Current students

March 2011. Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto. A surgical oncology team is working to remove a complex tumour entwined around the patient’s adrenal glands and pancreas.

At one point in the delicate procedure, Dr. Calvin Law puts down his scalpel, turns to a computer screen displaying an image of the tumour and, without touching anything, makes a gesture with his gloved hands. The image rotates, and three Waterloo Engineering grads in the operating room exhale in unison.

Systems design engineering professor John Yeow is driven to solve real-world problems that lie deep within the human body. As the Canada Research Chair in Micro and Nanodevices, much of his work focuses on technology aimed at diagnosing and treating diseases like cancer. And the smaller the technology, the better.

The partnership between Prof. Bill Anderson’s chemical engineering research lab at the University of Waterloo and a local manufacturer of medical gas recovery units is a fruitful one. “In fact, Bill Anderson and his team have given us a worldwide competitive advantage,” says Marian Marshall, Vice President of Operations at Class 1 Inc., in Cambridge, Ontario.

When Ben Gaffney signed on to participate in the EcoCAR 2 competition, he couldn’t have predicted the kick start it would give his career in automotive engineering. Two years later, and deep into the vehicle re-design process for EcoCAR 3, Gaffney is completing his master’s in mechanical engineering and was recently named General Motors (GM) Canada’s first hire among 100 new engineering recruits.

Splitting a pill in two usually means cutting its strength in half as well. But what if the active ingredient was dispersed improperly and concentrated on only one side? That half pill could either be rendered inert or worse, poisonous.

Systems design engineering graduate Olga Pawluczyk is the president and CEO of P&P Optica Inc., a company that develops advanced spectrometers for biomedical and other purposes.

When it comes to lifting the veil on computer technology, Stephanie Rozek isn’t playing games. That is, unless she is.

Rozek, who graduated with a Waterloo electrical engineering degree in 2000, is the co-founder and CEO of Hackademy Canada, a company that demystifies technology by teaching computer game design, coding, programming, and even interactive hardware classes in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

Jeffrey Azzolin has been hitting the ice almost as long as he’s been hitting the books.

The mechanical engineering grad (BASc ’13) first laced up as a minor hockey player in grade school. He spent his elementary and high school years playing rep hockey in Ajax, Ontario. At Waterloo, he was part of an intramural team.

Andrew Andrade was halfway around the world when the mechatronics engineering student discovered he had not only won Waterloo Engineering’s top co-op student award, but the national award as well.

A small blood monitor, about the size of a typical cell phone, could someday be all that stands between life and death for a cardiac patient.

Eric Migicovsky is the king of Kickstarter. For the second time in three years his brainchild, the Pebble smartwatch, reigned supreme on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding phenomenon. In just 49 minutes, the campaign raised over $1 million. Two days later, 47,000 people had backed the Pebble campaign to the tune of $10 million.