Professor Enid Montague (MIE) aims to engineer a better health-care experience and help ease the current stress on the system using an approach known as human-centered automation. 

Canada faces a critical doctor shortage that has left more than six million Canadians without a primary care physician — and the after-effects of COVID-19 have only magnified the strain. But Montague notes that the burden is not shared equally.  

“The challenges of having too few physicians have disproportionately affected equity-seeking groups, particularly individuals who are racialized, or come from low-income or rural environments,” she says.  

“We can use engineering tools to help our health-care systems do more with fewer resources — and build systems that are equity-focused, while also meeting the demands of our aging population.”   

Montague’s project Automation and Equity in Healthcare Laboratory is one of seven from U of T Engineering — and 35 from across the University of Toronto — being supported in the latest round of funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI JELF).  

Montague doesn’t see her work as designing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to replace humans. Instead, it’s about using AI to free up human attention for more important work, such as spending time with patients.  

Her work includes designing systems that leverage AI to assist physicians with clerical tasks, leaving them more time for clinical duties. She is also building applications that use virtual agents known as chatbots to help patients seek out health care or manage their medication. 

“This support from CFI means everything,” says Montague. “I’ll be able to have a physical laboratory where we can do human-centred participatory design. A big part of understanding how to automate is understanding human capabilities and limitations.  

“I’ll be able to take data from clinical settings and analyze it in the lab to look for opportunities for automation and build models that can predict the effectiveness of those automation scenarios.”  

Montague is also developing human-centred guidelines for automation in health care. These provide safeguards for the tools and ensure that they lead to better equity and access to care for all people seeking treatment.  

Growing up in a rural part of the United States, Montague witnessed the stark reality experienced by people who live without access to health care. This motivated her at an early age to find solutions that enable equitable health care for all.  

“We are already starting to see the consequences of not having enough primary care doctors in Canada, including poor diagnoses, and overcrowded emergency rooms with patients who have missed their window for early disease intervention,” she says.  

“While automation isn’t always the answer, it can help free up resources and allow us to take full advantage of our global infrastructures.  

“I want my work to help physicians avoid burn out and feel less burdened, and I also want to expand access to care for more communities in a way that is more equitable.”   

The other six U of T Engineering principal investigators and their associated projects receiving support from CFI JELF are:  

• Professor Ali Dolatabadi (MIE) — Advanced Cold Spray Facility 
• Professor Sarah Haines (CivMin) — The Indoor Microbiology and Environmental Exposures Laboratory 
• Professor Xilin Liu (ECE) — Integrated Circuits for Wireless Brain Implants with Multi-modal Neural Interfaces 
• Professor Emma Master (ChemE) — Accelerating Biomanufacturing Innovation Through Enhanced Capacity for Scale-up and Downstream Bioprocess Engineering 
• Professor Ibrahim Ogunsanya (CivMin) — Establishment of Metallurgical Materials and Corrosion Laboratory Group for Corrosion Microscopy Studies 
• Professor Yu Zou (MSE) — Multifunctional Materials for Biomedical Applications 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on August 29, 2023 by Safa Jinje.

This fall, Raylene Mitchell will begin her studies as a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at U of T — and while engineering was not where she expected to find herself, she hopes that her experience will help change that expectation for others.

Mitchell grew up in Makkovik, an Inuit community of about 350 people on the coast of Labrador that is only accessible by air in winter, or by sea in summer.  

“Growing up in such a small place, I had never met any engineers, and I didn’t really know what engineering was,” she says.  

“What I did know was that there had been many large engineering projects built in Labrador, and that many of them had later failed. And I knew that none of these projects had included any proper channels to incorporate the community into the early stages of the design process.” 

About a decade ago, Mitchell moved to Newfoundland. She enrolled at Memorial University, where she initially chose to major in commerce. However, she didn’t find her courses very fulfilling. Despite having been told earlier that STEM wasn’t for people like her, in her third year she decided to switch into electrical engineering. 

“I didn’t tell my parents at first, because I wanted to be sure it was what I wanted to do,” she says. 

