News

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a new 3D-printed electrode design for redox flow batteries, a technology that could help store renewable energy generated by wind and solar farms. Their work shows how carefully designed electrode structures can help battery fluids move more effectively through the system, improving performance and reducing the energy needed to operate the battery.

Led by Nanotechnology Engineering professor Maxime van der Heijden, the research team created porous, 3D-printed electrodes with internal patterns inspired by structures found in nature. These designs helped the battery liquid reach more of the electrode surface while allowing it to flow through the battery with less resistance.

Electrodes are an important part of a battery because they are where the chemical reactions that store and release energy occur. Making electrodes porous, meaning full of tiny open spaces, increases the available surface area and creates more places where these reactions can take place.

Redox flow batteries work differently from the lithium-ion batteries used in phones and electric vehicles. Instead of storing energy inside solid materials, they store energy in liquid electrolytes contained in external tanks. During charging and discharging, the liquids are pumped through a reactor where the electrochemical reactions occur.

Nanotechnology engineering students Edward Hong and Micahel Ali were part of an interdisciplinary research group that has created a new tissue‑like hydrogel that can act as "muscles" for soft robotics.

The project was led by PhD candidate Negin Bouzari. Her supervisor, Hamed Shahsavan, a chemical engineering professor hired four undergraduate co-op students to assist Bouzari in her research. The team included Melanie Bouzanne, Nrushanth Suthaharan, Ali and Hong. Their collaboration embodies Waterloo’s mission to involve undergraduates directly in high‑impact, interdisciplinary research.

Shahsavan calls the work a powerful example of what students can accomplish when they’re trusted with ambitious challenges.

“Complex problems rarely fit inside one discipline. Interdisciplinary research brings complementary tools and viewpoints together, leading to creative, high-impact solutions,” says Hong. “Beyond innovation, working across disciplines improves communication skills and adaptability; abilities that are invaluable in both industry and academia.”

A nanotechnology engineering team won first place at the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC) in Ottawa for their Capstone Project called IISense. The team designed a prototype to monitor chronic kidney disease (CKD).

The competition was fierce at the OEC which was held in Ottawa this year. Teammates Flora Wu, San Basnet, and Divhleen Ruprai entered the innovative design category at the event.

“The best part of OEC was that for the innovative design competition, we had to do a public opening. We displayed our poster and prototype, and people approached us and asked questions about our project. It was really cool to hear people’s perspectives on our product.” says Ruprai.  “They provided feedback on things that we had not considered, which could improve our project to make it easier to use and accessible to different groups of people that we weren't aware of before.”

CKD is a silent disease that can have no obvious symptoms until a late stage and lead to the need for dialysis or, in some cases a kidney transplant. It can be more prevalent in people who have pre-existing health issues like diabetes or hypertension.

Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) Group 22 placed second for their Capstone Design Project titled Detecting Mutations in Genes: A Microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip Solution.

The group designed a benchtop microfluidic device which detects DNA mutations. DNA mutation detection can be used to tailor cancer treatments, identify genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, prenatal testing and more.

 DNA mutation detection is a time-consuming process. It takes between four to six hours to get the results from the current process of testing. The device designed by group members Gabriel Ghrayeb, Declan Gunning, Cyrus Hatami, and Alek Kechichian takes a small DNA sample and can process and produce results quickly and with minimal manual intervention.

“Our device works with and can be tuned for any DNA segment of interest, whether you're working in genetic engineering and you want to check if you have successfully caused or edited a gene mutation, or in genetic screening where we want to check if a person's genetic code has a mutation that might make them at higher risk for breast cancer or some other condition down the line,” says Kechichian.

Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) Group 7 took first place for their Capstone Design Project VitEx, that reimagines hospital emergency room triage through a new approach in wearable nanotechnology.

The group created a wristband for use in hospital emergency rooms embedded with sensors to enable continuous monitoring of the patients’ vitals.

