Dr. Donald H. Sebastian is the President & Chief Executive Officer of the New Jersey Innovation Institute (NJII) and Senior Vice President of Technology & Business Development at New Jersey Institute of Technology. NJII is an NJIT 5.01c3 Corporation that is a new model for business innovation serving key industrial clusters that anchor the state and national economy. In its first three years of operation, NJII has launched new programs that increased the annual base of expenditures to $70M in activities since it started in July 2014. Prior to that appointment NJIT’s sponsored research more than doubled to $110M under his leadership as Sr. Vice President for Research & Development, placing the Institute in the top five among US polytechnic universities.

Dr. Sebastian led the effort to form a statewide Health Information Technology Extension Center, funded with $25M in federal funding to assist NJ primary care physicians in adopting electronic health record systems. NJ-HITEC led the nation in physicians reaching meaningful use certification having enrolled over 7000 primary care physicians. That success led to a new $50M grant to support outcomes based medicine across a community of 15,000 physicians. Previously, he launched the NJ Homeland Security Technology Systems Center in 2004 to develop, validate and standardize new technologies for sustainable approaches to defending against terrorism. He was the principal academic organizer of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium. In 1996 he was founding director of the NIST-funded NJ Manufacturing Extension Program that has since documented over $2B ROI for the state’s small to medium sized manufacturers.

Dr. Sebastian was the institutional lead in a State program to develop child-safe weapons technology that has drawn international media coverage, and attracted over $5M in state and federal support, leading to the first biometric-based safety system for handguns. Dr. Sebastian was the principal academic organizer of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium, bringing the resources of the Lucent Bell Labs to the statewide research community, and served as the first Chairman of the Board. In 1996 he created the NIST funded NJ Manufacturing Extension Program that has since documented over $2B ROI for the state’s small to medium sized manufacturers.

Dr. Sebastian is an Executive Board Member, Treasurer and past Chairman of the R&D Council of New Jersey, Treasurer and Executive Board Member of the Greater Newark Healthcare Coalition, and serves on the Executive Committee of Innovation New Jersey, the Boards the Polymer Processing Institute, Inc., NJ Manufacturing Extension Program, the Puerto Rico Consortium for Clinical Investigation, and is immediate past Research Chair and Executive Board Member of the Henry H. Kessler Foundation. For these and other efforts he was inducted in the New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame in 2006, named an NJBIZ Healthcare Innovation Hero in 2015, added to the Made In New Jersey Honor Role in 2016, and in 2018 named to NJBIZ Power 100 and ROI’s top New Jersey Influencers for Technology.

Dr. Sebastian is a professor in the Department of Chemical, Biological and Pharmaceutical Engineering. He joined NJIT in 1995 and was appointed executive director of the Center for Manufacturing Systems. Prior to joining NJIT, Dr. Sebastian was a member of the Chemical Engineering faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology where he was co-founder of the Design and Manufacturing Institute, was part of the faculty team that founded the Polymer Processing Institute where he served as Head of Information and Computing Technology and created the PASS-1 extrusion modeling system. In 1991 he was named Henry Morton Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Dr. Sebastian received his Bachelor of Engineering at Stevens, graduating as valedictorian of the class of 1974, was a Tau Beta Pi National Fellow, and member of Gear & Triangle activities honor society, Khoda leadership society and the Varsity S club. He received his Masters of Engineering from Stevens in 1975, and the Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1977.