2016 Alumni Awards

Mark Ceolin (MA ’91) received an undergraduate degree in English and Psychology in 1986 from the University of Toronto, followed by a Masters degree in English in 1991 from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in 1999, from the University of Toronto.

Following several years of teaching and academic research at Canadian institutions, Mark moved to China in 2003 where he started Red Gate International, a successful media and public relations company.

He is the founding Chair of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, which is the pre-eminent organization supporting Canadian business and community interests in China. With Mark’s leadership for growing business and fostering Canadian culture abroad, the Chamber continues to thrive today. More recently, he has led initiatives in Singapore and Vietnam, inspiring their Canadian communities to develop business and cross-cultural connections.

Mark was awarded a 2013 Governor General's Medal in recognition of his significant contributions to Canada-Asia relations. With years of engaging with numerous communities abroad, Mark is truly a Canadian cultural ambassador.

While at Waterloo, Danielle Rice (BA ’12) was involved in a number of volunteer, research and teaching assistant positions. Since graduation, she excelled in research and clinical work in the fields of mental health and rehabilitation of chronic diseases. Danielle has provided cognitive and mental health assessments for stroke and heart attack patients, as well as for people suffering from dementia.

In just a few years, Danielle has published 18 peer-reviewed papers, 8 online book chapters, along with 50 conference presentations. She is currently a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at McGill University, for which she has won distinguished academic awards. She combines her studies with clinical work at two Montreal hospitals.

Danielle’s dedication to improve the mental health care systems is remarkable; her mentors say she holds tremendous potential to be a leader in the field of clinical psychology in this country. Danielle is an exemplary young alumnus who has already devoted a life time worth of work towards improving mental health care.

Tim Jackson (BA ’92) has an extensive background as an entrepreneur and business leader. Most recently, Tim joined SHAD in July 2016 after serving as an Executive Vice-President at the MaRS Discovery District, one of the world’s largest urban innovation hubs.

He’s also served as CEO of the Accelerator Centre, an incubator for technology start-ups and was a Vice President of University Relations at the University of Waterloo. He co-founded Tech Capital Partners (an early-stage venture capital firm), and served as CFO and CEO at Waterloo based technology firm, PixStream (sold to Cisco Systems).

Tim has been an active volunteer in his community chairing the boards of organizations such as the Waterloo Public Library, the Food Bank of Waterloo Region and the Centre in the Square Theatre. He has co-founded two charitable organizations and believes SHADs are as likely to transform Canada’s non-profit sector, as they are to build the corporate sector.

A lover of all things blueberry and/or avocado, Hamoon is currently the Director of Strategy and Innovation for the Executive Vice President at TELUS. Previously, he was the Founding Director of Studio [Y], a leadership and innovation academy at MaRS, Canada’s largest innovation hub.

Hamoon has also founded a social enterprise which raised $1M in its first year, helped build Deloitte’s consulting business in the Caribbean, and taught as adjunct faculty. He is a member of the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference, a Rothschild Fellow at the University of Cambridge, a recipient of University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Math Alumni Achievement Medal, and a Canada Millennium Scholar. Through his most recent venture, Audacious Futures, Hamoon works with leaders and innovators across sectors and around the world on breakthrough innovation, transformation, impact, and re-imagining the future.

Recreation and Leisure Studies alumnus Dorothy Dowling (MA ’83) has revolutionized the world of hospitality marketing. In 2014, Dorothy was named the 27th most influential Chief Marketing Officer by Forbes Magazine and has since risen to the 18th most influential in 2015! Dorothy’s passion for marketing, dynamic leadership skills, and profound dedication to her profession have helped distinguish her in the industry.

Joining Best Western in 2004, Dorothy serves as the Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales and has successfully implemented award winning programs leading to the hotel chain’s accelerated growth over 12 years. She has rebranded the brand’s loyalty program, Best Western Rewards, which more than doubled its revenue contribution percentage. Under Dorothy’s leadership, Best Western has transitioned into a business that now focuses on marketing and sales. She has thrived in securing branding partnerships with large organizations such as Disney and Expedia. Prior to her work with Best Western, Dorothy was highly influential in her executive roles in organizations such as ARAMARK and Travelodge Canada.

