Colloquium Series

11:30am - 1:00pm | NJIT Campus Center Atrium

Reclaiming Your Community

Speaker: Majora Carter

Successful young adults from low-status communities are frequently expected to measure their success by how far they get away from the places where they were born and raised.  That talent loss leads to other consequences such as long term economic stagnation followed by rapid displacement.  Somewhere between those two is where you can make a difference, and Majora is eager to explore how, before it's too late. 

Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, MacArthur Fellow, Peabody Award winning broadcaster, and teaches at Princeton University.

She is responsible for the creation of numerous economic developments, technology inclusion projects, green-infrastructure developments & policies, and job training & placement systems.

Majora is quoted on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC — which is also the subtitle of her 2022 book, Reclaiming Your Community: "Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one."

Carter applies corporate talent-retention consulting practice to reduce Brain Drain in American low-status communities. She has firsthand experience pioneering sustainable economic development in one of America's most storied low-status communities: the South Bronx, as well as cities across North America and abroad.

She and her teams develop vision, strategies and the type of development that transforms low-status communities into thriving mixed-use local economies.

In 2017, she launched the Boogie Down Grind, a Hip Hop themed specialty coffee & craft beer spot, and the first commercial "3rd Space" in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx since the mid-1980s.

Majora was born, raised and continues to live in the South Bronx. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science (1984), Wesleyan University (1988 BA, Distinguished Alum) and New York University (MFA).

After establishing Sustainable South Bronx (2001) and Green For All (2007), among other organizations, she opened this private consulting firm (2008) — which was named Best for the World by B-Corp in 2014.

This honors colloquium is required for all Dorman First-Year Scholars as a follow-up to the common summer reading and as part of Honors First-Year Seminar.

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

Women With STEAM (WWS) Colloquium

2:30pm - 4:00pm | IDS1, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Global Health Systems Digital Metamorphosis: How a radical new theory of the business for health, Stay Left, Shift Left-10X (SL2-10X) can and is being implemented by a novel systems innovation methodology Open Innovation 2.0.

Speaker: Prof. Martin Curley, Director, Digital Health Ecosystem

Chair, UNGA Digital Health Symposium, Maynooth University

This colloquium which traverses the intersection of research and practice covers four key questions of global health transformation, the why, what, how and with what? The lecture begins with the need for transformation and the digital opportunity. A new theory of the business for health is introduced supported by multiple empirical examples of 10X exponential change achieved in the Irish Health System and elsewhere using the SL2-10X paradigm. The lecture then describes the systems innovation methodology OI2, created from ten years of research stewarded by the European Commission, Intel and Maynooth University. The lecture finishes with a synopsis of the MOADH (Mother of all Demos for Health) led by Prof Curley in May 2025 at Maynooth University which demonstrates a platform based on a SPINE (Secure Patient Information Exchange) and associated application applications showing the way towards a new kind of health system which revolves around the individual and their phone, and no longer around the hospital.

Martin Curley is Professor of Innovation at Maynooth University. Most recently, Martin was Director of the Digital Transformation and Open Innovation at the Health Service Executive (HSE), helping enable the digital transformation of Ireland’s health service and also served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the HSE. Prior to joining the HSE Martin was Senior Vice President and group head for Global Digital Practice at Mastercard. Previously Martin was vice president at Intel Corporation and Director/GM of Intel Labs Europe, Intel’s network of more than 50 research labs which he helped grow across the European region. He also served as a senior principal engineer at Intel Labs Europe leading Intel’s research and innovation engagement with the European Commission and the broader European Union research ecosystem. Prior to this Curley was Global Director of IT Innovation and Director of IT Strategy and Technology at Intel. Earlier in his Intel career, he held a number of senior positions for Intel in the United States and Europe. He also worked in research and management positions at GE in Ireland and Philips in the Netherlands.

Martin has a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and a master’s degree in business studies, both from University College Dublin, Ireland. He received his Ph.D. in information systems from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Curley is the author of eight books on technology management for value, innovation and entrepreneurship. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, the British Computer Society and the Irish Computer Society. Martin is co-founder of the Innovation Value Institute at Maynooth University, a unique industry-academia collaboration driving research and development of advanced IT and Digital maturity frameworks. He was previously a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research and a visiting research fellow at the CERN Open Lab in Geneva. He was the inaugural winner of the Engineers Ireland Innovation engineer of the year in 2006 and was jointly awarded European Chief Technology Officer of the year for 2015-2016.

