Alumni Digest

Kristin O’Neill (MASc ’24) combined elite hockey with graduate study in psychology at Waterloo. Her work on child development and language helped shape an interest in speech pathology, a field she plans to pursue after hockey.

The university profile traces the support that made this possible, including flexibility as her professional career moved to Montreal. She later made Canada’s 2026 Olympic team and recently signed with San Jose. Her academic life provided a separate source of purpose during an uncertain sporting career.

MBET Alumni Impact Series feature Emma Tonallato-Keller, MBET '21.

The official Waterloo report places this work in entrepreneurship / brand. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, the 20-something founders of an autonomous trucking company now valued at approximately US $5 billion, don’t have

The official Waterloo report places this work in builders / sf. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Three alumni from the Faculty of Health share their memories and reminisce about Waterloo while reuniting on vacation in Florida.

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / community. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Celebrating National Volunteer Week

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / volunteers. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

An alumni event creates a low-pressure way back to campus community.

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / events. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

University of Waterloo Alumni Council members share why they will give on the University’s first-ever Giving Day, Thursday, May 15.

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / reflection. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

International Women's Day 2025

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / recognition. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

The EDGE for Women program is a one-month intensive that provides mentorship and training to women and gender-minority students at the beginning of their PhDs.

The official Waterloo report places this work in math / graduate life. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

The Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo announced its 2026 alumni award recipients on September 22. Douglas Jones (BES ’93) and Reiko Omoto (PhD ’13) received Distinguished Alumni Achievement Awards. Jo Fitzgibbons (MES ’19) and Kate Linden (PhD ’18) received Recent Alumni Inspiration Awards.

Adam Clark (BAS ’06, MArch ’09), an urban designer with the City of Kitchener, and KEEN Footwear received Friend of the Faculty Impact Awards. Jones is principal of Limehouse Public School, which has held EcoSchools Platinum certification for five consecutive years. Omoto studies how global sustainability approaches can learn from local knowledge in Japan, Southeast Asia and the United States.

Fitzgibbons plans and researches for the City of Vancouver, and Linden teaches at Cape Breton University. The awards were established in 2008, and this year’s six recipients join more than 40 previous honourees.

Upcoming: the faculty will honour the recipients on November 17 at the Evergreen Awards banquet in Federation Hall. Nominations for future awards are accepted year-round.

Douglas Jones (BES ’93) once told a classmate he would never teach geography to high school kids. A third co-op term at Boyne River Natural Science School, an outdoor education centre, changed his mind: a week with a group of Grade 5 students led him back for a second term and into an honours thesis on outdoor education.

He is now principal of Limehouse Public School, a small rural school beside the Bruce Trail and the Limehouse Conservation Area. When he arrived in 2021 he encouraged teachers to ask where students would learn a lesson best. Mornings begin outdoors, older students mentor younger ones, and in the first year the school’s academic results began outperforming board and provincial averages.

Limehouse has held EcoSchools Platinum status for five straight years and was one of five schools in its region to adopt Learning for Sustainable Futures. In 2025, Wilfrid Laurier University researchers placed it at the threshold of Stage 4, Collective Action and Widespread Practice. It has also been approved to become the Northern Centre for Environmental Leadership.

Jones, a 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, also coaches teachers, principals and administrators who want to teach outdoors and sustainably.

Carly Orth, a former Waterloo Warriors women’s hockey player, has signed with Örebro Hockey, a member of the Nationella Damhockeyligan. An agent sent her highlight video to coaches and general managers. She says she enjoyed talking with the coaches, loves Sweden and found the contract right.

Since the season ended she has trained in the gym almost every day, and this summer she has gradually added ice time. She says she is going with the flow about the move, and her priorities are bringing what she needs and arriving in good shape.

On the ice she hopes to help Örebro compete for a championship. Further ahead she wants to keep playing professionally, in Europe or with the PWHL, and she is taking it day by day.

Orth credits her Waterloo coaches, support staff, teammates, fans and professors, who accommodated practices and games through her undergraduate and master’s studies. She calls leaving bittersweet. Imprint published the profile on August 24, with the move still ahead.

Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON) provided $12,000 fellowships to 30 teams in the 2026 Velocity Summer Accelerator, a program that took in 55 recent and soon-to-be graduates of Waterloo. The idea was to help founders cross the stretch between graduating and running a company full time.

Over three months, teams followed weekly programming aimed at milestones such as letters of intent, first pilots and first sales, then pitched investors at a demo day. Participants came from all six Waterloo faculties, and more than 45 per cent of teams had female founders.

Among the entrants was Ashley Juraschka (MASc in progress, BASc ’24), whose company AllioHealth is building AllioGo, a breast pump designed around how a baby naturally feeds. After the Cooperathon powered by Desjardins, she took AllioHealth to the finals at Startupfest in Montreal, where it won a $5,000 Innovation Award and the People’s Choice Award.

Many teams will keep building with Velocity coaching and follow-on programs such as Velocity Northstar, a three-month run of weekly in-person check-ins covering customer discovery, sales and fundraising.

Aswad Tariq (MMath ’25), Alexandru Bara (MMath ’25) and Professor Urs Hengartner of the Cheriton School of Computer Science won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT). Tariq is the lead author.

Their paper studies behavioural biometrics, which analyze patterns such as typing speed, keystroke dynamics and mouse movements to help detect fraud. They ask whether the technology protects customers or invades their privacy, noting that some of the domains involved already appear on public blocklists.

It is the first large-scale study of how widely the technology is used on the web. The team assembled 232 behavioural biometric scripts from 18 vendors, developed a crawler called LoginGPT to find login pages containing them, and used static taint analysis and supervised machine learning to separate authentication from tracking. Hengartner says it is concerning that data is sometimes sent to third parties.

Juanita Metzger (BA ’96) arrived at Renison in 1993 and found her place in the Social Development Studies program, which let her study social issues and communities while staying close to home in Waterloo Region. Professors such as Tom Brenner and Peter Dunn taught her to look at the systems and policies behind people’s circumstances.

After graduating in 1996 she spent more than twenty years in community development, including work with House of Friendship and the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council. She learned to ask residents to take her for a walk, and the stories, introductions and local assets they shared became part of her practice.

In 2018 she left full-time employment, and freelance writing and local storytelling grew into Stroll Walking Tours. Its tours cover local history, food, women’s history and Black history in Waterloo Region. She says people often tell her they finally see themselves in the region’s history. Metzger calls Renison foundational and describes it as human scale.

Terry Crowe (BES ’72), a member of the fifth class of Waterloo’s School of Planning, wondered for years what his fellow graduates went on to do. After retiring he started asking, sending former classmates 12 questions about their studies, careers and views on the profession.

