News

Filter by:

Limit to items where the date of the news item:
Date range
Limit to items where the date of the news item:
Limit to news where the title matches:
Limit to news items tagged with one or more of:
Limit to news items where the audience is one or more of:

During World War II, when countless wounded soldiers required a scarce and expensive medicine, chemical engineers helped solve the problem that had limited its availability. In a triumph of chemical engineering, John McKeen used deep-tank fermentation to scale up production of penicillin, the first modern antibiotic. Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, another talented chemical engineer, designed the first commercial-scale penicillin plant. 

With their contributions to penicillin’s breakthrough, McKeen and Hutchinson Rousseau helped reduce the cost per dose, save thousands of lives and set the course for the industrial-scale production of other lifesaving drugs. As today’s chemical engineers address the many threats associated with COVID-19, will we see chemical engineering triumph again?

The University of Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering is tied for first in Canada with the University of Alberta's Department of Chemical & Materials Engineering in the 2020 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, released by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.

The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, which also publishes the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), is an independent organization dedicated to “research on higher education intelligence and consultation.” It has been using a transparent methodology and objective third-party data to rank and present the world’s top universities since 2003 and academic subjects since 2009.

The Global Ranking of Academic Subjects measures universities’ quality of education, faculty, research output and influence, as measured by citations.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

CHE embraces remote teaching

When the coronavirus pandemic necessitated the closure of university campuses across Canada, the Department of Chemical Engineering quickly transitioned the last few weeks of classes online so students could finish their term from the safety of home. At the same time, our spring term instructors began adapting their lectures, which would begin in just a few short weeks, for online delivery. Now, with these experiences as a foundation, we are building upon our successes and incorporating the best aspects of remote teaching into our plans for future terms. 

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Capstone Awards Ceremony

On Thursday, April 30th, Chemical Engineering’s faculty and staff came together online with students and their families for the Capstone Awards Ceremony, a unique celebration of the many accomplishments of our fourth-year students. After logging in from home, where they watched the proceedings on their own computer screen, guests enjoyed an awards show to rival the Oscars, with heartfelt speeches, humorous skits and a musical performance.

Friday, May 1, 2020

Capstone Design goes online

The Capstone Design project reinforces the concepts of team work, project management, research and design. This year’s fourth-year Chemical Engineering students added video production to the list of skills they learned from the project.