News

Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering PhD students, Mingcheng He and Shisheng Hu. Both students, under the supervision of Professor Sherman Shen, have won prizes at the IEEE ComSoc Four Minute Thesis (4MT) competition held at the IEEE International Conference on Communications 2024 in Denver, Colorado in June. 

Electrical and computer engineering professor, Kankar Bhattacharya has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the esteemed IEEE Canada P.D. Ziogas Electric Power Silver Medal Award. His important contributions to the field of Electrical Power Engineering have distinguished him as an outstanding Canadian Engineer. The award will be presented to Professor Bhattacharya at an awards gala in August as part of IEEE’s flagship conference, the IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE 2024) in Kingston, Ontario.

As part of a recent Government of Canada announcement, seven University of Waterloo doctoral students were named recipients of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Vanier CGS). Two of those students are from elecctrical and computer engineering:

Jack deGooyer, Electrical and Computer Engineering, co-supervised by Dr. Michael Reimer and Dr. Peter Levine, is working on a research project titled “A 400kHz ultra-low noise readout integrated circuit for a novel metamaterial photodetector.”
Read more about deGooyer’s work.

Sarah Odinotski, Electrical and Computer Engineering, supervised by Dr. Michael Reimer, is working on a research project titled “lntraoperative glioblastoma margin detection using metamaterial-based optical detectors.”
Read more about Odinotski’s work.
 

Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering PhD student, Ahmed Elbaroudy! Ahmed’s paper was selected as winner of the North American Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy (NAMBE 2023) Best Journal Paper Award! The paper entitled “Observation of an abrupt 3D-2D morphological transition in thin Al layers grown by MBE on InGaAs surface,” was chosen by the NAMBE Advisory Board from papers presented at the 37th North American Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy (NAMBE 2023) and published in JVST A.

The Government of Canada announced funding for several University of Waterloo faculty members through the New Frontiers Research Fund (NFRF).

“The New Frontiers in Research Fund supports high-risk, high-reward Canadian projects with the potential to spark transformational innovations,” said Charmaine Dean, vice-president, Research and International. “This year’s awardees from the University of Waterloo represent a variety of truly impactful research areas, including equitable approaches to climate change adaptation and improving eye health outcomes in children. Congratulations to the 2024 winners.”

Today, fifty-four new Fellows were elected to the Canadian Academy of Engineering - two of those new Fellows are University of Waterloo electrical and computer engineering professors – professors Ladan Tahvildari and Alfred Yu.

The Academy's President, Dr. Soheil Asgarpour commented: “Over the past 37 years, Fellows of the Academy have provided engineering leadership in the fields of education, infrastructure, innovation, energy, transportation, and many more. New Fellows have been selected for their outstanding contributions to engineering in Canada and around the world and for their service as role models in their fields and to their communities.”

Electrical and computer engineering professor, Claudio Cañizares, has been elected Fellow of the Chinese Society for Electrical Engineering (CSEE) for his outstanding contributions in the field of electrical engineering science and technology. Founded in 1934 in Shanghai, the CSEE's members include over 120,000 individual engineers and over 1000 organizations.

New collaboration will allow quantum researchers to study effects of solar radiation on quantum computing

A new collaboration between researchers from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo, SNOLAB near Sudbury, Ontario, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has been awarded a new grant to investigate the impact of radiation and cosmic rays on quantum technologies.

This grant, “Advanced Characterization and Mitigation of Qubit Decoherence in a Deep Underground Environment,” sponsored by the Army Research Office, a directorate of the U.S Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, has been awarded to Dr. Chris Wilson, a faculty member at IQC and professor in Waterloo’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, alongside Dr. Jeter Hall, Director of Research at SNOLAB and adjunct professor at Laurentian University, and Dr. Per Delsing, professor at Chalmers University of Technology and director of the Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology.

Researchers track the personalities of social robots to improve how they interact with humans

An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own.

This finding was made by a pair of Waterloo professors: Dr. Moojan Ghafurian, based in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who worked together to conduct new research on human interactions with social robots. These robots possess social abilities and can interact with humans in interpersonal and social manners.

Electrical and computer engineering professor, Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, has been elected an International Fellow of The Engineering Academy of Japan (EAJ). The EAJ is composed of leading experts from academia, industry, and government institutions who possess a wide range of knowledge and have made outstanding contributions in engineering and technological sciences, and closely related fields.