Tandon alumni are celebrated during a festive weekend

NYU’s annual Alumni and Families Weekend is always among the most widely anticipated events of the year, and the 2024 edition was no exception. Chances to connect with old and new friends, more than 100 programs and activities ... Washington Square was the place to be from October 24 to 27. And in the midst of the festivities, two Tandon alumni received special honors.

An NYU Distinguished Alumni Award — given to a graduate who has demonstrated extraordinary achievement and/or service in their professional, vocational, social, and cultural endeavors — was bestowed upon Joe Landolina (‘14), who wrote himself into NYU history even before graduating.

Like Rick Rubin, who founded Def-Jam Records from his Washington Square dorm, Landolina launched a fledgling company from his room in Othmer Hall. Then just a first-year student, he had discovered a way to mimic the extracellular matrix (ECM), which lends structure to tissues and organs in the body, using polymers from the cell walls of algae. (He had something of a head start: Landolina’s family owned a winery, and by the time he arrived at Tandon, he had already spent countless hours conducting chemical experiments with grapes and other plants.) In gel form, the new material was able to solidify and meld platelets together to close wounds and halt bleeding almost instantaneously.

In 2011 he joined forces with Isaac Miller, a finance and management student from Stern, to pitch the concept at the school’s Inno/Vention competition, and their triumph at that hotly contested annual event was just the beginning. By the time Landolina had graduated in 2014, the company, Cresilon, was firmly launched. Its initial product, VETIGEL®, was aimed at the veterinary market, and after that proved to be an unmitigated success, Cresilon set its sights on gaining FDA approval for human use, which was granted earlier this year for a life-saving product called TRAUMAGEL®.

Cresilon — which was recently included on the 2024 list of Fast Company’s most innovative companies, landing in the top spot in the medical device category — may have come a long way since those days in Othmer Hall, but Landolina has remained impressively focused on using the engineering skills he honed at Tandon in service to humanity.

Another honoree, Nikolai Wolfe (’09,’11), served as an officer of the Polytechnic Alumni Association (PAA) before taking the reins of the NYU Alumni Association (the umbrella organization for all 690,000-plus NYU alumni) from 2022 to 2024. Both organizations recognized him over the weekend for his tireless efforts: the PAA with their highest honor, the NYU Tandon Polytechnic Dedicated Alumni Award, and the NYU Alumni Association with its Meritorious Service Award.

Wolfe, a civil engineer who went on to earn a law degree after graduating from Tandon, merges those skills as a senior attorney at ConEd, but the demands of his career never prevented him from volunteering his time at the highest level, not just at NYU, but at other worthy organizations.

Also in attendance to be honored was a representative of the Class of 1974, Dr. Lloyd P. Haskell, who received a certificate announcing his induction into Tandon’s Golden Jubilee Society, whose members have celebrated 50 years since their graduation. “It’s wonderful to be recognized at Alumni and Families Weekend,” he said. “I truly feel a part of the Tandon and NYU communities in a deeper, more meaningful way.”