News

Hack the North, Canada’s largest student-led hackathon, welcomed more than 1000 student hackers to the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Engineering for its annual event of intense innovation. 

A marquee event on any serious hackers' calendar, Hack the North 2025 pulled out all the stops to deliver a memorable experience of 36 hours of playful, creative and collaborative builds. And they broke a Guinness World Record! 

The Faculty of Engineering community is mourning the loss of a professor whose pioneering work in biomedical optics advanced both science and clinical practice.

Kostadinka Bizheva, known as Dida to her colleagues and friends, was cross-appointed in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Optometry and Vision Science, with her main appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The Waterloo Space Research Team (WSRT), a student design team from the University of Waterloo, saw their work soar into near-space last month during the Canadian Space Agency’s Strato-Science 2025 campaign in Timmins, Ontario.

WSRT’s experiment, Project ASTRA, was selected for the Canadian Stratospheric Balloon Experiment Design Challenge (CAN-SBX), a national competition that invites student teams to design, build and launch compact experiments on high-altitude balloons operated by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). 

Three entrepreneurial graduates of Waterloo Engineering have launched a new product they hope will change the home heating industry, reducing carbon emissions and saving customers money by driving a move away from natural gas to greener electricity.

Stephen Lake, Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant (all BASc ’12, mechatronics engineering) built on their prior success in business to co-found Vancouver-based Jetson with a goal of making electric home heating much more common.  

Several researchers at Waterloo Engineering were key contributors to an international collaboration to turn sperm cells into magnetically controlled microrobots.

The sperm bots, as they have been dubbed, can be tracked using X-ray imaging, paving the way for potential uses in reproductive medicine, drug delivery and infertility diagnostics.

The Faculty of Engineering welcomed five Schulich Leader Scholars to its 2025 first-year class through the prestigious Schulich Leader Scholarships program.  

The cohort includes Kaibo Huang (Software Engineering), Hilary Pang (Mechatronics Engineering), Matthew Petersen (Systems Design Engineering), and Azka Siddiqui and Cherry Wang (both Computer Engineering).

Two students have been recognized nationally for their leadership, service and character as recipients of one of Canada’s most prestigious undergraduate awards.

First-year students Edna Nortey and Aishwarya Tandon were named 2025 Loran Scholars, an honour granted annually to just 36 individuals from thousands of applicants across the country. 

Two professors at the Waterloo School of Architecture are helping lead a collaborative, Canada-wide effort to address several deep problems they describe as ‘housing alienation’ during the 2025-26 academic year.

Students at 14 architecture schools, including Waterloo, will take part in design studios with a common aim to tackle issues including housing unaffordability, disrepair, under-housing, precarity and homelessness.

An inexpensive device developed by Waterloo Engineering researchers can generate enough electricity to power a calculator using only walnut shells and drops of water.

“This technology could be a game-changer for powering small electronic devices, especially in remote or off-grid areas,” said Nazmul Hossain, a PhD student in mechanical and mechatronics engineering. “Imagine environmental sensors monitoring forests, IoT and wearable health devices, disaster-relief equipment – all running on tiny water droplets from the air.”