Waterloo Engineering graduate Jarett Dewbury (BASc ’26, biomedical engineering) crossed the stage at convocation this month and is now heading to MIT to do full-time research in advanced AI for health-care applications.
Dewbury is the winner of this year’s Pearl Sullivan Emerging Global Leaders (PS EGL) Award, one of the Faculty of Engineering's highest student honours, in recognition of his work as a student to make advanced AI more accessible in health care and across Waterloo's student community.
Dewbury experienced a rapid growth spurt in Grade 8 left him unable to find a knee brace that fit, and the improvised solution he and his parents devised sparked a drive to address gaps in health care. He found that fusion of engineering, biology and medicine in Waterloo's Biomedical Engineering program.
In his first year, Dewbury noticed AI electives were closed to first- and second-year students, so during his first co-op work term he co-founded WAT.ai, a student-led AI design team. It launched with 40 members and now, four years later, has 800. Part of the Sedra Student Design Centre, WAT.ai is the official undergraduate body of the Waterloo AI Institute, and one of its project teams won $17,000 at a global climate hackathon, building tools now used by UK non-profit Open Climate Fix.
Dewbury's co-ops took him from a work placement at Harvard Medical School to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, work on AI diagnostics for resource-limited clinical settings earned him a first-author publication at ICLR and the 2024 Faculty of Engineering Co-op Student of the Year Award.
He plans to use funds from his PS EGL award to seed a scholarship helping Waterloo Engineering students present research at international conferences.
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