News

A medical technology startup co-founded by two nanotechnology students topped more than 100,000 applicants to take first place and the $500,000 USD prize in an international competition staged in Saudi Arabia.

NERv Technology, which is based at the Velocity Garage in downtown Kitchener, won the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) following a startup boot camp and several rounds of competition in Riyadh.

Former undergraduate student, Dawn Ng, worked a co-op position at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. During this term she studied and learned the vehicle painting process and she noticed every time a new color was applied to a bumper, a solvent-water mixture was used to clean the nozzles of the high-tech spray robots. The cleaning agent contained about 10 percent solvent.

Scientists have created an “artificial leaf” to fight climate change by inexpensively converting harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) into a useful alternative fuel.

The new technology, outlined in a paper published today in the journal Nature Energy, was inspired by the way plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into food.

Researchers have developed a faster, cheaper way to coat liquid medication, an invention that could improve how drugs are delivered in the body.

The new encapsulation technology, developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo, uses gravity and other natural forces to wrap drops as they fall through a thin layer of liquid shell floating on a base liquid.

Once hardened, or cured, by exposure to ultraviolet light, the shell houses and protects the liquid core inside.

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).

Physician-angel and VC firm fuel ongoing studies and product development.

NERv Technology Inc., an innovative medtech venture co-founded by a number of University of Waterloo alumni, has secured $1 million CAD in pre-seed funding.

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.

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. 

Four professors at Waterloo Engineering, including WIN Director Sushanta Mitra and WIN member Kevin Musselman, were recently awarded $570,000 in provincial funding to build their research teams and pay for research-related infrastructure.

Three WIN members have been named fellows of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and members of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

They are among 93 new fellows elected by their peers for outstanding scholarly, scientific, and artistic achievement and 46 new members of the College across Canada announced today.

Waterloo’s new RSC fellows and members are:

Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada