A research project that may significantly boost clean biofuel production in Canada is among three Waterloo Engineering initiatives to receive funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Jan Huissoon has been appointed chair of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, succeeding interim chair Fathy Ismail. The mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor's term runs from February 4 until December 31, 2016. In January, William Melek was appointed director of the mechatronics engineering program, replacing Sanjeev Bedi who served as director for six years. [announcement]
The New York Times calls the University of Waterloo "one of the world's best technology schools" and takes a look at the recent successful start-ups by Waterloo Engineering students and alumni.
"Increasingly, graduates are following the lead of Mike Lazaridis, who nearly 30 years ago helped found BlackBerry, and creating start-ups of their own like Pebble, the smartwatch company founded by a University of Waterloo grad, and BufferBox, a parcel delivery system recently acquired by Google," says the article run in the February 4th issue of the publication.
Robert Jan van Pelt, a Waterloo School of Architecture professor, was honoured as a finalist in the 2012 National Jewish Book Awards for editing At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944", written by Dutch student David Koker during his imprisonment in the Vught concentration camp. van Pelt, a leading Holocaust expert, also wrote the book's introduction, with Michiel Horn and John Irons translating Koker's diary for its first English printing.
Research into green transportation in Ontario received a boost, thanks to a new partnership that lets researchers and drivers see how well electric vehicles perform. The new collaboration, called Drive4Data, is the first of its kind in Canada and involves the University of Waterloo's Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE) and FleetWise EV300, an initiative of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.
A research facility that will one day develop the technology that enables hybrid vehicles to feed energy into the power grid is among the innovative research initiatives at the University of Waterloo that will receive major funding. The Canada Foundation for Innovation announced January 15 that it is awarding more than $4.7 million to four research projects at Waterloo, including over $2.1 million for the Green and Intelligent Automotive Research Facility being established at the university.
Peter Carr of management sciences was featured in a recent Toronto Star article about the effects of Facebook going public after the launch of its initial public offering in May 2012.
The article says the company has always struggled with how to continue making money from ads as people shift their computing to hand-held devices such as smartphones.
Duane Cronin, a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, is the new executive director for the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR). He succeeds Amir Khajepour, also of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, who held the position for more than three years.
Cronin's automotive research focuses on vehicle crashworthiness and occupant safety. Recent projects include collaborations on occupant modeling with an assembler consortium including Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai and Nissan, as well as work with 3M in automotive adhesives.
Two Waterloo Engineering research projects have received over $212,000 in funding from Carbon Management Canada. John Wen and Robert Varin, both of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, will use the money to characterize and evaluate the on-site adsorption and carbonation of flue gas CO2 in ball-milling activated mine waste. The purpose of their project is to modify the microstructures of mine waste and limestone for minimizing energy consumption and increasing the capacity of CO2 sequestration.
Bryan Tolson, a civil and environmental engineering professor, co-op student Ayman Khedr and doctoral candidate Masoud Asadzadeh recently came in second out of 14 teams in a Water Distribution Network design optimization challenge at the WDSA conference in Adelaide, Australia. The design problem they tackled involved minimizing design costs, greenhouse gas emissions and a measure of overall water age. The team members evaluated 20,000 solutions on a desktop PC using their multi-objective PA-DDS algorithm to help pick a design.