“But I found that I could actually do it; it just took a little more work. And I found myself falling into this place of understanding, that this is a way I could change how engineering is done in northern and Indigenous communities. That really inspired me to keep going.” 

Mitchell is one of three 2023 recipients of the IBET Momentum Fellowships, along with fellow graduate students LaShawn Murray (MIE PhD candidate) and Chantel Campbell (BME PhD candidate). Fellowship recipients receive financial support, mentorship, training and networking opportunities to foster a robust professional community. 

For her PhD, Mitchell will be working with Professor David Sinton (MIE), who she initially met through Professor Michael Ross, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Northern Energy Innovation at Yukon University. 

“I had been working with Dr. Ross as a research assistant for nearly two years, building wind turbine models for Indigenous communities in the Yukon. I told him I was thinking about doing a PhD, and he connected me with Professor Sinton. I’m planning to be co-supervised by both of them.” 

Mitchell’s thesis will focus on the challenges of building renewable energy infrastructure in Northern Canada and Indigenous communities. 

Currently, many of these communities rely on diesel generators for their power. Augmenting or replacing these with solar cells or wind turbines could lower emissions, but it also raises issues around intermittency: many northern communities do not receive any sunshine for months at a time, and while wind is plentiful, it is also unpredictable. 

Professor Sinton and his team have been developing new ways to convert excess renewable electricity into fuels that could be stored for months or years. As these new methods mature, the research focus is pivoting toward scale-up and demonstration, including in challenging environments such as the Canadian North. 

But if the team is to build a demonstration facility, Mitchell says they will need to work carefully to avoid making the same mistakes as the large-scale engineering projects that she remembers from her childhood in Labrador. 

“We want to understand how an energy storage solution — especially one based on a new, emerging technology — could impact the community,” she says. 

“Does the community want this?  What kind of social framework are we working with? How are we going to fairly include the community into an open discussion that includes the current need, but also the future risks?” 

The project encapsulates the kind of change that Mitchell hopes to effect, both in terms of mitigating the damage of climate change, but also in terms of renegotiating the relationships between large-scale engineering projects and the communities they work with.  

The timing could not be better: earlier this year, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from across Canada — including Sinton and Ross — kicked off a national research project on energy storage called CANSTOREnergy, funded by New Frontiers in Research Fund Transformation Program. 

Mitchell also hopes that by taking up the IBET Momentum Fellowship, she can help to change the perception of what an engineer looks like.  

“I’m Inuit, not First Nations, and I come from Makkovik, not the Yukon, but there is a shared history and shared pain there in terms of what those from outside our communities have imposed on us,” she says. 

“Indigenous people are engineers at their core — we have been creating engineering solutions to living in challenging environments for hundreds of years. I have a unique standpoint, and I’m hoping that I can use it to help the communities that this technology is meant to serve.” 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on August 24, 2023 by Tyler Irving.

 

An improved catalyst designed by an international team of researchers — including many from U of T Engineering — increases both the stability and efficiency of a system that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into valuable products such as fuels or plastic precursors.

“By using electricity to efficiently upgrade captured carbon into products we already use, we can improve the economics of carbon capture, and encourage investment in this emerging technology,” says Professor David Sinton (MIE), senior author on a paper recently published in Nature Catalysis.

“This new catalyst overcomes some of the key limitations that are holding back the performance of such systems.”

Sinton and his team use devices known as electrolyzers to drive forward chemical reactions that would not otherwise be energetically favourable. In this case, CO2 gas and a liquid electrolyte containing dissolved ions are supplied over a solid catalyst through which the electricity is supplied.

When the electrons combine with CO2 at the catalyst surface, they react to form carbon-containing molecules such as ethylene or ethanol. These molecules can be sold as fuels or commodity chemicals, and are precursors to many commonly used materials, from cosmetics to plastics.

The pH of the liquid electrolyte has a big impact on the system’s performance. For example, most of the previously reported systems operate under alkaline conditions, meaning high pH. While some of the CO2 pumped into these systems gets converted to the desired products, the vast majority of it reacts with the electrolyte itself to make carbonate salts, an undesirable side product.

