The American Chemical Society recently published an editorial on "The Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology: Societal Impact and a Sustainable Future" which hightlights research breakthroughs in energy harvesting and storage technology areas published by WIN members in the past decade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.