News

A company that was co-founded by a Waterloo Engineering architecture alumnus is in elite company – for the second time – on a worldwide list announced this week by TIME magazine.

Biobot Analytics, a startup launched by Newsha Ghaeli (BAS ’11) and Mariana Matus in 2017, cracked the second annual TIME100 Most Influential Companies list for 2022 along with global giants such as Amazon, Meta, Apple, Disney, Netflix, the National Football League and TikTok.

Impressing judges with projects ranging from a unique alternative to traditional cancer treatment to a high-performance e-bike that folds into the size of a backpack netted six senior-year engineering teams $10,000 each in the annual Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design contest. 

A mechanical engineering student at the University of Waterloo is the recipient of one of 10 scholarships awarded by Hydro One to help encourage gender diversity within the utility and the electricity industry in general.

In addition to $5,000, Winnie Lin will be given the opportunity to complete a paid work term at the company as a winner of its Women in Engineering Scholarship.

Over the years, Husky Technologies^TM (formerly known as Husky Injection Molding Systems) has helped Waterloo Engineering undergraduates experiencing financial difficulty through its Student Opportunity Fund.

Launched in 1999, the fund’s several awards of up to $2,000 each have been presented to over 100 students enrolled in one of the Faculty’s 13 undergraduate programs.

A company that was founded by three Waterloo Engineering graduates has secured $1.7 million in seed funding to fuel its growth in the agricultural technology space.

IntelliCulture was launched in 2018 by Ramin Shaikhi (BASc ’16, MASc ’19, mechanical engineering), Michael Wu (BASc ’19, mechatronics engineering) and Cole Powers (BASc ’19, mechanical engineering) to help farmers better understand their spray coverage and efficiencies, and manage the upkeep of their assets.

Demonstrating their impressive engineering design and debating skills, Waterloo Engineering students won the most first-place awards of any school participating in this year’s Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC).

Undergraduate teams captured three top prizes and one third-place finish in the remote competition hosted by the University of New Brunswick this month.

A new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that makes cancerous tissue glow in medical images could help doctors more accurately detect and track the progression of cancer over time.

The innovation, developed by researchers at the Waterloo Engineering, creates images in which cancerous tissue appears to light up compared to healthy tissue, making it easier to see.

An undergraduate who stayed close to home for the spring term is the Co-op Student of the Year for the Faculty of Engineering in 2021.

Sarah Odinotski, who is studying nanotechnology engineering, worked in-person and on-campus with Mahla Poudineh, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, to develop a hydrogel-based microneedle biosensor for pH measurement.

Minutes away from elective surgery, Eric Blondeel realized he wasn’t insured if he died on the operating table.

Lying on a hospital gurney, Blondeel used the cell phone he still had with him to google where he could purchase some type of last-minute life insurance.

“I wasn’t able to find anything, so I started checking on the chances I could possibly die within the next couple of hours,” says the Waterloo chemical engineering alumnus. “It was an orthopedic surgery but I was going to be under full general anesthetic, which I’d never been before, so I was a bit nervous.”

Manh-Kien Tran is optimistic about the future and the promise of advances in energy storage systems to pave the way for a cleaner, more energy-efficient society.

As a doctoral student in chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo, he hopes to contribute to that future through research focused on cloud-based battery management, with an emphasis on lithium-ion batteries.