News

Crouton Labs, a team made up of third-year mechatronics engineering students Drew Gross, Akash Vaswani and Jake Nielsen and computer science student Christophe Biocca, took first place in the Brainstem Build-a-thon. The competition was held as part of the June 25-27 BrainSTEM "unconference" at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. The Build-a-thon included 10 teams of university and college students that worked for 48 hours to create a digital media product.

According to a recent survey conducted by Business Insider, a respected U.S. based online news source, Waterloo Engineering is the best engineering school in Canada.

The same survey placed Waterloo 29th in the world, with two other Canadian universities included in the top 50. The University of Toronto ranked 35th and the University of Ottawa took the 44th spot.

A recent theoretical study by a doctoral candidate in nanotechnology engineering suggests that manufacturers may one day make lasers and LEDs out of silicon, with the potential to significantly lower their price.

Two Waterloo Engineering graduate students have received prestigious NSERC Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships that will help them pursue and complete doctoral degrees and conduct significant engineering research. The recipients are Ahmed Abdel Aziz of electrical and computer engineering and Mohit Verma of chemical engineering. 

Kyrylo Cyril Rewa, a Waterloo civil engineering master’s student, has challenged some beliefs about cyclists in a study by the University of Waterloo and Waterloo Region that was presented June 26 among the opening sessions of Velo-city Global 2012 in Vancouver.

ACCN's interesting interview with the University of Waterloo's own Marc Aucoin. The professor of chemical engineering shares his work with ACCN on the production system of viruses and virus like particles for vaccines and gene therapy.

Shesha H Jayaram, an electrical and computer engineering professor, and Chitral J Angammana, who completed his PhD under Jayaram’s supervision in 2011, have been honoured with 2012 IEEE James R. Melcher Prize Paper Award for their paper entitled Analysis of the Effects of Solution Conductivity on Electrospinning Process and Fiber Morphology. The award that recognizes the best Electrostatic Processes Committee papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications was presented during the 2012 Joint Electrostatics Conference held in Cambridge, Ontario in June.

Nicole Shum, who will begin nanotechnology engineering this fall at Waterloo, has been honoured with a $60,000 Canadian Schulich Leader Scholarship.  The new award recognizes students across Canada who demonstrate excellence in academics and/or community leadership and who plan to study one of the STEM subjects — Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics — during their undergraduate years.

Engineering's alumni list officially increased June 16 with the convocation of 1,359 students in two ceremonies. Highlights included the first class of 40 management engineering students receiving their degrees. The management engineering program was established in 2007 to provide undergraduate students with the "engineering education required to understand, design, implement, and manage complex management systems upon which organizations depend."

Several civil engineering students, faculty members and alumni won best paper awards at two recent annual events. At the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering Annual Conference held in Edmonton alumnus Beatrice Yung and faculty members Bryan Tolson and Donald Burn were recognized with the  best paper award in the hydrotechnical area published in the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering. The award for the best paper on bridge engineering published in the same journal was won by alumnus Reid Coughlin and faculty member Scott Walbridge.