Future students

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.

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. 

Engineering researchers will benefit from the use of the new, state-of-the-art CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory that is part of the collaborative research agreement the University of Waterloo signed with the federal government October 12 in Engineering 5.

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.

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. 

Waterloo Engineering is tied for the 48th spot in the Times Higher Education Top 50 Engineering and Technology Universities for 2011-2012 released this month. THE’s rankings of the top 200 universities in the world use 13 performance indicators designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer. The top 50 institutions by subject are based on criteria and weightings that are selected after extensive consultation.

Morteza Ahmadi, a Waterloo systems design doctoral candidate, has been honoured with the Krescent (Kidney Research Scientist Core Education and National Training Program) Allied Doctoral Award for his project on a nanotechnology-based wearable artificial kidney. The award is one of only two presented this year by the Canadian program. Ahmadi’s doctoral supervisor is John Yeow of systems design engineering.