Six decades after travelling halfway around the world to take a chance on a new university in Canada, a proud alumnus is helping it grow in a way he would never have imagined possible.
Nityan and Varma was the proverbial immigrant with eight dollars in his pocket when he left his native India in the early 1960s to do a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Now, as patriarch of a family that has maintained strong ties to Waterloo Engineering ever since, he is instrumental in a $1-million contribution to fund a new professorship in robotics.
Gennaro Notomista holds the new Varma Family Professorship in Robotics at Waterloo Engineering.
“It’s an arc, a journey, that I think is important to share,” said Varma’s son Amar, a serial entrepreneur who also earned an engineering degree at Waterloo. “This is representative of my parents’ life’s work and also of a generation that came to this country with an insatiable appetite to make life better for themselves.”
The donation helped create the Varma Family Professorship in Robotics, which is held by Gennaro Notomista, a young researcher from Napoli, Italy who comes to the post after graduate studies in Germany and the United States, and a year as a postdoctoral researcher in France.
Notomista, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, was part of a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology that developed an autonomous device called the SlothBot, a slow-moving, solar-powered robot that takes environmental readings while moving through forest treetops on a wire.
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