Firas Kamal Mansour, 50, passed away on December 29, 2021. An exceptional teacher and colleague, Firas dedicated his professional life to physics education and to the well-being of his students. With a larger than life personality replete with wit and charm, Firas had a passion for physics and physics education.
Omicron is the latest COVID-19 variant of concern, and it is expected to change the course of the pandemic. But how are variants formed, and what’s the threat level for people who are fully vaccinated? Kelly Grindrod, a pharmacist and professor, and Trevor Charles, a professor in the University of Waterloo’s Department of Biology, provide answers to these questions.
Congratulations to Professor Richard Epp for being awarded the 2021 CAP Medal for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduate Physics, and to Professor Roger Melko for being awarded the 2021 CAP/DCMMP Brockhouse Medal.
That morning coffee might be even more helpful than you think.
In the first study of its kind to explore caffeine’s effects on dynamic visual skills, researchers concluded that caffeine increases alertness and detection accuracy for moving targets. Caffeine also improved participants’ reaction times.
For Michael Houston, PhD ’93, BSc ’87, the University of Waterloo is more than his alma mater. For a good chunk of his youth, the campus is where he called home.
When it comes to hibernation, conserving resources is key for an animal’s survival. For bats of Western North America, water may be the key to assessing a bat species’ ability to thrive during hibernation.
New research that comes as part of a larger project to understand the potential impact of white-nose syndrome in the West found that bats are adept at finding similar hibernation conditions across their large geographic ranges, despite a variety of climates in these areas.
The University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry & Vision Science (UWOVS) is announcing that The Right Honourable David Johnston, the 28th Governor General of Canada and former UWaterloo president, will serve as Honorary Chair for the School’s $35-million campaign.
In the field of chemistry, one challenge that students commonly encounter is difficulty visualizing molecules, their arrangements and relationship between atoms in space. While there are some tools already being used to address this difficulty, they each have some disadvantages as well. Molecular model kits are bulky, expensive, require students to spend valuable time building each molecule, and are also limited by the number of pieces in the set.
The University of Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science is amongst the top optometry schools in the world, according to one of the field’s top scientific journals.
These rankings were published in Clinical and Experimental Optometry, naming Waterloo 5th overall, out of the 245 optometry schools in the world.
The listing also leaves Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science as #1 in Canada, and #3 of optometry schools in North America.
Nine University of Waterloo professors are in the top one per cent of citations for their field of study and publication based on Clarivate Analytics’ 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list.