Talent

Teaching and learning in engineering and other STEM disciplines can sometimes seem to be impersonal, in the sense that the subject matter is highly technical, and the focus is often on demonstrating discrete competencies.

Yet for Dr. Jennifer Howcroft and Dr. Kate Mercer, seeing the world through the eyes of students and empathizing with them is an essential pedagogical technique.

Howcroft is a lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Mercer is a librarian and sessional instructor who teaches in the Department of Systems Design Engineering.

What does it mean to teach with kindness and care?

That’s the central theme of the 14th annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference, taking place May 3 to 4.

Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) organizes the annual conference, which features sessions and speakers from UWaterloo and other post-secondary institutions.

Nicholas Cheng (MSc in Pharmacy in progress) won the Winter 2023 Social Impact Fund Grand Prize for his project Entomatia, which uses food waste as feed for mealworms to extract a serum to replace fetal bovine serum (FBS).

The $10,000 prize from the GreenHouse Social Impact Fund will be used for infrastructure costs and to generate a prototype serum for further scale-up.

“I grew up on the margins,” he says. “I was in a school system that wasn’t built for success, or was built for success for some people and not others. The seed was planted for me to think about pedagogy way back then.”

In his work as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, Dr. Adam Ellis is now practicing an approach to teaching and learning that aims to undo the very systems that pushed him to the margins, a liberatory pedagogy he is developing organically.

Sarah Rourke, who will graduate this spring with a Bachelor of Science, will pursue a master’s degree in physics at McGill University. She is among 30 students from 10 countries selected for these awards worth more than $3.3 million combined. The awards were created with a generous gift of $200 million from John and Marcy McCall MacBain. Rourke is the second Waterloo student so honoured.

“The climate crisis is our biggest existential threat,” said the University of Waterloo’s President, Vivek Goel, in his opening address at the Waterloo Innovation Summit on Friday, April 21. 

It’s no coincidence that the Summit, centred on sustainable transportation, took place on the eve of Earth Day.

The calls and commitments to reduce our carbon emissions have never been louder, but our global energy related CO2 emissions continued to climb in 2022.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) announced close to $51 million in funding today for projects that will strengthen Canada’s quantum research and innovation capacity in alignment with the National Quantum Strategy.

Helping to develop future pharmacists plays an important role in Puja Sharma’s (PharmD ’15) life. She is a pharmacist at Baxter CIVA Pharmacy Services and first applied to be a PharmD interviewer during her last two years at Waterloo Pharmacy.

PharmD interviewers help to interview new prospective students looking to start a doctoral degree.

“Volunteering at the School gives me a sense of wholeness,” says Sharma. “I’m fortunate that I am able to make a difference by giving back in such a positive way to our profession.”

Twenty years ago, a cross-campus collaboration in quantum science and technology was just a newly unfolding idea. Today, the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has grown from this idea into a fully formed campus research community, and recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary. 

Today, on World Quantum Day, we proudly reflect on IQC’s impressive achievements made over the past 20 years, look forward to the future of quantum discoveries, and celebrate the new connections and collaborations that they have brought to the University of Waterloo community.

In April 2019, the government of Indonesia announced a 10-year plan to transfer all government offices away from its capital Jakarta to a new sustainable, planned capital city. Jakarta is well-known for its traffic congestion and poor air quality; however, sea level rise also played a role in the island nation’s unprecedented decision.