmers to write code that is more easily understood from the beginning, rather than repaired after the fact.

The paper also casts a critical eye on tools that developers use every day. Kellogg observed that many software development environments apply a code quality measurement based on cyclomatic complexity, a concept he described as discredited, which assigns a score based on how many decisions a program can make. This, he argued, is indicative of a wider problem: code is too often evaluated based merely on what automation tools and development environments can prove, instead of on what matters to real-world engineers. The new paper did not examine that particular issue directly, but Arvan and Kellogg hope their findings will motivate the people who build software development tools to modernize such approaches, replacing inherited metrics with measures that have been validated against actual human comprehension.

The team’s agenda for the coming years is ambitious. Arvan said a future direction of their plans is to revisit all of the prior studies that use one of the measurements they tested, and to show those results to the community. The aim is to review the existing literature in light of the new findings so that researchers can see which results can be trusted, which cannot, and which papers should be redone and reconducted so that their conclusions become reliable. In effect, the group is proposing an audit of four decades of program comprehension research, with their validated proxies serving as the standard against which older instruments are judged. Such a re-examination could reshape how the field designs experiments, interprets past findings, and builds on one another’s work.

Collaborators at William & Mary will pursue another forward-looking thread: studying the possibility of replacing human participants in comprehension studies with large language model agents. If LLM agents can stand in for human readers in these experiments, research could scale dramatically, running far more comparisons of code designs and evaluation methods than human-subject studies allow. But that substitution only makes sense if the underlying measurements are sound, which is precisely what the NJIT team has worked to establish. Taken together, the award-winning paper suggests a field in the midst of a methodological reset, one that borrows the consensus-building rigor of the social sciences, elevates output prediction as the gold standard of understanding, and aims ultimately at a future in which both people and the AI systems that assist them produce code that is understandable by design.

Subject of Research: Reliability of measurement methods used in program comprehension research

Article Title: NJIT computing researchers awarded for code evaluation paper

Article References: NJIT computing researchers awarded for code evaluation paper. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: code comprehension, program comprehension, software engineering, Delphi method, cyclomatic complexity, large language models, NJIT, Automated Software Engineering, code quality, measurement reliability, output prediction, developer tools

Nanobubbles are gas-filled cavities suspended in liquid, typically measuring less than about 200 nanometers across, far below the resolution of the naked eye. Their minute scale gives them unusual physical properties compared with ordinary bubbles: they can remain stable in water for extended periods, travel deep into soil and porous materials, and carry dissolved gases or chemical payloads to places conventional aeration cannot reach. Conference chairman Wen Zhang, an NJIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, described them as a delivery vehicle for chemicals or gases in air, soil and water, performing functions such as aeration, cleaning and disinfection.

The scientific puzzle at the heart of the field is that classical physics suggests bubbles of this size should collapse almost instantly under the immense internal pressure created by their tiny curvature. Yet experimentally, nanobubbles persist, sometimes for days or weeks. Explaining this stability, and reconciling theory with observation, remains one of the discipline’s defining challenges, and it featured prominently in the conference program.

Jay Meegoda, conference co-chair and NJIT distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering, led a session devoted to the Mysteries of Nanobubbles and drew on his own team’s environmental clean-up experiments in the nearby Passaic River. He described two persistent puzzles: bubbles that exist even though extreme pressures should theoretically eliminate them, and bubbles whose behavior changes depending on how they are generated in the laboratory. Electrical charges on bubble surfaces and interactions with ozone are among the factors his team has identified as responsible for these anomalies, underscoring how sensitive the technology is to generation method and water chemistry.

Those open questions were taken up directly in a panel discussion titled Critical and Unanswered Questions on Nanobubbles, moderated by Meegoda. Panelists and attendees confronted issues that will determine whether the field matures into a mainstream engineering tool: how to characterize and predict bubble stability, whether the reported benefits of nanobubble treatments can be reliably traced to their proposed mechanisms, and whether the technology is economically viable at industrial scale. Such questions matter because the gap between laboratory promise and field performance is where many emerging water technologies stall.

