Current students

In late February, the Region needed a vaccine clinic to serve downtown Kitchener. Joe Lee and the Centre for Family Medicine (CFFM) stepped forward. When it came to finding an appropriate location, CFFM asked their neighbour, the School of Pharmacy.

“The word ‘no’ isn’t in our vocabulary,” says Trenny McGinnis, pharmacy’s administrative officer. “Our executive team had already implemented changes to support the vaccine effort, from injection-training students earlier in the program to creating COVID educational materials. Partnering on a clinic was a logical next step.”

It’s no secret that our everyday technologies gather personal data. But these increasingly entrenched conveniences, from Internet of Things-enabled Smart TVs to online voting systems to crowdfunding platforms, can also perform harmful surveillance.

Knowing how tools track user behaviour and collect personal information is important. Understanding their implications for social inequality within Canada and globally is perhaps even more pressing. What’s more, the challenge demands multiple areas of expertise.

Ryan Tennant is interested in bridging health care and engineering. From co-op terms and research projects at Sunnybrook and Sick Kids hospitals to developing a medical device at a company in Switzerland, he’s always looking to use his biomedical engineering education to improve the world around him. 

> Ryan Tennant
> PhD Student

The University of Waterloo is building out a pipeline for health innovation in Southwestern Ontario thanks to a $10-million investment from FedDev Ontario. 

Companies at the University of Waterloo’s flagship entrepreneurial incubator have broken through a major funding milestone.

The total amount of funding raised by Velocity companies surpassed $2.4 billion in recent weeks, less than two years after the program announced it had reached the $1 billion mark over the previous decade.

Imagine reading a map or email on a head-up display right in front of your eyes — it sounds like something from a sci-fi novel, but it’s one of the many possible future uses for contact lenses that has been predicted through current and emerging research.

> Lyndon Jones
> Director of CORE

The Toronto-Waterloo innovation corridor employs more than 200,000 tech workers. As home to tens of thousands of tech companies and startups, the region is sometimes called Canada’s Silicon Valley. The corridor contributes some 17 per cent to Canada’s GDP. 

Yet, for all the advancement on the tech and business side, the industry’s social development lacks in one key area: the gender gap. 

While most COVID-19 infections are spread through close contact with an infected person, in some cases, they can occur through extended airborne exposure, making proper ventilation essential. For the past year, Waterloo’s mechanical design teams and trade staff have been inspecting the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units on campus, making retrofits to support higher levels of filtration and reprogramming our Building Automation Systems (BAS) to accommodate building occupancy and new guidelines for health and safety.

Waterloo’s student-led autonomous vehicle team pulled into second place in the final stage of the four-year international SAE AutoDrive Challenge.

The competition, which ended last month, had teams convert a stock Chevrolet Bolt EV into a fully autonomous vehicle.

WATonomous completed the last leg of the competition with its best results to date, improving on the team’s third-place finish in the third year of the competition.

"With the rapid pace of vaccination and the decline in new COVID cases, barring a surge in variants, we can anticipate a small measure of normalcy by this fall. For universities, this will mean a gradual and safe return to campus.