Dorothy’s contributions to the hospitality industry have had great impact. She has been recognized with a number of awards and honours, including receiving the prestigious American Hotel Foundation Award for Best Practices in Guest Loyalty Programs, and was among HSMAI’s Top 25 Extraordinary Minds in Sales and Marketing two times. Additionally, in 2014, Dowling was inducted into the Direct Marketing News Marketing Hall of Femme. She serves as a leading figure in a number of hospitality and tourism industry associations, including Global Business Travel Association Allied Leadership Council as the Vice-President and Chair of the Hospitality Sales and Marketing International Association.

A 2011 Health Studies graduate, Kim continued her education by pursuing a Master of Science and is currently a doctoral student in Health Research Methodology at McMaster University.

Since graduating, Kim has managed five large-scale multinational clinical trials in orthopaedic surgery, working directly with surgeons and site coordinators in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Her work with this multinational prevalence study, published in the Lancet, garnered international media attention. Kim’s research led to the development and implementation of procedures that no longer solely assess the physical health of abused women, but also their mental health.

Kim remains highly engaged with the University of Waterloo through Co-operative Education. She has supervised 15 Waterloo co-op students and 2 recent grads. With Kim’s mentorship and guidance, two Waterloo co-op students successfully published their research papers in peer reviewed medical journals.

Kim is the recipient of several honours and awards including the McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences award for Outstanding Achievement in a Graduate program, awarded to the top 10% of graduating students (2014), the Health Methodology Excellence award (2016), McMaster University President’s Award for Outstanding Service, the highest honor for non-teaching members within McMaster University (2014) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Scholarship (2016).

At age 17, Barbara Paldus (BASc ’93, BMath ’93) walked into the Waterloo Engineering undergraduate office to enroll in classes. When she was asked which program she was interested in, Barbara responded by asking a question of her own: Which program was the hardest to get into?

Not content to simply study electrical engineering at Waterloo, she pursued an applied math degree at the same time. Barbara graduated from both programs in 1993. Her exceptional grades earned her a spot in graduate school at Stanford, where she developed a spectrometer a million times more sensitive than existing instruments.

Doctoral degree in hand, Barbara set about commercializing her invention. It was a crash course in everything from raising capital and building teams to developing real-world applications. Today, cavity ring-down spectroscopy is used for everything from detecting pipeline leaks to ensuring that every banana in a shipment ripens at the same time.

In 2005, Barbara co-founded Finesse Solutions in Silicon Valley to develop measurement and control systems for pharmaceutical bioreactors. Currently, she is focusing on developing miniature cell factories for immunotherapy by taking T-cells from a cancer patient’s blood and training them to attack the tumours. The company’s goal is to develop a desktop machine that makes that process possible within hospitals to help extend the life expectancy of people with advanced cancer. Barbara, whose work has been recognized with numerous prestigious honours, has been awarded a remarkable 21 patents and has 12 pending patent applications.

By every standard, Romesh Batra’s (MASc ’69) academic career has been truly outstanding. After graduating with his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Thapar University in India, he came to Waterloo where he completed his master’s degree, also in Mechanical Engineering. He pursued his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University where he graduated in 1972.

Romesh is currently the Clifton C. Garvin Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is also a world recognized leader in the science of failure of materials under extreme loads, such as those produced by roadside bombs.

His scholarly accomplishments are exceptional. He has mentored to completion 34 doctoral and 18 master’s students, and collaborated in research with 55 post-doctoral fellows. Nearly a dozen of his former PhD students hold faculty positions in India, China, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, France, the United States, and right here in Canada.

The dean of Engineering at Virginia Tech describes Romesh’s academic accomplishments in research, scholarship, teaching, service and outreach as stellar and among the best of any faculty member he’s ever known.

His numerous awards include the Honorary Membership Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his life-long outstanding accomplishments in research. The prestigious and highly competitive award is the highest honour bestowed by the society.

For his fourth-year Capstone Design project, Michael Litt (BASc ’11) designed a tool that could track how people watch marketing videos. The product became so successful that his Capstone Design team was chosen for a coveted spot at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s prestigious business incubator.

Since then, Michael, who graduated from Systems Design Engineering in 2011, along with Devon Galloway, also a Systems Design Engineering graduate, have built a comprehensive video marketing platform for recording, distributing and analyzing marketing videos. Vidyard is now one of Canada’s most successful tech startups and has attracted over 60 million dollars in venture capital and more than 1,000 global customers.

Despite his success in California, Michael returned to Waterloo Region to build Vidyard, which has inspired countless other young entrepreneurs to follow suit. The confidence shown by Michael to start and grow a great technology company has had an incredible impact on the startup community not only locally, but right across Canada.

