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Waterloo Engineering success story BufferBox Inc. has been acquired by Google. Company founders and mechatronics engineering alumni Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah  sold their company for an undisclosed amount. BufferBox was created by the trio as their fourth-year design project to provide a reliable and secure parcel delivery alternative. In January 2012 they launched what is believed to be the first parcel delivery kiosk service in Canada in the Student Life Centre at the University of Waterloo.

With the opening of the new Real-time Embedded Systems Laboratory (RESL), Waterloo Engineering has gained the tools and capabilities necessary to reduce the size, power, and cost of a wide range of industrial and consumer products, while increasing reliability and performance.

The 2012 Waterloo Engineering Awards dinner held on November 22 honoured engineering's exceptional students, alumni and a friend of the faculty. More than 2,500 students received awards this year for everything from top marks to extracurricular activities such as leadership, community engagement, and involvement in athletics.

A number of awards were distributed at the event, including:

John Wen, a Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, has been awarded funding from BioFuelNet Canada for his grant proposal entitled Emission Performance and Catalytic Combustion of Fuel Blended with 3-OH Methyl Esters. Wen will receive initial funding of $68,000 towards his research into developing next generation biofuels. 

Waterloo Engineering Dean Pearl Sullivan is featured in an article about the future of engineering education in the fall issue of The Voice produced by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. According to Sullivan the push for change is dually fuelled by increased scientific knowledge and the drive to create ever more complex products and processes that may cut across engineering (and non-engineering) disciplines. "Students have to know math and the parameters of design even better today just to keep a plane in the air," she says in the article entitled Renaissance Plan.

Brendan McDonald, a chemical engineering (nanotechnology) master’s student, captured the second place 2012 Excellence in Thermoset Polymer Research Award for his paper entitled Biomimetic Micro-Structured Surfaces: Pattern Transfer and Fabrication of Icephobic Epoxy Surfaces. McDonald, who is supervised by chemical engineering professor Boxin Zhao, presented his paper at the Thermoset Resin Formulators Association (TRFA) annual meeting held at the end of October in Orlando, Florida. 

Ibraheem Khan (MASc, PhD, mechanical) presented his Waterloo Engineering research on shape memory alloys during his keynote address at the Medical Manufacturing Innovations Conference held in Toronto at the end of October. Khan's doctoral thesis was on the discovery of  Multiple Memory Material Technology for which he and Norman Zhou, a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, are co-inventors. Kahn is currently president and CTO of Smarter Alloys and a research associate at the University of Waterloo's Centre for Advanced Materials Joining.

Simarjeet Saini of electrical and computer engineering had an article published about his silicon nanowire research in the print and online editions of LaserWorld magazine.“Low-cost measurements in optics are the holy grail for photonics researchers,” says Saini in the article.

Waterloo Engineering students had their chance to impress Canadian business leaders on the October 31 all-student episode of CBC's Dragons' Den.  Hongwei Liu, an electrical and computer engineering student, and Desmond Choi, a  University of Waterloo arts student, pitched their company MappedIn's smartphone application that helps people navigate through malls. 
 

Waterloo's School of Architecture is one of the top design schools in North America and the only Canadian institution chosen by AZURE, an award-winning magazine with a focus on contemporary architecture and design.  The ranking appears in the publication's November/December issue. In alphabetical order the top five schools are: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Southern California Institute of Architecture and Waterloo.