News

“Now is about when we should start seeing trouble with 1990s buildings, with the glass starting to get fogged up, the rubber gaskets and sealants starting to fail,” John Straube, a Waterloo architecture and civil and environmental engineering professor, told a CBC reporter for a special radio and television series investigating the short-term durability and long-term costs of Toronto’s glass-walled condos.

Do you know an engineering faculty member, graduate, student or someone else under the age of 40 who is making a difference? If you do, consider nominating that person for Waterloo Region Record’s 40 Under 40 awards. Submissions for possible canadidates will be accepted until December 2. Selections will be made by a panel of judges from the Record and the community. 

About 2,900 potential Waterloo Engineering students, family members and others checked out our Waterloo and Cambridge campuses on November 5 as part of the campus-wide annual fall open house. The day offered tours of engineering buildings and the School of Architecture, residence viewing, demonstrations, including a dissection of a car engine, and even a “Parents’ Lounge” to answer questions.

Peter Carr, a Waterloo management sciences professor, was asked by a Globe and Mail reporter whether something like Facebook or Twitter can contribute to the academic side university. “Absolutely,” he responded. “The new modern philosophies of education would say it’s important to have students working in groups, interacting with each other and the professor and learning the content together.” Carr recently taught a group of students who connected with Red Cross workers at offices in Uganda, Colombia and India using Skype.

Lawrence Wong, of systems design engineering and the University of Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, was awarded the MEMSCAP Microsystems Design Award for his presentation entitled Ultrasound Imaging System using Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers. The competition, sponsored by CMC Microsystems, is targeted at microsystems applications including telecommunication, health care, automobile, aerospace and the environment.

Kui Jiao, who graduated last week with his PhD in mechanical engineering, has been chosen as the grand prize winner of the 2011 Dr. Bernard S. Baker Student Award for Fuel Cell Research. The award will be presented to Jiao November 1 at the 2011 Fuel Cell Seminar Exposition in Orlando, Florida. This is the first time a Canadian student has won the award. Jiao’s doctoral supervisor was Xianguo Li of mechanical engineering. At the October 22 convocation Jiao was one of five doctoral students campus-wide recognized with the rubric “outstanding achievement in graduate studies”.

Lola Sheppard of Waterloo’s School of Architecture was a recipient of the 2011 Holcim Gold Award awarded in Washington D.C. to Lateral Office/Infranet Lab headed by Sheppard and Mason White of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. The architectural firm, based in Toronto and Princeton, New Jersey, was awarded the top prize of $100,000 by the Holcim Awards Program that honours sustainable North American construction projects.

Waterloo Engineering is tied for the 48th spot in the Times Higher Education Top 50 Engineering and Technology Universities for 2011-2012 released this month. THE’s rankings of the top 200 universities in the world use 13 performance indicators designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer. The top 50 institutions by subject are based on criteria and weightings that are selected after extensive consultation.

To help receive financial assistance for a new innovative medical device the associate director of Waterloo’s Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology is requesting that people check out his online video proposal and give it a thumbs up. Karim Karim, also an electrical and computer engineering professor, says that approval of his research team’s inexpensive ($1000) tuberculosis X-Ray imager intended to save lives in developing countries will play a large part in whether the proposal receives the funding from Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the Bill Gates Foundation.