Thursday, October 15, 2026

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• Join us for President Rosehart’s official installation

• How tiny technology is changing industries

• Uniting visionaries

Join us for President Rosehart’s official installation

On Thursday, October 22, Waterloo will celebrate Dr. Bill Rosehart at his presidential installation: a formal ceremony that marks this new chapter of the University’s leadership.    

The event will be broadcast via livestream from 3 to 4 p.m. and everyone in the University community is invited to attend. Register to view the ceremony.

Celebrations are always better together. Gather your team, department, class, or colleagues for a watch party, and send us your pictures. Following the installation, President Rosehart will select one group for a visit—and he won't arrive empty-handed. More details are available on the Presidential Installation webpage.

In advance of the installation, we’re collecting congratulatory messages from across the University community and the President would love to hear from you. With your permission, messages may be featured on the Presidential Installation webpage and in other University communications.   

Thank you for helping mark this momentous occasion for the University of Waterloo.

How tiny technology is changing industries

This article was originally published in Waterloo News.

The field of nanotechnology is enabling unprecedented precision on a tiny scale. Across the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Science, researchers are innovating nanotechnology to develop solutions to challenges in medicine, chemical manufacturing, and electronics. By designing materials at the nanoscale, scientists are discovering new possibilities that could improve our day-to-day lives.

Improving drug delivery through nanotechnology

At the School of Pharmacy, Dr. Marianna Foldvari and her team are developing nanoscale delivery technologies that help drugs, biologics, vaccines, and gene therapies navigate the body’s natural barriers. By enabling non-invasive delivery through the skin, eye, and nose, their work is creating new opportunities for treating skin, ocular, and neurological diseases.

Biological barriers designed to protect us, such as the skin, the eye, and the blood-brain barrier, can also prevent medicine from reaching diseased tissues. Researchers in the Foldvari Lab are developing nanomedicines that address this by packaging therapies inside carefully designed carriers. These carriers protect therapeutic agents, improve their stability, and help transport them to their intended destination.

“Conventional medicines are often distributed broadly throughout the body, even when only a small amount is needed in one specific tissue,” Foldvari says. “Nanotechnology allows us to control the journey a therapy takes. The therapeutic provides the message and the nanocarrier ensures the message reaches its destination.”

Foldvari’s lab is advancing drug delivery technologies for retinal, skin and neurological diseases, based on the belief that the future of medicine depends on delivering therapies precisely where they are needed. For example, her team has used nanotechnology to deliver neuroprotective genes to retinal tissues to preserve vision and slow neurodegeneration and has demonstrated highly efficient intranasal delivery of neuroprotective agents to the brain.

More precise drug delivery could improve treatment effectiveness, reduce side effects, and help make advanced therapies practical for a broader range of diseases. As treatments become tailored to an individual's genetics and disease profile, nanoscale delivery systems will need to become equally precise. By working at the same scale as the molecules, cells, and biological processes they seek to influence, Foldvari and her team are helping unlock new possibilities for precision medicine.

Advancing sustainable chemical manufacturing with nanoparticles

Clean energy solutions are often focused on how we generate and store electricity. However, another emissions challenge gets far less attention: how chemicals are made. Fossil feedstocks, high temperatures, and large, centralized plants manufacture fuels, fertilizers, plastics, and industrial chemicals. In Dr. Anna Klinkova’s lab in the Department of Chemistry, researchers are designing nanoparticles that let renewable electricity drive those reactions instead.  

“We are exploring ways to convert carbon dioxide into fuels and chemical feedstocks, using captured carbon as a building block for organic synthesis rather than simply treating it as waste,” Klinkova says. “We are also developing processes to recover nitrogen from urea and ammonia in wastewater, and more recently, we’ve begun working on ways to produce hydrogen peroxide, an important industrial oxidant, on site and on demand.”  

