At the annual Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards, two teams from Systems Design Engineering won prizes this year:
- PhysioBuddy (Shirley Ng, Kassandra Predovic, Ritu Shah, Elizaveta Vorobieva) won $10,000, and
- Hiza (Sanhar Balachandran, Sadruddin Hashmani, Bainian Liu, Nabeel Shahid) won $3,000.
The Esch Awards support creative and entrepreneurial students in the pursuit of research and development and its commercialization for the benefit of Canada.
This is the second year in a row that teams from Systems Design Engineering have won awards as part of this prestigious competition that includes Capstone Design Projects from across Faculty of Engineering. Last year, Chameleon Hearing Protection won one of the $10,000 awards.
Both winners this year worked on projects related to engineering applications in healthcare: reducing physiotherapy recovery time for post-surgery patients, and reducing risk of non-contact ACL (knee) injuries among collegiate athletes.
50 teams applied to this year’s competition, with 14 making the final. Systems Design was well represented, with 5 of the 14 teams who made pitches coming from our department. Minima (Adrienne Chan, Kenny Chan, Adele Chui, Kenny Lam), Potentia (Melanie Levy-Hara, Andrew Smiles, Jason Phachanla, Cyrus Titina, Alexander Sterling), and seCure (Angela Chao, Aye Chan Htun, Matthew Robichaud, Liyang Wang) should also be congratulated for making the finals along with PhysioBuddy and Hiza. [Read more]