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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:

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to imagine how Mariko Shimoda had time to become an engineer with all of her community involvement. The Mechanical Engineering graduate (BASC ’20) clearly excels and can juggle a lot and do it well - she was hired full-time by her co-op placement.

Over the past five years, Shimoda participated in the following volunteer roles:

Mihaela Vlasea’s, high achievements were recognized by SME.org. The awards are centered on research and management efforts around manufacturing processes, environmental sustainability, additive manufacturing, smart manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, nanomanufacturing, biomedical manufacturing, metalworking fluids, civil and environmental engineering, and advanced materials.

Congratulations to our alumni at Otto Motors, a division of Clearpath Robotics, who announced an additional $29 million (USD) Series C funding raise June 1^st -  led by the Kensington Private Equity Fund Private Equity Fund with participation from BMO Capital Partners, Export Development Canada (EDC), and previous investors iNovia Capital and RRE Ventures. This raise adds to the $54 million (USD) previously raised, for a total of $83 million (USD) in funding.

Patricia Nieva and William Melek, both Mechanical and Mechatronics Professors, have partnered with Facedrive Health, to incorporate the new algorithms they’re developing into a smart phone contact tracing app called TraceSCAN.

In isolation due to COVID-19Zhongchao (Chao) Tan, Professor of University of Waterloo’s Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, spent two months writing and self-publishing an English resource book because he understands first-hand the formal, non-native, English writing challenges to engineering international students who come to Canada from another country.

RoboHub technician and long time MME staff member, Robert Wagner, develops a swab booth to test people for COVID-19 

The PPE-Free swab testing booth works by providing a hard physical barrier to significantly reduce the amount of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) needed to test patients and protect healthcare professionals.

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