Jarett Dewbury, a recent graduate from Waterloo's Biomedical Engineering undergraduate program and co-founder of WAT.ai, is the 2026 recipient of the Pearl Sullivan Emerging Global Leaders Award. This award is one of the Faculty of Engineering's highest student honours, celebrating a graduating student who has passionately worked to make the Engineering community a better place, and who will take that passion into a career focused on improving the human condition.
In Grade 8, Dewbury experienced a drastic growth spurt that his ligaments couldn't keep up with. As walking became difficult, and his family discovered that there were no commercially available solutions, they had to improvise a solution — a strap worn tightly below the kneecap. From this experience, he discovered his future career path — one in which he could address gaps in health care. This led him to the Biomedical Engineering undergraduate program at the University of Waterloo. According to Dewbury, the fusion of engineering design and problem-solving with biology and medicine stood out and helped to solidify his choice. He cites the strong co-op program as well as the cohort model as additional draws to Waterloo Engineering.
During his time at Waterloo, he completed two work terms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), independently securing the Emergent Ventures Fellowship to cover his living costs and visa requirements before his first placement began. While completing his first MIT work term, he stepped in to work on a stalled project on AI diagnostics for resource-limited clinical settings, completing in roughly three months what was scoped to take one year. This work resulted in a first-author publication at the International Conference on Learning Representations and the 2024 Faculty of Engineering Co-op Student of the Year Award.
Now, having graduated, he is heading back to his MIT lab to begin full-time research, still focusing on AI tools to make access to healthcare more equitable. He plans to use funds from his Pearl Sullivan Emerging Global Leaders Award to seed a scholarship to help Waterloo Engineering students present their research at international conferences by covering various associated expenses. Still in the early stages, discussions with the Faculty are underway.