In celebration of an entrepreneur who had a passion for mentoring students and an appetite for innovation, a memorial scholarship will support students at the forefront of electric vehicle research.
The Dr. Voiko Loukanov Engineering Scholarship has been established at the University of Windsor by D&V Electronics in honour of its founder, who has guided many engineering students in research projects to develop advanced technologies.
Dr. Loukanov was an entrepreneur who led D&V Electronics in pioneering and developing scientific testing technologies and expanded the test equipment company’s reach to thousands of customers in more than 90 countries.
In addition to taking co-op students under his wing, Loukanov spent more than a decade advancing electric vehicle research with Narayan Kar, a UWindsor professor who leads the Centre for Hybrid Automotive Research and Green Energy (CHARGE) Lab. D&V continues to work closely with Dr. Kar and is developing cutting-edge testing methods for electric motors in collaboration with UWindsor and Ford Motor Company on a $4.3 million project.
In honor of Loukanov’s longstanding commitment to research collaborations and student mentorship, D&V Electronics has donated $125,000 to endow the scholarship, which will provide an annual award of $5,000 to an engineering graduate student or exceptional undergraduate who is contributing to electric vehicle research at UWindso.
Brad Sato (BASc 2019), the first recipient of the scholarship, is a research intern in the CHARGE Lab who completed a co-op placement at D&V, which he says was a highlight of his undergraduate experience.
“The one thing that stood out to me the most was the quality of people employed there, not just in terms of intellect but also in character,” he says.
“Through my time there I was able to work with state-of-the-art technologies and witness first-hand the applications of the many things I learned in my classes. Collaborating with the brilliant minds and working with the advanced technologies at D&V were some of the driving forces that inspired me to pursue a post-graduate degree working with electric machines.”
Read the full article in the latest issue of WE, the Faculty of Engineering’s annual magazine.
—Kriste Pearce