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The past year has presented many new challenges at home and around the globe — prompting us all to be ever agile and resilient. As we close out 2021, we can all be proud of the many contributions made by our Waterloo community to combat the coronavirus and to sustain high levels of education and research excellence. This list of stories — inspired by our quest to develop talent for a complex future, advance research, and strengthen sustainable and diverse communities — is by no means exhaustive, but is a sampling of the tremendous impact of our students, faculty and staff.

When University of Waterloo co-op student Anthony Ilersich faced the challenge of easing vaccine-related anxiety in children, he used his love for gaming to make a difference.

Another challenging year couldn’t stop Waterloo alumni from shining.

Around the world, our talented graduates are smashing glass ceilings, breaking Guinness records, pursuing cancer research and more. Keep reading to discover some of the most inspiring alumni stories of 2021.

Seven Waterloo alumni smashing glass ceilings

From helping stroke victims through STEM research to taking climate action, read about seven Waterloo women who are challenging gender stereotypes and making an impact in the world.

When you scroll through news and social media feeds, you probably see content specifically curated to your interests and biases. Is this really a news feed? Or is it personalized entertainment? 

Today we're posing these questions and more to Arjun Moorthy (BASc '99). Arjun is the co-founder and CEO of The Factual, an AI-powered news platform that provides readers with credible perspectives on the day's trending stories. Arjun shares how the platform works, the role of sensationalism and his thoughts on paywalls.

At 57, he was still running, cycling, canoeing and skiing competitively. But after a routine checkup revealed colon cancer, Murray needed immediate surgery.

Mary Robinson was a Grade 7 student standing in a hallway of her Ottawa school when she heard about the Dec. 6, 1989 tragedy.

Only 11 years old at the time, Robinson recalls the “gut punch” she felt after finding out 14 women, mainly engineering students, were murdered during an anti-feminist rampage at École Polytechnique in Montreal.

“I was young, but it was still impactful for me,” she says. “It was really weird to think the women were killed because they liked science. But out of that feeling, I redoubled my determination to go into the field.”

Within the initial 12 hours of opening, Ontario reported more than 68,000 bookings to vaccinate children against COVID-19.

The wave of interest in the newly approved Pfizer-BioNTech for those aged five to 11 has health experts weighing in on the benefits and rare risks associated with the shot.

The University of Waterloo’s global hub for eye and vision research is taking on some of vision science’s most pressing challenges through five strategic research programs aimed to generate technologies to prevent vision loss and preserve healthy vision.

Coming to the end of another challenging year marked by the pandemic, I am inspired by the resiliency of our University community. I also understand the toll that COVID-19 has had, especially on our students. This Giving Tuesday, I am personally supporting the Waterloo Fund because it offers the University the ability to quickly respond to the most pressing priorities, including supports for students.

The intricacies around collecting health data is nothing new to Canada’s medical communities, but the intensity on the subject has shifted since COVID-19.

More than ever before, the pandemic has highlighted gaps accessing, compiling and understanding health metrics, which has hindered Canada’s ability to respond to the virus in a timely manner.