Professor Michael Carter among this year’s recipients of U of T’s Alumni Association Awards of Excellence. Carter, who created the course MIE 561 Healthcare Systems, won the Northrop Frye Award for teaching excellence.

MIE alumna Huda Idrees (IndE 1T3) has been named a YWCA Toronto Young Woman of Distinction for 2019. This recognition honours the outstanding achievements of young women who work to improve the lives of women and girls in their community.

March 1, 2019 – Professor John W. Senders, who joined the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) department in 1974, passed away on February 12, 2019 due to complications from pneumonia, two weeks before his 99th birthday.

Senders will be remembered fondly for his many achievements over the course of his life and seven-decade career in academia. He was considered by many as one of the pioneers in the field of Human Factors Engineering, the study of human interactions with technology and systems. Human Factors Engineering focuses on creating safer and more cost-effective systems in areas such as healthcare, manufacturing and defence.

Much of Senders’ early work was applied to the design of space vehicles, including the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects. Dedicated to improving human well-being, Senders also worked in the areas of mental workload and highway safety, among many others. His groundbreaking work on driving safety led to the Occluded Vision Paradigm, which was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for “improbable research” in 2011. This prize was one of the many cherished awards he received throughout his life.

Senders’ groundbreaking activities in the nascent field of human error research eventually led to his interest in patient safety and medication errors. He was one of the founders of Canada’s Institute for Safe Medication Practices, an organization committed to advancing medication safety. Senders also introduced the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis technique for medical safety through the American Institute for Safe Medical Practices in 1994.

Senders was MIE Professor Paul Milgram’s PhD thesis supervisor and longtime friend. “In addition to cherishing my personal, decades-long friendship with Professor Senders,” says Milgram, “I was always particularly impressed by the significant number of my own students who established and maintained their own strong, filial relationship with their ‘academic grandfather.’”

In 2010, the University of Toronto’s John W. Senders Award for Medical Innovation was established. The annual award supports student projects that apply engineering to the design of a medical device. To date, the award winning student projects have included a powered mechanical leg brace, a cost-effective portable lift and a physiotherapy device for Parkinson’s disease patients.

Outside of the classroom and laboratory, Senders was known as a gourmet cook who enjoyed hosting large dinner parties at his home. He would often share anecdotes about his travels, career and anti-authority leanings, including the story about being expelled from Antioch College for refusing to take a required first-year math course, saying, “I’ve known this stuff since I was seven, and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again.” 

His humour and tenacity will be missed, but the MIE community is grateful to have had Senders as a long-standing member. “I am privileged to have known John in his last years,” says MIE Chair and Professor Markus Bussmann. “He was a wonderfully interesting man who was full of ideas and opinions. He truly lived life to its fullest and anyone who knew him is the better for it. His was a life worth celebrating.”

Senders is survived by his wife, Ann Crichton-Harris, of Toronto, by his first wife, Virginia Loftus Senders, of Amherst, Massachusetts, and by five children and nine grandchildren. Memorial contributions may be made to the John W. Senders Award for Medical Innovation by contacting Kristin Philpot at kristin.philpot@utoronto.ca and 416-946-7827 or at www.donate.utoronto.ca/senders

by Pam Walls, pam@mie.utoronto.ca

February 1, 2019 – This past December, mechanical engineering student Zhenglin Liu (Year 4 MIE) delivered a speech to a room full of world leaders and activists at the Conference of the Parties (COP), a major international meeting on climate change hosted by the United Nations in Katowice, Poland. A few days later, he spoke at a press conference for YOUNGO, the youth constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the two week-long conference, Zhenglin worked with youth delegates from around the world on negotiations concerning transparency, the impacts of response measures, aviation and maritime transport.

Zhenglin, who is currently doing his Professional Experience Year, chose to specialize in the Energy and Environment stream at the University of Toronto’s Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE). He says he learned a lot from discussions about environmental implications in several MIE courses including MIE 313 Heat Transfer with Professor Aimy Bazylak and MIE 311 Thermal Energy Conversion with Professor James Wallace.  

It was at an Engineers Without Borders event a few years ago that Zhenglin first considered the possibility of attending the climate change conference. Fellow student Sam Harrison (EngSci 1T8 + PEY) spoke about his experience attending COP in 2016. Zhenglin approached Professor Matthew Hoffmann, who teaches political science at U of T and is co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab, about the possibility of attending COP. With the help of Sam and Professor Hoffmann, Zhenglin was able to register to attend as a civil society observer under accreditation from U of T.

“My main goal at COP,” says Zhenglin,”was to learn more about international climate policymaking, both what these negotiations look like in action and how different sectors can contribute to an environmentally and morally responsible outcome.” Zhenglin also wanted to build stronger connections between the Canadian climate NGO community and the U of T Environmental Action (UTEA) student group, of which he is an External Advocacy Director.

After coming home from the whirlwind convention, Zhenglin says he sees the importance of such large-scale meetings to hold governments accountable, but that changes at the national, provincial, local and individual levels are critical. He thinks engineers can make a difference by creating sustainable options such as fabrication processes that require less energy and material or building systems that are more resilient to climate change impacts and extreme weather. 

“We are not only engineers,” continues Zhenglin,”but also citizens, and it is our duty to tell our elected representatives that we want ambitious climate action, especially considering the authority our technical expertise confers upon us.”

Posted by Pam Walls

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Watch Zhenglin present the youth constituency’s intervention speech (jump to 1:50:28):

Watch Zhenglin speak at the YOUNGO press conference (jump to 28:40):