Waterloo News

Engineering Entrepreneurship

When University of Waterloo professor Dr. Carolyn Ren was a child, her father came home one day with a tape cassette recorder. This was China in the early 1980s and such devices were hard to come by, particularly in their rural village. Everyone was curious to see it, no one more so than Ren who was transfixed by its ability to play music as if by magic. She had to understand how it worked so took the device apart. Unfortunately, she couldn’t put it back together again. Determined to never get stuck in such a situation again, the young Ren set her sights on becoming an engineer.  

Kelly Zheng has a lot on her plate. She’s an engineering doctoral student at the University of Waterloo who is building a startup while also working towards a graduate business degree. It can be a balancing act, but she’s tackling it all.

Her PhD research in quantum machine learning for spatial temporal modeling can be difficult for many to wrap their heads around. This emerging, quantum-based branch of AI and machine learning allows large data sets to be analyzed in a fraction of the time that a regular computer can manage.

A startup company founded by a Waterloo Engineering professor and two of his graduate students has won US $250,000 to expand and commercialize green technology for the packaging industry.

Nfinite Nanotechnology was launched on Earth Day in 2021 by Kevin Musselman, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, and Chee Hau Teoh (MASc ’20) and Jhi Yong Loke (MASc ’21), who earned master’s degrees while developing the technology in his lab.

A medical technology company launched by two Waterloo Engineering graduates is making news this week with the announcement that a device it developed has been successfully used to treat stroke victims.

Vena Medical, which grew out of a Capstone Design project by Michael Phillips and Phillip Cooper when they were classmates in the mechanical engineering program, earned Health Canada approval earlier this year for hardware it calls the Vena Balloon Distal Access Catheter (BDAC).

University of Waterloo students may soon be able to order pizza or a burger from a nearby plaza and have it brought to campus by Canada’s first all-weather autonomous delivery robot.

LoopX, a Waterloo Engineering startup company that is developing the technology to do just that, received a $30,000 funding boost recently when it took top prize in the 5G Transportation Challenge sponsored by Rogers and the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network.