Raafat R. Mansour, Ph.D., P.Eng., F.I.E.E.E., F.E.I.C., FCAE, was honoured at the 2014 Ontario Professional Engineers Awards with the Engineering Medal for Research and Development.
The Engineering Medal honours those association members who have contributed substantially to advancing the engineering profession, and recognizes excellence in the practice of engineering.
Considered our country’s foremost researcher, and among the world’s best, in the field of microwave engineering, Dr. Raafat Mansour has vaulted Canada to the forefront of the international microwave and radio frequencies (RF) technologies community through nearly 30 years of groundbreaking initiatives.
Dr. Mansour has had a unique and productive career, holding distinguished positions in both industry, as a director of research and development at COM DEV, and academe, as a professor at the University of Waterloo. He currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Micro-Nano Integrated RF Systems and has lso held an NSERC Industrial Research Chair for 10 years.
His research at COM DEV brought international success and recognition to the company, which is a world leader in providing satellite payload equipment to the space industry. Until 1995, it was widely accepted by the scientific community that superconductor filters had reached their peak performance and would never be capable of handling power levels above three to five watts. Dr. Mansour’s research incontrovertibly disproved this assumption, demonstrating superconducting filters capable of handling more than 50 watts.
Dr. Mansour developed a superconductive multiplexer that is 50 per cent smaller in size and mass by comparison with conventional multiplexer technologies. This device is considered the benchmark in the miniaturization of satellite systems. In 1996, Dr. Mansour’s superconductive multiplexer was successfully flown as part of a space experiment package on the U.S. Advanced Research Global Observation Satellite (ARGOS), which demonstrated the viability of using the superconductive technology for space applications.
In making the transition to academe, Dr. Mansour took his research in new directions.
In 2004, he established the only cleanroom facility in Canada that is dedicated to RF micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) research, providing critical MEMS fabrication support to researchers across Canada. This University of Waterloo facility has enabled the launch of a new avenue of research that has paved the way to the development of a wide range of highly advanced RF MEMS devices and low-cost nano-instrumentation technologies
- Professional Engineers of Ontario (http://peo.on.ca/index.php/ci_id/28104/la_id/1.htm)
Congratulations Dr. Mansour!