May 25, 2018 – Nick Di Donato (IndE 8T1) is among three U of T Engineers to be honoured by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) with Ontario Professional Engineers Awards. Di Donato received the Citizenship Award, honouring an engineer who has made significant contributions to society.

“These prestigious awards recognize the wide-ranging contributions made by our faculty and alumni to engineering in Ontario, through their innovation, leadership, and service,” said Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “I am delighted that PEO and OPSE have chosen to honour these outstanding members of our community.”

As founder, President and C.E.O. of Liberty Entertainment Group since 1986, Nick Di Donato has restored several heritage buildings in Toronto, turning them into leading entertainment venues. He has made exceptional contributions to the community as a member of boards and committees for institutions such as Sick Kids and Variety Village, and has volunteered his time to U of T, George Brown College, and St. Michael’s College School. Di Donato has served on committees and trade missions for the City of Toronto and was a member of the Toronto Transit Commission’s Board of Directors. He is founder and co-chair of the annual Caring & Sharing Children’s Christmas Gala and has provided sponsorships and donations to many charitable events held at the Liberty Grand.  Di Donato has received the Toronto’s Construction Association “Best of the Best” Award, Foodservice & Hospitality Magazine’s Pinnacle Award for “Entrepreneur of the Year”, Ontario’s Trillium Award for “Restaurateur of the Year”, and the Toronto Economic Development Council Business Recognition Award.

 

May 23, 2018 – U of T Engineering researchers are combining audio and art to provide better, standardized ways of simulating and understanding medical imaging of brain aneurysms.

Currently, if a patient comes into a medical clinic with an unruptured brain aneurysm, a clinician’s decision to operate or leave it, depends on risk factors related to the patient’s medical history, as well as the aneurysm’s shape, size and location in the brain.

Aneurysms in the back of the brain, for example, are more likely to rupture than those at the front. “This is what the epidemiology has told us,” explains Professor David Steinman (MIE). However, many large aneurysms don’t ever rupture, and many small aneurysms that are normally left alone, do rupture.

So the question is: how does one treat only the aneurysms that are risky?

Professor Steinman’s approach to finding a solution is a unique one – he’s melding biomedical engineering and the art world. Collaborating with Toronto Western Hospital’s Aneurysm Clinic (Canada’s largest), as well as Peter Coppin, a professor at the Faculty of Design at OCADU, his lab is taking fresh insights from visual artists and sound designers to improve visual and audio communication in medical imaging, starting with aneurysms.

“Visualizations of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are typically presented to clinicians as ‘canned’ animations, which tend to rely on dense engineering representations that unselectively portray both relevant and irrelevant details,” said Professor Steinman.

By using graphics and sound to amplify key features, while suppressing irrelevant information, “This would allow a user to visually concentrate on one field, while listening to the other. Certain aspects of complexity can be heard better than it can be seen,” said Professor Steinman. A clinician can then more easily and efficiently decide whether to operate on an aneurysm.

If the simulated blood flow of the aneurysm were to show a very strong and unstable ‘jet’ coming into the aneurysm and against the aneurysm wall, “that might be a hint that that wall is more likely to be aggravated,” explains Steinman.

He hopes this innovative approach can help reduce the number of unnecessary treatments and the number of accidental ruptures. “Imagine if I’m a patient with what I feel is a ticking time bomb in my head. What do I do about it? And a clinician tells me, ‘well, we’re not sure,’” said Professor Steinman. “I want to provide more information for the clinician. It’s a new piece of the puzzle to give to them.”

To work alongside Coppin’s team at OCADU, he has recruited MIE post-doctoral fellow Thangam Natarajan to translate CFD visually, and MIE MASc student Dan MacDonald to translate CFD into sounds.

MacDonald is a trained classical pianist, a skill that has helped elevate his project. “Piano led me to synthesizers and sound design,” he said. “So taking the data and turning them into sound, has a lot to do with knowing fundamentally how to create sound from the bottom up.”

The power of this approach can be seen and heard in this video:

Further down the line, Steinman hopes his work will lead to a standardized, new way of representing and understanding how to treat aneurysms in medical clinics. “The way I see it, you’d build a tool where the CFD data could be displayed on a simple interface. Then, you’d either put on headphones or turn on the speakers, just like a Doppler ultrasound exam. We’re maybe five years away from that.”

 

May 15, 2018 – Meet Holly Johnson (MechE 0T9 + PEY), MDA’s rising star and youngest manager. She’s worked at MDA, Canada’s largest space company, since her days as a Professional Experience Year (PEY) Co-op student. Since graduating in 2010, Johnson has propelled herself into leadership roles, helping to apply space technology to applications in medical, nuclear and advanced manufacturing.

