The University of Waterloo is proud to mark International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8. Championing our female students, researchers and leaders makes Waterloo and Canada more resilient, innovative and prosperous.
While we mark this day across our campuses and faculties, we work every day to inspire those who are a part of our campuses and members of our communities. One way we can support this effort is to showcase the inspiring work of our female colleagues, students and alumni.
There are ample reasons to highlight the success of women at Waterloo. Their leadership expands perspectives while increasing creativity and innovation. Entrepreneurs like Christy Lee (BASc ’24) and Margaret Mutumba (PhD ‘23) are making significant economic and technology impacts here at home and around the world. While at Waterloo, Lee developed an application (PatientCompanion) that helps improve patient experience while reducing pressure on health care workers and Mutumba created an affordable telemedicine healthcare platform called MedAtlas that connects patients to a specialist from anywhere in Africa.
Women at Waterloo are also being heralded in the news. Amy Tai, a PhD student who works in the Vision and Image Processing Lab at Waterloo, developed a new AI-enhanced method to improve cancer detection and treatment. This is just one example of female students and researchers at Waterloo who are leading their fields and inspiring girls to follow in their footsteps.
Waterloo’s IWD landing page features many more stories about female students, researchers and alumni who are making an impact in our community and beyond. The page includes a video series led by Monique Chambers and Dr. Laura Mae Lindo. The series provides an opportunity for viewers to reflect on the what, how and why of systemic barriers and outlines steps we can take to address them.
Within this year’s Global Futures Innovation Update, you’ll find several stories about female researchers. They include a feature on the work of Dr. Lai-Tze Fan, a professor of sociology and legal studies who is a Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change. Dr. Fan investigates what she calls the “invisible aspects” of the technologies we use. In particular, she focuses on the social implications, benefits and risks of AI technologies to better understand technology bias. The Waterloo Magazine also profiles Rebekah Churchyard’s (BA ’13, BSW ’14) Green Care Farms, a care farm specifically for adults living with dementia, and CT Murphy (BASc '23, MASc in progress) who founded CELLECT, a health screening tool that uses nanotechnology in menstrual products to detect HPV and cervical cancer.
By exploring and sharing this content, we have an opportunity to inspire girls, women and allies on our campuses and in our communities to continue to strive towards a more equitable world.
If you are looking for more inspiration, in two weeks, the University of Waterloo and the Township of Woolwich will play host to the 2025 USPORTS Women’s National Hockey Championship (March 20-23). The best women’s hockey student-athletes from across the country will meet to determine the next national champion.
The tournament’s theme is “See them, be them.” The focus is on empowering girls and women in sport. Whether you’re a competitive athlete or enthusiastic fan, I hope we can all join together to cheer on the hard work and dedication our women’s team has demonstrated to get to where they are today. This team has been one of our most consistent varsity programs over the last decade. Last year, they won the OUA championship and finished fourth at Nationals.
They are competing at the highest level of university sport –and perhaps more importantly, inspiring others to reach for their dreams.
As a community, we can leverage our values of thinking differently, acting with purpose and working together, to support every member of our community. I am happy to mark International Women’s Day by recognizing the success of students like Amy and CT along with our Warriors women’s hockey team who are just some of the many female leaders across Waterloo. Together, we will continue to work towards ensuring our campuses and our country are stronger, more innovative and propel us towards a bright future.
Happy International Women’s Day.
