News

As a teenager Amanda LeDuc wasn’t sure what her future held, but she knew one thing: she wanted to help people. Now a fourth-year Waterloo management engineering student LeDuc is involved in the engineering society and has held a wide variety of engineering roles, including three terms as a student director on the Women in Engineering Committee. Her current focus is on Go ENG Girl, a WIE event to be held October 1, 2011, at 11 universities across Ontario. Registration for Go ENG Girl begins August 5. 

Peter Douglas, director of the university’s UAE campus, was recently interviewed by Gulfnews.com about Waterloo Engineering’s unique co-op program which is manadatory for all engineering students in Canada, as well as the UAE. “The idea behind our cooperative education program is a work and study experience offering students much more than an internship,” said Douglas, a chemical engineering professor. The first 15 chemical and civil UAE-campus engineering students will join the 3A classes in Waterloo starting January 2012 and will complete their degrees in Canada.

More than 160 competitors and volunteers took part in the recent spring Waterloo Engineering Competition. This term’s senior team design winners are Shahid Haider, Benjamin Tan, Yiling Wang, and Martin Lui, all of systems design engineering. The winners of the junior team design are Kumar Singh, electrical engineering; Ayush Kapur, mechatronics engineering; and Drupandh Manjunath, chemical engineering. The first place consulting engineering team include Amir Taleghani, Caitlin Speicher, Matthew Casswell, and Stuart Pearson, all of civil engineering.

2G Robotics, founded by mechanical and mechatronics master’s student Jason Gillham, is helping document the HMS Investigator, a British ship sent out 150 years ago to search for John Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition. This summer, divers are recording and assessing the wreck resting near the shore of Aulavik National Park in Northwest Territoires. Equipment to be used includes a robotic underwater laser scanner developed by 2G Robotics, a University of Waterloo spinoff company.

Saied Yousefi, who recently completed his PhD in systems design engineering, Tarek Hegazy, a civil engineering professor, and Keith Hipel, a systems design engineering professor, have been honoured with this year’s best peer-reviewed paper award from the Journal of Management in Engineering. Their award-winning paper, Yousefi’s doctoral thesis, is entitled Attitude-Based Negotiation Methodology for the Management of Construction Disputes.

Mechanical engineering professors and graduate students captured two awards at the recent NSERC Magnesium Strategic Network annual general meeting. The best poster award was won by professor Kaan Inal and students Yauheni Staraselski, Abhijit Brahme and Raj Mishra for their work entitled Modeling Dynamic Recrystallization in Magnesium Alloys. The best oral presentation honour went to professor Mary Wells and student Pedram Mehraram for their presentation Heat Transfer During Twin Roll Casting of Metals.

Devon Rizzo, a first-year management engineering student, will be a member of Team Canada’s golf team at the 2011 Summer Universiade games in Shenzhen, China, August 17-20. Rizzo is the record holder for the lowest OUA women’s golf score. [news release]

Derek Satnik, an electrical engineering alumnus, and his family have built the first LEED Platinum certified building in the Waterloo Region. Making the investment to build an energy efficient home was a natural one for Satnik who works as an energy-efficiency consultant with Mindscape Innovations, a “green home” consulting firm located in Kitchener. 

Accolades continue to come in for the new Engineering 5 building. It was recently reviewed by Gabriel Fain in the June issue of Canadian Architect Magazine. Fain notes that the six-storey E5 successfully combines student project space on the lower levels with labs, offices and classrooms on the upper levels. He concludes that, “… there is no question that a new sense of identity will be formed that builds upon the rich academic culture and reputation of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering” with the construction of E5 and the other planned engineering buildings on this part of campus. 

A story in the July 6 Globe and Mail outlines a funding challenge faced by software engineering alumnus Kunal Gupta and his company Polar Mobile. They need bridge funding to meet their growth needs while they wait for government research and development grants to come in. Advice comes from three business specialists, including Rod McNaughton, director of the Conrad Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre at the University of Waterloo. READ more about Polar Mobile’s challenge and McNaughton’s recommendations.