His many awards and accolades include being recognized as one of 2016 Change Agents by Canadian Business magazine. Michael believes in giving back through supporting the University’s co-op program and hiring new graduates, many of them Waterloo Engineering students and alumni. In recognition of the company’s generosity, Vidyard has been named a top employer by the University.

As a student in the Local Economic Development program, Nirvana Champion (MAES '11) was the only Canadian selected to intern at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva, where she helped build a Toolkit on public-private partnerships. It was an experience that inspired her career goal of re-defining the way communities thrive through strategic policy interventions. Since then, she has had the opportunity to out her passion into practice in both the private and public sectors, first as a senior development analyst with Canada's top economic development consulting firm, Millier Dickinson Blais, and later running a one-woman economic development office in the Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville. Champion was then hired as the youngest economic development officer on the City of Toronto’s Entrepreneurship Services team, where she authored a five-year strategic plan to guide the work of entrepreneurship services; the first of its kind for Toronto.

Outside her accomplished professional life, Champion is committed to building the community of Ontario’s next leaders. She helped establish the Young Professionals Network for the Economic Developers Council of Ontario and served as its first President. Now more than 200 members strong, the organization hosts mentorship and networking events and recognizes rising talent through a Young Professional of the Year award. Champion herself received the 2012 EDCO President's Award in recognition of her impact.

William Zhou (BMath ’15) is the co-founder and CEO of Chalk.com, an education software company focused in K-12. William has been passionate about entrepreneurship from a young age, founding his first company in high school. He launched his first Internet business in 2010, which he sold at the age of 18 during his first year of computer science at the University of Waterloo.

To pursue the bigger challenge of changing education, William founded Chalk.com to create a productivity suite for K-12 teachers. Forbes recently named Zhou to the top 30 under 30 list. Today, Chalk.com is used in over 20,000 schools and Chalk.com is empowering teachers to focus on what matters most - their students.

The Faculty of Mathematics awarded William Zhou the Young Alumni Achievement Medal for 2016.

Joanna Duong (BMath ’04) took her passion for doing more with less and created the highly successful fashion company, Henkaa, which produces convertible apparel and accessories for women.

Jo’s family literally came to Canada with nothing more than the shirts on their backs and as the youngest of five, being resourceful, carving an identity, striving for growth and doing more with less are ingrained in her. After graduating from the University of Waterloo in 2004, Duong went into the real estate business. She was recognized for excellence, receiving the Coldwell Banker Sterling Award in 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2011. In 2010, Henkaa was started.

Jo (and Henkaa) believe in giving back and supporting women’s causes by participating in the Breast Cancer Run for the Cure, New Circles Prom Drive, Dress for Success, The Shoebox Project, and is an active partner of Plan Canada - Because I am a Girl.

The Faculty of Mathematics awarded Joanna Duong the Young Alumni Achievement Medal for 2016.

CEO, Pulse Microsystems

Tas Tsonis (BMath ’75) has been an entrepreneur in the computer industry for over thirty-five years, demonstrating leadership and a passion for innovation and for inspiring people.

Tas has a Bachelor Math in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Waterloo, and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

After several executive IT roles at General Foods, Atomic Energy of Canada and Maple Leaf Mills, Tas co-founded and incubated a series of successful technology companies in a variety of fields including mobile technology, design technology, cloud-based graphics engines and social e-commerce.

For many years, Tas’ primary focus has been Pulse Microsystems, a software company that he co-founded. Pulse transformed the personalization of apparel and accessories by creating game changing software that blends graphical algorithms, computer science and mathematics including computational geometry. He has been granted twelve US patents based on mathematical and graphical algorithms.

Tas came to UWaterloo from Athens, Greece after high school and lives with his wife in Kitchener and Vancouver. He is a father of three, has completed several marathons around the world and enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.

Founding Partner, Riverwood Capital, Menlo Park, CA

Nicholas Brathwaite (MSc ’83) is a successful technologist, engineer, entrepreneur, multinational business executive, and private equity and venture capital investor.

As a technologist, Nicholas has several patented inventions and pioneered the development of low-cost cell phones for developing countries. As an entrepreneur, he started several successful businesses which grew to annual revenues of $50M-$6B. As a business executive, he built and managed large multi-national teams and businesses. As an investor, he became a founding partner of Riverwood Capital in 2008, a private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology companies. His unique combination of technology know-how and commercial judgment ensured success of the many companies he developed, launched, managed, operated and championed. He also cofounded WRV, a venture capital firm that invests in tech start-ups.

