More than 140 Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board high school students converged at the Faculty of Engineering to experience and learn about aerospace, industrial, and mechatronics engineering on Thursday, May 5.
The day was particularly momentous in that it was the first field trip the Faculty of Engineering outreach program has hosted in over two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. In-person visits to high school classrooms resumed about three weeks ago.
Mentors from the Master of Engineering (MEng) program celebrated an outstanding Winter 2022 term by participating in a friendly “Tallest Marshmallow Tower” contest on May 3 in the Ed Lumley Centre for Engineering Innovation.
The event recognized the time, effort, and dedication by all MEng’s current mentors.
“As a nation that aspires to be a leader in high-value advanced technology manufacturing, Canada needs to find opportunities to add value to our natural resources and build the highest-value parts of the future car,” which is exactly what the recent decision by Stellantis and LG Energy to build a large-scale electric vehicle battery plant in Windsor does, says Peter Frise.
An engineering professor and director of the Centre for Automotive Research and Education, he argues for a complete auto ecosystem that brings together research and development, materials, parts and assembly in an article published Monday in The Globe and Mail.
Being taken out of their engineering comfort zone and into the unchartered waters of marketing challenged the winners of the Proteus Innovation Competition to employ a whole new mindset.
The contest requires teams to create a viable commercialization strategy for a promising technology, in hopes of winning a cash prize of up to $5,000. Contestants hone their business skills, work with a variety of experienced advisors, and accelerate the commercialization process of discoveries coming out of Ontario universities.
A Windsor team led by postdoctoral fellow John Magliaro and including grad students Anthony Gudisey and Aryen Shakib took top honours with their business plan to commercialize professor Bill Altenhof’s “Kinetic Energy Dissipation System.”
Apoorva Srivastava, India’s consul general in Toronto, toured the Faculty of Engineering’s research lab facilities and connected with officials of the Master of Engineering (MEng) Graduate Student Society on Tuesday, April 12.
Your hands tightly clench the wheel; your ears flood with engines roaring. You’re seconds away from thrusting your foot on the pedal, but your mind? For Roman De Angelis, it’s completely still.
“It's almost blank,” says De Angelis, a 21-year-old professional driver who’s spent more than half of his life on the raceway.
“The second you begin rolling to the start line, everything clears and it’s really quiet and calm. Then, when the race starts, that's kind of when all the chaos breaks loose.”
De Angelis is a third-year mechanical engineering student who’s managed to find time to clinch first place finishes in the Detroit Grand Prix, Northeast Grand Prix and in both the U.S. and Canadian Porsche GT3 Cup Challenges, all while studying full time at the University of Windsor.
His team, The Heart of Racing, competes internationally with an Aston Martin Vantage GT3 and uses its platform to raise funds for children’s hospitals. They’ve raised more than $8 million to date.
WE Magazine Guest Column by Dr. Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech
We are entering an era of extreme volatility, driven by the fundamental disruptions: climate change and the need for sustainability, the development and deployment of autonomous systems (including the rise of machine learning and big data), and the changing geopolitical landscape. These three disruptions are going to impact almost all areas of society. We are going to need to revolutionize our production systems, consumption choices, energy systems, and technologies if we are to achieve environmental stability and economic prosperity. We need to be preparing for an economy that requires the ability to develop and deploy innovative solutions in a socially-responsible, ethical, environmentally-appropriate, and economically-viable way, and to champion innovations through the commercialization process that will support these goals.
Engineers must have the ability to solve complex problems, but Norm Becker has taught us they should be equipped with a full heart too.
The University of Windsor alumnus always found ways to use his profession to help others — from his pro bono work everywhere from rural China to the town of LaSalle to establishing four scholarships for UWindsor students following in his footsteps.
Becker passed away in spring 2021 and now, thanks to a memorial scholarship established by his wife, Mary Ellen, he will continue to inspire the next generation of aspiring engineers.
“Norm always had great empathy for students,” says Mary Ellen. “He mentored them gladly, began scholarships to support them and included them on some of his many projects when he could. I believe that this scholarship in his name is a very fitting tribute to his memory."
The Dr. Norbert K. Becker Scholarship in Engineering will support upper-year undergraduate students in civil and environmental engineering based on academic excellence, scholastic potential, good character, and community involvement on campus and beyond.
There are two teams in the University of Windsor’s centre for automobility cybersecurity research.
There’s the blue team, which works diligently to create secure, impenetrable hardware for automobility applications and the red team, whose mission is to destroy it.
This is Canada’s first organization dedicated to countering threats to the connected transportation marketplace. Launched in 2021, UWindsor’s SHIELD Automotive Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence is home to a growing multi-disciplinary research team that specializes in artificial intelligence; machine learning; and advanced analytics and is led by a powerhouse pair that is rapidly gaining notoriety in Canada’s auto industry.
Within the last three years, founders Mitra Mirhassani and Ikjot Saini have garnered six accolades naming them leaders across Canada’s automotive, cybersecurity and tech sectors. Most recently, Mirhassani received the 2021 Donald S. Wood Leadership Award, bestowed by the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA), for showing exemplary public leadership in Canada’s auto sector.
“Our most challenging research is detecting maliciously placed hardware Trojans, which can wreak havoc on and even destroy sensors embedded in vehicles, infrastructure and the manufacturing supply chain,” says Mirhassani, an electrical engineering professor. “This is happening now in the Canadian supply chain.”
