BME students named recipient and finalists of the Pearl Sullivan Emerging Global Leaders Award

Jarett Dewbury, the 2026 recipient of the Pearl Sullivan Emerging Global Leaders Award, has built an exceptional record of leadership, research and community building in engineering and AI. As a Biomedical Engineering student with a specialization in Medical Artificial Intelligence, he has spent his undergraduate years working to make advanced AI accessible, both in healthcare and within the student community at Waterloo.

As co-founder of WAT.ai, the University of Waterloo's AI Engineering Design Team, Jarett helped grow a community of more than 800 members, launching more than 40 collaborative projects and 10 publications. His research has taken him to MIT, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he has worked on AI diagnostics for resource-limited clinical settings. This work earned him a first-author publication at ICLR and the 2025 Faculty of Engineering Co-op Student of the Year Award.

Jarett plans to pursue a PhD and ultimately found a company focused on AI diagnostics for underserved health systems globally. He also intends to establish an international research scholarship supporting Waterloo undergraduates who present work at conferences abroad, removing the financial barriers he himself has navigated throughout his career.

Binalpreet Kalra is a Biomedical Engineering student whose path through Waterloo has been shaped by a conviction that people do their best work when they feel empowered to create. After building a strong foundation in software and hardware through roles at UW Blueprint, Hack the North and the Living Architecture Systems Group, she turned that belief into action by co-founding PRISM Collective, Waterloo's first student-run creative-tech design team. PRISM was built on the recognition that many engineering students are also artists and storytellers, but lack spaces to bring those identities together.

In under a year, PRISM grew to more than 600 community members working on more than ten interdisciplinary projects, with workshops across Waterloo, Toronto and Montreal. The collective secured $15,000 in funding for Rhythms of Chaos, a large-scale installation selected for the Lumière festival at Ontario Place's Trillium Park. Binalpreet also contributed to Nucleate Dojo's DojoGrants program, helping it grow from a $25,000 pilot to more than $150,000 in undergraduate research funding.

After graduating, Binalpreet plans to move to Toronto to continue growing PRISM and pursue formal training in art and design. Her longer-term goal is to open her own studio, developing open-source creative-tech tools and building spaces where engineering is imaginative, interdisciplinary and deeply human.