The result is a newly released grad report that follows the first five cohorts, who graduated from 1967 to 1971, to the present. Crowe found 95 of them. They include Jean Monteith, an award-winning planner and Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners who founded Monteith Brown Planning Consultants, and David Witty, who helped Atikaki Wilderness Provincial Park win its designation and prepared the memorandum of understanding behind Grasslands National Park.

Crowe himself had a 46-year career from coast to coast, including work on rerouting Nova Scotia’s Highway 101 to save Annapolis Royal and on the 2010 Winter Olympic Speed Skating Oval in Richmond, British Columbia. The faculty says the report shows how the early graduates shaped communities and policy, and reconnecting also brought back long-forgotten memories.

Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate students Oscar Hurtado and Luis Marquez came back from Italy with international recognition after taking part in the 15th APESS summer school on smart structures technology (the Asia-Pacific-Euro school) and the 17th ANCRiSST Workshop at Politecnico di Torino. They joined 58 graduate students from around the world.

Participants attended lectures on structural health monitoring, control systems and topology optimization, visited sites including the Regina Margherita Bridge and EUCENTRE’s shake-table laboratories, and spent intensive days in the FabLab with teams from more than a dozen countries.

Hurtado’s team won first place in the structural health monitoring competition with a topologically optimized design that minimized earthquake response, then monitored and updated its model to improve performance. Marquez’s team received the award for Best Presentation. Both say the greatest value is the new questions they bring back to their research at Waterloo.

Masterworks 2026: A Room of One’s Home gathered the graduate thesis work of six Waterloo Architecture alumni at the Riverside Gallery, Design at Riverside, and ran until October 1, 2026. Visitors move through rooms of drawings, counter-archival projects, artifacts and photography that explore identity, memory and architecture. The projects acknowledge displacement and cultural loss without reducing identity to nostalgia.

Ricardo Espinoza (Caribbean Sea) and Nidi Metaj (Albania) are joined by Angeline Reyes (Philippines), Giulia Simonetta (Italy), Zaven Titizian (Syria and Lebanon) and Hiba Z. (Indus River Basin), each tracing a link to a place of origin. Curator Bianca Weeko Martin (M’Arch ’22) says the show took a village, and she put much of it together from Toronto without a driver’s licence.

Martin is a writer and researcher. She wrote the Architectural Guide: Manila, and her piece Tita Tallulah was recently longlisted for the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Masterworks is Waterloo Architecture’s annual exhibition of graduate and alumni research, supported by Diamond Schmitt.

Irina Bukhteeva (PhD ’25, Physics) and Alexey “Alex” Smirnov (PhD ’24, Applied Mathematics) designed a board game during graduate school and have turned it into a label, Wagglebee Games. The game, Tokelau, was playtested in student apartments, board game cafés and at kitchen tables around Waterloo.

Tokelau is a strategy game for two to six players, aged 12 and up, based on exploration and trade across the islands of Polynesia. Players sail between islands in shifting winds, gather resources, found settlements and build trade networks on a modular board that can form thousands of island layouts. Miguel Valenzuela Beltrán drew the artwork, and visual cues help colour-blind players.

The couple say every playtest felt like an experiment, and that learning to take reviewer-style criticism during a PhD helped them keep improving the design. Smirnov now works as an optical engineer in Ottawa, and Bukhteeva moved into postdoctoral research in molecular biology and regenerative medicine.

Upcoming: Tokelau is featured on Kickstarter, and the two hope to launch the project in fall 2026.

Dr. Catherine Burns has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Dr. Suning Wang Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentorship, presented by CAGS.

The official Waterloo report places this work in engineering / mentorship. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Jo Fitzgibbons (MES ’19) calls herself a former “bog child,” happiest catching frogs in wetlands. A walk through a Toronto ravine during a hard season reminded her what nature had always given her, and it shaped a career built on community-engaged research.

She interned with the City of Toronto, competed internationally for Waterloo and researched equity in resilience planning, testing her ideas in practice. Associate Professor Carrie Mitchell taught her to work as a situated researcher, and the Governor General’s Gold Medal went to her master’s research. Her doctoral work at the University of British Columbia asked whose knowledge counts in environmental decisions, and some chapters appear as a toolkit and a zine.

She became a Registered Professional Planner and finished her PhD while working in local government. At the City of Vancouver she works with engineers, planners, finance and social policy staff to embed ecology in land-use planning, development and public infrastructure, and she values small, careful changes that build up over time.

Fitzgibbons is a 2026 Recent Alumni Inspiration Award recipient from the Faculty of Environment.

David Carciente joined Waterloo’s first Rising Stars Fellowship cohort in 2024 while studying software engineering at Concordia. In the Vision and Image Processing Lab, he helped make computer vision tools more accessible to marine researchers.

He returned for a master’s in Systems Design Engineering after getting to know the supervisors and research environment. His current work pairs satellite imagery with sea ice charts. The fellowship offered something a prospectus cannot: time to discover what working in a particular lab feels like.

A new agreement connects Waterloo and Airbus across sustainable aviation, advanced materials, digital systems and emerging aerospace technologies. The Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics coordinates the partnership, alongside the Future in Motion Network.

The framework builds on a relationship begun in 2021 with Airbus’s local digital aviation team, now operating as Skywise. It also points toward student projects and experiential learning. These are planned avenues for collaboration, rather than a tally of completed projects or new jobs.

A new Communitech initiative is putting University of Waterloo's students at the centre of efforts to transform how local businesses adopt AI

The official Waterloo report places this work in ai / co-op. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Cohere and the University of Waterloo partner to prepare students to lead AI transformation work

The official Waterloo report places this work in ai / work. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

A news article announcing that Research Professor Maura R. Grossman has received two awards for her work at the intersection of law, data governance, and AI

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / ai. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

A news article announcing the four incoming 2026 Schulich Leaders at the Cheriton School of Computer Science

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / students. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

From being named an MLH top 50 honoree to scaling up hackathons, Jeffrey Zang learned to build by embracing failure.

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / teaching. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

PhD student wins seed funding for her technology that supports children with ADHD

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / pitch. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Feature on E Co-op alum Humza Ahmed, founder of Automax.ai, who raised more than $5 million in funding after completing Y Combinator.

The official Waterloo report places this work in entrepreneurship / alumni. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

News item featuring Professors Victor Cui and Felix Arndt sharing federal funding announcement for research.

The official Waterloo report places this work in entrepreneurship / research. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Michael Benoit has been recognized as one of Canada's Top 40 Under 40® for 2026, one of the country’s most recognized honours for young leaders.

The official Waterloo report places this work in engineering / recognition. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Three chemical engineering graduate students won the inaugural pitch competition of the Academy of Research Commercialization (ARC). The new program is run by Engineering and Conrad together, with help from Velocity and WatCo, the Waterloo Commercialization Office, and it prepares PhD students to turn deep-tech research into ventures.