In 2016, she received the Northern Lights Foundation’s Rising Star award, a prestigious Canadian aviation and aerospace award that honours outstanding Canadian women who have made significant contributions in their field.

MIE recently spoke to Johnson to learn more about her extraordinary career.

Why did you choose to study Mechanical Engineering at U of T?

I chose to study Mechanical Engineering at U of T to position myself with the knowledge, experience, and practical skills that would maximize my opportunities upon graduation. U of T’s world-renowned reputation, access to resources, and strong connections to industry gave me confidence that I could build my career upon a solid foundation.

What made your time at MIE memorable?

My best memories at MIE include the countless days (and sometimes nights!) working with my classmates to solve hard problems. The personal satisfaction in taking on a challenge and working together to find an ideal solution is something that still resonates with me today. Creating and fostering a positive team dynamic is the best way to solve the toughest challenges, and I personally try to bring this approach to all of the teams that I work with.

How did your PEY engineering experience at MDA prepare you, and guide you, towards your career today?

I completed my Professional Experience Year at MDA, where I was fortunate to work on the Canadarm operations team. During this time I developed practical insight into real-world applications, while also gaining key skills in problem solving, communication and leadership. My professional development during my PEY, largely supported by a few key mentors, put me in an ideal position to return to MDA after graduation to continue my dream of working in the space industry.

You are the youngest manager at MDA. What skills or traits do you think have helped propel you to this role?

I have always had a strong passion for the work that we do at MDA, and my desire to connect with people – including customers, colleagues and the public – has provided me with key opportunities to take on leadership roles throughout my career.

Thinking back to my time at U of T Engineering, my involvement in the Engineering Outreach Program (including Sci-Camp, Skule Sisters, amongst others) played a pivotal role in sparking my desire to connect people to engineering. Being able to communicate technical ideas to an audience with varying backgrounds is a useful skill that I developed during my Outreach activities, and one that I continue to employ on a daily basis in my current job.

Tell us more about your career at MDA, and what you have been involved in.

After graduating from MIE in 2010, I returned to MDA to work as a Systems Engineer. MDA is best known for developing the Canadarm, Canadarm2, and Dextre robotics, but we have also had success in applying this space technology to terrestrial applications such as medical, nuclear, and advanced manufacturing.

While working as a Systems Engineer I was involved in a wide range of these projects – from designing an MRI compatible robot for brain surgery, to developing next generation concepts for space exploration robotics. In 2016, I transitioned into the role of Business Development Manager, where I looked for opportunities to apply MDA’s robotics and automation expertise into new applications.

What are your plans for the future, both short term and long term?

Within the past month I am very excited to have taken on a new role as President’s Business Manager. This developmental position will allow me to work closely with the MDA President to support the business needs, while also gaining insight and perspective at the executive leadership level.

As someone with a deep passion for MDA’s heritage and Canada’s role in space, I hope this position is another stepping-stone to becoming a valuable member of the senior leadership team. In the future, I’d be thrilled to have a front-row view of the amazing technologies that MDA will bring to space and the world.

What advice would you give to young alumni, or engineering students graduating next month, who aspire to have a successful career like yours?

The words of wisdom I would offer to engineering graduates in the early phase of their career is to connect with people. Ask questions, be a humble listener, and learn from the experience and wisdom of others. Engineering will provide you with the technical background to build your career, but your interactions with people along the way will provide the brightest waypoints on your journey.

May 14, 2018 – Neville Moray was a pioneer in exploring the interaction between humans and machines by combining the disciplines of psychology and engineering. His work is still influential today in the development of technologies such as self-driving cars and social network algorithms.

Moray had two stints at the University of Toronto – from 1970 to 1974, when he was professor of psychology, and from 1981 to 1988, when he was a professor of industrial engineering. He died in December at his home in the south of France, at the age of 82, after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis.

Aside from his academic achievements, Moray had a broad intellectual curiosity, a playful sense of humour, and in later years became an accomplished artist.

Moray’s love of parties may have helped inspire some of his early research into what is known as the “cocktail party effect,” where people tune out crowd noise to concentrate on one conversation. He published a seminal paper on the subject in 1959, which showed that usually the only thing that will break this concentration barrier is if a person hears their own name said somewhere else in the room.

While Moray spent two decades focusing on cognitive psychology and auditory attention, he shifted direction after spending a sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he met engineers working on human-machine interaction and transferred his focus to that topic, known as human factors or ergonomics.  From then on he deftly combined the two disciplines of engineering and psychology.