Each avenue of research has the same goal: replacing heat and fossil carbon with electrons and a well-designed catalyst. Researchers synthesize metal nanoparticles (crystals measuring only tens of nanometers across). By controlling their size, shape, composition, and atomic arrangement, they create highly efficient electrocatalysts that allow renewable electrons to drive complex chemical reactions. “Making a reaction go faster is comparatively easy," Klinkova says. "Making it go one way and not another is the hard part, and it's decided by structure.  

While research remains in its early stages, the goal is to replace carbon-intensive fossil fuels with clean, renewable electricity to manufacture chemicals, fuels and everyday materials directly from recycled waste.

Nanotechnology for next-generation technology

Each year, electronics get smaller, faster and more powerful. However, conventional technologies are reaching their limits, and we need new materials to drive innovation. In Dr. Adam Wei Tsen’s lab in the Department of Chemistry, researchers are exploring ultra-thin two-dimensional quantum materials reduced to the nanoscale that could pave the way for next-generation technology.  

“Two-dimensional materials have a layered structure similar to graphite, which means they can be stabilized all the way down to a single layer,” Tsen says. “In single-layer materials, the natural interaction between layers disappears, completely changing how electricity, magnetism and light behave within them. By artificially stacking these layers back together in new combinations, we can engineer entirely new properties that do not exist in nature."  

This cutting-edge research takes place at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, one of the top quantum information research institutes in the world. The team is using these ultra-thin materials to build advanced light sensors, such as broadband photodetectors that allow a single, microscopic sensor to see a massive range of light. This research could lead to more compact and higher-functioning light-sensing solutions for security and diagnostic applications.

Uniting visionaries

This article was originally published in Optometry & Vision Science News.

The University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry unites vision researchers through its newly launched Vision Science Consortium.

The University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science is proud to announce the launch of the Waterloo Eye Institute Vision Science Consortium (WEI VSC), connecting researchers across campus who are working to understand, protect, and enhance human vision.

At the helm of its establishment is Dr. Austin Roorda, a professor in the School of Optometry and Vision Science. When Roorda joined the school, he set a goal to establish new connections to advance his research. He has always viewed vision science as a multidisciplinary field that requires expertise from a wide range of disciplines.

He found that collaborative approaches to innovative solutions are embedded in Waterloo’s culture. In Optometry, Lyndon Jones and Maud Gorbet (Systems Design Engineering) have collaborated for more than 20 years, bringing together complementary expertise in vision science, biomaterials and engineering to advance knowledge of tear film and contact lenses, Krista Kelly has teamed up with Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo (Kinesiology and Health Sciences) to study hand-eye coordination in children with strabismus, and Stanley Woo is also working with Helen Chen (School of Public Health) to develop Can-View, a national eye data repository for AI-driven vision care.

Roorda’s goal is to accelerate more research partnerships like this by developing a community that will strengthen, showcase and leverage the depth of vision science expertise at Waterloo.

“Unlike most disciplines where researchers are trained with a single set of skills and apply them in different areas, Vision Science is a field where multiple disciplines are directed toward one system – human vision,” says Roorda. “This is why the consortium is so important. By facilitating multidisciplinary collaborations, the WEI-VSC will ensure that the University of Waterloo will be better poised to make impacts in vision healthcare and research.”

The WEI VSC comprises 57 researchers from 12 departments and spans 37 research areas. More than half of the consortium’s members are researchers outside the School of Optometry and Vision Science, a testament to Waterloo’s breadth of expertise and culture of collaboration.

The vision for the WEI VSC is to build a community that will serve as a one-stop hub for current and prospective researchers looking for collaborators. Through these connections, the consortium also aims to foster more interdisciplinary training opportunities for students, whether informally or through joint degree programs.

“The WEI is a national resource for education, clinical care and research,” says Ben Thompson, the Director of the School of Optometry. “The VSC provides a platform that will accelerate activity in all three of these areas enabling the development of new knowledge, skills, technologies and treatments.”

Learn more about the Waterloo Eye Institute and Vision Science Consortium.