Awards, Honours and Rankings

The maker movement — a global do-it-yourself culture of people who make things — has inspired a group of Waterloo Engineering students to create a soldering iron that’s safe and easy to use.

“We specifically designed the Solder Otter for the Maker Market,” said Vanessa Guido, a systems design engineering student and chief executive officer of Solder Otter. “We’ve had a lot of great feedback on our product.”

Solder Otter, a safe, easy-to-use soldering iron with built-in fume extraction, was one of six major winners at the second annual Norman Esch Capstone Design Awards competition for engineering students held today at the University of Waterloo.

Student teams from the Faculty of Engineering will have 90 seconds to win over the judges when they pitch their inventive ideas tomorrow for a chance at $60,000.

Judges selected the 15 finalists for the second-annual Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design from the 60 participants in the Capstone Design symposia held on campus in March. The five-day event showcased projects that senior engineering students spent months designing and building.

Graduate students at the University of Waterloo who are researching everything from micro-scale 3D-printing of Graphene to the geometry of our universe will present their work at the annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition on Thursday, April 2.

Each of the students will have just one slide and three minutes to share their research.

Last year, Matthew Vonk, a graduate student in the kinesiology department of the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, won for his presentation on the effects of a single session of weight training on mental health.

Three sustainability leaders from the University of Waterloo have been named to the annual Corporate Knights Top 30 under 30 list. The list honours young entrepreneurs, activists, corporate professionals and students making social and environmental change worldwide.

The Distinguished Teacher Award (DTA), Waterloo’s most prestigious teaching honour has been given to four recipients “in recognition of a continued record of excellence in teaching at the University of Waterloo.”

The recipients are chosen by a committee of students, faculty, staff and alumni based on nominations from the university community. The 2015 award winners are:

A University of Waterloo physicist, along with two Canadian astronomers will be part of the science working group directing ASTRO-H, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) newest flagship x-ray astronomy observatory.

“This is a fantastic opportunity for Canada and Canadian astronomers,” says Brian McNamara, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who also holds a University Research Chair in Astrophysics.

The American Cancer Society has given a researcher from the University of Waterloo the award considered the top in the world for tobacco control.

Geoffrey Fong, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the School of Public Health and Health Systems at Waterloo, has received one of the American Cancer Society’s Luther R. Terry Awards for Outstanding Research Contribution.

A Waterloo student who co-founded an oil and gas startup has won a national award for best co-op student of the year in Canada. He is among six students who received the University of Waterloo's top award for co-op students in their Faculties.

Credit: Jaymz van Hees