The commercial footprint of nanobubbles is already broad. Applications discussed at the meeting spanned agriculture, biomedicine, cleaning products, energy, fisheries, food processing, industrial processing and water treatment. In agriculture, oxygen-rich nanobubbles delivered through irrigation water can improve root-zone aeration and support healthier crops; in water treatment, bubbles generated with ozone can oxidize contaminants and disinfect without leaving chemical residues. Zhang’s own research combines material science with nanobubble generation for agricultural applications and environmental remediation, work that connects to processes used in cleaning the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after algae blooms appeared there in summer 2026.

One of the most vivid illustrations of the technology’s reach came from an unexpected venue. Kent Semmen, a water chemist at Florida’s Walt Disney World, presented the company’s pilot use of nanobubbles to clean aquariums at the EPCOT and Animal Kingdom theme parks. According to Semmen, the approach works faster than traditional cleaning methods and is better for the animals in the tanks, a meaningful consideration where harsh chemicals or disruptive manual cleaning would stress aquatic life. He noted that Disney has not yet extended the technology to its saltwater bodies; testing would need to continue before that step, a reminder that even enthusiastic adopters proceed carefully across different water chemistries.

Commercialization was further represented by Yuhong Jiang, chief executive of Pure NanoTech, a Parsippany, New Jersey startup that commercializes patents developed by Zhang’s team at NJIT. The company serves customers in the agriculture, pharmaceutical and wastewater sectors, and several of its employees are NJIT alumni, including its top three scientists. Jiang also serves as president of the North American Ultrafine Bubble Association, for which NJIT became one of seven founding organizations this summer. The association’s stated mission is to foster responsible and sustainable growth of the industry by promoting best practices, encouraging collaboration, facilitating information sharing and supporting technology standardization.

Standardization is where the science meets the marketplace in a formal sense. The relevant framework is being developed under International Standards Organization Technical Committee 281, which covers fine bubble technology. Zhang explained that the standards address measurement methods for bubble size, concentration and stability, as well as application methods such as how to deploy the technology for aeration and oil remediation. He noted that ISO already offers a number of published standards with many more pending or under development. Common measurement protocols are widely seen as essential for a field in which reported results can depend heavily on how bubbles are generated and counted, allowing buyers and regulators to compare claims across vendors and laboratories.

In opening remarks, NJIT Interim President John Pelesko captured the paradox that gives the field its appeal: there is something fitting about a conference devoted to objects too small to see, yet convenient for discussing consequences that are remarkably visible in the world, whether in clean water, sustainable agriculture, safer food or better health treatments. He added that the conference reflects the values that define NJIT, including innovation, collaboration across disciplines, global engagement and a steady insistence that research should answer the problems people actually have. As nanobubble researchers returned to their laboratories and companies to their pilot projects, the meeting’s first American edition signaled a field moving from curiosity to infrastructure, one nanometer-scale bubble at a time.

Subject of Research: Nanobubble science and its environmental, agricultural and industrial applications

Article Title: Nanobubble scientists convene at NJIT to share environmental research

Article References: Nanobubble scientists convene at NJIT to share environmental research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: nanobubbles, NJIT, water treatment, agriculture, ultrafine bubbles, ISO standardization, environmental remediation, bubble stability, aeration, Pure NanoTech, Walt Disney World, Passaic River

Zapico received the honor on Friday, Sept. 25, during a ceremony in Tiernan Hall, the building that houses New Jersey Institute of Technology’s forensic science laboratories. The setting was fitting: rather than a distant banquet hall, the award was presented in the very spaces where her students learn to handle evidence, run analyses and interpret results. The presentation took place as part of National Forensic Science Week, an annual observance that highlights the role forensic science plays in the justice system and the professionals who make that work possible. Britton Morin, director of the Union County Prosecutor’s Office Forensic Science Laboratory, delivered the award on behalf of the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, a body that represents more than 21,000 forensic science professionals nationwide. The presence of a working crime laboratory director at the podium reflected the award’s emphasis on bridging academic training and professional practice.

