Future students

As automobile manufacturers continue their pivot to electric vehicles (EVs), the days of the internal combustible engine are ending — and sooner than you think. In Canada, the sale of new gas-powered vehicles will end in 2035. South of the border, the U.S. is set to end the sale of new gas-powered light vehicles as early as 2025.  

For many car owners, their next purchase will be an EV. But as many current EV owners know, the environmental benefits of battery-powered cars come with a tradeoff.  

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.

Layered over the pandemic in 2021 was an epidemic. Toxic drug overdoses in Canada spiked that year, with almost 8,000 reported deaths from opioid overdoses alone. In British Columbia, 2,264 people died that year of toxic drug overdoses.

Naomie Seh Abomo, a fourth-year civil engineering student at the University of Waterloo, has been awarded Canada’s 3M National Student Fellowship Award. She is one of just 10 students from across the country to receive this prestigious national fellowship in recognition of her outstanding leadership and dedication to her community.

On May 5, the University of Waterloo community came together to observe Red Dress Day, also known as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S). The commemoration ceremony was led by Indigenous Knowledge Keeper, Elder Myeengun Henry, at B.C. Matthews Hall (BMH) Green. The Waterloo community was invited to help hang red dresses on trees around BMH Green to represent and honour the lives of the missing and murdered, while showing solidarity with their family and loved ones. 

Asian Heritage Month offers us the opportunity to pay special attention to the vital roles our community members of Asian heritage play in the success of our institution, while also recognizing the important work needed to eliminate anti-Asian racism, and all forms of racism, on our campuses.  

Sarah Rourke, who will graduate this spring with a Bachelor of Science, will pursue a master’s degree in physics at McGill University. She is among 30 students from 10 countries selected for these awards worth more than $3.3 million combined. The awards were created with a generous gift of $200 million from John and Marcy McCall MacBain. Rourke is the second Waterloo student so honoured.

Twenty years ago, a cross-campus collaboration in quantum science and technology was just a newly unfolding idea. Today, the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has grown from this idea into a fully formed campus research community, and recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary. 

Today, on World Quantum Day, we proudly reflect on IQC’s impressive achievements made over the past 20 years, look forward to the future of quantum discoveries, and celebrate the new connections and collaborations that they have brought to the University of Waterloo community.

Students at Velocity Digital are bullish about artificial intelligence.

More than 35 per cent of the cross-disciplinary teams engaged in Velocity Digital, the South Campus Hall creator space, are using artificial intelligence in multiple ways, recognizing its power as a tool to solve problems at a capacity beyond the capabilities of human analysis of data.