ADHC / MTSM Co-sponsored Colloquium

Global Studies Colloquium

Medical Humanities Colloquium 

11:30am - 1:00pm | IDS1, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Food for a Hot Planet: Case Study - Puerto Rico

Speaker: Maria Stanko, PhD; Maneet Kaur and Sarabjit Singh '02H, '04 Honors Faculty 

Fellow in Agriculture and Climate Change and Senior University Lecturer, Dept. of Biological Sciences 

This colloquium will introduce scholars to the ADHC Faculty Fellows course BIOL 336 - Food for a Hot Planet. Human food systems have profound effects on our planet’s ecosystems. The climate changes that result from those ecosystem effects will shape the food systems of the future. The course focuses on the intersections between climate change and food and involves extensive reading, discussions, and actions on these topics. In the Spring 2027 semester, the course will include a study abroad travel to Puerto Rico during the spring break. The course will use Puerto Rico as a living classroom where scholars engage directly with landscapes and communities confronting the realities of climate change while developing innovative responses. Through guided field visits, service-learning, reflection, and interactions with practitioners, scholars will examine how ecological systems, food production, and human communities are interconnected.

Dr. Maria Stanko is a community ecologist and co-director of the Urban Ecology Lab at NJIT. Dr. Stanko’s research examines the role of species interactions, especially between flowering plants and pollinators, in biodiversity maintenance and investigates the community-wide consequences of the disruption of these interactions through loss of biodiversity, species invasion, and global change. Her teaching and research interests also include scientific teaching, urban agriculture, and invertebrate conservation. 

ADHC / HCSLA Co-sponsored Colloquium

Women With STEAM (WWS) Colloquium 

Honors Faculty Fellows Colloquium 

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

Global Studies Colloquium

12:00pm - 5:00pm | Bus transportation from Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Study Tour: Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Join fellow scholars for a guided tour of the exhibition Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Read more here: 

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/orientalism-between-fact-and-fantasy

Global Studies Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | IDS1, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Co-design for Community Impact: An Introduction 

Speaker: Hannah Berkin-Harper, Associate Professor of Industrial Design, NJIT

This honors colloquium introduces co-design, an approach that positions community members as equal partners in defining challenges, generating ideas, and shaping solutions. We'll cover core methods such as community listening sessions, participatory mapping, collaborative prototyping, and iterative feedback cycles, and discuss why this way of working matters when a project's success depends on how well it fits the people it's meant to serve.
The colloquium also introduces the Honors service learning course Co-design for Community Impact (AD390 Special Topics in Art & Design), where students partner with a local organization to co-create a real solution.
 

Hannah Berkin-Harper is an Associate Professor of Industrial Design whose work focuses on design that serves communities and public spaces. Her practice bridges design, civic engagement, and social impact, exploring how thoughtful, participatory design can shape more livable and equitable environments. She has design initiatives that activate public spaces across New York City, working closely with communities to reimagine how shared spaces can better serve the people who use them. Through her teaching and practice, she is committed to advancing co-design approaches that treat community members as active partners in the design process.

ADHC / HCAD Co-sponsored Colloquium
Honors Faculty Fellows Colloquium

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium
 

11:30am - 1:00pm | IDS1, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

“We Care a Lot" — The Case for Health Humanities in an Era of Perpetual Crisis

Speaker: Stephen Pemberton, Ph.D.; Chair, NJIT Federated Department of History

If our health care system is critically ill and is itself in need of care, what can humanities perspectives contribute to those trying to navigate it for the better?

Dr. Pemberton’s talk will examine the widespread perception that U.S. health care is in crisis, suggesting what is old and new in this phenomenon—and asking what the medical and health humanities are good for, in light of it.  

The talk is designed for scholars who are curious about the state of medicine and healthcare in the United States; it will also introduce what the medical and health humanities are for anyone unfamiliar with these fields.

Dr. Pemberton is a historian of medicine, disease, and health with expertise in United States history and the history and sociology of science. His research and teaching is also informed by his training in philosophy and his engagements with medical humanities scholarship and health policy debates. He is author of The Bleeding Disease: Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and co-author of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). His current research project is ‘Bleeding Disorder: What Hemophilia Experiences Reveal about Biocapitalism and Health Advocacy.’ Dr. Pemberton’s education includes Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History, 2001; M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History, 1997; M.A., University of Memphis, Philosophy, 1992; and B.A., Trinity University, Philosophy, 1990.

