News

Sergey Bogdanov, a Waterloo mechanical engineering doctoral candidate, won the best poster presentation at the International Conference on Fatigue Damage of Structural Materials IX held September 16-21 in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The conference was attended by almost 200 experts from 58 countries. Bogdanov's work will be published in the form of a full-length paper in the International Journal of Fatigue Journal.

Mark Smucker of management sciences and Charlie Clarke of computer science have been honoured with the best paper award by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval at its annual conference, considered to be the premier one in the field of information retrieval. The University of Waterloo professors' winning paper is entitled "Time-Based Calibration of Effectiveness Measures."

Canada's ninth annual National Biotechnology Week, from September 14 to 21, celebrates national biotechnology excellence. Canada's bio-economy is estimated to be worth more than $87 billion and involves a wide variety of sectors including pharmaceutical manufacturing, health, and medicine, agriculture and food bioprocessing, and organic chemical manufacturing.

Claudio Cañizares has received one of Canada's highest academic honours by being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

The electrical and computer engineering professor is among the recipients of 11 medals and awards, which recognize outstanding achievements in several fields of research and scholarship.

As students return to school, Waterloo Collegiate Institute's Janelle Tam was featured in the September 4 edition of Premier Dalton McGuinty's blog. Janelle is the daughter of Dr. Michael Tam, a faculty member in Waterloo's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology.

A paper written by engineers from Waterloo and South China University of Technology recently won the Best Student Paper Award at the 3M-NANO international conference held in Xi’an China.

Waterloo Engineering has been ranked number 43 in the world (number two in Canada) in the “Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences” Field of the Academic Ranking of World Universities for 2012! Along with the University of Toronto in 13th spot, we are the only two Canadian schools in the top 50 of what's also known as the Shanghai Ranking. Seven other Canadian schools appear in the top 200.

Naveen Chandrashekar is developing a method of simulating career-ending injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) located in the knee. The mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor has designed a  simulator that is capable of accurately replicating high-speed knee movements, such as those resulting from intense athletic activity.

According to Chandrashekar, around 100,000 athletes in North America tear their ACL every year, resulting in more than $2 billion in treatment costs annually.

An electrical and computer engineering professor is creating a novel terahertz frequency laser that can operate closer to room temperature than any other previously developed.

Three Waterloo Engineering graduates are the first recipients of the new Scientists and Engineers in Business Fellowship, created to help turn innovations into businesses. Armen Bakirtzian, JS Rancourt, and Ryan Denomme each received $60,000 in the first round of fellowships. Two more rounds of fellowships will be awarded in the next eight months.