Six decades after travelling halfway around the world to take a chance on a new university in Canada, a proud alumnus of Waterloo Engineering is helping it grow in a way he would never have imagined possible.
Nityanand Varma was the proverbial immigrant with eight dollars in his pocket when he left his native India in the early 1960s to do a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Now, as patriarch of a family that has maintained strong ties to Waterloo Engineering ever since, he is instrumental in a $1-million contribution to fund a new professorship in robotics.
“It’s an arc, a journey, that I think is important to share,” said Varma’s son Amar, a serial entrepreneur who also earned an engineering degree at Waterloo. “This is representative of my parents’ life’s work and also of a generation that came to this country with an insatiable appetite to make life better for themselves.”
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