ADHC / HCSLA Co-sponsored Colloquium

Medical Humanities Colloquium

12:00pm - 5:00pm | Bus transportation from Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Study Tour - Tenement Women: Tour & Tasting

Visit the Tenement Museum in NYC: Our apartment tours visit the historically recreated 19th and 20th-century homes of immigrant and migrant families who lived in New York City tenements. This special combination tour pairs the tour 5A: Levines with a short walk and tasting tour. First, you'll explore the stories of Jennie Levine and Goldie Lustgarten, Jewish immigrant mothers involved in the kosher meat boycott of 1902. After delving into their world, you’ll walk the same streets they would have with a specialized food tour educator to learn about the importance of the former street vendor market before visiting The Pickle Guys, the only remaining pickle vendor on the Lower East Side. You’ll sample their family-recipe cucumber new pickle along with two pickled treats from Dominican and Italian cultures.  Apartment Tour: 38 steps up/down. Tasting: about 4 city blocks.

Medical Humanities Colloquium

Global Studies Colloquium 

11:30am - 1:00pm | NJIT Campus Center Atrium

The City of Tomorrow: The Spatial Evolution of a City's Social Spaces

Speaker: Myles Zhang, PhD

Drawing on century-old maps, phone books, and historical documents, this colloquium uses cartography to visualize the social fabric that once existed in Downtown Newark. Churches, clubs, neighborhood associations, union halls, bars, cafés, recreational leagues, and other institutions served as this city's social spaces. However, state policy, land use laws, mass production, and new technologies reshaped this city's immigrant neighborhoods. Older forms of social infrastructure vanished from some neighborhoods: corner stores, social clubs, and labor unions. Newer social spaces emerged in the city: university campuses, sports stadiums, and the offices of multinational corporations.

By charting century-long economic shifts and by mapping the decline of family-owned corner stores in Newark, this visual presentation asks: How can the benefits of technological progress be more evenly distributed? Past technologies benefited suburbs, but harmed our cities and our society's civic spaces. Creating a more egalitarian metropolis in the future requires us to wrestle with the transformative social impacts of the new technologies we celebrate.

Myles Zhang is an urban historian and lifelong Newark resident. Myles currently works at the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he teaches courses on urban history, architectural history, digital history, public humanities, and spatial research methods. His research examines how political power, new technologies, and state policies reshape the built environment, with a particular focus on the Newark and New York City metropolitan region and mid-size American cities in the twentieth century. In some form or another, all of his work reflects the observation that: We shape our cities, and afterwards our cities shape who we are. 

This honors colloquium is run in partnership with NJIT's Federated Department of History.

ADHC / HCSLA Co-sponsored Colloquium

ADHC / HCAD Colloquium

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

2:30pm - 4:00pm | NJIT Campus Center Atrium

Living Voices: Musical Dialogues with Women of the Italian Resistance

Speaker: Laura Montanari, Postdoc Fellow, Montclair State University; Adjunct Professor, NJIT

"Living Voices" is a lecture/performance that brings together memory-making and live music, centering songwriting as a method of historical inquiry. The project emerges from Dr. Montanari's dissertation on the oral histories of women involved in the Italian Resistance and transforms archival testimony into a musical dialogue with our recent past. Original oral history interview recordings were unearthed from the Circolo Gianni Bosio sound and oral history archive and interwoven into research songs composed through community listening, scholarly inquiry, and an ethical commitment to foreground historically marginalized voices.

"Living Voices" invites audiences into an ethics of listening-for (Silverman, 2015). Through narratives of courage, humanity, and resistance, this concert demonstrates how artistic practice and songwriting can serve as a mode of remembrance and collective memory-making. These women’s voices continue to speak to contemporary audiences, offering enduring reflections on democratic engagement and civic responsibility.

