News

Hamid Tizhoosh was looking for a new idea, a fresh start, when he began talking to doctors about how they do their jobs and how they might do them better. 

Six months into his consultations, with his engineering lab at the University of Waterloo reduced to a one-man show by a failed artificial intelligence (AI) startup, he heard something that almost floored him. 

After working for more than a decade as a chemical engineer, Waterloo Engineering alumnus Ajoa Mintah (BASc ’01) reached a crossroads in her career.

"I got to a point with my work where I hit a ceiling,” she recalls. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to break through as a Black woman. So, I had a choice to make. Am I going to work for someone else and keep trying to break through or build my own house?”

It was a turning point that led Mintah to found an ice cream business in 2016 that now boasts a factory in Kitchener and a retail shop in Waterloo.

A startup company launched by researchers at Waterloo Engineering won $50,000 this week in a pitch competition for cancer innovations.

Air Microfluidic Systems was co-founded last year by Carolyn Ren, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, and one of her graduate students, PhD candidate Run Ze Gao.

Four graduate students at Waterloo Engineering recorded a second-place finish at a recent design competition with a device to speed up COVID-19 vaccinations.

Kris Jiang, Kshitij Kadiya, Syed Mujtaba Ahmad and Yashesh Dasari are all master’s students in mechanical and mechatronics engineering who took the graduate diploma in design engineering option.

A spin-off company with deep roots at Waterloo Engineering has won a second Emmy Award for its work to improve the quality and reduce the costs of video.

SSIMWAVE, based in Waterloo, was founded in 2013 by Zhou Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Abdul Rehman and Kai Zeng, who both earned their doctorates at Waterloo Engineering the same year.

Two students at Waterloo Engineering have launched an online project to help their peers across campus share strong emotions and the stories behind them.

Queenie Wu and Leslie Xin, third-year students in the systems design engineering program, created a heat map called Waterworks to show places where students have cried as a tool for coping and connecting.

Waterloo Engineering researchers have found that single-use, medical-grade gloves may be safely reused up to 20 times when using certain disinfection methods.  

In a recent study of six viral disinfection treatments on two commonly used types of disposable gloves worn for personal protection throughout the pandemic, the researchers discovered that alcohol, UV and heat treatment could allow the reuse of gloves safely up to 20 cycles.

A professor at Waterloo Engineering has been named a fellow of an international organization that fosters leadership and collaboration among leading environmental researchers.

Nandita Basu, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and earth and environmental sciences, is one of 21 sustainability scientists selected from across North America for the 2021 cohort of the Earth Leadership Program (ELP).

Teams representing Waterloo Engineering made the top three in six of eight categories at the recent Ontario Engineering Competition, which was held online due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

The two Waterloo teams, the winners of campus competitions held in the spring and fall of last year, together collected two firsts, three seconds and a pair of thirds at the 42^nd annual event.

Undergraduate students competed in communications, programming, consulting, re-engineering, junior design, senior design, debates and innovative design over two days.

Researchers at Waterloo Engineering have taken another step forward in their open-source COVID-19 project with the release of new datasets and an artificial intelligence (AI) model that was built using them.

Launched in March, the initiative involves the use of deep-learning AI software to screen for evidence of infection in chest x-rays and CT scans.