Engineering

It’s that moment that every entrepreneur dreams of the realization that you’ve not only created a product that would help solve a genuine problem but that it’s unique in the marketplace. For nanotechnology engineering alums Khanjan Desai (BASc '13) and Chong Shen (BASc '13), that inkling happened in their fourth-year capstone course, as they were tackling the challenge of keeping windshields frost-free.

Teaching and learning in engineering and other STEM disciplines can sometimes seem to be impersonal, in the sense that the subject matter is highly technical, and the focus is often on demonstrating discrete competencies.

Yet for Dr. Jennifer Howcroft and Dr. Kate Mercer, seeing the world through the eyes of students and empathizing with them is an essential pedagogical technique.

Howcroft is a lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Mercer is a librarian and sessional instructor who teaches in the Department of Systems Design Engineering.

Ten senior student teams from the Faculty of Engineering competed in this year’s Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design, pitching their startup ideas to a panel of judges tasked with awarding $60,000.   

All 10 pitches showcased innovative thinking and entrepreneurial skills. The teams presented creative solutions to challenges ranging from an affordable at-home robot that helps non-verbal autistic children learn how to communicate, to a smart intervention that prevents tennis elbow.

During high school in the Waterloo Region, Rachel Wormald attended Go ENG Girl, an outreach program hosted by the University of Waterloo that introduces grade 7 to 10 girls to the world of engineering.

She was immediately hooked.

Modern society relies on the products of traditional manufacturing processes: plastics, fuels, solvents, etc. However, these industrial activities release significant volumes of atmosphere-warming CO2 into the air and there is an urgent need to address this problem.

Passionate about sharing his Indigenous heritage, an adjunct architecture professor named a new course after the ceremony his ancestors have used for thousands of years to welcome visitors to their homeland — At the Woods Edge.

This semester, William Woodworth, also known as Elder Bill, started teaching the course focused on the relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers from the 16th century to today, and how those associations have affected both engineering and architecture.

Karina Sukhina

Karina Sukhina woke up to the sound of the first bomb that landed on Kyiv at five a.m. February 24.

While at first uncertain about what she’d heard, Sukhina and her boyfriend Nazarii Kulyk were soon packing their bags and heading for safety.

“It was an awful time,” she says. “I can’t stop thinking about the morning Kyiv was bombed. We were so stressed for the next couple of weeks.”

A suggestion by a Waterloo School of Architecture professor to build a synagogue at the site of the largest single massacre of Jews during the Holocaust has developed into a unique place visited by people of all faiths.

Seven months after Robert Jan van Pelt came up with what he describes as a “throw-away idea,” an outdoor synagogue opened in Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv where more than 33,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered on a single day in 1941.

Five new students at Waterloo Engineering are starting their academic careers backed by $100,000 scholarships from a prestigious national organization.

Software engineering students Saptarshi Bhattacherya and Kushal Mujral, mechatronics engineering student Shanaya Barretto, Aung Khant Min of computer engineering and Dina Orucevic of systems design engineering are among 10 campus-wide winners of 2021 Schulich Leader Scholarships.

The following opinion piece originally appeared in the Report on Business section of The Globe and Mail on July 26, 2021.

On ethical AI, the world is calling – and it’s time for Canada to answer

When COVID-19 struck Canada, we were caught flat-footed by a lack of domestic capacity to produce personal protective equipment.

A year later, we were home to 90 new companies pumping out PPE by the truckload for the North American market.