NJIT's Mobile Health Pioneer and Forensic Age-Estimation Scientist Join National Inventors Academy

The National Academy of Inventors named 230 faculty from 82 institutions to its 2026 Senior Member class, recognizing inventors whose work has translated from laboratory to application through patents, licensing, commercialization, or demonstrated real-world potential. Two of those selections come from the New Jersey Institute of Technology - an electrical engineer who built mobile health infrastructure for emergency responders and a forensic scientist who developed biochemical methods for estimating how long someone has been dead.

The Senior Member program, launched in 2018, now counts 945 members worldwide, collectively holding more than 11,000 U.S. patents. This year's cohort is the Academy's largest, with members collectively holding more than 2,000 U.S. patents.

Cesar Bandera: From Engineering Theory to the Field

Cesar Bandera holds the Leir Endowed Chair for Entrepreneurship at NJIT's Martin Tuchman School of Management, where he teaches entrepreneurship at every level the school offers. His trajectory is unusual for an academic: he has maintained an active invention portfolio, accrued four U.S. patents, and built a company serving emergency responders, federal agencies, and international health organizations.

His most visible work involves mobile health applications for emergency scenarios. Technologies he helped develop have been recognized by the National Institutes of Health as a Small Business Success Story and cited in reports to Congress by both the NIH and the Department of Defense through the Small Business Innovation Research program. His augmented-reality training system for hazardous materials response is now operational at more than one hundred facilities across the U.S. - a concrete measure of technology that moved from lab to deployment.

Bandera also earned a NASA Space Act Award, given to individuals or organizations that contribute to NASA's mission through non-NASA technology, and received multiple Small Business of the Year nominations from the Department of Defense.

On the academic side, he serves as an associate editor at the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, leads NJIT's National Science Foundation-funded Accelerating Research Translation initiatives, and chairs the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business Entrepreneurship and Innovation Affinity Group. His scholarship spans entrepreneurship education, business incubation policy, and the use of technology in learning environments.

Sara Zapico: Molecular Methods for Identifying the Dead

Sara Zapico, an assistant professor in NJIT's Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, directs the Interdisciplinary Forensics and Biomedical Sciences Lab (ForenBioS). Her work sits at the intersection of molecular biology and forensic investigation, applying biochemical and epigenetic tools to problems that have traditionally relied on physical observation alone.

Her signature contribution is a patent on biochemical age-estimation methods using DNA methylation patterns in dental tissue. As cells age, specific locations on DNA gain or lose methyl groups in predictable patterns. By reading those methylation signatures, Zapico's methods can estimate how old a person was at death - information critical for identifying remains in mass-casualty events, homicide investigations, and humanitarian identification work where traditional documents are absent.

The precision matters. Conventional age-estimation methods based on bone or tooth wear can produce ranges of a decade or more. Methylation-based approaches can narrow that window considerably, improving the utility of forensic identifications for medical examiners and humanitarian organizations working with degraded or fragmentary remains.

Her research portfolio also covers body-fluid identification from degraded samples, post-mortem interval determination, and DNA extraction from difficult substrates like burnt remains. She co-authored a 2023 Wiley volume on burnt human remains. Her Smithsonian collaboration connects laboratory research to applied identification contexts in ways that keep her methods grounded in operational forensic realities.

Both faculty members will be formally inducted at the NAI's 15th Annual Conference in Los Angeles from June 1 to 4, 2026.