Four graduate students at Waterloo Engineering recorded a second-place finish at a recent design competition with a device to speed up COVID-19 vaccinations.
Kris Jiang, Kshitij Kadiya, Syed Mujtaba Ahmad and Yashesh Dasari are all master’s students in mechanical and mechatronics engineering who took the graduate diploma in design engineering option.
Waterloo Engineering design students (clockwise from top left) Kris Jiang, Kshitij Kadiya, Yashesh Dasari and Syed Mujtaba Ahmad work remotely on their vaccination device.
They formed a team to compete at the 2021 CAD Designathon, a virtual, weekend-long event hosted by McMaster University that drew more than 500 participants.
Similar to a hackathon for computer coders, it challenged teams to develop solutions to one of four problems using their computer-aided design skills in just 36 hours.
Jiang, Kadiya, Mujtaba Ahmad and Dasari tackled a challenge to design a device to automatically prepare and inject a COVID-19 vaccine.
They estimated the modular device they came up with could safely vaccinate 25 per cent more people than manual methods now in use.
Their category at the competition was sponsored by Starfish Medical, the largest medical device design, development and contract manufacturing company in Canada.