Future students

Waterloo’s Autonoumous Robot Racing Team took all four top awards in the International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition held July 23 and 24 at the University of British Columbia. The team received the overall grand award and won first place in the design competition, the drag race competition and the circuit competition. The team’s winning entry was a redesigned version of the vehicle that crashed just before last year’s competition. [race website]

Vanessa Bohns, who joined Waterloo’s management sciences department last month, has been attracting media attention with work she did at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Bohns and a colleague showed that posture has a lot to do with the amount of pain a person can tolerate. Adopting a dominant posture can make you feel stronger while adopting a more submissive posture can make pain feel worse. Bohns was interviewed on the CBC and her research has been included in the Toronto Star and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Mohammad Bozchalui, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student, was recently honoured as the winner of MPrime’s award for Best Novel Use of Mathematics in Technology Transfer. MPrime, Canada’s only Network of Centres of Excellence for the mathematical sciences, brings together academia, industry and the public sector to develop mathematical tools vital to the knowledge-based economy. Bozchalui received his award at the seventh International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, which was held in Vancouver.

Collaboration between University of Waterloo researchers and Ontario businesses was officially celebrated August 9 in Engineering 3. Under FedDev Ontario’s Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative the University of Waterloo has received $750,000 to partner with businesses on a total of 16 research projects. Duane Cronin of mechanical and mechatronics engineering spoke about his research at the event attended by government and university officials. Cronin is working with Polefab Inc. to make traffic and lighting poles safer and more stable in accidents.

Working for Kraft cookie manufacturer Peek Freans sounds like a pretty sweet gig. For Kartik Vaideswaran, a 2B chemical engineering student, it was. That is in large part because of the extra effort he put into his job as an Engineering Assistant at the company’s East York bakery. His contributions helped to have a production line certified above three sigma, a first for a Kraft facility in Canada. As a result, Kartik has been hired back for his next co-op term. He shares his experience in a story written by Andrea Banerjee in the Spring 2011-2 issue of Inside sCo-op.

The 2011 World University Rankings released by QS in Britain on September 5 lists Waterloo Engineering at 56^th in the world among engineering and technology faculties. QS ranks the top 300 universities in the world based on six factors: academic reputation; employer reputation; student/faculty ratio; citations per faculty; international faculty; international students. 

A story in The Globe and Mail on September 7 describes a flurry of investment in Canadian start-ups by U.S. technology companies. The story notes that there have been at least 20 major acquisitions since January, injecting capital that will help transform centres such as Waterloo into global mobile hubs.