John Lee, one of his former graduate students who is now an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, says Moray’s attitude had a huge impact on people who worked with him. “He had a curiosity and passion for doing interesting stuff,” Lee says. “He had fun doing research, and that has really stuck with me. Sometimes that gets lost in the worry about publication and grant dollars and funding students, but in the end it’s really important.”

One of Moray’s central areas of research concerned the trust that people place in automated systems, and what level of trust is appropriate to ensure automation is supervised and applied effectively.

While Moray’s work focused on automation in manufacturing plants, Lee says, his findings set the foundation for later studies of issues that are top-of-mind today, such as the reliability of self-driving cars. It even influences work on social networks that make use of automated algorithms to send advertising to users.

Moray also did visionary analysis of mental workload – a field that examines how many simultaneous tasks people can perform effectively. This, too, is a subject that is more relevant than ever, particularly with current concerns over distracted driving. “His work still informs that area of research,” Lee says.

Read the full article at U of T News.

May 3, 2018 – Professor Yu Sun (MIE) has been awarded a chair advancement to Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Micro and Nano Engineering Systems. Professor Sun is among six U of T Engineering faculty members who were recently awarded new, renewed or advanced CRCs.

The Canada Research Chairs program enables U of T to attract and retain the best and most promising researchers from around the world. In addition to conducting research that improves our depth of knowledge and quality of life, the university’s allocation of 275 Canada Research Chairs significantly enhances its capacity to train the next generation of leaders in their fields through student supervision and teaching.

Professor Sun’s work focuses on designing and constructing micro and nanosystems, such as micro-nano robotic systems and MEMS/microfluidic devices. His Advanced Micro and Nanosystems Lab manipulates, characterizes and senses cells, molecules, and nanomaterials for both fundamental studies, as well as for clinical and industrial applications in IVF cell surgery, rare-cell isolation, blood-cell testing, drug screening, and precision instrumentation for industrial automation.

“I want to congratulate all of the new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at the University of Toronto and thank the government for supporting their important work,” says Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation.

“We are grateful to the Government of Canada for its ongoing investments in the Canada Research Chairs program and for the additional funding for this program announced in Budget 2018. Such investments not only yield new knowledge, but set the stage for important innovations ranging from new cancer therapies to sustainable transportation technologies that will improve lives in Canada and around the world.”

May 2, 2018 – U of T Engineering researchers have developed a handheld 3D skin printer that deposits even layers of skin tissues to cover and heal deep wounds. The team believes it to be the first device that forms tissue in situ, depositing and setting in place in two minutes or less.

Their research, led by Navid Hakimi (MIE PhD candidate) under the supervision of Professor Axel Guenther (MIE, IBBME), and in collaboration with Dr. Marc Jeschke, director of the Ross-Tilley Burn Centre at Sunnybrook Hospital, was recently published in the Journal Lab on a Chip.

For patients with deep skin wounds, all three skin layers — the epidermis, dermis and hypodermis — may be heavily damaged. The current preferred treatment is called split-thickness skin grafting, where healthy donor skin is grafted into the surface epidermis and part of the underlying dermis.

Split-thickness grafting on large wounds requires enough healthy donor skin to traverse all three layers, and sufficient graft skin is rarely available. This leaves a portion of the wounded area ungrafted or uncovered, leading to poor healing outcomes.

Although a large number of tissue-engineered skin substitutes exist, they are not yet widely used in clinical settings. “Most current 3D bioprinters are bulky, work at low speeds, are expensive and are incompatible with clinical application,” explains Guenther.

The research team believes their in-situ skin printer is a platform technology that can overcome these barriers, while improving the skin-healing process — a major step forward.

The handheld skin printer resembles a white-out tape dispenser — except the tape roll is replaced by a microdevice that forms tissue sheets. Vertical stripes of “bio ink,” made up of protein-based biomaterials including collagen, the most abundant protein in the dermis, and fibrin, a protein involved in wound healing, run along the inside of each tissue sheet.

“Our skin printer promises to tailor tissues to specific patients and wound characteristics,” says Hakimi. “And it’s very portable.” The handheld device is the size of a small shoe box and weighs less than a kilogram. It also requires minimal operator training and eliminates the washing and incubation stages required by many conventional bioprinters.

The researchers plan to add several capabilities to the printer, including expanding the size of the coverable wound areas. Working with Dr. Jeschke’s team at Sunnybrook Hospital, they plan to perform more in vivo studies. They hope that one day they can begin running clinical trials on humans, and eventually revolutionize burn care, though Professor Guenther says estimating a realistic timeline remains challenging.

