News

Breakthroughs in technology and computing are changing the way researchers approach medicine. Early scientists wielded the revolutionary tools of their time, such as the microscope, to understand human health. Today, researchers increasingly use math as a microscope to understand biology and medicine, dictating the need for scientists to navigate between the worlds of computations and medicine comfortably.

WIN member Emmanuel Ho, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy and an international expert in nanomedicine, is developing a 3D-printed intra-vaginal ring (IVR) that would provide highly precise doses of medication to protect women from getting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS and kills one million people globally each year, according to UNAIDS.
 

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.

Teams with members from the nanotechnology engineering undergraduate program claimed one of the four $5,000 prizes on the line today at the latest on-campus pitch competition for students with business ideas.

Nanotechnology greatly benefits from mathematical disciplines such as data science, informatics and computational modeling, assisting with theoretical and experimental approaches to designing materials with novel physical and chemical characteristics, optimizing device design, and predicting behaviour of complex biological-pharmaceutical systems.

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. 

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.