Wednesday, August 19, 2026

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• Use your Health Care Spending Account (HCSA)
• Remembering Professor John North
• Reinventing home appraisals with AI nets $5 million raise

Use your Health Care Spending Account (HCSA) 

A Health Care Spending Account (HCSA) is available through GreenShield for eligible employees. The HCSA provides $300 per benefit policy year (which runs from May 1 to April 30), to be used for eligible health and dental expenses that are not covered by your extended health, dental, or your provincial health plans. Every May 1, you receive a $300 allocation for eligible expenses incurred before April 30 of the following year. Any unused funds may be carried forward for one additional year, for a maximum amount of $600; funds remaining after two years are forfeited.  

Employees are encouraged to explore the HSCA webpage to learn more about this benefit, what is eligible, and how you can use it to support your health and wellness needs.  

For detailed information on eligible expenses, HCSA claim submission procedures, and any applicable deadlines, please contact GreenShield.  

Remembering Professor John North

Dr. John North, professor of English, passed away August 10 at the age of 86, leaving a long legacy as a scholar and teaching at the University of Waterloo.

“John was a legendary teacher and researcher at Waterloo, who touched the lives of thousands of students, many of whom stayed in touch with him long after they graduated,” says Dr. Jay Dolmage, Director of the School of Critical and Creative Humanities.

“His courses on connections between the Bible and Literature were extremely important to students at Waterloo over the years. His research legacy, a very impactful one, is best characterized by the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900, which currently boasts entries for more than 73,000 titles and is an ongoing resource for other researchers and teachers.”

Originally from Vancouver, North joined the Department of English Language & Literature in September 1968 with the intention to return to British Columbia as soon as he could. In 2018, he celebrated 50 years at the University of Waterloo. At the time, he credited his students, colleagues and University administration as influencing his decision to make his home here.  His love of Victorian Studies, Shakespeare, Literature and the Bible and Children's Literature was as evident in his scholarship as it was the courses he developed in person and for distance education students.  

His impact as a teacher earned him a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003 not just for his passion for the material, but for the personal approach he brought to his classes. He was praised by students because he “showed us not so much how to ask questions of works of literature, but how they ask questions of us. It is our own lives we find dissected, probed, doubted, and spurred on to tackle questions of meaning, purpose and faith when we read literature.” 

Beyond the classroom, North was also a founding member of the Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University at the University of Waterloo and an avid volunteer in the community, including with Grand River Hospital and welcoming refugees arriving in Kitchener-Waterloo (being a second-generation immigrant himself).

Visitation will be held at the Henry Walser Funeral Home from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, August 21 and from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 22. The service will follow at 4 p.m. (in person and via livestream).  Read the obituary for more details.

Reinventing home appraisals with AI nets $5 million raise

This is an excerpt from an article that was originally published on Waterloo News.

Humza Ahmed (BASc, in progress) didn’t come to the University of Waterloo imagining he’d become a tech founder. In fact, his eyes were set far higher.

“I was planning to become an astronaut,” he says. “I was super into aerospace.”

But an unexpected twist in his co-op plans, and the influence of Waterloo’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, launched him on a wildly different trajectory. Today, Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Automax.ai, a fast-growing startup reinventing the home appraisal industry across North America.

Ahmed has now raised more than $5 million in funding, including an initial preseed investment followed by a major raise after completing Y Combinator.

Using Automax.ai’s mobile app, homeowners can scan their property in minutes. The app captures a 3D model and precise measurements and uses 700 data points using built-in LiDAR and computer vision. Licensed appraisers then review and sign the final reports.

The result is a process that traditionally takes weeks is now completed in 24 hours.

Ahmed credits Waterloo’s startup ecosystem including Velocity and the Conrad School for Entrepreneurship and Business as critical to his success to date.

Ahmed had never given much thought to entrepreneurship before a chance encounter with the late Dr. Wayne Chang, then director of the Enterprise Co-op (E Co-op) program offered by the Conrad School. Chang encouraged Ahmed to participate in the program, so he registered.

E Co-op gives Waterloo students an opportunity to build a business while earning co-op credit. Ahmed entered with no initial startup idea, so he started building anything he could. “I was just finding businesses and building custom AI solutions for them,” he says. “Dental clinics, e-commerce, basically whatever I could find.”

Read the full story in Waterloo News.