NEWARK, N.J. – Poet Yuriy Tarnawsky was among the 11 Newark College of Engineering (NCE) graduates inducted on March 12 into the NCE 100, the alumni hall of fame established this year as part of the college’s celebration of its centennial.
“The range of what our graduates have done is very wide,” noted NCE Dean Moshe Kam, at a ceremony in Eberhardt Hall, the campus’s oldest building, that touched on NCE’s origins in the industrial age and the confident role its graduates currently play in shaping the new, technologically dynamic era of nanotechnology, robotics and advanced manufacturing.
Mr. Tarnawsky (1956), an electrical engineer and poet, Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski (1978), a chemical engineer and a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force, and Sohail Mohammed (1988), an electrical engineer and New Jersey Superior Court judge, joined eight of their fellow inaugural inductees, whose graduation years spanned more than three decades, for an evening that began with accolades and ended with anecdotes and fine dining.
The honorees were recognized for singular accomplishments: “a significant contribution with a tangible positive effect on society or the profession – through authorship and composition; high-impact research, discovery or artistry; or major long-term and widely recognized leadership of organizations or groups beneficial to the public.”
The induction kicked off a year-long celebration of NCE’s 100th anniversary, which will feature awards ceremonies, galas, historical tributes and engineering competitions to commemorate the school’s “Century of Public Service Through Engineering.”
News of the event spread quickly. The following night, as part of his introduction before the screening of a documentary on his life and literature, the crowd at the Ukrainian Institute of America in Manhattan was informed that Mr. Tarnawsky “was just inducted into the hall of fame at NJIT.” NCE is one of six colleges that are part of NJIT.
Mr. Tarnawsky, who graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, is a writer and linguist who is also a former electronics engineer and computer scientist for IBM Corp. He is one of the founding members of the New York Group, a Ukrainian émigré avant-garde group of writers, and co-founder and co-editor of the journal New Poetry. His fiction, poetry, plays, translations and criticism in both Ukrainian and English have been translated into nearly a dozen languages.