Awards dinner celebrates students, staff, faculty, supporters and alumni

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Exceptional students and alumni were honoured at the 2015 Waterloo Engineering Awards Dinner held November 26.                    

Over 2,500 students received awards this year for everything from top marks, to extracurricular activities, such as leadership, community engagement and involvement in athletics.

Faculty of Engineering medals were presented to the following alumni:

2015 Young Alumni Achievement Medal winner Brent E. Tweddle
The first recipient of the Young Alumni Achievement Medal was Brent E. Tweddle (BASc '07, Computer). Tweddle went on to complete his Masters and PhD at MIT and while working on his doctoral degree he headed up the development of a robotic research system that has successfully operated on the International Space Station. Currently Tweddle is a Guidance and Control Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Lander Vision System for the Mars 2020 Entry, Descent and Landing System.

2015 Young Alumni Achievement Medal winner Fangjin Yang
The second recipient of the Young Alumni Achievement Medal was Fangjin Yang (BASc '07, Electrical ‘07, MASc ’09 Computer). While working at Metamarkets in the digital advertising space he created the open-source, real-time analytics system Druid that recently won the Best Open Source Innovation award for excellence in software development from the Software and Information Industry Association. He has since formed the startup Imply.

2015 Team Alumni Achievement Medal winner Team Clearpath Robotics
The Team Alumni Achievement Medal was awarded to Patrick Martinson (BASc '09 MechatronicsMASc ’15 Management), Matt Rendall (BASc '08 MechatronicsMBET ‘09), Ryan Gariepy (BASc '09 Mechatronics, MASc ’11 Mechanical) and Bryan Webb (BASc ‘09 Mechatronics) of Clearpath Robotics. Since launching the company six years ago, the company has earned an international reputation for providing reliable, state-of-the-art robotics solutions for a range of industrial applications. 

2015 Achievement Alumni Medal recipient in the Professional Category winner Marc Morin

The Alumni Achievement Medal for Professional Achievement was awarded to Marc. H. Morin (BASc '87 Electrical). A highly successful local entrepreneur who has made a tremendous contribution to Waterloo Region technology economy including building PixStream, that was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. in 2000 and then launching Sandvine, Emforium and most recently Auvik; a cloud-based system, provides IT professionals with a better way to monitor, configure and automate networks.

2015 Friend of the Faculty Award John Carrick, Blair McArthur and Kelly Carrick
Also honoured at the Awards dinner was The Miller McAsphalt Group with the Friend of the Faculty Award. The Miller McAsphalt Group was instrumental in the formation of Waterloo Engineering’s Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology. The Group’s support of research at the centre and the Norman W. McLeod Chair has had a huge impact on advanced research and education that has resulted in improvements to Canadian standards and specifications, including the development of recycled asphalt pavement. Pictured above are John Carrick, Blair McArthur and Kelly Carrick from The Miller McAsphalt Group.