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Electrical engineering student Jordan Leis has been named a 2026 Cansbridge Fellow, joining a group of just 15 students selected from across Canada this year. The fellowship supports students developing their leadership and entrepreneurial skills through international experience.

Leis is scheduled to complete a self-organized internship in Asia in winter 2027. As a fellow, he will receive a $10,000 scholarship to support the placement, attend a bootcamp and conference in San Francisco, and join a lifelong network of mentors and alumni.

Now in its fourteenth year, the Cansbridge Fellowship is run by alumni and funded by sponsors. For Leis, the community is a meaningful part of the opportunity.

A paper co-authored by electrical and computer engineering professor Weiyi (Ian) Shang has received an ACM Distinguished Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), a flagship conference in software engineering.

Titled “Stop When It Matters: Detectability-Guided Microbenchmarking for Performance Regression Testing,” the paper resulted from a collaboration among institutions in Canada, Europe and China.

The research tackles a practical challenge in performance testing. Developers run microbenchmarks to catch software slowdowns, but they often do not know how long those benchmarks need to run. Existing approaches usually stop when results appear stable or after reaching a fixed time limit. The paper demonstrates that stability alone is not enough: a benchmark can appear stable while still being unable to reliably detect a real performance regression.

A University of Waterloo Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) research team has received the Stamatis Vassiliadis Award for Best Paper at the 36th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 2026), held in Ghent, Belgium.

The team includes Emir Guevara, an Electrical Engineering alumnus and current ECE PhD student; Gavin Lusby, a current Computer Engineering undergraduate student; Chaitanya Sharma, who graduated from Computer Engineering in 2026; and ECE professor, Dr. Nachiket Kapre.

Their award-winning paper, “Cocotb-PYNQ-PR: From Co-Simulation to Deployment: A Unified DFX Framework for PYNQ,” presents an open-source framework that allows FPGA partial-reconfiguration designs to be tested in simulation and then deployed on PYNQ hardware through a unified workflow.

More than three-quarters of donated lungs offered for transplantation are not used, according to the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, contributing to a chronic shortage of organs for patients with end-stage lung disease.

Researchers hope a new medical device incorporating monitoring technology they recently developed could ultimately help change that by continuously measuring key indicators of lung function while donor organs are being maintained outside the body.

Continuous monitoring of important health indicators, or biomarkers, could provide transplant teams with far more timely and detailed information than the hourly laboratory tests they now rely on in clinical practice.

The new device, called MetaboSense, was developed in collaboration by researchers at the University of Waterloo and clinicians at University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, home to one of the world’s leading lung transplant programs.

Two incoming students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are among the University of Waterloo’s 2026 Schulich Leaders, recipients of one of Canada’s most prestigious undergraduate STEM scholarships.

The Schulich Leader Scholarships recognize exceptional students entering science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs who demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset, outstanding leadership and a commitment to making a meaningful impact.

This year, 10 exceptional students are joining the University of Waterloo as Schulich Leaders. The incoming cohort is already demonstrating an impressive drive to tackle complex global challenges, with interests spanning climate change and accessibility to space exploration and robotics.

Among Waterloo’s 2026 recipients are two students beginning their studies in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, bringing their own accomplishments, ideas and ambitions to the ECE community.

Dr. Raafat Mansour, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), one of the country’s highest academic honours.

Mansour is among eight University of Waterloo researchers elected as Fellows and College Members in the RSC’s Class of 2026. The appointments recognize exceptional contributions to research, scholarship and innovation across a wide range of disciplines.

“Congratulations to Waterloo's new Royal Society of Canada Fellows and new Royal Society of Canada College Member on this outstanding achievement,” says Charmaine Dean, Vice-President, Research & International. “Recognition from the Royal Society of Canada marks an exceptional milestone for Canada’s leading researchers and highlights not only the strength of their research programs but also the significant contributions they make to Canada’s research ecosystem and beyond.”

Dr. Mansour is an internationally recognized leader in radio-frequency (RF), microwave and micro-electromechanical systems engineering. His research has advanced high-performance communications technologies, nano-instrumentation and cryogenic RF hardware for quantum computing.

A new student design team at Waterloo Engineering is tackling one of computing's most demanding disciplines: high-performance computing. 

Computer engineering students James Redekopp and Karl Keshavarzi founded UW High Performance Computing (UWHPC) earlier this year within the Sedra Student Design Centre (SSDC). Their faculty advisor is Dr. Tahsin Reza, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. UWHPC is now wrapping up its first project, a high-performance Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) simulation, built from the ground up in C++. 

The idea grew out of a physics simulation Keshavarzi had been building, and conversations between the two co-founders about how to speed it up. "The biggest reason [we launched UWHPC] was that the kind of team we wanted to join didn't really exist," Redekopp said. 

A student team from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Waterloo has earned international recognition after taking first runner-up in the Hardware Design Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Signal & Power Integrity (EMC+SIPI) in Texas. EMC+SIPI 2026 leads the industry in providing state-of-the-art education on EMC and Signal Integrity and Power Integrity techniques.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) graduate student, Jinmeng Shi, has earned international recognition for her research into the semiconductor materials behind terahertz quantum cascade lasers (THz QCLs).

Shi, a Master of Applied Science (MASc) student co-supervised by ECE professors Dayan Ban and Zbig Wasilewski, received the Best Student Poster Award at the International Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy, held July 12–16, 2026, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her winning poster, “Towards Ultra-Smooth Interfaces in THz QCLs: Revisiting Si Doping in GaAs Grown on (411)A Substrates,” presented research aimed at addressing one of the challenges limiting the performance of THz QCLs.

A quantum technology company co-founded by University of Waterloo Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor, Dr. Chris Wilson, announced today the closing of approximately $4.69 million in new financing.

Wilson is co-founder and chief technology officer of QuantumCore, a Waterloo-based company that grew out of research at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), where he is also a faculty member. The company is focused on developing hardware technologies for quantum computing.

QuantumCore is developing specialized hardware to support increasingly advanced quantum computing systems. Its technologies include superconducting quantum amplifiers and single-photon detector solutions, designed to address technical challenges that become more significant as quantum computers scale. The company is continuing to build its technology portfolio through internal research and development and strategic acquisitions.