Waterloo Engineering

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Monica Emelko, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, on receiving the Norman J. Howard Award — one of the Ontario Water Works Association's highest honours for leadership in municipal water supply!

Emelko is internationally recognized for her research on how wildfires affect drinking water security, including her work with the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo after the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, and for leading the forWater Network.

🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/3SGDRev

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. John Yeow, professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and director of the Advanced Micro and Nanodevice Lab, on his election as president-elect of the IEEE Nanotechnology Technical Council (NTC)!

Elected at the council's annual meeting in Nanjing, China, Yeow will serve as president-elect in 2027 and president in 2028-29.

He plans to grow engineering education and community building for early-career professionals in Africa and South America.

🔗 Read the full story: https://bit.ly/3UwCYpe

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Vinny Gupta, assistant professor in Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering and director of our Fire Research Laboratory, on receiving the Silver Combustion Medal from The Combustion Institute — one of the most prestigious honours in combustion science, and a rare win for fire-related research.

🔥 Gupta and his international collaborators showed that chemically enhanced water mist suppresses large turbulent fires far more effectively than water alone, using high-speed laser diagnostics to capture what's happening inside the flame itself.

🔗 Read the full story: https://bit.ly/3SoAIzO

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Victor Cui and Dr. Felix Arndt of Waterloo Engineering's Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business on new funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)! They're among 37 University of Waterloo researchers who secured more than $8 million in SSHRC funding this year.

Dr. Cui holds the Conrad Research Excellence Chair. His project, "The Global Chilling Effects of U.S. Sanctions on Open-Source AI," asks whether sanctions on specific countries chill AI development across the global open-source community well beyond their intended targets — with implications for national security and competitiveness.

Dr. Arndt is Eyton Director of the Conrad School and an engineer by training. His project, "Innovation Ecosystem Success," examines why Waterloo Region has become one of the world's most successful innovation hubs outside the U.S., drawing on startup investment data and interviews with founders, investors and policymakers.

🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/45ioTOt