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The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, announced the recipients of the second competition of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) during a ceremony at the University of Waterloo today. Thirteen initiatives across Canada will share $900 million in funding.

Forests, wetlands and grasslands all provide “watershed services” by enhancing water quality and supply, biodiversity and carbon storage. They have economic value but unfortunately their market price is $0, says the executive director of the Water Institute.

Orientation is an important rite of passage for the more than 9,000 new students to campus. That’s why the University of Waterloo is delivering even more customized Orientation activities to meet the varied needs for our diverse group of students, including:

Matt Rose figures he learned more in high school as a member of the prize-winning electric car team than he did in a lot of his academic classes.

But as he starts the mechatronics engineering program at the University of Waterloo this fall, the lasting lesson he brings with him has as much to do with repeated failure as it does with eventual success.

“Nothing works the first time,” said Rose, 17. “You’ve always got to figure out a solution to a problem that you didn’t see coming.”

Women living in a refugee camp in Uganda are at an increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, early marriage and domestic abuse, says a University of Waterloo researcher

Suzan Ilcan, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, and Marcia Oliver, an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, have conducted research in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement where they were informed by several refugees of the prevalence of such violence around the settlement.

Four incoming first-year students at the University of Waterloo are recipients of Schulich Leader Scholarships, which encourage high school graduates to embrace science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in their future careers. 

Scholarship winners are known as Schulich Leaders and receive between $60,000 and $80,000 towards their university education. The University of Waterloo has been home to 14 Schulich Leaders in the past five years.

When Jesse Thistle was battling addiction, he slept in shelters for homeless people, on friends’ couches and even the streets. At the time, he was angry at his parents for giving him up for adoption and confused about his aboriginal heritage.

After finally getting sober, Thistle went back to school, eventually making his way to the University of Waterloo to study history. Against all odds, Thistle, now a master’s student, has recently been awarded a prestigious Trudeau Doctoral Scholarship.

Mandy Bujold was lying in a hospital bed just one hour before her Olympic quarter-final boxing match. The Waterloo Liberal Studies student was being treated with an IV after getting a stomach bug the night before. She left the hospital at 9:30 a.m.; her match was scheduled for 10:15.

Before Fitsum Areguy completed his high-school diploma, he helped his parents earn theirs. As the first-born son of new immigrants, Areguy needed to be both translator and advocate for his family growing up. He spoke with government agencies, paid bills and navigated the complex healthcare system when his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

A tight timeline was only fitting when engineers at the University of Waterloo took on a special project for the Canadian track cycling team headed to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Lending their expertise in a world where winners and losers are typically decided by tiny fractions of a second, Professor John McPhee and research engineer Carin Yeghiazarian had just one week in June to produce a small but technically complex piece of hardware.