Moments after accepting the honor, surrounded by students and colleagues from NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science, Zapico turned the spotlight away from herself and toward the people she teaches. “I am very proud of what you have accomplished, what you are doing and what you will accomplish,” she told her students. “You make me a better teacher every day. I learn from you — you’re supposed to be learning from me, but I learn from you, too.” The remark captured a teaching philosophy that colleagues and students describe as deeply reciprocal, one in which the laboratory functions less as a lecture hall and more as a working research environment where undergraduates, graduate students and faculty pursue questions together.

That philosophy was central to the citation read at the ceremony. “At the heart of Dr. Zapico’s teaching philosophy is a simple but powerful belief: Students learn best when they are actively engaged with science and understand its relevance to real-world forensic investigations,” Morin said on behalf of the consortium. “Her students do not simply learn forensic science; they practice it. They analyze evidence, test hypotheses, interpret results and communicate conclusions, gaining the skills and confidence needed to succeed as future forensic professionals. Perhaps the greatest measure of an educator’s success is the inspiration they leave with their students.” The statement reflects a broader movement in forensic science education away from purely didactic instruction and toward immersive, evidence-first training that mirrors the demands of operational laboratories.

Zapico’s own route into the field was anything but direct, and she has often said that this winding path shapes how she mentors students today. Growing up in Spain, she was inspired by the detective fiction of Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes stories, but at the time there were few opportunities to study or train in forensic science in her home country. She instead studied biology and biochemistry, completed her doctoral studies in cancer research, and only later pursued formal forensic science training. Her first opportunity in the discipline came in forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, an institution with which she remains connected today as a research associate. “Becoming a forensic scientist was a difficult path. I encourage my students to take every opportunity they have here,” she said. “This award isn’t only about what I’ve accomplished. It’s also about what I can pass on to them.”

Since joining NJIT in 2021, Zapico has led the ForenBioS Laboratory, where she involves students at every level in research on emerging forensic methods. Among the lab’s central projects are new approaches to estimating age at death from skeletal remains, a problem with direct consequences for identifying unknown individuals in missing persons and mass fatality investigations. Her research portfolio also extends into forensic epigenetics, including the use of DNA methylation patterns to estimate age, an area of growing interest because chemical modifications to DNA change in predictable ways across the human lifespan. More recently, the lab has examined the molecular effects of smoking, vaping and exercise among young adults, connecting forensic molecular biology to pressing public health questions about a generation exposed to novel nicotine delivery products.

The students who filled the ceremony offered the most concrete evidence of her mentorship in action. Forensic science undergraduate Marlene Mohammed ’27 first met Zapico at NJIT’s Accepted Students Day while she was still a student at Clifton High School, and has since worked on three research projects in the ForenBioS Laboratory. One of those projects uses advanced spectroscopy techniques to study skeletal remains, with the goal of improving estimates of the postmortem interval — the length of time a person has been dead, one of the most difficult parameters to establish in forensic anthropology. Mohammed and Zapico are scheduled to present that research at the Eastern Analytical Symposium in November, a major meeting that brings analytical chemists and forensic scientists together. “I definitely wouldn’t have realized my passion for anthropology or serology without her,” Mohammed said. “She’s a multidisciplinary researcher, so I also saw the benefits of working with different sciences and collaborating with many scientists.”

Zapico’s mentorship has carried students into a wide range of forensic careers. Alumni from her lab now work in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, including in its digital forensics laboratory, while Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar Maria Castagnola, who also attended the ceremony, is applying DNA-based methods to help identify unknown human remains — a humanitarian application of molecular biology that echoes Zapico’s own work with international forensic organizations. David Fisher, director of NJIT’s Forensic Science Program, described Zapico as absolutely integral to the program, citing her supervision of undergraduate capstone projects and doctoral students as well as her involvement in the university’s Forensic Science Initiative. That initiative introduces local high school students to forensic science through hands-on coursework and laboratory experiences, extending the pipeline of future practitioners well before students arrive on campus as freshmen.

