Current students

More than 350 people were on hand in November for a celebration of timely support and impressive success at the 2019 Waterloo Engineering Awards Dinner.

In addition to hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students recognized for excellence in their academic and extracurricular endeavors, additional funding was announced for four student startup companies through the Engineer of the Future Fund.

A new distribution system designed by researchers at the University of Waterloo would reduce electricity prices by more than five per cent while also improving service reliability.

The design involves the integration of the two kinds of electric current that power homes, industries and electric vehicles - alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC).

Researchers at Waterloo Engineering are developing a new virtual tool that could help planners choose the best places to install bikes lanes in cities.

The data-based tool builds on a field study that validated the safety benefits of bike lanes for cyclists and motorists.

Collected using sensors and a handlebar camera as researchers cycled hundreds of kilometres in Kitchener-Waterloo, the data showed bike lanes virtually eliminate vehicles getting too close to cyclists when they pass them.

Two Capstone Design teams earned a significant financial boost as winners of this year’s Palihapitiya Venture Creation Fund competition created to help transform projects into successful startups post-graduation.  

How do you top the surprise arrival of a Canadian military helicopter carrying special operations soldiers who slide down ropes as it hovers right outside?

About 1,500 young people might just find out this weekend when they come together at the University of Waterloo for Hack the North, a three-day whirlwind of activity that is the largest hackathon in Canada and one of the largest in North America.

Morteza Ahmadi PhD'13
PhD Alumnus, Faculty of Engineering
> Co-Founder, Qidni Labs 
> Velocity Garage

When Morteza Ahmadi visited a dialysis clinic he saw what kidney dialysis patients endure.

She noticed him as soon as she walked in, a handsome young man with blonde hair and a beaming smile at the back of the room.

It was the fall of 1974, the first day of classes for 90 incoming students in the University of Waterloo’s systems design engineering program.

And for two of them - teenagers Cille D’Eon and Rob Harris - it was the start of a 45-year partnership that would see them all the way through school, careers, marriage and parenthood.

This month, doors open at a new school in one of India’s most rural and impoverished regions to provide 300 children with a formal education— something many of their parents never had the opportunity to experience.     

The Steele Family Foundation, led by Michael Steele, a 1980 civil engineering alumnus, helped fund, design and build the school in the town of Mathigiri, just south of Bangalore, India, for young students from three to 10 years old. 

Robert Jan van Pelt shares both a strong professional and personal connection to an upcoming New York City exhibit that tells the story of the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz.

Robert Jan van Pelt (middle) installing New York exhibit.

Keith Hipel learned to love nature and care deeply about the environment during glorious boyhood summers spent playing outside at his family cottage on Belwood Lake.

Six decades later, that passion was still fueling his life’s work as a systems design engineering professor at the University of Waterloo today as he won a coveted $100,000 national award for scholars.