Current students

An exciting and innovative transition has been taking place in the Faculty of Science, and we are now pleased to announce the opening of the Science Innovation Hub!

When he was a young boy growing up in Burkina Faso, Yannick Traore’s dad didn’t like to buy him toys. Yannick had a habit of taking things apart just to figure out how to put them back together. Even as a child, he needed to understand how things worked.

Today, Yannick’s putting that curiosity to good use as a PhD candidate in Professor Emmanuel Ho’s lab.

A nanotechnology engineering undergraduate team won first place at this year’s Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) in the Innovative Design category.

Hosted by the University of Guelph from January 17 to 19, OEC brought together engineering students from across the province to compete in eight unique challenges designed around the theme of Improve Life.

Professor Todd Holyoak is an expert in the dynamic aspects of the enzyme structure-function relationship, or “conformational plasticity” in enzymology and how these dynamic aspects of enzyme structure can be altered/influenced to alter and enzyme function. Currently, the Holyoak lab is exploring the structure-function relationship in several diverse enzyme families with a current focus upon the GTP-dependent phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinases (PEPCK) and the IgA1 protease family of bacterial proteins.

The research in Professor David Rose’s laboratory in the Department of Biology is focused on the human enzymes that recognize and act upon carbohydrates. These enzymes play key roles in multiple aspects of health and disease, including deriving glucose from components of our diets, such as starch and sucrose, and in the synthesis of glycoproteins (proteins that consist of carbohydrates as well as amino acids).

There are many proteins that aid in COX assembly. Professor Moira Glerum was the first to identify many of these so-called COX assembly factors in yeast, which in turn facilitated the identification of the molecular bases for a number of different COX deficiencies in patients by molecular and medical geneticists. 

There are many researchers searching for new and clean sources of energy. However, few are conducting research at the intersection of nanotechnology and quantum phenomenon. Professor Dayan Ban, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is conducting seminal research in the area of quantum photonics and nanoelectronics.

Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN) members, in partnership with the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), is developing the next generation of radar, quantum radar.