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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.

Waterloo Engineering start-up BufferBox is launching a network of parcel pickup locations at GO Train stations after landing a contract with Metrolinx, the agency that oversees GO Transit stations in Ontario. Beginning with installations in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), BufferBox will enable GO Transit riders to conveniently pick up goods purchased online at a BufferBox in their local GO Station. 

A paper written by Rafael Lotufo, an electrical and computer doctoral candidate, Zeeshan Malik, a computer science master's student, and their supervisor Krzysztof Czarnecki, an electrical and computer engineering professor, won the best paper award at the International Conference on Software Maintenance held in Riva del Garda, Italy. Their paper, entitled Modelling the ‘Hurried’ Bug Report Reading Process to Summarize Bug Reports, was singled out from 181 submissions.