From a graduate whose work led to technology used on the International Space Station to a team of alumni that produces award-winning unmanned vehicles for research and development, the Faculty of Engineering 2015 Alumni Achievement Medal and Friend of the Faculty Award recipients are pushing innovative boundaries and making a difference throughout the world.
Our latest honorees include the following individuals, team and friend of the Faculty.
Marc H. Morin, BASc 1987, Electrical Engineering
Recipient of the Alumni Achievement Medal for Professional Achievement
Marc Morin is a highly successful entrepreneur who continues to demonstrate the knowledge and extensive opportunities that go hand in hand with his Waterloo Engineering education.
After completing his electrical engineering degree, he worked as a software engineer for Hewlett-Packard before becoming Chief Technology Officer of PixStream, which manufactured and marketed network hardware and software solutions. The successful Waterloo-based company was sold to Cisco Systems Inc. in 2000.
Since then, Morin has gone on to launch and lead three companies in the Waterloo Region: Sandvine, Emforium and now Auvik of which he is the Chief Executive Officer. Auvik, a cloud-based system, provides IT professionals with a better way to monitor, configure and automate networks.
Always remembering his academic roots, he gives back to the University of Waterloo by regularly employing Waterloo Engineering co-op students and graduates.
Brent E. Tweddle, BASc 2007, Computer Engineering
Recipient of the Young Alumni Achievement Medal
After graduating from Waterloo Engineering, Brent Tweddle went on to complete his master’s and doctoral degrees at MIT. While working on his PhD, he headed up the development of a robotic research system that has successfully operated on the International Space Station.
Tweddle was the technical lead of a team from academia, the government and industry who worked together to design, build and test what’s known as the Vertigo Goggles. Vertigo Goggles is a set of stereo cameras, embedded high performance computers and associated electronics that enable computer vision base navigation algorithms to be tested in a microgravity environment.
The Vertigo project was cited as a major factor in Tweddle receiving the 2013 Boeing Engineering Student of the Year award. The honour recognizes the best and brightest among future leaders and innovators.
Since the beginning of 2014, Tweddle has been employed as a guidance and control engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Lander Vision System for the Mars 2020 Entry, Descent and Landing System.
Fangjin Yang, BASc 2007, Electrical Engineering; MASc 2009, Computer Engineering
Recipient of the Young Alumni Achievement Medal
Fangjin Yang worked for Cisco Systems as a software engineer before joining Metamarkets, as one of the first employees of the real-time analytics platform for the digital advertising space.
While part of Metamarkets, he received major international recognition as the creator of Druid, an open-source, real-time analytics system that has tackled some of the most difficult computing problems in a distributed data framework.
As Druid’s lead engineer, Yang was responsible for designing and executing the data platform. He also headed the promotion of Druid in the big data community and the integration of the system into the world’s top technology companies such as Yahoo, Netflix, eBay, PayPal, Time Warner Cable and many others. In May 2005, the Druid team won the Best Open Source Innovation award for excellence in software development from the Software and Information Industry Association.
Last fall Yang cofounded Imply. The startup’s first product is the Imply Analytics Platform, which includes Druid and other open-source components.
Ryan Gariepy, BASc 2009, Mechatronics; MASc 2011, Mechanical, Patrick Martinson, BASc 2009, Mechatronics Engineering; MASc 2015, Management Engineering, Matt Rendall, BASc 2008, Mechatronics Engineering; MBET 2009, and Bryan Webb, BASc 2009, Mechatronics Engineering, founders of Clearpath Robotics
Recipients of the Team Alumni Achievement Medal
It was as Waterloo Engineering students that Ryan Gariepy, Patrick Martinson, Matt Rendall and Bryan Webb became passionate about building robots for school, for fun -- and just about any other reason they could think of at the time.
In 2009, they launched Clearpath Robotics to create robotic solutions for mining, military, academic, and industrial research applications. Today, co-founders Webb, Gariepy and Rendall are still with the company in executive positions.
Over the years, Clearpath Robotics has become a global leader of unmanned vehicles for research and development. The company has also gained big inroads selling robot technology to research laboratories. Its impressive client list includes the Canadian Space Agency and MIT.
Clearpath Robotics was one of 10 corporations named by Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions and Richardson GMP Ltd. to the 2014 list of Canada’s Passion Capitalists.
The company remains located in Kitchener because of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem and top talent. Like Clearpath Robotics’ founders, many of the more than 100 employees are Waterloo Engineers.
The Miller McAsphalt Group
Recipient of the Friend of the Faculty Award
Over the years, Waterloo Engineering has forged a strong and valued relationship with The Miller McAsphalt Group. Formed in the late 1960s by partners Leo McArthur and John Carrick, first as McAsphalt Industries and then with the addition of Miller Construction, the Group represents the largest privately held enterprise of its kind in Canada.
The Miller McAsphalt Group was instrumental in the formation of Waterloo Engineering’s Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology, which opened its doors in 2000. The Group’s support of research at the centre and the Norman W. McLeod Chair has had a huge impact on advanced research and education that has resulted in improvements to Canadian standards and specifications, including the development of recycled asphalt pavement.
The Miller McAsphalt Group’s broad range of support of the Faculty of Engineering also includes employing over 50 of our co-op students and alumni.