Drew Davidson’s ArcticEdge Technologies is making a nanotechnology moisture barrier for firefighting gear to replace PFAS, which has been identified as carcinogenic. He was inspired by his mother, Kelley Willemze, a Cambridge firefighter for more than 30 years. Batches are going to clients for evaluation, including gear maker LION and Wuxly, which supplies cold weather gear to the Canadian military.

Chuchi Chen and Ellie Zarnke pitched Aqualis Bio, a probiotic for salmon feed. Their engineered microbes secrete astaxanthin, the additive that gives farmed salmon their pink colour, and they say it could cost $1500 against a current range of $2000 to $7000. They have filed provisional IP and confirmed the function at lab scale.

Bahareh Arab’s Porphyrion relies on engineered microbes and precision fermentation to make natural colours that can stand in for the synthetic dyes found in everyday products.

Kelsey Leonard (Shinnecock) holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability. She is a professor in Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. Her WAMPUM Lab, which works on Indigenous ocean, water and climate justice, has built a mobile laboratory so community-led research can happen where people live.

Leonard says Indigenous nation leaders the lab works with proposed the idea, and it gained momentum at environmental conferences before COVID. The aim was a welcoming space where elders and youth can practise place-based science.

The team retrofitted a 2014 bus instead of buying a new vehicle and added solar panels. It carries wet and dry lab space, a desk, refrigeration for water and soil samples, and outdoor worktables for jobs such as fish and shellfish cleaning. Onondaga pop artist Frank Buffalo Hyde designed the exterior, with sweetgrass on one side and wampum belt designs, whales and a quahog clam on the other.

Future plans include Indigenous community events and powwows. Funding for the infrastructure came from the John R. Evans Leaders Fund of the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Thiru Sinnathamby (BASc ’01, electrical engineering), Vice-President of Engineering at NVIDIA, invested $500,000 to establish the Sinnathamby Professorship in AI for Sustainable Solutions in Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering. His family also helps fund wells in Africa and Asia through groups such as Charity: Water.

Dr. John Quilty of Civil and Environmental Engineering leads the research it supports. His graduate team builds AI models that follow water from source to tap, forecast river flow, optimize reservoir operations and predict contamination. Better predictions for rare 50 to 100-year floods already feed a forecasting partnership with Natural Resources Canada.

PhD student Soheil Khosravi is building reservoir-operation models that include the physical dynamics and operating limits of the reservoir, so water managers can see why a release decision makes sense. Quilty says the professorship let him recruit the students for the work.

Sinnathamby, who benefited from co-op as a student, calls the idea a multiplier effect: students who see an alum invest in their work may one day do the same for someone else.

A $500,000 investment from the Tang Family Foundation, a charitable fund under the Philantra Foundation, will pay for graduate scholarships in embodied AI at Waterloo’s Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute (Waterloo.AI). The first eight recipients, from Engineering and Math, each received $15,000.

Waterloo.AI director Stephen Smith describes embodied intelligence as AI that senses and acts in real environments. A robot clearing a kitchen, he explains, can use a large language model to infer that a mug is fragile and belongs in a cupboard, reasoning that once had to be coded by hand for every object and room.

PhD candidate Atusa Ghorbani Siavashani, co-supervised by John McPhee and Arash Arami, is working on exoskeletons, wearable robots that could help people living with mobility impairment. The scholarship, the student says, shows that industry as well as academia cares about the work.

At a demo day the scholars tried their algorithms on real hardware. Smith would like the event to become a regular, more public showcase.

Grace Liang, Kevin Gong, Vincent Nguyen and Austin Lew have just graduated from mechanical and mechatronics engineering at Waterloo. For their capstone they built a robot for coaching professional volleyball players and teams. It delivers repeatable, game-like sets, so an athlete can practise without needing a teammate to set the ball.

Competing as Team Onset, they entered the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) National Design Competition and were honoured for the technical strength of their design. Each year students across Canada submit capstone and non-capstone projects for national recognition and cash prizes.

At the department’s yearly awards ceremony the project also won Most Innovative Project, an award sponsored by Dyson. The team presented the design at the department’s symposium in March, so this summer’s announcement follows earlier showings.

Shahrzad Tofighi, a Master of Science in Physics student at Waterloo, applies physics to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites stop responding to medicines such as antibiotics. The World Health Organization estimates that bacterial AMR caused 1.27 million deaths in 2019.

She builds mathematical models of how antimicrobial peptides interact with bacterial membranes. The peptides attack bacteria through the membrane, which makes resistance harder to develop. Tofighi does not alter the peptides themselves. She studies how conditions such as salt concentration change how well they work.

Her supervisor is Dr. Bae-Yeun Ha, whom she credits with teaching her to question assumptions and work through uncertainty, a change from the course-based thinking of her undergraduate years. The long-term hope is that such theory can guide experiments, reduce costly lab work and inform dose studies for peptide-based antibiotics.

A team led by Waterloo chemical engineering professor Dr. Maxime van der Heijden has built a 3D-printed electrode that could make it easier and safer to store large amounts of wind and solar energy. The researchers drew on natural structures to redesign a key component of redox flow batteries, helping the liquid move more efficiently so the reactions that store and release energy work better.

Redox flow batteries differ from lithium-ion batteries. They hold energy in water-based liquid electrolytes in external tanks, which avoids the flammable materials in lithium-ion cells, and capacity grows by using bigger tanks. Van der Heijden calls them well suited to large-scale renewable storage and grid use, and describes them as complementary to lithium-ion rather than a replacement.

Wind and solar power are intermittent, so storage that returns energy to the grid later matters. Printing the electrodes let the team control their porous structure and the flow of fluid through them with a precision that conventional methods struggle to match.

Dr. James Wolffsohn, a global eye health researcher from the U.K., joins Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science with a Government of Canada Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in Health Innovation. The announcement was published on September 3, and his official start date was October 1, 2026.

He plans a research program that runs from discovery through commercialization and involves Waterloo students at each stage. His questions include how low-cost portable diagnostics can widen early detection, how AI image analysis can cut preventable vision loss, and how new insight into disease can shape next-generation treatments and lenses.

He lists unequal access to care, rising childhood myopia, dry eye and its links to screen time, age-related retinal conditions and gaps in rural and remote services as the problems he wants to address, including through tele-optometry, mobile screening and community-based monitoring of conditions such as macular degeneration.

He points to Waterloo’s creator-owned intellectual property model, its Commercialization Office and the new Waterloo Eye Institute as reasons the move suits his translational work.

Dr. Raafat Mansour, a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The society cited his leadership in engineering for radio-frequency (RF), microwave and micro-electromechanical systems.

As founding director of the Centre for Integrated RF Engineering, he has helped make Waterloo a leader in RF and microsystems research, including work on high-performance communications and on cryogenic RF hardware for quantum computers.

