Thursday, October 14, 2021

Engineering alumni make US $1.75-billion sale

Business partners Frank Baylis, left, and Kris Shah met during their first year of undergraduate studies at Waterloo Engineering in the early 1980s.

By Brian Caldwell. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

A company that is co-owned by former classmates at Waterloo Engineering has hit pay dirt with the sale of its cardiology business for US $1.75 billion.

Baylis Medical Company Inc., which is co-owned by Frank Baylis (BASc ’86, electrical engineering) and Kris Shah (BASc ’86, electrical engineering), announced this week that it has reached a deal with Boston Scientific Corp. that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

Baylis, executive chairman of the Montreal-based business, and Shah, the president, met during a co-op placement during their first year as engineering students at Waterloo.

In 1989, they both joined Baylis Medical – which had been started by Baylis’s mother, Gloria, three years earlier – and built it into a leading medical devices company with offices worldwide. They previously sold two other divisions to major US companies.

Staunch supporters of Waterloo Engineering

“Baylis Medical Company is proud of its Canadian roots and commitment to investing in the Canadian biomedical sector,” Shah said in a media release.

Frank Baylis, also a former Liberal MP, and Shah were honoured by Waterloo Engineering in 2014 with the Faculty’s Team Alumni Achievement Medal, and have both  been staunch financial supporters of their alma mater.

In addition to backing an entrance scholarship in honour of Gloria Baylis and an annual award for a Capstone Design project with a biomedical focus, the company donated $300,000 in 2016 for a student garage in Engineering 7 to provide biomedical engineering students with dedicated space to work on their senior-year projects.

The sale to Boston Scientific is expected to drive global growth and adoption of the Baylis cardiology devices, for which sales are now concentrated in the U.S. and Japan.

Baylis and Shah announced they will use proceeds from the sale to build another medical devices business, Baylis Medical Technologies, that is focused on radiology and neurosurgery.

Waste Week 2021: Rethinking Waste is just around the corner

A message from the Sustainability Office. 

The Sustainability Office invites all members of the campus community to participate in Waste Week 2021: Rethinking Waste. From October 18 to 24, students and employees can take part in planned zero-waste activities to rethink waste consumption and look at unique and innovative ways to reduce it. 

Waste Week Activities

• 3-Day Zero Waste Challenge (October 18-24) - Keep your jar as empty as possible, but more importantly to increase your awareness of how much and what kind of waste you produce for a minimum of 3 days so you can look for more sustainable alternatives. Registrar on the Sustainability Office website and complete a short follow up survey to enter to win a prize.
• Waste Warrior Sorting Game (October 18-24, App) – Are you a Waste Warrior or a Recycling Rookie? Test your knowledge about sorting waste and access resources for sorting at home. All respondents will be entered to win prizes. Download the Waste Sorting App at the App Store or Google Play. To enter to win, tag us online of your score once finished or send us an email at sustainability@uwaterloo.ca. 
• Waste Wise: Lifestyle & Cooking (October 20-21) Looking to be more waste conscious throughout your day? We challenge you to either have a zero-waste meal day or buy nothing for a day. To enter to win a prize, tag the Sustainability Office in a social media or send sustainability@uwaterloo.ca and email depicting your waste conscious meal day or how you avoided buying items for a day. All participants who entered to win some awesome prizes, including gift cards to Zero Waste Bulk and Swag.    

This year, the Sustainability Office is challenging all staff, students, and faculty members to take part in the zero waste (mason jar) challenge from work or home – wherever you are for a minimum of 3 days! 

To look at the full schedule of activities, outline of prizes and further details, please visit our website.

Latin American Heritage Month lecture coming up October 19

A message from the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies.

The Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies is happy to host Dr. Dolores Figueroa Romero’s lecture titled Binational Dialogues on the Challenges to Document Violence Against Indigenous Women in Mexico and Canada.

As part of our virtual celebration of Latin American Heritage Month, Dr. Figueroa Romero will present on her work to bring together academics and local leaders from Canada and Mexico to analyze gendered violence affecting Indigenous women.  

When: October 19, 11:00 a.m.

Where: MS Teams. A link will be shared with registrants a few days before the event. 

RSVP: Email Jorge Castaneda Ochoa at j3castanedaochoa@uwaterloo.ca.

Wandering minds and dysfunctional emotions

By Wendy Philpott and Effie Pereira. This article was originally published on Waterloo News.

Most of us experience the world in two different states of mind. In one, we're attentive and focused on what we’re doing, and in the other we wander through our mental landscape. These states of mind wandering occur 30 to 50 per cent of our daily lives says Dr. Effie Pereira, the inaugural Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts. While science has studied states of attention for over a century, mind wandering remains a lot less understood, she adds.