The educator award is the second major national recognition Zapico has received this year. In June she was inducted as a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors, an honor that acknowledged her contributions to forensic science research and innovation, particularly in translating laboratory discoveries into practical methods. Her broader career spans academia and international humanitarian work: before joining NJIT she directed a forensic science master’s program at Florida International University, conducted postdoctoral research at the Smithsonian Institution, and worked with the forensic unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, where forensic identification of missing persons carries profound significance for families and communities affected by conflict. For now, Zapico says she is focused on what comes next for her students. “To see how they advance in their careers is special — to see them growing as scientists and as forensic scientists — I think it’s the most rewarding thing for me,” she said.

Subject of Research: Recognition of forensic science education and mentorship in forensic anthropology and forensic epigenetics

Article Title: NJIT’s Sara Zapico named National Higher Education Forensic Science Educator of the Year

Article References: NJIT’s Sara Zapico named National Higher Education Forensic Science Educator of the Year. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: forensic science, Sara Zapico, NJIT, forensic science education, Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, forensic anthropology, DNA methylation, forensic epigenetics, postmortem interval, mentorship, National Forensic Science Week, higher education award

The six-member team, known as Star Maker, traveled to Houston in July to pitch at NASA’s first-ever ORBIT Challenge, a student competition designed to crowdsource fresh ideas for the agency’s exploration goals. The competition drew hundreds of university entries nationwide, from which 20 teams were selected as finalists across two tracks. Star Maker competed in the Space Track and walked away with a $15,000 prize for its Orbital Solar Energy Harvesting Swarm, or OSEHS, a constellation of autonomous satellites that would collect solar energy in space and relay it to receivers on the lunar surface using microwave beams. The concept deliberately moves the power source off the Moon entirely, sidestepping the two-week darkness problem that makes surface solar power untenable at the pole.

Tatiana Mejia, an NJIT mechanical engineering student in the class of 2027 who conceived the project, argues that the idea sounds more futuristic than it actually is. In her view, the individual pieces of the system already exist in some form, and the real challenge lies in pushing them forward and integrating them at scale. She points to swarm robotics as the key enabling technology, noting that a distributed swarm can complete its mission even when individual units fail. In the space environment, she emphasizes, that kind of resilience is not a luxury but a requirement, because a single fault can endanger everyone involved. It is a philosophy she knows well: Mejia previously developed a swarm robotics concept that earned a $10,000 NASA grant, and she had spent three years working in NJIT’s Swissler Innovative Robotics Lab before the lunar power idea began taking shape in fall 2025.

The team assembled organically around that seed of an idea. Mejia began working with fellow NJIT mechanical engineering student Natalie Kiwanian and Jennifer Salto, a mechanical engineering student at Stevens Institute of Technology, after Salto discovered the newly announced ORBIT Challenge. The trio then recruited specialists to fill the technical gaps. Kevin Gutama, an NJIT electrical engineering alumnus now working at GE Aerospace, took on power distribution. KesUranNu Baylor, an NJIT physics student with orbital mechanics experience from a NASA Goddard internship, handled the trajectories. Andrea Yanez Soto, also from NJIT, modeled how the swarm would communicate. The result was an unusually complete undergraduate team, pairing mechanical, electrical and physics expertise with hands-on robotics experience.

Their proposed architecture is ambitious in scale. The team envisions a network of roughly 1,100 autonomous satellites, each about six feet wide, operating in an agile formation. Some units would orbit closer to the Sun, harvesting sunlight where the solar flux is far more intense than in Earth’s neighborhood, while others would relay that collected energy inward, beaming it by microwave to receivers on the lunar surface to provide continuous power regardless of the Moon’s day-night cycle. The physics behind the choice of location is straightforward: capturing even a tiny fraction of the Sun’s raw output dwarfs humanity’s entire energy consumption. As Mejia puts it, harnessing just 0.01 percent of the Sun’s raw power would exceed current global energy demands by a factor of roughly two billion.

