News

In 2025, Waterloo Engineering’s Outreach programs reached more than 41,500 young people — a 30 per cent increase from 2024 and more than triple the 13,500 participants served in 2017.  

With support from donors, partners and sponsors, the programs are intentionally designed to engage young people who have historically been excluded from STEM — girls, 2SLGBTQIA+ youth, Black and Indigenous youth, youth living with disabilities and newcomers to Canada.  

There’s a myth that if you want to build something great, you have to leave Canada.  

University of Waterloo alum Jeff Shiner (BMath ’92), executive chairman of the board at 1Password, and Chris Albinson, co-founder and managing director of True North Fund, make the case for why Waterloo students will do better to build their companies in Canada than in the United States (U.S.). 

Waterloo Engineering is mourning the loss of Dr. Sinnathamby Thambithurai (S.T.) Ariaratnam, one of the earliest members of the Department of Civil Engineering. He passed away on April 2, 2026. He was 92.

Ariaratnam joined the University of Waterloo in September 1962, recruited as one of the institution's first engineering professors when it was only a few years old. He taught in the department for nearly four decades until his retirement in 2001, and was named Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2002.

A group of fourth-year mechanical engineering students on the Waterloo Rocketry team designed, built and tested a fully reusable rocket engine for their Capstone Design project.

Called Project Sisyphus, the engine will make test flying rockets significantly easier and more affordable for competitive rocketry teams.

Waterloo Engineering co-op students at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (TMMC) are key to its ongoing success as an automotive industry giant.

Their excellent work ethic and innovative problem-solving skills help improve quality control and advance manufacturing processes. Some students go on to join the company after graduation.

Researchers at Waterloo Engineering have created technology to safely control and coordinate autonomous robots to perform routine tasks in hospitals and long-term care facilities.

The system, developed to help address a projected global nursing shortage, features ceiling-mounted sensor nodes equipped with cameras, LiDAR (light detection and ranging), an onboard processor and a 5G WiFi communication interface to connect to the cloud.

Researchers at a Waterloo Engineering lab have partnered with a leading data analytics company to advance insight into the fast-paced play in professional hockey.

The Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Research Group is collaborating with Stathletes, an Ontario-based company that provides data and problems for members to tackle using computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.

The University of Waterloo is home to the largest engineering school in Canada. Founded in 1957 to train skilled engineers for local industries, the institution has been central to the Waterloo Region’s economic growth.

Waterloo’s reputation is underscored by its internationally renowned co-op program and entrepreneurial ethos. Its global co-op employer network of more than 8,000 organizations in 70 countries — from Fortune 500 leaders to tech startups — hire Waterloo talent, giving them a head start in the workforce. 

Two interdisciplinary capstone teams — each including Waterloo Engineering students — are partnering with Princess Margaret Cancer Centre to solve real clinical and research challenges.

Team CT Optimizers built a machine learning model and dashboard prototype to automate how the cancer centre fills last-minute CT scan slots, reducing the manual, time-sensitive work currently handled by patient flow coordinators. A second team, We Dream in Voxels, extended an existing two-dimensional tumour drug-mapping model into three dimensions and rebuilt it in Python, achieving speeds more than 100 times faster than the original.

Waterloo Engineering students claimed podium finishes across all four categories at Canada's most prestigious engineering student competition.

The 2026 Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC), hosted at the Université de Sherbrooke, saw every qualifying Waterloo team finish on the podium. Yaxin Wang and Matthew Ko (biomedical engineering) took first place in the Consulting category, while Alanna Rudolph (mechatronics engineering) and Eva Siao (computer engineering) secured second place in the Debate category.