The wrist band uses a sweat-based enzymatic sensor to continuously measure patients’ glucose levels and heart rate. When a voltage is applied to the glucose sensor, glucose is oxidized and then that produces a measurable current that can be measured using an electrode.

The heart rate sensor is a pressure-based sensor that uses piezoelectric PVDF as the sensing layer with the addition of zinc oxide nanorods underneath to increase the overall sensitivity. 

Fourth-year nanotechnology engineering (NE) student Alexei Abiiaka is an entrepreneur with his own software start-up called iNano IoT Corp.

Abiiaka was attracted to the NE program in high school because of the diverse opportunities that the NE Program offers from working with circuits and electronics, to lab work and device fabrication in the cleanroom.

“I’m having a great time in Nano! I love the variety of labs we take part in, and we work with equipment that undergraduate students in other departments never get access to,” says Abiiaka. “Our labs get better every year. For example, working in the cleanroom was interesting—it's a rare opportunity.”

Concurrent to his studies, Abiiaka built a start-up called iNano IoT Corp, inspired by software he began developing in high school. The company offers a highly flexible platform that works like a modular system, allowing users to build customized software solutions, without coding.

Khanjan Desai (BASc ’13) and Chong Shen (BASc ’13) are co-founders of Alchemy, a company that fabricates leading-edge coatings using nanotechnology for the automotive and defense industries. Chong and Desai, nanotechnology engineering (NE) alumni, launched the start-up in 2013.

Alchemy recently received $1.8 million in funding from the Government of Canada through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) to scale up the manufacturing of their automotive products.

University of Waterloo’s entrepreneurial ecosystem played a pivotal role in the development of Alchemy, providing initial funding through the Velocity incubator as well as additional grants from the University.

“To launch Alchemy, we needed lab space, access to advisors and infrastructure that would have been so expensive to have on day one of our start-up. The University of Waterloo provided all of that for us, we would not exist without Waterloo,” says Desai.

Professor Guo-Xing Miao has won the En-Hui Yang Research and Innovation Award. The En-Hui Yang Award is bestowed annually to an outstanding researcher in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering. 

Miao’s research focuses on the specific spin quantum properties in condensed matter platforms. The precise confinement, transport and manipulation of electrons and ions across nano materials and devices, enriched by their accompanied spin degrees of freedom, allows for advanced information processing in both the quantum and classic realms.  

His team synthesizes industrial level quantum materials such as complex spin systems, ion platforms, topological phases, and superconductors—to mass fabricate scalable, wafer-level devices. 

His innovation extends to a new company called SpinQ. Miao is one of the founders and science advisors of SpinQ. This company was founded in Waterloo, with all founding members deeply connected with the Institute for Quantum Computing. 

Congratulations to a team of first-year Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) students who took first place at the HardHaQ Quantum Hardware Hackathon! The event was open to undergraduate teams from across North America.  

Focused on hardware, the competition offers students an opportunity to gain experience with tools and systems driving quantum technologies.

Teammates Philip Szymborski, Arjun Mahes, Prithvi Singh and Keegan Mark were excited to have the opportunity to work in the quantum space. Mark learned of the event through Quantum Club and invited his friends to join.

The challenge in the competition was to optimize ion traps through computer simulations and geometric modelling, and they only had a week to do it!

Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) alumnus, Edgar Cao (BASc 2011) is currently working in Paris, France for a company called Nexdot, which specializes in the development of Quantum Dots and their application in industry.

Cao was in the second class accepted into the newly launched NE Program in 2006. His journey in nanotechnology engineering has taken him across continents, industries and disciplines, rooted in the foundations he built at UWaterloo's NE Program.

Today, Cao is a Senior Project Manager at Nexdot, where he works at the interface of materials science, diagnostics, and biotechnology.

A culture of possibilities

For Cao, his co-op experience in the NE Program was an integral part of his career development. He went from doing research in academic labs, to working at a tech transfer hub, to quality testing, to product development in industry. Having worked in the automotive sector and agricultural research and development, his experience sparked his longer-term goal of working on product development projects.