News

Minutes away from elective surgery, Eric Blondeel realized he wasn’t insured if he died on the operating table.

Lying on a hospital gurney, Blondeel used the cell phone he still had with him to google where he could purchase some type of last-minute life insurance.

“I wasn’t able to find anything, so I started checking on the chances I could possibly die within the next couple of hours,” says the Waterloo chemical engineering alumnus. “It was an orthopedic surgery but I was going to be under full general anesthetic, which I’d never been before, so I was a bit nervous.”

Manh-Kien Tran is optimistic about the future and the promise of advances in energy storage systems to pave the way for a cleaner, more energy-efficient society.

As a doctoral student in chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo, he hopes to contribute to that future through research focused on cloud-based battery management, with an emphasis on lithium-ion batteries.

A former Waterloo Engineering student is giving up his 2022 salary and bonus at the multi-billion-dollar autonomous trucking company he co-founded to support youth robotics and STEM education.

Alex Rodrigues, who left the mechatronics engineering program at Waterloo to pursue his passion for self-driving vehicles in Silicon Valley, is CEO of Embark Trucks, which went public last year with an approximate valuation of US $5 billion.

A management engineering student who worked at Tesla during the winter term in 2021 has been recognized with an honorable mention in the annual Co-op Student of the Year Awards at the University of Waterloo.

Nimisha Saxena, who is in her fourth year, worked as a technical program manager intern at the electric automaker, assisting with the development of a third-party risk management (TPRM) program.

Devasted by what’s happening in Ukraine, a Waterloo Engineering alumnus with deep ties to the country is supporting its humanitarian relief efforts through sales of her vodka brand in Ontario liquor stores. 

Katherine Vellinga is helping Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion of their homeland by donating 100 per cent of profit made from Zirkova Vodka purchased in LCBOs across the province.

Technical excellence has earned a company headed by a Waterloo Engineering alumnus its third Emmy award for a media asset management system.

Ross Video, which is based in Ottawa and employs almost 1,200 people, is scheduled to receive its hardware at a media and technology conference in Las Vegas next month.

A study of more than 2,000 streams around North America supervised by a Waterloo Engineering professor found that those altered by human activity are at greater risk of flooding.

The study analyzed the seasonal flow patterns of 2,272 streams in Canada and the U.S. and found that human-managed streams – those impacted by developments like dams, canals, or heavy urbanization – had significantly different flow patterns compared to streams in natural watersheds.

An award-winning student project to reduce plastic waste has advanced to the semi-finals of the Wege Prize, a global competition for redesigning the way economies work.  

Elijah Birley, a mechanical engineering student, Isabella Daneyko, a biomedical engineering student, and Carlton Darby, a chemical engineering student, are members of the Decomp team, which is developing an organic plastic waste disposal solution.

An engineering undergraduate at the University of Waterloo who has dreamed of working in the space industry since she was a young girl took a big step in that direction today with her selection for a national fellowship program.

Elizabeth Drew, a third-year mechatronics engineering student, is one of 10 fellows in the inaugural class named by the Zenith Canada Pathways Foundation (ZCPF), a non-profit organization created to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in the space sector.

Fueled by passion for the final frontier, UW Orbital is building a satellite members hope will someday blast off into space.

The year-old student team is working on CubeSat, a fully functioning satellite, for research in earth-centred orbit, called Eternium-III, and to compete in 2023’s Canadian Satellite Design Challenge.