Current students

Tech-savvy students will put their coding skills to the test during the Great Canadian Appathon taking place September 30 to October 2 at the Conrad Business and Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre and other university and college ‘hubs’ across the country. Student teams will have 48 hours to create a mobile game they think could become the next top selling smartphone app. CBET already has over 30 teams registered, more than three times the number that particpated last year.

Waterloo management engineering students came second and third in the IIE Ryerson-Siemens Competition hosted by the Ryerson University student chapter of the Institute of Industrial Engineers on September 30. The competition, in which over 100 engineering students representing Waterloo, Ryerson and the University of Toronto took part, was sponsored by Siemens and Canadian Tire.

A team comprised of members of Waterloo’s advanced micro-nano-devices lab placed second in the Global Nano Innovation Contest which took place October 4 in Taiwan as part of the Taiwan National Exhibition. First prize was awarded to a team from IBM and third place was taken by a team from NASA. Waterloo was the only Canadian team to participate in the international competition.

Martha Nelson joins Waterloo Engineering from Brock University where she held the post of Associate Vice President, Marketing and Communications. Martha will lead the Faculty’s advancement team, recently created by combining the Faculty’s communications team with the development and alumni affairs team. We look forward to the new team’s significant contribution to our Vision 2015 goals under her leadership.

A memorial service for Donald Grierson to celebrate his long career as a distinguished engineer, researcher and educator will take place Thursday, October 27 at 2 p.m. at Trinity Evangelical Missionary Church on Conservation Drive in Waterloo. Grierson, distinguished professor emeritus in civil and environmental engineering, died on August 25. A Waterloo Engineering faculty member for 37 years, he had earned his BASc in civil engineering in 1964, master’s in 1966 and PhD in 1968.

Waterloo’s Midnight Sun team is now in Australia preparing for the 3,000-km World Solar Challenge from Darwin to Adelaide which takes place October 16-23. Forty vehicles are participating, including ones from the University of Calgary, University of Toronto and Montreal’s Ecole de technologie superieure. The top teams in the world aim to finish the course in three or four days. The 14-member Midnight Sun X team expects to finish in either fifth or sixth place. 

To help receive financial assistance for a new innovative medical device the associate director of Waterloo’s Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology is requesting that people check out his online video proposal and give it a thumbs up. Karim Karim, also an electrical and computer engineering professor, says that approval of his research team’s inexpensive ($1000) tuberculosis X-Ray imager intended to save lives in developing countries will play a large part in whether the proposal receives the funding from Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the Bill Gates Foundation.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Civil students win TAC scholarships

A number of civil engineering students have been honoured with Transportation Association of Canada Foundation Scholarship Awards. The Waterloo recipients include Daniel Baggio, Matthew Casswell, David Duong, Mohab El-Hakim, Amir Ghods, Mehran Kafi Farashah, Andrew Northmore, Samantha Pinto and Leanne Whiteley-Lagace. The scholarships are intended to help students pursue their education in transportation-related careers.