Three India-born scholars, Aritra Dasgupta, Ashish Borgaonkar and Shahid Akbar, are among winners of New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) 2026 Nexus of Excellence Awards.
NJIT celebrated the achievements of its faculty and staff at an awards ceremony on Oct. 14, recognizing outstanding contributions to teaching, research, mentoring, service and community engagement, according to an NJIT release.
“The Nexus of Excellence Awards recognize outstanding contributions across an unusually broad range of university life: teaching and mentoring, advising and educational innovation, research and creative scholarship, service, and community engagement,” said Interim Provost Moshe Kam.
Ashish Borgaonkar, Associate Professor of engineering education at the School of Applied Engineering and Technology, was one of three faculty awarded Master Teacher designation, NJIT’s highest teaching honor. The designation recognizes sustained instructional excellence, innovative teaching approaches and a significant impact on student learning.
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Borgaonkar, founding director of Newark College of Engineering’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program, also received the Excellence in Innovation in Education award.
Dasgupta, an Assistant Professor in the Informatics department at NJIT received the Excellence in Graduate Instruction award.
He develops and studies interactive visualization techniques for helping people understand and communicate with data. The goal of his research is to foster greater human-machine trust by the use of visualization as a transparent medium between computational methods and human insights.
Before joining NJIT, Dasgupta was a researcher at New York University and at the U.S. DoE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he led several interdisciplinary, data visualization projects working with experts from diverse domains such as biology, healthcare, climate science, & cybersecurity.
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Dasgupta directs NJIT’s Intelligible Information Visualization lab (NiiV), which engages students at all levels developing cutting edge, human-in-the-loop visualization techniques for transparent, data-driven decision-making.
At NJIT, Dasgupta teaches courses on data visualization and visual analytics. He has a PhD in computing and information systems from the University of North Carolina.
Shahid Akbar, a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Materials Science program who joined the group from Jammu and Kashmir, won the Excellence in Instruction by Teaching Assistants award.
His research focuses on multifunctional materials. He is currently using periodic electronic structure calculations to study the structure-property-function relationship in magnetically bi-stable metal-organic frameworks.