News

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.

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.

A self-driving shuttle bus - the first at any academic institution in Canada - could be operating on the Ring Road at the University of Waterloo by the time students return to campus for in-person classes as COVID-19 restrictions ease.

MME Professor and Executive Director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology,Sushanta K. Mitra and Kiran Raj Melayil, a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Micro Nano-Scale Transport Lab, are working toward a better understanding of droplet dynamics on face masks to gain insight into the transmission mechanics of COVID-19. Their research is a promising step toward safer and more effective face mask designs for the public.

The Ontario government recently announced a $2.5 million investment into Facedrive Inc. to support the development and deployment of the contact tracing system TraceSCAN.

The purpose of this project is to develop an artificial intelligence alert system for COVID-19 based on contact tracing and health monitoring using Bluetooth-enabled wearable technology and mobile app. The University of Waterloo has partnered with Facedrive Inc. to conduct research/development in areas such as AI-based models to better predict outbreak patterns of COVID-19 and any subsequent pandemics. 

Four MME graduate students recently won second-place at McMaster University's 2021 CAD Designathon Competition for designing a Covid-19 automatic vaccination device. Their design demonstrated considerably higher vaccination rates than current manual methods.  

Congratulations to Kris Jiang, Kshitij Kadiya, Syed Mujtaba Ahmad, and Yashesh Dasari.

Read the full story on the UWaterloo Engineering website

Run Ze Gao, PhD candidate and CEO of Air Microfluidics Systems (AMS) Inc. recently won the 2021 Falcon's Fortune Pitch run by Ontario-based venture firm, FACIT. AMS, the startup co-founded by Gao and MME professor Carolyn Ren, were recognized for the novel concept of an air microfluidics-enabled compression sleeve to treat breast cancer-related lymphedema.