University of Waterloo
Engineering 5 (E5), 6th Floor
Phone: 519-888-4567 ext.32600
Staff and Faculty Directory
Contact the Department of Systems Design Engineering
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John McPhee received his degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Acadia University, the Technical University of Nova Scotia, and the University of Waterloo, Canada. He worked at the Université de Liège, Belgium, and Queen’s University, Canada, before taking a faculty position in 1992 at Waterloo, where he is now a Professor in Systems Design Engineering and the Canada Research Chair in Biomechatronic System Dynamics.
Dr. McPhee is Canada’s foremost researcher in the field of multibody system dynamics, with principal application to the analysis and design of vehicles, mechatronic devices, biomechanical systems, and sports equipment. He pioneered the use of linear graph theory to model multi-domain dynamic systems, and his research algorithms have been commercialized by Maplesoft and are a core part of the MapleSim engineering package, which is used by thousands of engineers and researchers at Toyota, NASA, Ford, Honda Motorcycle, General Motors, Harley Davidson, TRW, and others. Dr. McPhee has won several research awards, including the I.W. Smith Award, the Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and Best Paper Awards from the American and Canadian Societies for Mechanical Engineering and the International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems. He has also received awards for his teaching, written over 200 peer-reviewed papers, consulted to many industries in Canada and the United States, and appeared as an expert witness in the Federal Court of Canada. He has supervised 70 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and is a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario.
Dr. McPhee has served as the Associate Editor for seven international journals, two of which he helped to found – Multibody System Dynamics and the ASME Journal for Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics – which are the two flagship journals in this field. He has given invited keynote presentations around the globe, delivered webinars on automotive system modelling to thousands of practicing engineers, and in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Dr. McPhee was a co-founder of the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR) and, during his 2007-2009 tenure as the Executive Director, he grew WatCAR from a fledgling research centre to the largest academic cluster for automotive engineering research in Canada, garnering international recognition and over $10 million in annual funding. Following this tenure, he was the first academic to spend a sabbatical year at the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he launched his NSERC/Toyota/Maplesoft Industrial Research Chair in Mathematics-Based Modelling and Design. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers.
In 2014, Dr. McPhee received the prestigious NSERC Synergy Award from the Governor-General of Canada.
University of Waterloo
Engineering 5 (E5), 6th Floor
Phone: 519-888-4567 ext.32600
Staff and Faculty Directory
Contact the Department of Systems Design Engineering
The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office.