Engineering student one of Maclean's Future leaders under 25

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Dominic Toselli started Waterloo Engineering in 2009 with one main goal in mind – to make the most of his engineering education.

Dominic Toselly Photo
This spring Dominic Toselli will graduate with a mechanical engineering degree along with an option in international studies in engineering. 

Toselli is armed with a CV full of educational and other achievements including his latest: being named one of Maclean’s Future leaders under 25. Part of the magazine’s April 21 issue, the special report profiles Canada’s future leaders described as an elite group of young people who are outstanding in their fields.

Early into his Waterloo Engineering education Toselli, whose father is Italian, decided he wanted to spend a year working on his degree in Italy. The problem was he didn’t speak Italian and the University of Waterloo didn’t have an exchange agreement with Polytechnic University in Milan. But Toselli didn’t let those two obstacles deter him. He spent two years studying Italian and working on putting an exchange agreement in place. While overseas, he passed all his exams, even the oral ones, and found time to take pictures of models for his photography business.

Toselli says he chose Waterloo Engineering for its co-op program and the opportunities it can provide, especially in the Silicon Valley where he spent a work term at Apple. While there, he developed a mechanism that would allow a camera component to detach from a device such as an iPhone if it hits the ground, reducing the chance that anything will break. Toselli’s invention so impressed Steve Zadesky, vice-president of iPod/iPhone, that a patent for it was recently published.  

“Apple gave me an incredible amount of freedom,” says Toselli. “It was the first job that I’ve had the freedom to work the amount I wanted to and on the projects I wanted to work on.”

Top co-op honours

During another co-op term at Shell, he came up with a solution to a heat exchanger problem that has resulted in the company saving $1 million a year and the University of Waterloo honouring him as engineering’s top co-op student for 2012.

His work with Shell and Cenovus, another oil sands firm, provided him with the background used to start PetroPredict, a company he co-founded with Andrew Andrade, a second-year Waterloo mechatronics engineering student. PetroPredict uses data analytics to find potential oil and gas leaks that may go undetected for years. The impressive pitch made by the two engineering students for their startup has resulted in several awards from VeloCity, the University’s business incubator. Last November, PetroPredict won the people’s choice award and best pitch and just last month it captured one of the top awards of $25,000.

Besides working on his startup and finishing his engineering degree, Toselli somehow managed to find the time last term to start two clubs. An avid squash player, he launched the Waterloo Engineering squash club as well as the University of Waterloo Italian Club to encourage students to think about travelling abroad to complete a semester or a year.

When it comes to finding the time to tick off everything on his to do list, Toselli has a simple answer.

“I haven’t slept a lot in the past year,” he laughs.