After graduating from University of Waterloo, Nicholas started his career at Intel Corporation earning his first patent and developed some of the most advanced semiconductors assembly and packaging technologies of that time. He was a founding member of nChip which developed industry-leading advanced, multi-chip module assembly process. He then served as the Chief Technology Officer at Flextronics where his expertise and innovation moved the company into product development, overseeing the launch and growth of several of the company’s largest business units.

Nicholas is on the Board of Directors of many public and several private technology companies in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, China, Japan, and India.

Associate Professor of Surgery and Oncology, Western University, London, ON

Dr. Pautler (BSc ’92) pioneered robotic surgery for prostate cancer and has championed robotic surgery services for urology surgery. Following five years of surgical training in the urology residency at The University of Western Ontario, Dr. Pautler spent two years of post-graduate surgical training at the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, performing both clinical and basic science research in minimally invasive interventions for urologic cancers. Additionally, he worked on molecular cloning and signal transduction mechanisms in kidney and prostate cancer, before joining the staff the Department of Surgery at Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western, in 2002. During the evolution of his career, he developed the first robotic surgery program in Canada and has performed the most robotic surgeries of any surgeon in any surgical discipline.

An active patient advocate and highly regarded teacher and researcher, he has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, several chapters, has presented at numerous international urology meetings, and has been successful in obtaining peer-reviewed grant funding. He is a Canadian expert in hereditary kidney cancer syndromes and robotic surgery. Dr. Pautler provides leadership in provincial health care in his roles as the Southwest Regional Surgical Oncology Lead for Cancer Care Ontario and the Provincial Lead for Urologic Surgery, Access to Care.

His current interests include surgical quality improvement, robotics, the application of minimally-invasive surgical techniques and image-guided ablative procedures for urologic cancers.

Dean of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto
Rector of St. James’ Cathedral, Toronto

Dean Andrew Asbil (BSc ’85) is a leader in Canadian urban ministry within the Anglican Church of Canada. As rector of the Church of the Redeemer (2001-2015), located in the heart of downtown Toronto, Asbil has developed new and different ways to carry out ministry in an urban setting so that both the homeless and the banker feel welcome within the parish community. He has been at the forefront and a leader in creating inclusive communities within the Church for members of the LGBT community. Under Dean Asbil’s leadership, the Church of the Redeemer lunch program grew to feed over 100 people a day, five days a week, 44 weeks a year. The $130,000 cost of the program is funded mostly by the weekly open plate offerings of the parish. Asbil has been a courageous leader, trying new things both in liturgy and socially with an uncanny ability to mobilize congregations towards social justice and advocacy. In 2016, Asbil began his appointment as Rector of the Cathedral Church of St. James and Dean of Toronto. For his extraordinary record of service to the Anglican Church of Canada, to the community, to the marginalized, and to Renison University College, Renison was pleased to name Dean Andrew Asbil a Distinguished Alumnus of the College.

Nancy McCalder (née Derbyshire) (BA ’78) is a graduate of the Honours Co-op Recreation and Leisure Studies program and lived at St. Paul's from 1973-74. Recently retired, Nancy spent over 25 years working in mental health awareness and advocacy in Alberta. As Executive Director of The Support Network, she worked with Alberta Health Services to create the Wellness Network, Alberta's first peer to peer mental health support service.

For much of her career, Nancy was a leading advocate to increase funding for and accessibility to mental health services in Alberta. Her work was instrumental in the development and expansion of services for Albertans such as the 24 Hour Distress Line, Suicide Grief Support and 211, a wayfinding telephone and web service to enhance wellness for users. She also was part of a national committee that is working towards the development of a national suicide prevention line.

As Executive Director of The Support Network, Nancy lead a team of volunteers, professionals and practitioners to deliver daily supports for people in crisis who seek information and for those impacted by a loss to suicide in the city of Edmonton. After retirement, Nancy established the McCalder Mental Wellness Foundation to continue her support of mental health services in her community.

In recognition of her long service to the people of Alberta as a leading advocate, practitioner and for working to eliminate the stigma of mental health, Nancy was recently named recipient of the 2016 True Leadership Award by the Lieutenant Governor's Circle on Mental Health and Addiction.