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Waterloo Magazine looks at Then and Now
The spring issue of Waterloo Magazine is now live, and the theme of the issue is Then and Now. This issue celebrates how the University of Waterloo’s legacy of learners, innovators and changemakers are leading a future of opportunity and impact.
"The origins of the University of Waterloo are genuinely inspiring," writes President and Vice-Chancellor Vivek Goel in his message that kicks off the issue. "An institution founded by its local community has grown over the past 65 years to become a globally recognized driver of innovation and impact. Together, our students, faculty, staff, alumni and community have driven Waterloo’s rich history and helped to shape its future. This issue will undoubtedly stir up nostalgia as you return to campus through photography and stories."
Waterloo Magazine is produced by a team of people from across the University – led by University Relations in collaboration with the Office of Advancement. The stories, illustrations and photography are a testament and celebration of the impact that Waterloo alumni, researchers, students and staff continue to have.
Content highlights
- Looking to our past to inspire our future - a message from President and Vice-chancellor Vivek Goel.
- Coming home - Alumnus and Professor Emeritus Ken McLaughlin (BA ’65) dives into Waterloo’s unique history and describes how the University helped shape his life.
- That band played here? - Alumni Betty Anne Keller (BA ’69) and Joe Recchia (BASc ’68, MASc ’71) share how the power of music did more than bring people together at UWaterloo. It transformed the social scene.
- There’s something in the Water(loo) - The success of global tech giants and Waterloo’s rich startup ecosystem fuels a collaborative spirit by attracting the best talent to a thriving community.
- Computing pioneer Wes Graham: Inspiring the impossible - The innovator, entrepreneur and “father of computing” who helped chart Waterloo’s path to the future.
If you like what you read in this issue, share the stories online using the hashtag #UWaterlooMagazine and tag @uwaterlooalumni.
Campus clean-up went beyond trash talk
A message from the Sustainability Office.
In honour of Earth Day (April 22), the Sustainability Office hosted their annual campus clean-up event last week. On Friday afternoon, more than 100 employees and students helped to pick up litter from “hotspots” around main campus, collecting over 80 bags of trash. Several groups also hosted smaller clean-ups throughout the month, including parts of the Health Sciences Campus in downtown Kitchener. Among the top litter culprits were bottle caps, wrappers, plastic lids and drink cups, reminding us that much of this litter can be reduced at the source with reusable alternatives.
The campus clean-up is also an important reminder of our shared responsibility to be good stewards of our environment and the collective impact we can achieve when we work together. A special shoutout goes to many departments in the Green Office program, including teams from the Centre for Career Action, Centre for Teaching Excellence, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dean of Environment Office, Finance, Geography and Environmental Management, Institutional Analysis & Planning, Information Systems & Technology, Library, Plant Operations (Campus Services), Recreation and Leisure Studies, Renison University College, Safety Office, School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability, School of Pharmacy, and Student Success Office!
Stay tuned for several upcoming events to support biodiversity and nature on campus and at home, including a Seedling Swap on May 17 and a tree planting event in late May.
New programmable smart fabric responds to temperature and electricity
A new smart material developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo is activated by both heat and electricity, making it the first ever to respond to two different stimuli.
The unique design paves the way for a wide variety of potential applications, including clothing that warms up while you walk from the car to the office in winter and vehicle bumpers that return to their original shape after a collision.
Inexpensively made with polymer nano-composite fibres from recycled plastic, the programmable fabric can change its colour and shape when stimuli are applied.
“As a wearable material alone, it has almost infinite potential in AI, robotics and virtual reality games and experiences,” said Dr. Milad Kamkar, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo. “Imagine feeling warmth or a physical trigger eliciting a more in-depth adventure in the virtual world.”
The novel fabric design is a product of the happy union of soft and hard materials, featuring a combination of highly engineered polymer composites and stainless steel in a woven structure.
Researchers created a device similar to a traditional loom to weave the smart fabric. The resulting process is extremely versatile, enabling design freedom and macro-scale control of the fabric’s properties.
The fabric can also be activated by a lower voltage of electricity than previous systems, making it more energy-efficient and cost-effective. In addition, lower voltage allows integration into smaller, more portable devices, making it suitable for use in biomedical devices and environment sensors.
“The idea of these intelligent materials was first bred and born from biomimicry science,” said Kamkar, director of the Multi-scale Materials Design (MMD) Centre at Waterloo.
“Through the ability to sense and react to environmental stimuli such as temperature, this is proof of concept that our new material can interact with the environment to monitor ecosystems without damaging them.”
The next step for researchers is to improve the fabric’s shape-memory performance for applications in the field of robotics. The aim is to construct a robot that can effectively carry and transfer weight to complete tasks.
A paper on the research, Multi-Stimuli Dually-Responsive Intelligent Woven Structures with Local Programmability for Biomimetic Applications, appears in the journal Nano-Micro Small.
N Drive for several faculties heading to that big cloud storage facility in the sky
A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST)
Effective April 30, 2023, the IST-hosted individual user network drives and related profiles for employees ('fileu' and 'filep') and students ('files' and 'fileq') in the Faculties of Arts, Environment, Health, and Science will no longer be offered. Please note, Faculties of Math and Engineering host their own N: drives and are not included in this change.
Staff, students, and faculty in Arts, Environment, Health and Science need to:
- Migrate files you wish to keep from your N: drive to your OneDrive. Please follow the migration steps in the appropriate support article below.
- Update all relevant course notes that reference N: drives to point to an alternate, University-supported storage option (e.g., OneDrive).
Content must be migrated by April 30, 2023 to prevent data loss.
Additional Resources
Parking pass swaps and other exchanges
Looking to change your (parking) lot in life? Did you know that Parking Services offers employees with active parking passes an opportunity to switch parking lots with other employees who are looking to change lots? If you meet the eligibility criteria, you can put your information up on the parking pass swap site and hopefully connect with another employee looking to make a similar switch. It's like online dating, but not really. The successful transfer of parking permits must be done with Parking Services's approval, of course.
On Tuesday, May 16 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, the Extended Reality Community of Practice (XR CoP) will host an online session in which Lynn Long and Burcu Karabina will discuss their experience in Fall 2022 offering optional supplementary augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) learning activities via tutorials to second year multivariable calculus students. Feedback gathered indicated that both technologies enhanced student learning, that learning could be further enhanced by improving accessibility, and that complementary use of the two technologies merits further exploration. They will also discuss where they hope to go next. Note that the findings to be shared are relevant to all disciplines, not just STEM subjects.
Click here to join the meeting when it starts (no need to register in advance). All are welcome.