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Researcher awarded prestigious Singapore water prize
A renowned Waterloo hydrogeology professor, who helped set global standards for safely disposing hazardous waste, received the 2016 Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize this week.
John Cherry, now a distinguished professor emeritus, is the first Canadian to receive the prestigious prize. Cherry, who spent his career dedicated to groundwater management and protection, received the honour in the company of water experts from around the world, including a Waterloo delegation, at Singapore International Water Week. The honour came with a prize of more than $280,000 CDN.
“It is a great honour for me to be the 2016 recipient of the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize,” Cherry said in his acceptance speech. “I am most pleased because this prize granted to me draws attention to the importance of groundwater in the global water crisis.”
Cherry, who joined Waterloo’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in 1971 when it was known as the Department of Earth Sciences, worked to set benchmark criteria for choosing safe disposal sites for hazardous industrial and nuclear waste that were later adopted into regulatory frameworks around the world.
Cherry says he plans to use some of the prize money to update, translate and publish his Hydrogeologists Without Borders textbook online. In 1979, Cherry co-authored the book under the title Groundwater.
The University of Waterloo and its Water Institute are participating in Singapore International Water Week in a number of ways. The Water Institute has a booth at the Canada Pavilion, and Interim Associate Vice-President, International Ian Rowlands and the Water Institute's Kevin Boehmer and Roy Brouwer are all at the event, attending presentations, staffing the booth and representing Waterloo in Singapore.
Read more about Cherry’s award and legacy.
Students win big with tiny device at competition
This article was originally published on the Engineering news site.
A device that harvests ambient emissions from smartphones and converts them into power to run smart contact lenses has earned a team of Waterloo Engineering students a third-place finish and a $4,500 US prize in an international design competition.
Fifty student teams vied for honours at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in Puerto Rico after being challenged to design and build power-harvesting devices capable of turning radio-frequency emissions into useful DC power.
Supervised by electrical and computer engineering professor George Shaker, the multidisciplinary Waterloo team included master’s student Luyao Chen and undergraduates Ben Milligan and Shiran Qu.
They met the challenge with a tiny harvesting device to power contact lenses equipped to monitor glucose levels in the tears of wearers with diabetes, an idea now being developed by companies including Google and Microsoft.
“A smart contact lens is the next step towards taking control of our own health,” the students said in a supporting video. “Team Waterloo has brought us that much closer to making it a reality.”
The students noted that diabetes, which can lead to health problems including heart attacks, strokes and nerve damage without careful glucose monitoring, is expected to affect 380 million people worldwide by 2025.
Tuesday's notes
As far as Internet mysteries go, here's one with a Waterloo twist: users on the University of Waterloo's unofficial subreddit are currently trying to figure out how and why a character in the 2014 Japanese movie Fushigi na misaki no monogatari or, if you prefer, Cape Nostalgia, is pictured wearing a University of Waterloo leather jacket, thousands of kilometres from the nearest Waterloo Retail Services outlet.
The character, played by popular Japanese actor Hiroshi Abe, wears the jacket in several scenes during the movie.
Waterloo redditors are poring over screenshots of the film to determine the faculty and year of the Waterloo jacket. Think you can identify the jacket's vintage? Why not track down a copy of the movie and try your luck?
Velocity and the Faculty of Science will be celebrating the grand opening of the new Velocity Science lab today from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Located in the Earth Sciences and Chemistry (ESC) building, the lab, which has tripled in size to 2,500 square feet, is fully operational, with many science startups already utilizing the discovery space. The expansion will better provide students interested in building a science startup with the lab space, equipment, and mentorship needed to initiate and develop world-class science companies.
Refreshments will be provided.
“The Science Undergrad Office (SUO), in STC 2031, will be closed tomorrow (Wednesday, July 13) from 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., due to Science 101," says a message from the SUO. " We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Check the SUO webpage for regular office hours. Don't forget to sign up for our drop-in hours!”