More than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have trained under him, and he co-founded two spinoff companies, one of them AdHawk Microsystems, which pioneered eye-tracking technology. Mansour has 37 patents and more than 450 peer-reviewed publications to his name, and he is also a Fellow of the IEEE, the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Diego Lalla (BSc ’26) grew up watching his mother struggle with severe vision problems and migraines. After nearly a dozen eye specialists failed to give her an effective plan, she went to the Waterloo Eye Institute Optometry Clinic, where optometry students found the cause and treated it. Lalla says that when her sight began to return, everything clicked.

By Grade 10 he had decided on Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science, and he picked the Faculty of Science’s Biological and Medical Physics program as the route. A co-op term as a physician’s assistant, working with neurologists, occupational therapists and psychologists, confirmed his plan, and he says co-op mattered to his admission.

Professors Brenda Lee, Josh Neufeld and Stefan Idziak sparked an interest in teaching. He worked as a Learning Assistant at Sheridan College and spent 10 hours a week tutoring on campus. He has now secured his place in the optometry program.

Mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor Zhao Pan and PhD student Kaveeshan Thurairajah won the 2026 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for a splash-free urinal design. They toasted the news with blueberry wine from espresso cups in his office, then attended the sold-out ceremony in Zurich in bright yellow raincoats.

The Ig Nobels, organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour research that makes people laugh, then think. The winning design, Nautilus (pronounced Nauti-loo), all but eliminates splatter by keeping the angle at which a stream meets the wall under about 30 degrees, a limit found by theoretical modelling and checked in physical experiments. More than a decade of off-and-on research went into it.

Pan says most of the work, which led to a journal paper in 2025, was done by undergraduate students, including Mabel Song and JD Zhu. Thurairajah was still an undergraduate when he led the study and first presented early findings at a conference in the United States in 2022. Professors Randy Hurd of Weber State University and Tadd Truscott of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are also on the team. Ten prizes were awarded in all.

TextNow marked cumulative revenue above $1 billion by unveiling a public sculpture at its headquarters in the David Johnston Research and Technology Park on Waterloo’s north campus. Derek Ting (BASc ’10) launched the company in 2009 as a co-op placement, to help pay his bills while he earned his computer engineering degree.

Its app-based free phone service has attracted millions of users and is described as the largest ad-supported free wireless service in the United States, offering a local number plus nationwide talk and text, with wireless data available for a flexible fee. TextNow also has an office in San Francisco.

The company has grown without venture capital beyond its initial seed funding, staying close to the local technology ecosystem. Ting, a co-founder and its CEO, said the milestone is less about the number than what it represents. “We have shown there is another way,” he said.

The company calls the sculpture a lasting marker of what was built in Waterloo and an invitation to the next generation of founders.

Twenty volunteers from the Society for Environmental Restoration at Waterloo (SER-UW), Bird Friendly Kitchener and Bird Friendly Waterloo began work in May 2026 on putting Feather Friendly decals on the northeast side of the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre (QNC), on its first and second floors. The building was chosen because it has been noted as having the highest bird fatality on campus.

Professor Jennifer Clary-Lemon leads the project, which the Sustainability Action Fund paid for. She credits Plant Operations staff for handling scheduling, labour and cleaning, which made for an easy two days of installation. The decals come from a Mississauga company and are known to reduce bird-window collisions by 95%.

An estimated 16 to 42 million birds die in window collisions in Canada each year, often because they mistake reflections of vegetation for real objects. Over the next three years SER-UW will keep monitoring the building for collision fatalities to measure results. The university suggests covering windows with decals, turning off lights in empty rooms and keeping houseplants away from windows.

Engineering and the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business co-hosted Canada is the Move, a conversation on the ambition, energy and connections behind Waterloo’s technology and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Professor Chris Holt moderated.

On stage, Michael Litt (BASc ’10) spoke as a co-founder of Vidyard and Garage Capital, Jocelyne Murphy (BASc ’25) as a co-founder of Wygo, and Chris Albinson as Managing Partner of True North Fund.

Murphy says three things gave her team the financial freedom to build Wygo’s foundation before raising venture capital: Enterprise Co-op at the Conrad School, the Pearl Sullivan Scholarship for Community Leadership and the Accelerator Centre. Wygo was also the official platform behind this year’s Waterloo Tech Week.

The conversation described Waterloo as a dense web of students, alumni, founders, mentors and community partners who trade ideas and open doors for one another. The Conrad School says programs such as E Co-op let students test ideas and build ventures. The event took place the week before the September 23 report.

Henry Abanum, a Master of Science in Pharmacy student at Waterloo, is developing a bacteria-responsive coating for food contact materials. It pairs toxin detection with on-demand release of an antimicrobial, a response to concern over Listeria outbreaks. The World Health Organization estimates that unsafe food causes 866 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths a year.

The coating relies on tiny biocompatible carriers called liposomes, which respond to bacterial toxins and release a naturally derived antimicrobial only when it is needed. Abanum describes the work as a blend of drug delivery and food safety that could improve quality, extend shelf life and reduce spoilage, which would also ease food waste and its greenhouse gas emissions.

His interest in applied research began during pharmacy training in Nigeria, where he became drawn to industrial pharmacy. After a PharmD and work as a clinical pharmacist, he applied to Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy, citing its multidisciplinary environment and industry collaborations.

In Dr. Zoya Leonenko’s Physics and Astronomy lab, three students serve as research assistants: Charlotte Baur, in fourth-year Biological and Medical Physics; Hugh Hossfeld, in third-year Honours Science; and Isabella Barichello, in third-year Biomedical Engineering. They are testing epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), an antioxidant found in green tea, as a possible shield against the cell damage linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

The lab works with model versions of neuronal membranes and watches how they respond to amyloid beta, the protein clusters that form plaques. Baur and Hossfeld use electrophysiology to see whether EGCG blocks the pore-like openings that amyloid beta oligomers create, which let ions pass. They have observed reduced membrane permeability, which suggests the extract could protect the membrane.

Barichello comes at the problem from the surface, using surface plasmon resonance to study how amyloid beta attaches to the membrane and whether EGCG reduces that. The work builds on earlier studies of compounds such as melatonin and trehalose. The results so far come from model membranes in the lab, not from patients.

Eight University of Waterloo researchers were elected Fellows and College Members of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) in 2026, in fields from global governance and public health to AI, cybersecurity and quantum neurobiology. Separately, Dr. Geoffrey Fong, who has been an RSC Fellow since 2017, became only the second person to receive the Eric Jackman Prize in the Human Behavioural and Social Sciences.

Fong founded the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (the ITC Project) and is its chief principal investigator; it was the first international cohort study to track tobacco use alongside tobacco control policy. More than 150 researchers across 31 countries have used it to evaluate measures under the World Health Organization’s tobacco treaty, such as warning labels, smoke-free laws and taxes.

Andrew Fenton Cooper (BA ’72, MA ’73) studies diplomacy and global governance, including the G20 and BRICS, and has written nine books on his own. Myra Fernandes, a psychology professor, studies how the brain coordinates systems to optimize memory in younger and older adults and in people with dementia, and she chairs the Psychonomic Society.