Pereira’s previous research was one of the first to identify that the predictability of mind wandering is a core factor that determines how this state of mind can affect a person for better or worse. As a cognitive scientist and postdoctoral member of Professor Daniel Smilek’s Vision and Attention Lab based in Psychology, Pereira is deepening her study on the link between mind wandering and affective dysfunction — or negative mental health outcomes.

Here, Pereira unpacks her research and the app she’s developing to collect real-world mind wandering data — and why Waterloo and the Lupina fellowship are a good fit for this work.

Could you tell us a bit about mind wandering?

Mind wandering can be considered a state of internal attention, when our thoughts are not tied to our external environment. One way it can occur is intentionally, when we purposely or willingly choose to shift our attention away from our immediate situation to our internal thoughts. But another way it occurs is unintentionally, where this shift happens unexpectedly or involuntarily, similar to the surprising feeling we might have when we’re talking to a friend and we realize we've just lost the last minute of our conversation.

And what is affective dysfunction?

Affective states are used to define a broad range of feelings, thoughts, moods, and emotions that characterize how we’re subjectively experiencing things on a moment-to-moment basis. These can encompass positive affects like happiness and pleasure and excitement, but it can also mean negative affects, such as nervousness, frustration, and fear. So affective dysfunction is a state that occurs when an individual finds themselves temporally stuck in a negative state for either a short period of time or a very long period.

Okay, great. Now please tell us about your research project titled Unpredictable minds and dysfunctional emotions: The link between predictability of unintentional mind wandering and affective dysfunction in everyday life.

Past research supports the idea that people who tend to mind wander more tend to experience increased states of affective dysfunction — such as decreased happiness. And recent work from my advisor Dan Smilek’s lab has also found that these negative affective states were specifically associated with unintentional states of mind wandering. So, there are these tight links between these two constructs. And that's where some of my work comes in.

In my PhD work I found that each of us has a very specific style of mind wandering that is either very predictable or unpredictable. And it's this predictable nature of mind wandering — when you have a very cyclical or recurring pattern where you can’t stop your mind from wandering — where we tend to find an association with negative outcomes. In my Lupina postdoc work, I’m exploring this link between the predictability of mind wandering and negative outcomes by focusing on the predictability of intentional versus unintentional mind wandering and how these relate to affective dysfunction.

How does the smartphone app figure into this research?

Within cognitive science, one of the things that we try to keep developing is new and novel ways to examine real world behaviour — because there's really only so much that we can do to simulate this within the laboratory. But there are also ways to bring the laboratory into the real world. And that's what my work at the University of Waterloo is focusing on.

The smartphone app I'm currently developing and programming will be used by study participants who would keep it turned on during everyday activities. The app will message them at random intervals and ask them to document aspects of their mind wandering throughout the day. The notion that everyone carries their smartphone with them allows us to capture this wide and diverse range of behaviours and activities that we wouldn't really be able to test otherwise. And the app users can actually check out what their patterns of attention and mind wandering look like throughout the day. While it’s not meant to be diagnostic, it is a way for individuals to feel more connected to the scientific process they’re participating in.

With its emphasis on the social determinants of health, what attracted you to apply for the Lupina postdoc?

Larger demographic, societal or environmental factors, such as experiences of racism or historical trauma, are all negative determinants of health. So there's a lot more work that needs to be done to determine not just the effect, but also the intersectionality of these determinants and how they contribute to different outcomes. And while I'm a cognitive scientist who is very much focused on brain mechanisms and behaviour, individuals are not independent from their environment, and I think it's vital to understand what these embedded spheres of influence mean, even within a cognitive science framework.

One of the big reasons for joining Waterloo as a postdoctoral researcher is my current advisor, Dan Smilek, who is widely regarded for his expertise in attention and mind wandering. I'm excited to be part of such a creative team within his lab and within the Psychology department as a whole, as part of the next generation of researchers that are unpacking the connection between cognitive states and health outcomes. Waterloo’s research excellence and track record are just very clear – and the perfect place for me to continue my postdoc.

Your Daily Inspiration continues and other notes

Today's Daily Inspiration

October is Islamic Heritage Month

Honour and celebrate the significant contributions made by Muslims within the University of Waterloo community and beyond. Explore the many events, supports, resources, communities, and educational tools.

See all Daily Inspirations on the Keeping Well at Work conference site. Questions and contest entries can be sent to ohd@uwaterloo.ca or tweet @OHDuwaterloo.

The Thrive Creative Showcase will be kicking off Tuesday, October 19 and will run until Friday, November 12. "Share your mental health and wellness journey by expressing how you manage and destigmatize mental health challenges through writing, music, or any expression of art," says a note on the Thrive website. "Examples include stories, paintings, drawings, photography, sculptures, videos, music, songs, podcasts, etc. These will be showcased during Thrive month on the Thrive website and through social media."

Submit your creative piece on the Thrive Creative Showcase Submission tool between October 19 and November 11.