Future students

It was almost 60 years ago when Canada was in dire need of engineers that Engineering became the first and founding Faculty of the newly formed University of Waterloo. Now, Canada – and the world – is again clamouring for engineers to not only replace the retiring generation, but to lead innovation in emerging technologies. To meet this demand, it’s essential that the engineering talent pipeline be full of diverse, bright and uniquely educated people. 

From a distance, it’s just possible to believe that University of Waterloo engineering professor Safieddin (Ali) Safavi-Naeini, who currently occupies the NSERC/ BlackBerry Industrial Research Chair in wireless communication, has a dull, dry and theoretical job in academia.

In the mainstream media and even within some business meetings, terms like “data analytics,” “data science” and “big data” are used so interchangeably that they might almost seem like the same thing. When you’re focused on the kind of work Samir Elhedhli is pursuing, specific to management engineering, the distinctions between them are critical.

Her name is Amy, and even before she starts racing underwater, she’s already created a sea change in how a submarine student team at the University of Waterloo see the potential of engineering to pursue innovation.

Waterloo’s Physical Activities Complex (PAC) swapped sports for robotics, hosting the twelfth Waterloo FIRST Robotics Waterloo Regional Competition over the April 1^st weekend.

Most parents are probably happy if their children graduate from university and get a job, but since Armen Bakirtzian (BASc ’08 Mechatronics) left the University of Waterloo’s mechatronics engineering department he has managed to co-found a company that could improve hip replacement surgery all over the world, helping untold numbers of surgeons — including his own father.

John McPhee thought it would be easy to design a device to give Canada’s competitive wheelchair curlers better control of their shots.

Eighteen months and seven prototypes later, he doesn’t mind admitting it hasn’t been easy at all.

The surprisingly complex problem has so far required hundreds of hours of work by McPhee, a systems design engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, and four of his students.

“When Team Canada described it to me, I thought ‘how hard can it be?’” he said. “It turns out it was very, very difficult.”

Construction of the Faculty of Engineering's new Engineering 7 (E7) building began at a ground-breaking event that included robots, autonomous vehicles and good old-fashioned shovels.

About a year ago, several news outlets published stories with playful headlines that included “Static electricity helps geckos get a grip,” and “Shocking! Geckos use static electricity to stick to walls.” The discovery by researchers at the University of Waterloo behind all those stories, however, has much bigger implications that could include breakthroughs in everything from art restoration to car tires to medical applications such as promoting wound healing.