In 2021, Sinton and his collaborators reported a new system that can operate under acidic conditions, meaning low pH. By making some changes to the chemistry of the electrolyte and the operating conditions of the electrolyzer, they were able to greatly reduce the formation of carbonate and increase the overall carbon efficiency.

However, those improvements came at a cost in terms of the stability of the catalyst.

“In that system, we added cations — positively-charged metal ions — to the solution, creating a thin region of alkaline conditions next to the catalyst surface, while leaving the rest of the solution acidic,” says Jianan Erick Huang (ECE PhD candidate), a co-lead author on the previous study and one of five co-lead authors on the team’s new paper.

“But in that region, which is only 50 micrometres thick, we still have the same problem as before: the formation of carbonate salts. Over time, these accumulate on the surface of the catalyst, and act as channels to bring in water molecules. Since the catalyst surface is designed to be hydrophobic, water destroys its reactivity.”

In their latest design, the team replaced the dissolved cations with an ionomer: an organic molecule that carries a positive electric charge. The molecule they chose is known as benzimidazolium, and the team applied a thin layer of it to the surface of their copper-based catalyst.

“Immobilizing the positively charged molecules on the surface of the catalyst prevents them from joining with carbonate ions to create salts,” says Dr. Mengyang Fan, a postdoctoral fellow in Sinton’s lab group and another co-lead author on the new paper.

“This made a big difference in terms of stability. While the old version of the catalyst only lasted about 12 hours, we measured the stability of the new one at more than 150 hours, which is more than 10 times as long.”

The change had the additional benefit of reducing another unwanted side reaction. In the previous system, about 30% of the electrons ended up producing hydrogen gas. This reaction siphons away electrons that would otherwise end up in the desired multi-carbon products, reducing the system’s efficiency. The new catalyst reduced this to less than 10%.

The system will still require further improvements before it can be applied at scale: for example, the stability of the catalyst will need to be further extended to many times its current duration. But the team believes that the new design points to a promising way forward.

“We did all this using a standard copper-based catalyst,” says Rui Kai (Ray) Miao (MIE PhD candidate), another co-lead author on the paper.

“There is a lot of experimentation that can still happen in terms of its chemical formulation, and there are other ionomers that could be explored. But this insight of a coating, as opposed to changing the chemistry of the solution, is a new insight, and we think it’s the way to go for future designs.”

 

A team from U of T Engineering has invented a device that leverages electrochemistry to increase the efficiency of direct air carbon capture. Their alternative strategy aims to accelerate the widespread adoption of this emerging technology.

“The technology required to pull carbon directly out of the air has been developing for decades, but the field is now accelerating with governments and industry investing in the infrastructure required to actually do this at scale,” says Professor David Sinton (MIE), senior author on a paper published in Joule that outlines the new technique.

“One key barrier is that current processes require a lot of energy, and indeed emit a fair amount of carbon themselves. If we can offer a more efficient strategy, we can make the case to scale this technology to climate-meaningful levels.”

The specific carbon capture technique that Sinton and his team are working to improve is known as a pH swing cycle. It begins when air is pumped through a liquid solution that is strongly alkaline, meaning that it has a high pH. CO2 in the air reacts with the alkaline solution and is captured in the form of carbonates.

To regenerate the capture liquids, chemicals are added to precipitate the carbonates as a solid salt. In the typical process, this salt is heated by burning natural gas to turn the carbonates back into CO2 gas which can be injected underground or upgraded into other carbon-based products.

“If you conduct a life-cycle analysis of this entire process, you see that for every tonne of CO2 you capture, you generate the equivalent of around 300 to 500 kilograms of CO2,” says Yi (Sheldon) Xu (MechE 1T6, PhD 2T0) who worked on the project as a PhD candidate and a postdoctoral fellow in Sinton’s lab. Xu is now at Stanford University.

“You’re still coming out ahead, but the energy inputs, particularly the heating step, cost a lot in terms of overall carbon efficiency.”

To overcome this challenge, the team turned to electrochemistry. Devices known as electrolyzers use electricity to drive forward chemical reactions that would not happen otherwise. Devices known as fuel cells do the opposite, generating electricity from chemical reactions.

