Lecture

Mary Wells, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, is excited to share a transformative new vision for Waterloo Engineering - one that positions the Faculty as leaders driving meaningful change for the future.

Engineering alumni are invited to explore the strategic plan and join one of the upcoming alumni roundtables (two virtual options are available on Zoom: March 12 and March 14, 2025). The roundtables will provide an opportunity to discuss how this vision will create tangible, positive impacts worldwide.

Waterloo Engineering recent alumni are invited to participate in an exclusive virtual conversation with Waterloo Engineering alumna, Lisa Tong (BASc ’01, Chemical Engineering), who recently published her book Hello (World) Me, a personal self-guided coach to self, awareness, understanding, and choices — to creating the life YOU want. 

Waterloo Engineering students and alumni are invited to participate in an exclusive in-person workshop with Waterloo Engineering alumnus Ron Ojanpera (BASc 1969, mechanical engineering). The “Working the Room” workshop is based on 50 years of Ron’s personal business experience.  

Innovations in technology have advanced every aspect of our human lives — often with engineers at the helm. One such example is the intersection of health care and technology, as showcased by the University of Waterloo’s Global Futures framework which highlights the importance of health tech in our future world.

There are many urgent and exciting opportunities for engineers to step in and help redesign health care systems, innovate solutions and develop new ways of solving problems for the good of society.

Join this live event in Toronto with a panel of engineers, researchers and health tech entrepreneurs who will discuss how — in our rapidly changing world, challenged by rising costs and lack of access — engineering can help advance health care through technology.

The conversation will focus on how engineers can work towards solutions for optimal health care, showcase innovative research, discuss strategies for retaining health tech startups in Canada, identify challenges, explore opportunities and propose actionable solutions to foster an innovative and thriving health tech ecosystem in the country. 

The Waterloo Engineering alumni class reunion in 2025 is taking place on June 6 and 7 at Reunion Weekend. The engineering Classes of 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 are invited to campus to celebrate this milestone in their engineering career.

Join 2SLGBTQ+ Waterloo Engineering alumni and current students in a conversation about their journey from student to the workplace, how they leverage and navigate their 2SLGBTQ+ identity as current/future engineers, and the historical and emerging challenges facing this community. Examples of anti-2SLGBTQ+ actions that should concern the engineering community include the resistance to move toward gender-neutral washrooms in building designs and development proposals’ disregard for Hanlan’s Point’s cultural importance as Canada’s oldest Queer space.

It's a full day of discovery at TronCon 2024! TronCon will coincide with the Mechatronics Capstone Design Symposium to give alumni an opportunity to view the newest batch of Capstone design projects (FYDPs) by fourth year mechatronic students, get involved in judging the capstone design projects, and reconnect with the Tron community at the event and at the dinner that follows. 

Engineering work has a huge impact on society - we know that in the general sense. However, it can sometimes be hard to really understand how seemingly small design decisions can end up causing huge waves. In conversation with a recent engineer alum with a PEng and JD and legal professionals from the Law Commission of Ontario, we will discuss how design decisions in information systems and artificial intelligence end up creating major issues that we as a society are still figuring out how to address - from both a legal and engineering perspective. We are delighted to have with us three amazing speakers:

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Dr. David McDonald, Professor, Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, will present: What’s public about public water?

This event is in person in DC 1302 with a lunch reception to follow in DC 1301 (The Fishbowl).

Debates about water privatization have tended to construct a simplistic binary of public versus private. In reality, ‘public’ water is varied and complex in its institutional and ideological make-up, illustrated in part by the rise of very different types of ‘remunicipalized’ water services over the past ten years as well as the growth of ‘corporatized’ public utilities. Drawing on two decades of empirical and theoretical work on this topic, Dr McDonald will highlight key tensions and synergies in the emerging debates about the nature of public water services.

David McDonald is Professor of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University and Director of the Municipal Services Project. He has conducted research on public services in more than 50 countries and has written extensively in academic and popular formats. His most recent book is “Meanings of Public and the Future of Public Services”

An enduring appeal of interactive entertainment media such as video games is that they invite the user to co-create the on-screen experience. More than an invitation, these experiences demand near-constant attention from players—and do so on myriad dimensions, including cognitive (problem-solving), emotional (affective reactions), apparatus (control or interface intuitiveness), exertional (physical activity) and social (attending to social agents). Individually and combined, these sources of demand are mediators for understanding the relationship between formal features of interactive media and intended (or unintended) outcomes of usage.

This presentation will present and review an interactivity-as-demand model based on prior and ongoing research into video games and virtual reality technologies, with specific implications for game design and player psychology.

Speaker Bio: Nick Bowman (PhD, Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the uses and effects of interactive and immersive media, with specific interests in social media, video games, and metaverse technologies. He has published more than

125 peer-reviewed manuscripts and co-authored more than 200 competitively selected conference presentations. He is the editor of Journal of Media Psychology and associate editor for Technology, Mind, and Behavior. Recently, he completed a term as the Fulbright Taiwan Wu Jing-Jyi Arts & Culture Fellow and the National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he was researching the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demands of virtual reality experiences, including video gaming and digital advertising campaigns. He is a lifelong gamer, part-time mechanic, and an excited-yet-skeptical futurist.