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Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Pitching to win

In a dazzling display of innovation at this year's Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design, senior engineering teams from the Faculty of Engineering brought forth groundbreaking projects to compete for substantial funding to fuel their entrepreneurial dreams. Out of the ten formidable teams, two remarkable groups from the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering (MME) stream notably clinched victory.

Congratulations to PhD student Ahmed Saieed for winning the 2021 Graduate Scholarship Award from the CFD Society of Canada. The award is a national-level recognition and was created in 2005 to encourage graduate students to pursue the topic of computational fluid dynamics in their thesis. Each year, up to two students are awarded $4,000 scholarships and applicants must be a full-time Master or PhD student and an active member of the CFDSC.

On March 30th and 31st, MME's 4th-year Capstone Design Symposium events were held virtually and showcased our latest and greatest in terms of talent and innovation. This year, there were over 100+ senior teams showcasing their projects and competing for a selection of awards from best product design, web design, prototype, inovation, presention quality etc. Below are the results and conclusions of this year's award winners. 

Congratulations to the winners and to everyone that participated in the event!

On March 17, 2021, the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering community gathered together to celebrate and learn about the innovative research taking place in the department at the 4th annual MME Graduate Research Symposium.

With the largest attendance to date, this event had many other “firsts”. It was the first time the event was held online, the first collaboration and sponsorship from the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business and featured the first ever entrepreneurship award.

This past Wednesday April 7th, at the Norman Esch pitch competition, a pitch competition amongst the entire UWaterloo Engineering faculty, 4 of the 6 ten-thousand dollar prizes were awarded to teams from the MME department (2 Mechanical, 2 Mechatronics). Mechanical engineering team, Bless Your Sole, earned an additional $3,000 as the winner of the Sedra People’s Choice Award.

Take a brief look at each of our winning teams below:

Team AquaSensing, a MME student-run start-up project, have won a $5000 grant, among four winning teams, from the 2021 Winter Concept pitch competition.

Founded by MME master's students, Nathan Johnson, Connor Al-Joundi, Kushant Patel and Jarren Teo, AquaSensing focusses on the design of battery-free water-leak detection devices.

Come join us virtually on Wednesday April 7th and witness 10 finalist 4th-year Capstone teams from various engineering departments battle it out in the Norman Esch Pitch Competition for $60K in prize money to jumpstart their startup project. 

Of the 10 finalists selected, 5 of them, an unprecedented majority, are from MME (2 MTE, 3 ME). Each team could take home one of six $10,000 prizes - yes, MME could clean sweep the finals by winning five of the six awards!

AquaSensing, a tech startup started by MME professor Norman Zhou and ECE professor George Shaker, have earned a spot in the finals of an international pitch competition for water innovation.

The duo booked its spot in the global Water Dragons pitch competition after winning second place in the preliminal round against eight other companies.

Waterloo Autonomous Racing (WATORACE), including two Mechatronics students, Ben Kurrek and Elijah O’Leary, won 4th place in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) virtual race #3, also capturing the Rising Star Award.

Ben and Elijah have contributed to determining the best racing line for the car to follow, as well as the throttle controller and test scenarios.