The team’s key insight was creating a single device that could operate in both directions, that is, as both a fuel cell and an electrolyzer. This innovation enabled them to open up a new pathway to regenerating the alkaline solutions needed for carbon capture.

“Both electrolyzers and fuels cells have a positive electrode and a negative electrode,” says Jonathan Edwards (MIE 1T5 + PEY, PhD 2T1), another member of the team.

“In our device, the positive electrode of the fuel cell and the electrolyzer are one and the same. We switch the mode of operation every second, so that two different reactions can happen at the surface of the same electrode.”

In the first of these two reactions, the electrolyzer uses electrical current to extract alkali metal ions and regenerate the strongly alkaline solution needed for air capture. The electrolyzer also produces hydrogen, which is recycled back to the fuel cell side of the device, where it reacts to produce electricity, which in turn is fed back into the electrolyzer.

The fuel cell produces an acidic solution, which is reacted with carbonate salts from the air capture unit to release CO2 gas. After the CO2 is released, the resulting solution is fed back to the electrolyzer, thus completing the cycle.

The process offers several advantages. First, it circumvents the energy-intensive heating step entirely. Second, it uses electricity as opposed to natural gas; this electricity could be obtained from low-carbon sources such as solar, wind or nuclear energy.

Finally, the fact that two reactions happen at a single electrode cuts down on what are known as mass transfer limitations — bottlenecks in how fast the reactants can diffuse to the electrode surface — which increase the amount of energy needed to drive the reaction.

“When we ran the life cycle analysis on our process, we saw that it only generates about 11 kg of CO2 equivalent per tonne of CO2 captured,” says Shijie Liu (MIE PhD candidate), another member of the team.

“That’s about 40 times less than the current thermal process.”

The team has already attracted international interest: as Team E-quester, they placed in the top 60 of the global XPRIZE Carbon Removal held last year. Now that their work has been published, they are hoping that more teams will join them in further optimizing this electrochemical pathway.

“At the moment, we’re focusing on improving the capture fluid and further reducing process energy consumption, ensuring that it’s made of sustainable and low-cost substances, as well as scaling it up to industrial levels,” says Xu.

“But there are other places, such as electrode design, where there could be more innovations to discover. We’d love to see this become a viable new platform for carbon capture plants that are less energy-intensive to build and operate than what we have today. That would give us a powerful new tool to mitigate the impacts of climate change.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on August 2, 2023 by Tyler Irving.

The Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium is investing $1.05 million in innovative, cross-disciplinary research to tackle infectious threats and bolster preparedness against future outbreaks.

The funding, awarded through the Career Transition Awards, Convergence Postdoctoral Fellowships, New Connections Grants and Proof-of-Principle Grants, will support researchers and senior trainees at the University of Toronto and partner hospitals. The 12 funded projects span a wide breadth of research topics from organ-on-a-chip models of infection to new approaches that aim to improve disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

“A key part of EPIC’s mission is to enable new transformative research through training and research opportunities. The funding announced today will accelerate discoveries and provide critical support for the next generation of infectious disease research leaders,” said Scott Gray-Owen, academic director of EPIC and a professor of molecular genetics in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

“We were impressed by the number and quality of applications that we received to these four competitions, which is a testament to the strength and vibrancy of the infectious disease research community in Toronto. Thank you to our volunteer reviewers for supporting our peer review process and congratulations to all the recipients!”

Among the new grants announced today is the New Connections Grants, which provides $100,000 over two years to support projects led by researchers from at least two different research disciplines and who are coming together for their first significant research collaboration.

One of the two teams receiving a New Connections Grant is co-led by Nicole Weckman, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and applied chemistry at U of T, and Robert Kozak, a clinical microbiologist at Sunnybrook Research Institute. The two researchers first met when they were invited to be on the same panel at a symposium on antimicrobial resistance co-hosted by EPIC and bioMérieux in November 2022. Building on their combined engineering and clinical expertise, their new project aims to develop a rapid diagnostic test that can detect the drug-resistant fungal pathogen Candida auris and predict the drugs to which a specific strain is resistant.

