News

Engineering faculty, staff and students will have three opportunities the week of January 9 to hear from Pearl Sullivan, candidate for dean of Waterloo Engineering. Sullivan, currently chair of Waterloo’s mechanical and mechatronics engineering department, has been unanimously recommended by the dean of engineering nominating committee as the next dean of engineering for a five-year term beginning July 1, 2012. If successfully appointed, Sullivan will succeed current dean of engineering Adel Sedra whose second term as dean ends June 30, 2012.

Drew Higgins, a chemical engineering doctoral candidate, was recently awarded third place in the Dr. Bernard S. Baker Student Award Competition, an international award recognizing exceptional students in the field of fuel cell technologies. He was honoured at the Fuel Cell Seminar and Exposition which took place in Orlando, Florida in November. Selection for the award was based on the quality of completed and/or proposed student based research work and involved competition with many students working in various fuel cell related fields worldwide.

A Waterloo Region Record article, entitled UW chemical engineering students hope to change the future, takes a look at the wide range of innovative research taking place in the department’s new home in Engineering 6. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as current faculty and retired faculty members were interviewed for the feature that describes Waterloo’s chemical engineering as “hot stuff.” The department, once housed in the first facility built on Waterloo’s campus, now has 800 undergraduate students, 155 grad students, 35 faculty, 15 staff and more than 4,000 alumni.

Prithula Prosun, a recent graduate of Waterloo’s School of Architecture, has won a Canadian Architect Student Award of Merit for her master’s thesis project Lift House that provides flood-proof housing for the Bangladeshi poor. Prosun developed a house that rises with flood waters and then lowers once flooding recedes. In October, Prosun’s project was honoured by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for applying leading-edge research to real-world situations. 

Chemical engineering professor Flora Ng has won the 2011 Hikal Chemcon Distinguished Speaker Award. She will be presented with the award at CHEMCON, the annual conference of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, to be held in Bangalore, India December 27-29. This year’s conference theme is Chemical Engineering in Synergistic Growth. Ng will deliver her award lecture on Catalytic Distillation: Applications for the Production of Green Fuel and Chemicals.

Zero emissions, no noise was the promise of the ZENN Low Speed Vehicle (LSV), produced by the ZENN Motor Company of Toronto between 2006 and 2010. A rare pre-production model is on display to the public in the Engineering 5 lobby until mid-January. It was brought to the university by Mehrdad Kazerani, a Waterloo professor of electrical and computer engineering, whose research team will be using the vehicle after the exhibition ends. The ZENN is a fully functional, two passenger, front wheel drive, electric vehicle that was produced at an assembly plant in Saint-Jerome, Quebec.

Industry representatives, students and the public had a first-hand look at Waterloo Engineering’s innovative engineering research at this year’s We Innovate held in Engineering 5 on December 7. The research on display ranged from work on quieter wind turbines, flood resistant housing and fire-retardant material to crashworthy auto parts, anti-icing agents for concrete and 3D scanners that could help surgeons and dentists.

School of Architecture professor John McMinn and his partner architect Melana Janzen of McMinn + Janzen Studio have pulled it off for a professional couple living in south Mississauga — they designed an urban loft on a quiet street lined with 1970s suburban ranch houses. The home, with radiant concrete floors inside and custom stainless steel wire mesh screens, provides a downtown urban feel while meeting the needs of a growing family leaning towards a suburban lifestyle. But success didn’t come easy, says McMinn. The first contractor couldn’t mix oil and water and was let go.