News

Waterloo Engineering graduates make global finals of high-profile contest for student inventors

Anneke van Heuven (BASc ’21) and Elias Trouyet (BASc ’21), co-founders of AlgoBio and recent graduates of Nanotechnology Engineering, received a runner-up spot in the 2021 James Dyson Award competition. Their new material was developed from sea-weed and can be used as a fire retardant. Read the full story on Waterloo News.

NERv Technology, a MedTech startup co-founded by Nanotechnology Engineering alumni Amr Abdelgawad (BASc 2016, Nanotechnology Engineering, MBET 2017) and Youssef Helwa (BASc 2015, Nanotechnology Engineering, MASc 2017, Electrical Engineering), has secured $3.32 CAD million in seed funding to support the launch of their smart catheter system that can enhance healthcare delivery by helping surgeons respond faster to potential post-surgical complications.

Thanks to our generous alumni, nanotechnology engineering students are using some exciting new 3D printing technology to fabricate a wide range of parts, prototypes and models. In the process, they are learning valuable lessons about iterative design and improvement.

Congratulations to the Nanotechnology Engineering program’s Scribenote for their success in the Winter 2021 Concept $5k Pitch Competition.

At the 11^th annual Capstone Design Symposium on March 26^th, the Nanotechnology Engineering program’s class of 2021 presented their fourth-year design projects to an enthusiastic audience. Students, faculty, friends and family members joined online to learn about the exciting innovations created by our fourth-year students.

Zhongwei Chen, Canada Research Chair in Advanced Materials for Clean Energy and Chemical Engineering Professor and Linda Nazar, Canada Research Chair in Solid State Energy Materials and Chemistry Professor, received more than $2 million in infrastructure funding from the federal government’s Canada Foundation for Innovation for the proposed Ontario Centre for Battery and Electrochemical Research.

NE alumna Kiara Bruggeman (NE BASc and CHEM BSc ’12, double degree) is engineering groundbreaking treatments that could help stroke victims essentially regrow parts of their brains. Her research team at Australian National University (ANU) is creating materials that can be used to tell stem cells to start behaving like brain cells in order to replace stroke-damaged tissue.

Just last spring, Alisha Bhanji (BASc 2020) was working with her Capstone Design team to finalize the liquid crystal technology behind their fourth-year design project. Now, as Co-Founder & Chief Engineering Officer of Scope Photonics, Alisha and her colleagues are taking it to market via their startup company.

Their camera lenses can instantly, and without digital cropping or physical movement, adjust their optical behaviour to take the perfect photo in any condition. With a potential market that stretches far beyond smartphones, their technology shows great promise. They’ve accomplished a rapid series of exciting achievements, including several big-name awards and unique opportunities, that have them poised for success.

NE alumni startup Scope won the International Runner-up prize in the 2020 James Dyson Award, a global competition for student inventors.