“The past few years have really highlighted the need to collaborate across disciplines to develop innovative systems and tools for tackling pandemics and infectious diseases,” said Weckman. “This project has brought together my engineering and diagnostics expertise with the clinical microbiology expertise of Rob and our collaborators Allison McGeer, Julianne Kus and Xena Li in a new collaboration to develop technologies for addressing Candida auris, a deadly pathogen causing hospital outbreaks.”

“As a new professor at U of T, EPIC has proven to be a fantastic and welcoming interdisciplinary network of expertise that fosters new collaborations and supports creative ideas for improving our healthcare systems.”

Like the New Connections Grant, the Convergence Postdoctoral Fellowships aim to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration by providing funding support to postdoctoral fellows who will work on a project co-supervised by faculty members from at least two different departments and/or divisions.

Three fellowships, each worth $120,000 over two years, were awarded this year, including to Ying Wang, a postdoctoral fellow co-supervised by Milica Radisic, a professor of biomedical engineering at U of T, and Slava Epelman, a clinician scientist at University Health Network.

Wang’s project seeks to uncover why males are at a greater risk than females of developing inflammation of the heart muscle, or myocarditis, after contracting COVID-19. To answer this question, she is creating sophisticated heart-on-a-chip models that also take into account biological sex differences such as hormone exposure. Her project will leverage the Toronto High Containment Facility to study SARS-CoV-2 infection in the engineered heart models in a safe and secure way.

One of the unique funding programs that EPIC launched this year was the Career Transition Awards. Designed specifically for experienced postdoctoral fellows and research associates, the awards provide $120,000 in funding over two years to allow recipients to develop and lead an independent project.

Michael Litvack is a research associate working with Martin Post, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and one of two recipients of the Career Transition Awards. Litvack’s project builds on his previous work developing a specialized immune cell that is specifically adapted to the lungs. His earlier work demonstrated the potential of these specialized cells to target viral lung infections. Now, he will lead an independent project to test whether these cells can attack the flu virus and reduce the burden of respiratory disease experienced during the flu.

“The Career Transition Award is a unique opportunity that will enable me to progress in my scientific and academic career while taking advantage of the vast technological and expert resources that Toronto has to support infectious disease research,” said Litvack.

“This funding will help me establish my program of study amongst EPIC investigators and will promote a strong foundation for me as I strive to build a sustainable and independent program focused on immune modulation and infectious diseases.”

The 12 projects were selected for funding as part of EPIC’s inaugural round of funding competitions, which include the previously announced Doctoral Awards, GlaxoSmithKline EPIC Convergence Postdoctoral Fellowship in Antimicrobial Resistance, Inspire Summer Studentships and Researcher Mobility Awards.

For the full funding results, please visit our website.

– This story was originally published on the EPIC: Emerging & Pandemic Infections Consortium News Site on July 20, 2023 by Betty Zou.

As one of the entrepreneurs on the front lines of Toronto’s rise as a modern tech hub, Eva Lau (IndE 9T2) says the University of Toronto will play a critical role in keeping the city on the cutting edge by fostering the next generation of innovators.

“I’ve been in this ecosystem long enough to see how it has matured,” says Lau, managing director and co-founder of Two Small Fish Ventures, which invests in early-stage tech companies and has backed successes such as SkipTheDishes, Sheertex and U of T drug discovery startup BenchSci.

“And I have to give credit to the universities.”

An alumna of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Lau is among the U of T founders, alumni and faculty expected to speak at the Collision conference from June 26 to 29  — a list that includes University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the Godfather of AI,” who has garnered global attention for sounding the alarm about the existential risks of the technology he helped developed.

At a special session on June 28, Lau — who was formerly the head of community at online storytelling platform Wattpad — will talk about the positive impact that diverse mentors can have on founders as they go through the accelerator and incubator experience.

She recently spoke to U of T News about the benefits of diverse mentorship and how U of T’s emphasis on entrepreneurship has bolstered Toronto’s startup scene.

How does having diverse mentors help founders and startups grow?

Mentorship is something that a lot of founders may take for granted. They’ll say, “I need someone who understands this space.” If they’re building financial products, they’ll look for someone in the financial sector, for example.