Laura Montanari is a postdoctoral fellow in music education at Montclair State University. She is also an adjunct professor of songwriting, music & the American experience (NJIT), and of Music & Movement (Bank Street College of Education). Her research focuses on songwriting, body music, and the relationship between songs and history. Through teaching, research, and creative practice, she aims to cultivate participatory, critically engaged learning environments in which music serves as a means of historical inquiry, democratic expression, and collective meaning-making. Her music is published under the pseudonyms Larthia and Cupra:Ring.

www.larthiamusic.com

ADHC / HCSLA Co-sponsored Colloquium

Women With STEAM Colloquium

8:30am - 10:00am | IDS1 & IDS2, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Board of Visitors Roundtable Networking

Scholars will have the opportunity to learn from and network with Board of Visitor members of the Honors College in a roundtable format.

Globalization in Practice: Politics, Governance, and the STEM Professions

Speaker: Theresa Hunt, PhD; Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology 

Globalization shapes not only politics and economics but also the professional environments in which scientists, engineers, healthcare professionals, and technology leaders work. This colloquium introduces key systems of global politics and governance, including international law, nongovernmental organizations, human rights, global governance, and the international political economy. Using examples such as global technology policy and technology transfer, transboundary sustainability regulation, international trade agreements, and organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the talk explores how global institutions and political forces increasingly intersect with STEM fields and professional decision-making. 

Theresa Hunt is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University, where her interdisciplinary training focused on the political, social, and institutional dimensions of an increasingly interconnected world. Her research and teaching interests include globalization, social movements, and political sociology. At NJIT, she teaches courses that connect social science perspectives with contemporary issues affecting technology, institutions, policy, and professional practice. 

Global Studies Colloquium

7:00pm - 10:00pm | Jim Wise Theatre, Kupfrian Hall

Sense and Sensibility by Kate Hamill - Play and Talkback

A contemporary (and hysterical) stage adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel. Following the performance, scholars will engage with cast and crew during the talkback.

Tickets must be purchased for this performance - link to follow.

11:30am - 1:00pm | IDS1, Martinson Honors Residence Hall

Confidently Wrong: How to Catch LLMs When They Are Wrong and Train LLMs to Be Safe 

Speaker: Arnob Ghosh, Assistant Professor, ECE Department, NJIT

Large language models have become remarkably powerful and are now widely used by students and researchers. Yet they fail in a peculiarly dangerous way: they are often most convincing precisely when they are wrong, making hallucinations and unsafe responses an Achilles' heel for reliable use. This talk addresses both, and points to open problems you can work on.

In the first part, we show how a set of simple, practical techniques—ones you can apply today as a user—can substantially reduce hallucinations and catch errors, rather than trusting fluent output at face value. The second part turns to the model level. We present a reinforcement-learning approach for eliciting safe responses from a pre-trained model: a semantic classifier that judges whether a response is safe from its meaning, used to train the model through an RL-based primal-dual method that generates safe responses while preserving usefulness.

Arnob Ghosh is an Assistant Professor at NJIT. His research develops safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and applies them in the cyber-physical domain. His recent interests are in making the LLM responses correct, safe, and robust.  He has published in top machine learning conferences and received a best paper award at ACM MobiHoc as well as a spotlight award at NeurIPS. He serves as an Associate Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research, and his research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

ADHC / NCE Co-sponsored Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | NJIT Campus Center Atrium

When Birds Become Music: A Concert-Lecture

Join composer Alexander Liebermann for an exploration of the birds that inspire his music. Through listening examples and insights into birdsong transcription, the presentation shows how birdsong shape melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas. The lecture is followed by live performances by acclaimed musicians Lun Li (violin), Ryu Cipris (flute), and Matthew Graybil (piano).

Alexander Liebermann is a composer who specializes in transcribing animal vocalizations, particularly those of extinct or endangered birds. His work has been featured in National Geographic and CBS Sunday Morning, and his music has been performed by the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra. He is a faculty member of Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program, the author of Birdsong: A Musical Field Guide, and an ambassador for Cornell Lab of Ornithology. 

ADHC / HCAD Co-sponsored Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm |  Agile Strategy Lab (CKB)

Honors Interdisciplinary Research Forum (HIRF)

Scholars from ENGL102 Honors (Introduction to Research Writing), STS 205 Honors (Introduction to Research Methods), ENTR 210 Honors (Introduction to Entrepreneurship) and STS 325 Honors (Science, Technology & Urban Transformation) will discuss their research and projects. Engage with scholars as they showcase their digital posters and cast your vote for the top presentations. This forum will be highly interactive and an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas while learning about an array of research taking place across campus.