Upcoming: the Waterloo group will be among 159 scholars, artists and scientists formally inducted at the RSC Celebration of Excellence and Engagement in Ottawa on November 13.

Researchers in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science are studying microbes as tools for environmental problems. In Biology, Dr. Laura Hug’s group targets legacy methane from older landfilled waste, working with microbial communities that can oxidize methane, degrade bioplastics and break down industrial solvents. Her lab has collected samples with the Region of Waterloo’s waste management division for a decade.

Dr. Jozef Nissimov leads the Environmental Virology and Ecology Research Group, which asks whether microbial communities help control harmful algal blooms or make them worse. His lab has shown that when a virus kills the bloom-forming cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa, it can trigger a spike in the liver toxin microcystin, many times above safe drinking-water limits, even when the water looks clear again. Samples come from lakes including the IISD Experimental Lakes Area.

In Earth and Environmental Sciences, Dr. Jenine McCutcheon’s team visits active and historic mine sites to see how microbes can improve or worsen water quality. Canada has more than 10,000 abandoned mines, and many still leak acidic, metal-rich drainage into surrounding land and water.

A new study has identified workflow barriers that contribute to delays, helping health providers improve outcomes for patients across the stroke care pathway.

The official Waterloo report places this work in research / health. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Waterloo-founded startup Ribbit scaling autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to expand transportation access in remote, infrastructure-limited environments across Canada and beyond.

The official Waterloo report places this work in engineering / aviation. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Canada can lead the revolution by educating leaders who bake core principles right in.

The official Waterloo report places this work in ai / culture. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Dr. Andrew Ramsook, a kinesiology professor who arrived at Waterloo in 2025, has been awarded $100,000 by the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, part of the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It will pay for instruments that test breathing from the airways and lungs through to the muscles that drive them.

His proposal notes that lung disease is estimated to cost Canadians $24 billion by 2030, with an aging population, wildfire smoke and rising youth vaping among the drivers. Within the respiratory system, only the breathing muscles are known to improve with training, and they can change blood flow, heart rate and blood pressure.

The new lab will help him learn how those muscles signal the rest of the body. Early experiments will look at fatigue in the breathing muscles during and after hard breathing work such as exercise, followed by readings of how active they are, and a final combined assessment of lung size and how well the lungs move oxygen into the blood.

UW High Performance Computing (UWHPC) was founded earlier this year by computer engineering students James Redekopp and Karl Keshavarzi inside the Sedra Student Design Centre, with Dr. Tahsin Reza of Electrical and Computer Engineering as faculty advisor. Redekopp says they started it because the team they wanted to join did not exist.

The first project, nearly finished, is a Variational Monte Carlo simulation written from scratch in C++. The method estimates properties of quantum systems with many interacting particles by statistical sampling, so the faster the software runs, the larger the problem the team can take on. Redekopp says performance tuning is rarely a single change that makes a program faster.

Next term the team turns to machine learning systems, starting with GPU optimization and specialized compilation. It takes on any high-performance problem members care about, from scientific computing to compilers and distributed systems.

As of the September 3 report, recruitment for the Fall 2026 term was open, with a hands-on onboarding challenge for applicants. Keshavarzi says GPU programming is not a prerequisite, because the team looks for the motivation to dig deeper. UWHPC is one of more than 40 student design teams in Waterloo Engineering.

Miles Yoshida, a fourth-year Environmental Sciences student in the Water Science specialization, spent a summer developing and calibrating a fibre-optic oxygen sensor system for soil. The Faculty of Science’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fund backed the work, and he hopes to pursue graduate studies in water and environmental science.

He worked in the Ecohydrology Research Group in Earth and Environmental Sciences under Philippe Van Cappellen and Fereidoun Rezanezhad. The sensor uses fibre-optic cables coated with a platinum complex whose luminescence dims as oxygen rises, and he tracks changes in the emitted light with a standard DSLR camera.

Over the summer he refined the design and tested it at different temperatures and oxygen concentrations, then analyzed the data to compare the system’s performance with commercial oxygen sensors. Soil oxygen influences microbial activity, nutrient cycling and contaminant transport, which is why finer measurements matter.

Waterloo chemical engineers are working with the University of Guelph, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness (OMAFA) and industry on two farm problems. The first involves Ontario’s 5,200-acre greenhouse sector, worth $1.8 billion a year, where disease and pests can spread fast and manual monitoring is slow.

That project builds a system that watches greenhouse crops for early signs of disease and stress before they are visible, combining computer vision, metabolic modelling and machine learning. Professor Nasser Mohieddin Abukhdeir leads for Waterloo, and Professor Christian Euler’s metabolic models reveal plant changes before symptoms appear, at least three days earlier, he says. Canada and Ontario fund it through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership.

The second project, with Corteva Agrisciences, asks whether drones can scatter winter wheat seed into standing soybeans in eastern Ontario, where the planting window is short. Guelph professor Joshua Nasielski says surface seed dried out, and fewer than half of 1.6 million seeds per acre survived. Professor Tizazu Mekonnen designed a biodegradable, super-absorbent hydrogel from potato starch to hold moisture around each seed until rain arrives, and unlike synthetic coatings it fully degrades.

Katja Kubasta, a Faculty of Environment student, completed 586 roadside surveys over four months in Norfolk County. She documented wildlife and pointed to places where new infrastructure could do more to protect species at risk.

The placement was with the Long Point Biosphere Region through a KEEN Global Citizen Internship, supervised by Chantel Markle of Waterloo and road ecologist Kari Gunson. The roads and habitat she monitored are used by endangered Eastern Fox Snakes, and the area holds Ontario’s largest Carolinian population of the species. Its president, Brian Craig, said the organization could not have done the research and monitoring without KEEN’s support.

KEEN Footwear has backed Waterloo students through graduate scholarships, internships and co-op opportunities, and it agreed to extend its partnership with the faculty by five more years. Its support has also reached the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the rare Charitable Research Reserve, where it supported learning and work on more than 1,200 acres of protected land.

KEEN received a 2026 Friend of the Faculty Impact Award for sustained investment in student learning.

Kyara Simoes, a recent graduate of Waterloo’s Master of Environmental Studies program, assessed how ready national-level Canadian sport organizations are for climate change. She had watched warm winters end skiing and smoky air stop her runs, and she chose Waterloo to work with climate researchers Michelle Rutty and Daniel Scott.

She reviewed 86 organizations, among them baseball, karate and triathlon bodies, using their public strategic plans, annual reports and sustainability reports. Only eleven mention climate change or environmental sustainability, and only five maintain a webpage on the subject.

Simoes argues that Sport Canada is well placed to help the whole sector by building climate considerations into future funding frameworks and by centralizing practical guidance, such as what a community coach should do on a smoky day or in a heat wave. For context, about 300 sports organizations have committed to halving emissions by 2030 under a United Nations framework launched in 2018.