But if we continue to iterate in a domain, we will always get incremental improvements of existing products. Disruption actually happens when people put their minds together and think outside the box. You need to surround yourself with people who think differently from you, who bring different perspectives.

Mentorship is more than getting advice about how to follow other people’s paths to success. It’s about building your own DNA, looking at things from a 360-degree perspective and making use of the advice around you so that you can chart your own path to build a product that works for everyone.

How did your education at U of T Engineering help you as an entrepreneur?

When I was at U of T, I studied industrial engineering. One of the subjects that intrigued me most was human factors — the product-human interface, designing products that suit human needs.

Addressing human issues is what innovation should be all about. When you design a product, you need to understand how humans will interact with it, because that’s what’s going to drive user adoption.

That was a real eye-opener for me. It’s not enough to create something that solves a problem for people. You have to think about how people are going to use your product to solve that problem. I’m not only the creator; I’m creating a solution for an actual person.

How have you seen Toronto’s startup scene evolve and where do you see it heading?

I’ve been in this ecosystem long enough to see how it has matured. And I have to give credit to the universities. Back when I was at U of T, entrepreneurship was barely mentioned. Nowadays, entrepreneurship is a building block of education.

At U of T, there’s the Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School of Management, the Entrepreneurship Hatchery at U of T Engineering and so many other incubators and accelerators.

That seed of entrepreneurship gets planted very early on, right after high school. And in the past couple of decades, we’ve seen more and more tech companies founded in Canada — Shopify, Wattpad, Wealthsimple and many others. That’s inspiring a lot more young people to follow suit.

We’re also seeing more budding entrepreneurs get first-hand experience working at companies as part of their education. For example, the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering has the Professional Experience Year Co-op Program, where students can earn up to 20 months of work experience before they graduate. That’s a game-changer.

That’s why we’re seeing the maturity of the startup ecosystem. Our young generation is no longer limited to learning from textbooks, professors and parents. They can get a diversity of mentorship during their formative years.

What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs at U of T, particularly women or people from diverse backgrounds?

Absolutely reach out to our amazing alumni network. And don’t limit yourself to alumni from your faculty. Reach out to alumni from the engineering school, or perhaps in philosophy, or physics, or history or business. Bring in different experiences to create your own recipe for success.

What will you be keeping an eye out for at the Collision?

I am so keen to listen to Geoffrey Hinton and other U of T co-founders talk about trends in artificial intelligence. I’m absolutely a believer that AI is going to bring so much more productivity improvement — or even disruption — to our ecosystem.

Certainly, there are concerns around AI. But the history of technology shows that innovation always creates some friction in the beginning, but the long-term gains are beneficial to everyone.

I want to hear from the people who are at the forefront of AI, and as importantly, see how their messages are received. How is the crowd reacting to what these influencers are saying? Because that’s a good temperature check.

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on June 27, 2023 by Adina Bresge.

Cristina Amon (MIE), Dean Emerita of U of T Engineering is a recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo, bestowed as part of its spring 2023 Convocation celebrations.

Amon is an Alumni Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. A leader in computational fluid dynamics for thermal designs, she has made significant contributions to the field of thermal transport in nanoscale semiconductors, energy systems, EV batteries and biomedical devices.

 

In 2022, Amon was named a U of T University Professor, the University’s highest and most distinguished academic rank, recognizing unusual scholarly achievement and preeminence in a particular field of knowledge. The number of such appointments is limited to two percent of the University’s tenured faculty.

Amon’s role as Dean of U of T Engineering from 2006 to 2019 included the strategic and visionary leadership of more than 750 faculty and staff, and 8,000 students.

Under her leadership, U of T Engineering has become a global hub for multidisciplinary research, education and innovation, known for its strategic Faculty-wide initiatives, cross-Faculty centres and institutes, and innovative undergraduate and graduate programming.

During her deanship, U of T Engineering made tremendous strides in gender diversity, increasing the representation of women in the first-year engineering cohort from 20% to 42% and the number of women faculty from 19 to 56, with women in 13 major leadership roles.

