Canada's Largest Engineering School

The Insight to Creation Speaker Series brings Waterloo Engineering alumni back to campus for honest, unscripted conversations with students about career journeys, bold decisions and what it really takes to build something meaningful.  

In this session, Dean Mary Wells welcomed three graduates from the electrical and computer engineering class of 2001 —Thiru Sinnathamby, Vice President of Software Engineering at Nvidia, and Shao Xia and Terry Guo, co-founders of LotusFlare — whose shared starting point led to strikingly different destinations.

A new monitoring system developed at Waterloo Engineering could save lives and significantly reduce health-care costs by quickly detecting infections in brain-injury cases in intensive care units.

About 25,000 hospital patients in the United States alone each year require drains to remove excess brain fluid due to traumatic brain injuries and other conditions, including hydrocephalus and brain hemorrhage.

Computer modelling at Waterloo Engineering shows professional baseball pitchers could make mechanical changes to avoid a common, career-threatening elbow injury without necessarily sacrificing competitive velocity.

"Our simulation found solutions that suggest there's untapped efficiency out there,” said Cedric Attias, who led the study while earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. “Our goal isn't to tell pitchers to throw softer. It's to help them throw smarter."