Crucially, the team did not stop at concept sketches. They built simulations and physical prototypes to demonstrate that their swarm could survive the harsh realities of deep space operations. In one simulation, 12 units orbiting the Sun in a formation the team describes as a pearl necklace showed how the constellation could recover from individual satellite failures without any intervention from Earth, redistributing tasks among the surviving units. Gutama notes that much of this work went beyond what NASA actually required of entrants. The simulation, the prototypes and the elaborate presentation display were all self-imposed efforts, driven by the team’s desire to show that they could genuinely compete and that their vision was technically grounded rather than merely aspirational.

The run-up to the competition tested the team’s endurance as much as its engineering. The day before their flight to Houston, members were at NJIT past midnight applying final touches to their materials, and Kiwanian recalls going almost two days without sleep. Once at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the finalists spent a week touring the facilities and meeting space scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs before presentation day arrived. At the Pitch Showcase on the final day, each team had 15 minutes to present everything they had built since February. Kiwanian remembers Baylor explaining how the swarm could use the gravity of Venus to bring the constellation closer to the Sun, a gravitational assist maneuver of the kind mission designers have used for decades to reshape spacecraft orbits without expending propellant. Midway through the explanation, she noticed the chief scientist of the International Space Station Program nodding along, a moment she took as a very good sign.

For Baylor, the experience was as much about personal and intellectual growth as it was about the prize. He describes how his applied understanding of everything he had learned at NJIT, particularly how physical bodies move in space, accelerated dramatically through the project, and how bringing the work to NASA and discussing it with the people there made him feel he had truly grown as a physicist. That sense of validation extended to the judging panel itself. Mejia recalls that the judges, who ranged from JPMorgan representatives to NASA engineers, encouraged the team not to treat OSEHS as just a paper concept for the agency but to actually make it happen after the competition. That advice appears to have landed.

Back from Houston, the six members split the $15,000 prize evenly, $2,500 apiece, but the project is far from over. Star Maker intends to turn OSEHS into a startup venture, and interestingly, the team’s first market may not be the Moon at all. Kiwanian suggests the technology could help data center developers power new sites by reducing their burden on the electrical grid, addressing the enormous and rapidly growing energy appetite of generative artificial intelligence. The team is applying to the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program for customer discovery training and has set its sights on NASA TechLeap, a prize program that could provide up to $500,000 to build and test actual hardware. Mejia says the ORBIT Challenge made the idea real for the team, and the next step is raising money to create a prototype and launch the startup.

Behind the technical ambition lies a broader motivation that the team returns to repeatedly. For Mejia, space exploration has always been about looking at the big picture, not continents and not skin color, but bringing humanity together. She argues that if humanity wants to avoid exhausting Earth’s resources, collaboration as one species is essential, and that conviction is what continues to inspire the team’s work together. Whether OSEHS satellites eventually beam power across cislunar space or first help terrestrial data centers lighten their load on the grid, the Star Maker team has demonstrated something that competitions like the ORBIT Challenge were designed to find: a bold idea, validated by simulation and prototype, carried forward by students determined to see it through from concept to hardware.

Subject of Research: A student-designed orbital solar energy harvesting satellite swarm for supplying continuous microwave-beamed power to a lunar base

Article Title: NJIT students’ plan to power the moon with swarm robots wins NASA prize

Article References: NJIT students’ plan to power the moon with swarm robots wins NASA prize. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: NASA ORBIT Challenge, lunar South Pole, space solar power, swarm robotics, microwave power beaming, NJIT, satellite constellation, orbital mechanics, lunar base power, OSEHS, NASA TechLeap, student aerospace competition