Alumni

About 2,900 potential Waterloo Engineering students, family members and others checked out our Waterloo and Cambridge campuses on November 5 as part of the campus-wide annual fall open house. The day offered tours of engineering buildings and the School of Architecture, residence viewing, demonstrations, including a dissection of a car engine, and even a “Parents’ Lounge” to answer questions.

The University of Toronto is offering an Advanced Skills in Journalism for Engineers program for engineering alumni and engineering graduate students who wish to work in media. The program will provide up to 10 engineers with eight months of mentored experience as freelance business correspondents to major news organizations in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. including: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Postmedia Network , the Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Financial Times, the BBC and The Washington Post.

Do you know an engineering faculty member, graduate, student or someone else under the age of 40 who is making a difference? If you do, consider nominating that person for Waterloo Region Record’s 40 Under 40 awards. Submissions for possible canadidates will be accepted until December 2. Selections will be made by a panel of judges from the Record and the community. 

Waterloo Engineering has ranked an impressive second in Canada in the 2011 Taiwan Ranking’s engineering field. In the ranking’s engineering subjects Waterloo’s chemical engineering was ranked first and electrical engineering was ranked second. The rankings are conducted by researchers at National Taiwan University and sponsored by the Higher Education Evaluation & Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT).

Geoff Christou (BArch ’10) has teamed up with a childhood friend to create Our Paper Life, a company that sells an environmentally-friendly shelf and a desk made from paper. The adult-size desk and shelf, each costing $19.99, are ideal for university students because they can be easily assembled and recycled when they’re no longer needed.

Jackie Rehkopf, who graduated from civil engineering with both her BASc and PhD, has had her book “Automotive Carbon Fiber Composites: From Evolution to Implementation” published by SAE International. Rehkopf is a senior researcher at Plasan Carbon Composites, a Tier 1 producer of carbon fiber composites for the U.S. automotive industry. She is also a principal investigator of a three-year project on predictive modeling of carbon fiber composites in automotive crash applications.

Prithula Prosun, a recent graduate of Waterloo’s School of Architecture, has won a Canadian Architect Student Award of Merit for her master’s thesis project Lift House that provides flood-proof housing for the Bangladeshi poor. Prosun developed a house that rises with flood waters and then lowers once flooding recedes. In October, Prosun’s project was honoured by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for applying leading-edge research to real-world situations.