Water Cycles Expeditions grew from an idea of students and partners supported by Dr. Dustin Garrick, a professor in the Faculty of Environment: put people on bikes to reconnect them with water. The project blends social enterprise, experiential education and community science. Its hypothesis is that riding in groups near water builds empathy, then learning, then community action on managing it.

The latest pilot, Two Row by the Grand, was co-led by Garrick and Spring Carter of Six Nations Tourism, with a Reconciliation-focused ride along the Grand River planned beside the annual Two Row on the Grand paddling event. Wildfire smoke from northwestern Ontario led Environment and Climate Change Canada to issue an orange-level warning in mid-July, so activities moved indoors. The ride did not happen, but the teachings did, starting with the Two Row Wampum.

Water Cycles says it has led 15 rides since 2022, with 500 participants in Canada, the United States and Kenya. Next come a Waterloo course on cycling for sustainability, a scavenger hunt for school students and, with Canada Foundation for Innovation funding, a fleet of 30 bikes for a bike-share program. A public Water Cycles Thanksgiving event was scheduled in Belwood on October 3.

The Faculty of Environment and the Moccasin Identifier unveiled a permanent treaty marker on September 25 along Ring Road near the EV3 building. The steel installation, designed by the university’s Creative Studio with the Moccasin Identifier around an Anishinaabe moccasin design, is meant to work as a living land acknowledgement.

Amanda St. Marie, the faculty’s Indigenous initiatives manager and a member of Matachewan First Nation, says its purpose is treaty education: helping people understand treaty relationships and traditional territories. The project grew from the faculty’s long relationship with Carolyn King, founder of the Moccasin Identifier, former Chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and a recurring guest lecturer. The First Nations-led initiative was established in 2011.

The youth women’s hand drum group Aki Ogichidaa Kwewak N’Gomawak opened the program, followed by Elder Myeengun Henry. St. Marie gave the keynote, and Laurie Froman, the Moccasin Identifier’s executive director, King and interim associate vice-president John Lewis also spoke. The day closed with a round dance.

Upcoming: the Moccasin Identifier team returns to campus in the first week of November to provide treaty education.

Biologist Julie Messier, MSc student Sabina Henry and collaborators examined black spruce growth in warmer, drier conditions. Better growth was associated with three traits together: fewer needles, conservative water use and conservative carbon use.

The combination matters. A single apparently helpful trait did not explain the pattern on its own. The research gives forest practitioners a more specific question to investigate when selecting trees for changing conditions; it does not establish that one planting strategy works everywhere.

Waterloo PhD candidate Hasti Shwan develops a platform that turns complex climate and natural hazard data into actionable insights for informed decision-making

The official Waterloo report places this work in climate / civic. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

The School of Optometry and Vision Science welcomed two new faculty members, Nicole Noel and Xiaoye Michael Wang, with expertise in photoreceptor biology and visual perception. The school says they help set the stage for the opening of the Waterloo Eye Institute in 2027.

Noel, from Fort McMurray, Alberta, earned her PhD in medical genetics at the University of Alberta and held a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London. She studies how photoreceptor cells form and break down using turquoise killifish, which develop age-related vision loss and live about six months. She hopes the work leads to ways to stop or reverse vision loss in people, and she will teach an undergraduate pathophysiology course in the winter term.

Wang studies 3D visual perception and motor control with virtual reality. His projects include a VR chemical engineering lab training application and motion capture work for the Toronto Raptors, and he is developing a computational fix for convergence and accommodation problems in VR headsets with Austin Roorda and Lisa Christian. With his wife, Emily Gong, he co-founded the Asian Arts and Culture Trust, which has worked with the Toronto International Film Festival.

Waterloo Engineering students sweep the podium at a national steel design competition.

The official Waterloo report places this work in engineering / students. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

A Waterloo Electrical and Computer Engineering team competed at the IEEE symposium on electromagnetic compatibility, signal and power integrity (EMC+SIPI) in Texas, where it was first runner-up for the hardware design award. Earlier this summer the same team had been named one of three finalists in the IEEE EMC+SIPI student hardware design contest.

Adjunct professor George Shaker supervises the team: master’s student Jake Peters, PhD student Amirbahador Mansoori, and undergraduate research assistants Alanna Rudolph and Dhyey Bhatt, all in his Wireless Sensors & Devices Lab.

Their work evaluates power integrity along with radiated and conducted emissions, combining circuit simulation, physical probing and automated measurements. They designed a bimanual robotic scanner with closed-loop vision for near-field interference mapping. ArUco markers give it millimetre-level precision as it locates the sources of radiated emissions across a custom printed circuit board. The students are active in the IEEE EMC Society Student Branch Chapter.

The Mennonite Archives of Ontario has curated an exhibit on Glenn Fretz, who spent fifty years as a graphic designer and consultant for Mennonite and non-profit organizations. It is on view at Conrad Grebel University College, on the third-floor atrium landing in the MAO Gallery and extending into the library.

Fretz’s work shaped the branding of Mennonite World Conference, Mennonite Reporter, Canadian Mennonite, MEDA and Mennonite churches in Canada and the United States. Pieces from the archives and from his own collection show how his career met these groups’ search for bolder visual expression, with his reflections on process and tributes to the clients who asked him to convey particular meanings.

The public launch took place on Thursday, September 17, during Mennonite Heritage Week, so the show is already open. Upcoming at Grebel: an event titled Credit Worthy: Anabaptist Debt and the Material Bases of Coexistence on Thursday, November 19, at 7:30 pm in the Great Hall. Visitors can also follow a self-guided Mennonite art tour of the college’s collection.

After arriving at the University of Waterloo as an international student, Robyn Varda Bhola found friendship, community and lasting connections through Math Orientation.

The official Waterloo report places this work in math / belonging. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Here are three of the CEMC’s many programs that are specifically helping to address the gender equity gap.

The official Waterloo report places this work in math / education. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

The University of Waterloo is well represented in the most recent cohort of companies accepted into the Y Combinator (YC), one of the biggest and most presti

The official Waterloo report places this work in builders / yc. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Karri Melvaer Wallsten (BA ’93) shares memories of being a student in the 1990s and meeting friends who remain close and recently travelled to Mexico together.

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / community. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

For 60 years, the University of Waterloo has inspired new generations of students and new waves of innovation and discovery.

The official Waterloo report places this work in campus / then and now. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

A class anniversary page turns old buildings into a way of remembering student life.

The official Waterloo report places this work in alumni / campus history. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Adam Clark (BAS ’06, MArch ’09) is an urban designer with the City of Kitchener. As a third-year architecture student at Waterloo, he and his team assembled a model measuring 8 by 60 feet for a studio that reimagined part of Toronto, and the project shifted his focus from buildings to cities.