She was appointed to the Order of Canada and inducted into the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Hispanic Engineer Hall of Fame, Royal Society of Canada, Spanish Royal Academy and U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She is a fellow of all major professional societies in her field and has contributed over 400 refereed articles to education and research literature.

Congratulations to University Professor Amon!

Eleven members of the U of T Engineering community have been elected as 2023 fellows of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE). Professors Ali Dolatabadi (MIE), George Eleftheriades (ECE), Baochun Li (ECE), Xinyu Liu (MIE) and Ning Yan (ChemE), along with alumni Janet Elliott (EngSci 9T0, MechE MASc 9T2, PhD 9T7), Mina Hoorfar (MechE MASc 0T1, PhD 0T5), Steve Hranilovic (ElecE MASc 9T9, PhD 0T3), Mark Martinez (ElecE 8T7, MASc 9T0), Carolyn Ren (MechE PhD 0T4) and David Tennenhouse (ElecE 7T7, MASc 8T1), are among the CAE’s 55 new fellows. The CAE is a national institution through which individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering in Canada provide strategic advice on matters of critical importance to Canada and to Canadians.  

“The election of these exceptional faculty and alumni to the Academy is an important recognition of their impact as engineering innovators, educators and leaders, both nationally and globally,” says U of T Engineering Dean Christopher Yip. “On behalf of the Faculty, congratulations to all our new CAE fellows.” 

 

Ali Dolatabadi is working to design, build and promote environmentally responsible coating processes which can meet the technical and economic needs of industry. Prior to joining U of T, he was a Research Chair in Multiphase Flow and Thermal Spray at Concordia University. His research has advanced the fundamental understanding of thermal spray processes, as well as droplet dynamics, heat transfer and phase change, for the development and characterization of novel functional coatings and surface engineering solutions. Dolatabadi is associate director of the Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies and was instrumental in the formation of Green-SEAM, the first surface engineering research network in Canada. He served as president of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering from 2014 to 2016 and as president of the Engineering Institute of Canada from 2020 to 2022. He has received several awards for his research and teaching. 

 

George Eleftheriades is a pioneer in the field of metamaterials, which are artificial electromagnetic materials that can bend waves and process light in unnatural ways. The applications for these materials are immense and include sub-wavelength imaging in advanced medical diagnostics, very small and efficient antennas, wireless power transfer, efficient solar light harvesting, and even cloaking, where waves are bent around an object in a way that renders them transparent. Eleftheriades has become a world leader in this area by marrying fundamental physics and engineering to demonstrate the potential of this technology and then using it to invent novel devices for wireless communications, radar, super-resolution imaging and in the defence sector. Eleftheriades is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Royal Society of Canada, and has received many of the most prestigious national and international awards in his field. 

 

Baochun Li is a pioneering researcher and innovator in multimedia systems, networking, cloud computing and distributed systems. A Bell Canada Endowed Chair since 2005, he has worked closely with industry partners such as Bell Canada and Microsoft and has published many influential papers, garnering more than 24,000 citations and an h-index of 86. Li led the creation of R2, the world’s first large-scale peer-to-peer video streaming system using network coding; R2’s technology was the first deployment of network coding in commercial video broadcasting. Li is also a leader in application-layer network protocols, which are technologies used to speed up the delivery of large volumes of data across cloud datacentres and the Internet. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he recently launched one of the first dedicated online conferencing platforms. Li is a fellow of IEEE and has received several prestigious awards for his contributions. 

 

Xinyu Liu is a world-renowned innovator who has tackled challenging interdisciplinary problems in microrobotics and microfluidics. His seminal contributions in microrobotic biomanipulation and diagnostic biosensors have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art and provided practical solutions to in vitro fertilization treatment and point-of-care diagnostics. Liu has developed a series of paper-based microfluidic biosensors for rapid diagnosis of conditions such as HIV, hepatitis, prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease and COVID-19. His research has led to 13 patents, with six licensed to industry, and technologies stemming from his work are sold in more than 20 countries. Prior to joining U of T Engineering, Liu was the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics and BioMEMS at McGill University. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering and the Engineering Institute of Canada.  

