News

In a world where just about everyone has a smartphone it also means that almost everyone has become an amateur photographer. In 2019, more than 657 billion smartphone photographs were taken – and many of them blurry. But help is on the way. A promising new student venture, Scope, is hoping their invention of a new type of optical zoom lens system with electronically tunable optical power will help people take better photos while reducing the battery use, costs, and processing power of smartphones.

Today, two prominent Waterloo scientists were among the 60 exceptional scientists selected to be Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences. 

Chemist Linda Nazar, a WIN member, and Physicist Donna Strickland were both elected for their outstanding contributions to their field and scientific understanding.

Innovative solutions to serious medical problems took four of six $10,000 prizes up for grabs when student teams competed via video this month in an annual pitch competition for startup companies. Three of the six winning teams consisted of nanotechnology students.

The new format, which replaced in-person presentations at the Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design due to the coronavirus crisis, gave graduating students five minutes to explain their projects instead of the usual three minutes, followed by questions.

At the Concept $5K Finals - formerly the Velocity Fund Finals - teams featuring nanotechnology engineering students took one of four $5,000 awards, plus the $500 People’s Champ prize, for students with business ideas.

Twenty-nine University of Waterloo researchers, including 4 science recipients, 3 of which are members of WIN, will receive $3.4 million from the provincial government to further research innovation in Ontario. 

A new, battery-free sensor can detect water leaks in buildings at a fraction of the cost of existing systems.

The tiny device, developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo, uses nanotechnology to power itself and send an alert to smartphones when exposed to moisture.

By eliminating a battery and related circuitry, researchers estimate their sensor could be commercially produced for $5 each, about a tenth of the cost of current leak detection devices on the market.

John Yeow, a WIN member and systems design engineering professor, is the new VP of Educational Activities for the IEEE Nanotechnology Technical Council (NTC).

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.