That experience informed the public engagement he led for Growing Together, Kitchener’s planning framework for accommodating growth near its ION light rail stations. Residents tested ideas with physical models of their neighbourhoods. The project won eight awards, among them Project of the Year from the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and a Congress for the New Urbanism Charter Award.

Clark also acted as the client for Professor Katherine Perrott’s graduate planning studio, inviting students to take on questions the City was still working through. Their research on housing, zoning and how other municipalities handle similar problems sometimes directly informed City policy. His models also led Perrott to bring model-making back into planning courses using the ENV Makerspace.

Clark describes the arrangement as collaboration, not giving back. The Faculty of Environment has named him a 2026 Friend of the Faculty Impact Award recipient.

Remi Rotenberg, now a fourth-year Civil Engineering student, knew Engineering Orientation by reputation before she arrived. Her father, Meir Rotenberg (BASc ’89), had told her stories. She says the real thing felt different, and within days she was purple, head to toe.

Orientation put her on a colour team with fellow Civil Engineering students. They became friends and study partners, sat together in lectures and turned to each other for the first group projects. Upper-year students became mentors too, passing on advice and notes.

Those contacts led her to the Engineering Society. After her first year she came back as an Orientation leader and took on more of the planning and delivery each year. She says she has had more fun as a leader than she did as a first-year student.

Her message to nervous newcomers is that everyone else is just as nervous, and calming those nerves together turns out to be a bonding experience.

Jinmeng Shi, a Master of Applied Science student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was named best student poster presenter at the International Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, held July 12 to 16, 2026. Professors Dayan Ban and Zbig Wasilewski co-supervise her.

Her research targets terahertz quantum cascade lasers, which are built from many extremely thin semiconductor layers, so small flaws at the interfaces can hurt performance. She is testing whether growing the layers on a different crystal orientation of gallium arsenide gives smoother interfaces, and her experiments found conditions for more predictable silicon doping while keeping the surfaces very smooth.

Shi began in Materials and Nanosciences on a joint program with Beijing Jiaotong University: two years in Beijing, then the final two at Waterloo. She says her supervisors changed how she treats failed experiments: she now examines the evidence for causes and uses it to decide what to try next.

Imprint’s preview of the Warriors’ 2026-27 football season began with a rematch of last year’s opener against uOttawa’s Gee-Gees, who won 27-12. The Warriors are coming off a 2-6 season. They return OUA all-star linebacker Michael Omoseni, have a healthy starting quarterback in Nick Orr, and have kicker Evan Astolfo, an all-rookie pick who kicked the longest field goal in OUA history in his second game last year.

Head coach Chris Bertoia said the team has worked hard for eight and a half months and called its culture special. The roster has 107 players, and seven of last year’s opponents are on the schedule, among them Carleton, Queen’s, Windsor, Guelph, McMaster and York.

The Battle of Waterloo returns to Warrior Field in Week 6. This is a late-August preview, so it does not cover results since then.

Gail Cuthbert Brandt registered for an Arts degree in History at Renison in 1963, lived in residence for three years, acting as a don in her final year there. Close to thirty years later she came back as head of the college.

In 1992 she became the first woman to serve as Renison’s principal, and the first woman to head any college at the University of Waterloo, serving as Principal and Vice-Chancellor until 2002. She was also the first woman to chair Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion, which helped Renison build international ties.

As a historian she specialized in Canadian social and women’s history, including women’s working lives and rural communities. She co-authored Canadian Women: A History and Feminist Politics on the Farm, wrote Through the Mill about girls and women in Quebec’s cotton industry, and documented the college in Bold and Courageous Dreams: A History of Renison University College. Renison profiled her for Women’s History Month on October 1.

The Waterloo Warriors beat the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks at Warrior Field on Saturday in the annual Battle of Waterloo, according to the Waterloo Region Record, which reports a 39-31 final after the league corrected the score. The win moved Waterloo to 2-4. Waterloo had last won the game in 2021, and Laurier had taken four of the previous five.

The Warriors led 24-10 going into the second half, but Laurier went ahead in the fourth quarter when quarterback Will Russell found Ryan Hughes for a touchdown. Waterloo answered with two touchdowns in the final six minutes to regain the lead and the bragging rights.

In the 11-team Ontario University Athletics league the top seven teams make the playoffs, and the two rivals are tied for seventh with two games each left. Upcoming: Waterloo hosts McMaster on October 17, and Laurier hosts Carleton the same day. The Record also describes fans filling the bleachers and the grassy slope around the field.

John Marshall (BES 1985) has given $500,000 to Conrad Grebel University College’s Windows to the Future campaign, which is renewing the residence. He and his wife, Wendy Derrick, already supported Grebel through capital gifts and student awards. Marshall says he wanted to help push the campaign over the finish line.

He came to Grebel in 1982 as a transfer student looking for a place to live, and a last-minute residence opening gave him a community he says shaped his studies and his social life. He credits Professor Walter Klaassen, who reviewed every one of his papers after his first term to help with his writing, for the wish to give back.

The campaign began with air handling, washrooms and plumbing, then grew to refresh student lounges, replace internet infrastructure and swap old lighting for energy-efficient LEDs. Marshall points out that in 2026 the residence still has no air conditioning and has 30-year-old washrooms.

The Future Cities Institute’s CIVIC program connects Waterloo students with municipal problems. In Edmonton, Preethi Raghuraman developed SmartShift to help with staffing in Parks and Roads Services, accounting for collective agreements, preferences and certification requirements.

The program treats a work term as a project that can continue beyond one student. Raghuraman later worked with a Planning student on a report intended to help other municipalities learn from the experience. The next challenge is making useful work transferable without losing its local constraints.

The New Residence Building is planned to open in 2027. The official housing page describes a mix of traditional and suite-style rooms, shared spaces and a community centre.

The useful detail is the room plan. A future building becomes legible when students can picture where they sleep, study, cook, meet and return after a long day.

The official building gallery moves from the river edge to the red and grey walls, stairs, studios and library. It reads like a campus portrait made from thresholds.

Architecture becomes alumni memory here because the building is doing work: it gives students a place to test scale, structure and the way a room changes a question.

The official weather station publishes current readings and long-run comparisons from the Soulis Memorial Weather Station. It gives the campus a small but useful public instrument.

Weather is part of the reader experience too: it changes the route between buildings, the light in a studio and the rooms people choose to stay in.

The official floor-plan index lists studios, lecture halls, libraries and shared spaces across the university. Residence plans are restricted, while many academic building plans remain visible to the campus community.

The map is an invitation to look closer at the rooms behind the stories: where people gather, what stays open and how a building guides the next move.

Since 1957, the University of Waterloo has been recognized for its rigorous research, entrepreneurial thinking and cross-disciplinary work.

The official Waterloo report places this work in campus / mascots. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Waterloo Rocketry’s rocket Polaris flew to 63,497 feet on Thursday, August 20, at Launch Canada in Timmins, Ontario, the country’s largest student rocketry challenge. That set a record for the greatest height reached by an amateur liquid rocket. The previous mark was 56,590 feet, held by a US team with its rocket Vespula.

