Designing the Future

Varsity track and field athlete Lucia Stafford (Year 4 CivE) competed against her older sister Gabriela DeBues-Stafford in the 1,500-metre race at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held July 2021.

In September, clean-tech startup Reeddi Inc., headed by alumnus Olugbenga Olubanjo (CivE MASc 1T9) was named one of 15 finalists of the inaugural Earthshot Prize during an awards ceremony at London’s Alexandra Palace. Reeddi produces solar-powered, portable energy capsules that provide dependable electricity to customers in Ayegun, Nigeria.

In the summer of 2022, Maryam Mousavi (ChemE PhD candidate) headed to Turku, Finland. There, she collaborated with researchers at Abo Akademi on a project investigating the fate of phosphorus in the gasification of bark. The project was facilitated by the U of T Pulp & Paper Centre consortium and funded by a Gadolin Scholarship and a Mitacs Globalink Award.

This year, Kyra Nankivell (Year 3 IndE) became the first U of T Engineering student to participate in the National University of Singapore (NUS) Overseas Colleges program. This enabled her to spend six months working as a Web Development Intern at Hiverlab, an emerging tech and immersive media company based in Singapore, while also taking a business course from NUS.

Erin Richardson (Year 4 EngSci, at right) and her team designed and built a unique experiment to examine the impact of spaceflight on astronauts’ genes. Their experimental apparatus was tested aboard the National Research Council Canada’s (NRC) Falcon-20 jet and the team travelled to Dubai to present their work at the 2021 International Aeronautical Congress.”

Household water pumps help customers extract as much water as they can in locations where the water is intermittent, but utilities say they create negative pressure that draws contaminants into the system. A new study from Professor David Meyer (CivMin, ISTEP) used a technological intervention to show that pumps are not the main factor driving water quality issues.

In November, Dean Yip interviewed Lester B Pearson International Scholar Diana Virgovicova (Year 3 ECE) on his podcast Tell Me More: Coffee With Chris Yip. A native of Pezinok, Slovakia, Virgovicova discussed her travels across Canada and around the world, as well as her recent internship with Astra Navigation, based in Houston, Texas. She was also selected for NEXT36, a national entrepreneurship program.

Recent graduate Anastasia Korolj (ChemE 1T5, PhD 2T1) used her 2021 Schmidt Science Fellowship to join Professor Ralph Weissleder’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. There, she plans to grow high-fidelity patient-derived tissues outside the body, using them to model and understand disease progression.

Karlye Wong (CivMin PhD candidate) worked with local health authorities in Tanzania’s Geita region to evaluate the performance of a pilot project that equips a health clinic with solar-powered UV systems to disinfect rainwater.

From September 2021 to September 2022, Carmelle Chatterjee (Year 3 ChemE) worked at VALSEM Industries SAS, an anti-corrosion industrial film and packaging company based in Lachelle, France. During her time there, she was in charge of devising the environmental roadmap for the company, as well as developing more sustainable products. Chatterjee is one of more than 750 students who participated in PEY Co-op this year, both in Canada and abroad.

Growing up in Syria, Salim Hourieh (CivE 2T2) dreamed of combining his interests in engineering, economic progress and sustainability. After coming to Canada as a refugee, he found a home at U of T Engineering, and worked to sponsor two more students from refugee camps through World University Services of Canada.

In their first-ever competition, student team UTWind took the top prize at the International Small Wind Turbine Contest (ISWTC), which is hosted annually by Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, Netherlands.