News

A story in The Globe and Mail on September 7 describes a flurry of investment in Canadian start-ups by U.S. technology companies. The story notes that there have been at least 20 major acquisitions since January, injecting capital that will help transform centres such as Waterloo into global mobile hubs.

The 2011 World University Rankings released by QS in Britain on September 5 lists Waterloo Engineering at 56^th in the world among engineering and technology faculties. QS ranks the top 300 universities in the world based on six factors: academic reputation; employer reputation; student/faculty ratio; citations per faculty; international faculty; international students. 

Dr. Donald Grierson, distinguished professor emeritus in civil and environmental engineering, passed away on August 25. Professor Grierson held a faculty post in the department for 37 years. He had earned his BASc in civil engineering in 1964, master’s in 1966 and PhD in 1968.

Newtonville, a tabletop eco-friendly city, along with its enthusiastic Engineering and Science Quest camper architects provided the backdrop for the federal government’s $1.25 million Actua funding announcement made August 17 in E5. Actua is a national science, engineering and technology youth outreach network of which Waterloo’s ESQ and nine other Ontario university organizations are members.

Collaboration between University of Waterloo researchers and Ontario businesses was officially celebrated August 9 in Engineering 3. Under FedDev Ontario’s Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative the University of Waterloo has received $750,000 to partner with businesses on a total of 16 research projects. Duane Cronin of mechanical and mechatronics engineering spoke about his research at the event attended by government and university officials. Cronin is working with Polefab Inc. to make traffic and lighting poles safer and more stable in accidents.

Vanessa Bohns, who joined Waterloo’s management sciences department last month, has been attracting media attention with work she did at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Bohns and a colleague showed that posture has a lot to do with the amount of pain a person can tolerate. Adopting a dominant posture can make you feel stronger while adopting a more submissive posture can make pain feel worse. Bohns was interviewed on the CBC and her research has been included in the Toronto Star and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Waterloo’s Autonoumous Robot Racing Team took all four top awards in the International Autonomous Robot Racing Competition held July 23 and 24 at the University of British Columbia. The team received the overall grand award and won first place in the design competition, the drag race competition and the circuit competition. The team’s winning entry was a redesigned version of the vehicle that crashed just before last year’s competition. [race website]