“Several steps are needed, but we are confident we will get there,” says Guenther. “My lab, and Dr. Jeschke’s lab, are committed to developing the technology. We have a clear goal of getting this to a stage of routine clinical application.”

This research was funded by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Grand Challenges Canada, Medicine by Design, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Toronto Hydro and the endowed Wallace G. Chalmers Chair in Engineering Design.

April 18, 2018 – Undergraduate and graduate engineering students were recently recognized for their exceptional contributions to the Engineering and University communities with 2018 Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Awards.

Five MIE students are among this year’s honourees: Faizan Akbani, Tammi Hawa, Oghosa Igbinakenzua, Dareen Kutob and Marissa Zhang.

Prior to the formal awards ceremony at Convocation Hall, students joined Dean Cristina Amon, Paul Cadario (CivMin 7T3) and chairs and directors for the annual Dean’s Tea to celebrate their accomplishments.

“Thank you for enriching the lives of students in our Faculty. Your commitment is a shining example of excellence, which is what we strive for in Engineering,” said Dean Amon to the award winners. “I am very excited to welcome all of you into our global alumni community when you graduate in June.”

Established in 1994, the prestigious award was named after former vice-president of development and university relations, Gordon Cressy, who presents the award to recipients each year.

Find out what U of T Engineering Cressy Award winners have in store after graduation and how they’ve made their mark on campus:

2018 Cressy Award winners from U of T Engineering

April 16, 2018 – On April 4, the U of T Supermileage Team unveiled its newest vehicle, a sleek black bullet-shaped prototype called Shadow. Now in its fifth year, the U of T Engineering student team designs, fabricates, builds and races hyper-fuel-efficient vehicles.

From April 18 to 23, the team will be competing in the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas (SEMA)against more than 90 teams from North, Central and South America in Sonoma, Calif., at the NASCAR-grade Sonoma Raceway.

The Shell Eco-Marathon event challenges engineering students to think small when it comes to the amount of energy required to power a vehicle. Over several days, contestants will drive a set number of laps around the race track. At the end of the competition, organizers calculate the distance traveled and measure the amount of fuel consumed by each vehicle. The team with the most energy-efficient vehicle in each category wins.

Over the past year, the Supermileage Team has been hard at work enhancing this year’s design with the goal of reclaiming their 2015 first-place title in the gasoline prototype internal combustion category.

Co-captain Melissa Fung (MechE Year 3 + PEY) is optimistic that the U of T team will come out on top, but they’re keeping a close eye on their long-time rival Université Laval, which took the title for the past two years.

“Laval is always our toughest competitor but I think we have a really good chance of placing first this year because of the upgrades we made to the vehicle,” says Fung.

The vehicle runs on a 30-millillitre engine with a maximum recorded efficiency of 5,505 kilometres per litre (3,421 miles per gallon). That means Shadow could drive the 541 kilometres from Montreal to Toronto on about 25 tablespoons of fuel — less than the amount in a typical 500-millilitre bottle of water. To improve their performance in Sonoma, the team has made a number of changes from previous years.

“Last year at the competition we had some difficulties with our rear drive train, so we completely redesigned it to withstand higher torques and we’re hoping that will give us some efficiency improvements,” says Supermileage Team co-captain Callum Bartlett (MechE Year 3). “We have also been working on our engine to make it more efficient and that included rewiring the whole system, which was a big project for us this year.” Other improvements to the vehicle include clearer windshields and side windows to enhance driver visibility.

One challenge the team faced in preparing for the competition was the limited amount of space in their current work room. This fall, Supermileage will be one of seven U of T Engineering student clubs and teams moving into the Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Myhal Centre). The team will have a dedicated garage space and direct access to prototyping tools and equipment and additional storage.

“[The Myhal Centre] will give us more space for fabrication, design work and theoretical modeling,” says Bartlett. “This will be important to the future success of the team because it will enable us to take our prototypes to the next level.”

April 9, 2018 -Professor Craig Simmons (MIE / IBBME) has been inducted as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in recognition of the U of T engineer’s contributions to heart valve disease research and methodologies to create mechanically dynamic microtissue models.

Election into the AIMBE’s College of Fellows is among the highest distinction in the profession, comprised only of the top two per cent of its membership from around the world.

Simmons is the U of T Distinguished Professor of Mechanobiology in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) and the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME). He is internationally renowned for his pioneering achievements in identifying critical roles of biomechanical forces in regulating heart valve disease, and for the creation of microfluidic tools that improve drug discovery by simulating biomechanical forces in the body.

