Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA)
Needles Hall, second floor, room 2201
Monday, March 15, 2021 — 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
This event is part of the GRADventure Professional Skills Conference. Visit the conference web page for a full schedule of events.
Canada's Waterloo Region solidly ranks among the top 25 startup ecosystems in the world, boasting approximately 1,100 startups for a population of about half a million people—the second-highest startup density in the world after the global leader, Silicon Valley.
Want to learn more about career possibilities in this startup ecosystem after grad school? Attend this panel discussion to hear from former grad students who work (or have worked) in the startup space. This session will be relevant to you as someone seeking a potential career in a startup company, or as a potential founder.
Panellist bios:
Eric Blondeel cofounded the medical diagnostic company Kenota Health in 2014, and received his PhD in 2018 from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is currently working on a new startup in fintech.
Lichen Zhang is a product designer at Faire and previously worked for Smile.io. While she was in graduate school she founded PriveHealth, a gamified cybersecurity training platform designed for healthcare professionals. She earned her BASc and MASc in Civil Engineering from UWaterloo.
Gordon Hall has been developing instrumentation for lab-on-chip devices for the past decade; starting at the University of Waterloo during the tail end of his undergraduate degree in Nanotechnology engineering and continuing through his PhD specializing in low-cost, scalable microfluidic instrumentation. Following graduation, Gordon joined Nicoya where he designed the OpenSPR microfluidics system and kicked off Nicoya’s digital microfluidics (DMF) platform. Gordon is currently the lead technical architect and project manager for Alto, the world’s first DMF-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Alto automates routine tasks and reduces instrument downtime so that scientists can focus on their next big discovery.
Additional Information
- Registration is required through Eventbrite.
- Questions for our panellists can be submitted in advance through the registration form. The deadline to submit questions is Friday, March 12 at 12:00 p.m. ET.
- This session will be recorded and made available to University of Waterloo graduate students and postdocs through our secure conference recording request form. Please check the conference web page approximately one week after the live session.
- A link to the live session will be emailed to registered attendees two days prior to the event, as well as the day of the event.