 

The Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Bioproducts, Ning Yan is an internationally renowned expert in converting renewable biomass into bio-based chemicals and functional materials. She is a global leader in developing bio-based adhesives, polyols, foams and resins using renewable biological building blocks. Yan led a large industry consortium to create a bark biorefinery for obtaining bio-polyphenolic compounds from waste bark residues. Her research team was the first to successfully synthesize bio-based epoxies using biophenolic extractives instead of toxic bisphenol A (BPA). Companies around the world are pursuing commercial applications of similar bark biorefinery processes. Yan’s research has resulted in 200 journal publications, eight patents/patent applications, and collaborations with academic, government and industry researchers around the world. She is a fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada and the International Academy of Wood Science.   

 

Janet A. W. Elliott is a University of Alberta Distinguished Professor, recognized as being among the world’s leading engineering scientists, known for her profound insight into fundamental and applied thermodynamics. Her creative and elegant integration of mathematics and experimental data has addressed many long-standing problems across a wide array of disciplines in science, engineering and medicine, particularly in surface science and cryobiology. Elliott’s work has expanded thermodynamics to new complexity, new length scales and new disciplines, has provided some of the most cited works on the osmotic virial equation and statistical rate theory, and has provided leading cryopreservation protocols. 

 

 

 

Mina Hoorfar is an accomplished academic leader and engineer known for her inspired teaching, award-winning research, innovative administrative leadership and championing of equity, diversity and inclusion. Her research in microfluidics and nanotechnology is applied to energy, health and the environment. An outstanding teacher, she has received the EGBC Teaching Excellence Award and has been recognized by Engineers Canada as an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Leader. Hoorfar has served in senior academic leadership roles including Director, School of Engineering at UBC Okanagan and Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Victoria.   

 

 

 

 

Steve Hranilovic is a research pioneer in optical wireless communications, an academic innovator and a technology leader developing Canadian-made solutions to bring equitable internet access to Canada’s northern, remote and rural communities. He ranks in the top 2% of researchers worldwide, his research has been applied widely in academia and industry and he is a Fellow of the IEEE and Optica. Hranilovic led the transformation of engineering education for 6,000 undergraduates, championing experiential project-based curricula. As Vice-Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies at McMaster, he is responsible for fostering innovation and maintaining a rich learning environment for graduate students across campus. 

 

 

 

Mark Martinez has made outstanding contributions to the pulp and paper industry, one of Canada’s largest manufacturing industries. He has developed new knowledge for improved operations in papermaking and co-invented several new products and processes. Martinez has trained a large number of engineers at the post-graduate level and disseminated knowledge through university teaching and industry courses. He has also played a significant leadership role as director of several university-industry initiatives for the traditional industry as well as the newly emerging bio-products sector. His accomplishments have contributed to the strengthening of a vital pulp and paper industry in Canada. 

 

 

 

 

Carolyn Ren is renowned for her leading-edge contributions to droplet and air microfluidics innovation. Her physical and theoretical models, as well as her design and optimization tools, have enabled new, integrated Lab-on-a-Chip devices for life sciences, environmental monitoring and material synthesis applications. Ren is forging a new frontier in soft, wearable assistive robotics technologies development, enabled by air microfluidics techniques. These lightweight, tetherless innovations are transforming prosthesis design and treatment of lymphedema, edema and arthritis. She has co-founded four start-up companies to commercialize her team’s inventions, is a Fellow of the CSME and a Member of the RSC College. 

 

 

 

David Tennenhouse is passionate about innovation and has led advanced research enabling software-defined networking and software radio. He has worked in academia, as a faculty member at MIT; in government, at DARPA; in industry at Intel, Amazon/A9.com, Microsoft and VMware; and as a partner at New Venture Partners and co-founder of Vericom Systems Ltd. Tennenhouse has championed a wide range of technologies, including networking, distributed computing, blockchain/digital assets, computer architecture, storage, machine learning, robotics and nano/bio-technology. He holds a BASc and MASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge. 

 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on June 6, 2023 by Carolyn Farrell.