News

A WIN member has won $265,000 in federal backing to develop a palm-sized device capable of detecting COVID-19 infection within 30 minutes.

Carolyn Ren, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and WIN Member, will lead the one-year project by a team that includes professors Emmanuel Ho (also a WIN member) of the School of Pharmacy at Waterloo and fellow WIN member and Keith Fowke of the University of Manitoba.

Last week, this year's Vanier Scholarship award winners were announced. Among the prestigious group was 2019 and 2020 Nanofellowship winner Christian Ieritano, one of three winners from UWaterloo.

Serapis Labs develops prototype for a testing kit that is simple enough for anyone to use

By Alana Rigby and Brian Caldwell University of Waterloo

Monica Hoang had no idea earlier this year that she’d be spending the last few months of her PhD working on the design of a COVID-19 testing kit.

The School of Pharmacy student moved back to her hometown when the University of Waterloo decided to go online for the spring term and planned to do her PhD defence digitally.

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.

Congratulations to three WIN members for winning the WIN-MESA+ Seed Funding Award for $75,000 each to support international joint research projects with faculty members from the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente, Netherlands.