Professor Simmons has published more than 100 original papers and supervised 40 graduate students to date.

In 2015, he was appointed the scientific director of the Translational Biology and Engineering Program, the University of Toronto’s component of the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research. There, he leads nine groups comprised of more than 100 engineering and medicine researchers to collaborate with health-care experts from the Hospital for Sick Children and the University Health Network to transform the future of heart health for Canadians through a combination of research, education and clinical care.

Professor Simmons’ numerous awards and accolades include the 2017 Ontario Professional Engineers Awards’ Engineering Medal for Research and Development, the University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye Award for achievements in integrating teaching and research, and U of T Engineering’s Faculty Teaching Award. He is a fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) and was named the Canada Research Chair in Mechanobiology in 2006.

“Congratulations to Craig on this incredible achievement,” said Professor Markus Bussmann, chair of MIE. “Craig is not only a leader in the field of biomedical and regenerative medicine, but also a dynamic and award-winning educator who is passionate about inspiring the next generation of biomedical engineers. We’re proud of his accomplishments and his significant contributions to improving the future of heart health.”

A formal induction ceremony was held during the AIMBE Annual Meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC on April 9, 2018 where Professor Simmons was inducted along with 156 colleagues who make up the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2018.

April 9, 2018 – The U of T Engineering-led team working to capture greenhouse gas and recycle it into useful chemicals has advanced to the finals of the international NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. The competition presents this challenge: capture carbon emissions from power plants and efficiently convert them into valuable chemical products.

Finalists were revealed at Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Future of Energy Summit in New York City.

CERT, a team of two dozen multidisciplinary researchers working with Professors Ted Sargent (ECE) and David Sinton (MIE), is one of just five teams around the world to make it into the third and final round in the natural gas plant stream. Thirty-eight teams from five countries, and from both industry and academia, entered the competition — of the field of 27 that qualified for Round 2, the contenders have now been reduced to five. An additional five finalist teams will work to capture and convert emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Currently, power generation produces more than 32 gigatonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) annually — that’s 32,000,000,000 tonnes. Renewable forms of energy, such as solar and wind, hold promise to help reduce that number, and have decreased in price and increased in capacity in recent years. By 2022 global renewable electricity generation is expected to grow by another one-third to over 8,000 terrawatts per hour.

CERT capitalizes on this trend by using green energy to capture and convert CO2 to useful chemical compounds.

“The Carbon XPRIZE aims to catalyze the development of practical solutions to one of the most urgent challenges of our time,” says Sargent. “Our team thanks its supporters in helping us pursue and meet a truly ambitious goal: upgrade waste CO2 into a valuable product.”

CERT leveraged the team’s expertise in electrocatalysis to develop nanoparticle-based catalysts that use clean electricity to recycle CO2 into valuable carbon-based products. The team demonstrated they could convert kilograms of CO2 into carbon monoxide, a widely utilized industrial chemical.

“Any important engineering problem brings unexpected challenges and demands creative solutions,” says Sinton. “The Carbon XPRIZE competition is timely and important because it rewards the combination of technological innovation and scaling at the heart of the CO₂challenge.  We knew we had an amazing team, but it’s still incredibly rewarding to look back on the truly stunning achievements of U of T researchers.”

A team of XPRIZE judges visited Toronto in December 2017 to evaluate CERT’s capabilities and potential for Round 3. CERT spent three days with the XPRIZE team at the XEROX Research Centre of Canada in Mississauga, where the judges evaluated their technology and data. They conducted their Round 2 research with $833,333 through a TargetGHG Stream 3 grant, supported by Ontario’s $74 million Green Investment Fund, and administered by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE). The work was also conducted in partnership with Quebec-based company CO2 Solutions Inc., which provided the team with carbon capture technology.

“Everyone at OCE is incredibly proud to see CERT advance in the prestigious international NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE competition,” says Dr. Tom Corr, President and CEO of OCE. “Having Ontario-based research and talent in greenhouse gas reduction being recognized at a global level is inspiring, and demonstrates how programs like TargetGHG funded by the government are helping Ontario lead the fight against climate change and transition to a low carbon economy.”

“Ontario congratulates the CERT team as they advance to the finals of the international Carbon XPRIZE,” say Reza Moridi, Minister of Research, Innovation and Science. “This impressive achievement is a testament to Ontario’s cleantech talent and research excellence.  This province is proud to have supported CERT’s efforts as we work together to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and create jobs in the cleantech sector.”

Read the article on U of T Engineering News.