News

Congratulations to fourth-year Chemical Engineering students Gavin Lee, Nishita Saha, Minh Trinh and Andy Yang for the great success they have had generating interest in their new technology: a low-cost, biodegradable replacement for single-use plastic cutlery. With their $5,000 Concept $5K award, $10,000 Esch Pitch Competition win and $3,000 Bhattacharya Capstone Design Award, the Capstone Design team known as UWTensil is moving forward on their plan to take their fourth-year design project to market.

The Waterloo Engineering Society has, once again, named Chemical Engineering’s Undergraduate Advisor and Program Administrator, Denise Mueller, a Friend of the Society.

Inspired to help accelerate the global sustainable energy transition, chemical engineering student Monika Mikhail started a new Student Energy chapter within the University of Waterloo Energy Network (UWEN). When the chapter hosted its first Ener-Challenge on March 6^th, five teams of UWaterloo students learned to identify barriers to clean and sustainable energy access and use the iterative design process to formulate effective solutions. 

Professor Rajinder (Raj) Pal of the Department of Chemical Engineering is a world-renowned researcher and an award-winning instructor with a reputation for helping students understand some of the discipline’s most complex and abstract concepts relating to transport phenomena and thermodynamics.

Zhongwei Chen, Canada Research Chair in Advanced Materials for Clean Energy and Chemical Engineering Professor and Linda Nazar, Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials and University Professor, received more than $2 million in infrastructure funding from the federal government’s Canada Foundation for Innovation for the proposed Ontario Centre for Battery and Electrochemical Research.

Chemical Engineering Professor Tizazu Mekonnen has been named Inaugural Director of the Indigenous and Black Engineering and Technology (IBET) PhD Project. This new partnership, which includes the University of Waterloo and five other Ontario universities, aims to diversify academia and Canadian technology industries by increasing the number of Indigenous and Black Canadians pursuing engineering and technology degrees at universities across Ontario.

With deep sadness, we announce the death of second-year Chemical Engineering student Mihir Rodrigues, who passed away from a heart-related issue on December 29th, 2020, while he was at home in India.

When faced with a new challenge, it never hurts to call a friend for advice. But, as many first-year students discover, it can be difficult to find someone who can relate. Fortunately, this year’s new chemical engineering students have exactly that – an experienced buddy to steer them in the right direction.

The University of Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering ranks first in Canada in the latest National Taiwan University Ranking, which measures universities’ research output and impact.

This is the eighth consecutive year in which our department has been ranked first among all of the chemical engineering departments in Canada, an honour it has held for 9 of the 11 years that NTU has ranked the top 300 universities in 10 subjects.

The Department of Chemical Engineering’s Aiping Yu has been awarded a prestigious 2020 E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship.

Each year, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) recognizes six highly promising early-stage researchers in the natural sciences and engineering with an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, in recognition of their efforts and to enhance their research capacity so that they can become leaders in their field and inspire others.