The team says it was the first nominal flight of a liquid rocket in Canada, and its first successful recovery ever. Polaris is its third liquid-fuelled rocket after Borealis in 2024 and Aurora in 2025, and the biggest so far at 213 inches tall and eight inches wide. A drogue parachute and then a main parachute brought it down safely.

Last year Aurora’s parachute failed and the rocket was lost in the Northern Ontario forest. This year wireless problems between mission control and the rocket, bad weather and a fueling tube failure delayed the launch to the fourth of the event’s five days. Media lead Niva Patel, a second-year mechanical engineering student, called it “our most successful flight ever.”

On August 26, October’s Very Own (OVO), the label founded by Canadian rapper Drake, revealed a clothing collection in collaboration with the University of Waterloo and five other Canadian universities. It went on sale August 28 at OVO’s GTA stores and online, and the W Store in South Campus Hall began stocking items on September 8.

The OVO x UW black and gold line has a tee shirt, hoodie, quarter-zip sweater, coaches jacket and baseball cap, priced from $68.00 to $198.00 CAD. Everything except the coaches jacket sold out on OVO’s website within hours.

Shawn Gilbertson, interim director of UW’s Print + Retail Solutions, told Imprint the collection lets the brand show up in new spaces and answers student interest and feedback. OVO has also worked with York University and the University of Toronto. This is earlier context, since the collection launched in late August.

An article detailing the achievements that led to Professor Ian Goldberg being named a 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / privacy. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Negar was recognized for her contributions in community engagement in the information retrieval community

The official Waterloo report places this work in computer science / community. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

1-2 awards are granted each year to teachers who “consistently demonstrated outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to our students’ education.”

The official Waterloo report places this work in math / teaching. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

David Carciente, a former Rising Stars Fellow, re-joins Waterloo Engineering for his graduate studies.

The official Waterloo report places this work in engineering / graduate study. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

A paper co-authored by Waterloo electrical and computer engineering professor Weiyi (Ian) Shang was honoured with an ACM Distinguished Paper Award at ASE, the 2026 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. “Stop When It Matters: Detectability-Guided Microbenchmarking for Performance Regression Testing” came out of a collaboration among institutions in Canada, Europe and China.

Developers run microbenchmarks to catch software slowdowns but often do not know how long to run them, and common methods stop when results look stable or a time limit is reached. The paper shows that stability is not enough, because a benchmark can look stable and still be unable to detect a real regression.

Its method, TT-MDE, uses minimum detectable effect reasoning to decide whether a benchmark should stop, continue or end because the target slowdown cannot be reliably detected in the time available. That could make performance testing in continuous integration cheaper and more trustworthy, and developers can define which slowdowns count as negligible. Shang researches software engineering, including ultra-large-scale systems and performance engineering.

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) named PhD candidate Caroline Lima and master’s student Ireneo James Membrere as the 2026 David Johnston Outreach Award recipients for their work as outreach volunteers. The award is worth $2,500 per recipient and honours David Johnston, Waterloo’s president from 1999 to 2010, for his contributions to IQC.

Lima studies quantum field theory and quantum gravity in Physics and Astronomy. She says the word quantum is often used to sell pseudoscience, and she volunteers so people can keep the wonder while learning to tell real science from nonsense. She did not meet a scientist in person before university and wants others to have that encounter.

Membrere, in Applied Mathematics, develops quantum information protocols and implements them with superconducting circuits. He likes working one-on-one with students during virtual lectures and says outreach raises scientific literacy. IQC outreach manager John Donohue said their efforts have made a significant impact on many young scientists.

Dr. David Hammond, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences, has been elected to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) as a Fellow, among the highest academic honours in the country. He works on tobacco control, substance use policy and nutrition policy, and has attracted more than $100 million in research funding for large international studies of how policies affect consumer behaviour.

He has advised the World Health Organization, and his findings have informed policy on tobacco and vaping, on cannabis legalization and on nutrition. He has authored or co-authored more than 600 publications and is among the most highly cited authors worldwide in social science and public health.

Upcoming: the Royal Society of Canada will hold its induction ceremony in Ottawa on November 13, with eight new Waterloo Fellows and Members, Hammond among them, due to be inducted in 2026.

The MBET showcase makes an early venture visible to a community.

The official Waterloo report places this work in entrepreneurship / showcase. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Alumni impact feature on Divya Lala, MBET '25 sharing her experience in the program.

The official Waterloo report places this work in entrepreneurship / education. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Kate Linden (PhD ’18) opens her ecological economics classes with a request: “When you hear economics, don't think markets. Think life.” She avoided economics as an undergraduate until a final-year course taught by ecological economist Peter Victor tied together ecology, political economy and the environment.

Since joining Cape Breton University in 2023, Linden has earned early promotion to associate professor. Within Homeward Bound, a $12.4 million project and the largest research effort in the university’s history, she heads the stream on economics and wellbeing, which looks at housing, healthcare and community supports that let rural Nova Scotians age in place. She is also Vice-President of ACAP Cape Breton, an environmental nonprofit.

She judges success by whether work continues after a project ends. A Métis calculator she helped develop through the Ecological Footprint Initiative is still used by the community. ENVigorate, the Faculty of Environment’s annual community celebration that she helped found as a graduate student, has carried on years after she left Waterloo.

Linden is a 2026 Recent Alumni Inspiration Award recipient.

The School of Accounting and Finance unveiled a commissioned three-panel mural on August 11 in the Don Craig Atrium of Hagey Hall. Its artist, Kyle Joedicke, is a Cayuga Woodland artist from Six Nations of the Grand River whose practice draws on Haudenosaunee stories. He also made the University of Waterloo’s Indigenous Warriors logo and a mural inside the Tatham Centre.

The panels follow the Haudenosaunee Sky Woman creation story in order. The first shows her descent from the Spirit World, the second sacred plants growing on Turtle Island, and the third the harmony of the natural world. Joedicke said the work deals with a teaching about community and about reciprocal gifts.

Elder Myeengun Henry opened the gathering with a smudging ceremony. President Bill Rosehart, Dean of Arts Alexie Tcheuyap and school director Blake Phillips, who commissioned the work, took part. Phillips has long pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge and reconciliation into accounting and finance teaching.

The atrium is one of the busiest gathering spaces in Hagey Hall, so students, faculty and visitors will pass the panels every day.

Over the past eleven years, Hack the North has grown to become a major force in the world of hackathons.

The official Waterloo report places this work in hackathons / community. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.

Press release about a new device that continuously monitors key indicators of donor lung health, potentially helping to identify more viable donor lungs.

The official Waterloo report places this work in research / health. It is a source-linked brief for alumni readers; the source page remains the authority for names, dates and outcomes.