Alumni receive scientists and engineers fellowships

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Three Waterloo Engineering graduates are the first recipients of the new Scientists and Engineers in Business Fellowship, created to help turn innovations into businesses. Armen Bakirtzian, JS Rancourt, and Ryan Denomme each received $60,000 in the first round of fellowships. Two more rounds of fellowships will be awarded in the next eight months.
 

The Waterloo program is supported by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) and offers fellowships to Waterloo graduates and recent alumni (graduates who earned their last Waterloo degree within five years) in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) program who want to commercialize their innovations and start high-tech/STEM related businesses.

For Denomme, a mechanical engineering graduate, the fellowship is helping advance the operations of Nicoya Lifesciences, his new company that has developed a unique home diagnostics technology that can monitor a wide range of medical conditions and illnesses.

The fellowship is helping Rancourt, a mechanical engineering graduate, and his partners with Hockey Robotics, a company that started as a fourth-year engineering project. During the next year, the fellowship will provide the funds needed to develop a more advanced version of Slapshot XT that will result in the employment of several co-op students as well as spin-off employment for clients of Hockey Robotics as their products evolve.

And Bakirtzian, a mechatronics engineering graduate and chief executive officer, director, and co-founder of Avenir Medical Inc., would like to see his concept for intelligent instrumentation that can be used in hip replacement surgery become the future standard of care. PelvAssistTM is under development and expected to be available to orthopedic surgeons by early 2014. The fellowship will have a significant impact on getting this new technology into the hands of doctors sooner by helping to accelerate the steps needed to commercialize the product. [full article]