News

A Waterloo Engineering professor has had their Tier 1 Canada Research Chair renewed, which will continue to support research to help AI-generated and immersive digital content meet the quality standards people expect.

Dr. Zhou Wang, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will receive $1.4 million over seven years as the Canada Research Chair in Multimedia Quality-of-Experience. The program supports outstanding researchers recognized as world leaders in their fields. Wang’s renewed Chair will develop a systematic, AI-driven approach to understanding, enhancing and enriching how people experience images, video and immersive media.

Three-time electrical and computer engineering alum Dr. Bill Rosehart (BASc ’96, MASc ’97, PhD ’01) has returned to the University of Waterloo, leading the institution into a new era. Rosehart was installed as the University’s eighth President and Vice-chancellor on October 22, 2026, where he was formally endowed to the duties and responsibilities of office.  

The installation ceremony was conducted by Genevieve Gauthier-Chalifour, University Secretary and Murray Gamble (BASc ’85), Chair, Board of Governors. 

A Waterloo Engineering student design team has taken another step toward repairing electronics in space by designing, building and testing an automated soldering device aboard a microgravity flight. As missions travel farther from Earth, the ability to fix equipment in-space is becoming increasingly important.

The Waterloo Space Soldering Team, made up of 17 students and recent alumni, was one of four teams across Canada selected by Students for the Exploration and Development of Space Canada for this year's Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment Design Challenge, held August 31 to September 4. Over two flights aboard a reduced-gravity research aircraft in Ottawa, the team operated its experiment through 16 parabolas — steep climbs and dives that each create about 20 seconds of weightlessness — and collected 35 solder samples for analysis.

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.