News

Waterloo’s Midnight Sun team is now in Australia preparing for the 3,000-km World Solar Challenge from Darwin to Adelaide which takes place October 16-23. Forty vehicles are participating, including ones from the University of Calgary, University of Toronto and Montreal’s Ecole de technologie superieure. The top teams in the world aim to finish the course in three or four days. The 14-member Midnight Sun X team expects to finish in either fifth or sixth place. 

A memorial service for Donald Grierson to celebrate his long career as a distinguished engineer, researcher and educator will take place Thursday, October 27 at 2 p.m. at Trinity Evangelical Missionary Church on Conservation Drive in Waterloo. Grierson, distinguished professor emeritus in civil and environmental engineering, died on August 25. A Waterloo Engineering faculty member for 37 years, he had earned his BASc in civil engineering in 1964, master’s in 1966 and PhD in 1968.

A team comprised of members of Waterloo’s advanced micro-nano-devices lab placed second in the Global Nano Innovation Contest which took place October 4 in Taiwan as part of the Taiwan National Exhibition. First prize was awarded to a team from IBM and third place was taken by a team from NASA. Waterloo was the only Canadian team to participate in the international competition.

Waterloo management engineering students came second and third in the IIE Ryerson-Siemens Competition hosted by the Ryerson University student chapter of the Institute of Industrial Engineers on September 30. The competition, in which over 100 engineering students representing Waterloo, Ryerson and the University of Toronto took part, was sponsored by Siemens and Canadian Tire.

Current students and graduates of University of Waterloo School of Architecture are hosting four installations at this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche that is being held in Toronto, Ontario starting at 7pm on Saturday, October 1.
 

Tech-savvy students will put their coding skills to the test during the Great Canadian Appathon taking place September 30 to October 2 at the Conrad Business and Entrepreneurship and Technology Centre and other university and college ‘hubs’ across the country. Student teams will have 48 hours to create a mobile game they think could become the next top selling smartphone app. CBET already has over 30 teams registered, more than three times the number that particpated last year.

Members of Waterloo’s EcoCAR team received $25,000 from corporate sponsor GM Canada on September 21 to help fuel their drive towards the greening of a Chevy Malibu.Fifteen universities across North America are competing in the EcoCAR 2 challenge that spans three years and is intended to produce an environmentally-friendly vehicle people will want to buy and drive. “Cars are around to stay whether we like it or not,’ said Josh Lo, a chemical engineering student. “Reducing pollution and making cleaner cars is always going to be a goal.”