Kinesiology students excel at national ergonomics conference

Waterloo students from the department of kinesiology were recognized earlier this month for their contributions to the field of ergonomics at the 42nd annual conference of the Association of Canadian Ergonomists (ACE).

The conference, which took place October 18 to 20 in London, Ontario, featured the theme, ‘Ergonomics and Performance: Health, safety and beyond’ recognizing that ergonomics and human factors theory, evaluation, and design principles not only have a positive impact on health and safety, but can contribute to the optimization of product, system, and environmental designs.

Alan Cudlip (above) won the ACE Undergraduate Award with a paper titled, "The Influence of Task Frequency and Force Direction on Psychophysically Acceptable Forces in the Context of Biomechanical Weakest Links." The paper resulted from research performed on a co-op work term with faculty member Clark Dickerson, and featured Waterloo professor Richard Wells as co-author.

Samuel Howarth (right) won the ACE Founders' Award for Doctoral Research for work performed as part of his PhD thesis with professor Jack Callaghan titled, "Cumulative Shear Injury: Implications For Occupational Low-Back Injury Evaluation."

Callaghan, who also served as Scientific Chair of the conference, is seen presenting Cudlip and Howarth with their awards.