When asked to talk about the qualities of leadership, perhaps it’s not surprising that a man who’s been mayor of Toronto, a litigation lawyer and CEO of World Wildlife Fund-Canada would focus on the importance of strength.

But during his recent visit to the University of Toronto David Miller shared a personal example of the strength that inspired him: the mother who raised him on her own before dying of cancer.

“She was incredibly brave and never complained,” Miller told students at the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) event. “I drew from her amazing strength when she was sick.”

Miller told students his mother’s influence helped him endure fierce opposition during his political career and stay rooted to his values. And he encouraged them to call on their own “inner reserves of strength” in times of need.

Urging students to have a greater voice in the non-profit and political worlds, Miller also called on them to be creative in their approach to problem solving, especially when tackling problems concerning environmental and urban sustainability. And he had specific advice for U of T’s many engineering students.

“So many of our environmental challenges are actually about waste,” Miller said. “Engineers are great at finding innovative solutions to reduce waste. The profession has a huge amount to offer the world.”

Acknowledging that students of engineering study the strength and endurance of systems, rather than of individual people, Miller reminded them that awareness and sensitivity to human systems were essential to many great feats of science and technology. And the very human skills of listening and the ability to articulate a clear and compelling vision are essential to success, the former mayor said.

“Those are the very skills that ILead teaches students through its leadership courses, certificate programs and workshops,” said Annie Simpson, Assistant Director of ILead.

One student at the engagement took up Miller’s challenge to reflect on her values and determine which ones she would stand behind in the face of adversity:

“We engineers have the skills to make things happen, but we really need to develop our perseverance and focus during our educational journey,” said first-year student Bella Zhang (MIE 1T7), adding she was deeply inspired by Miller’s talk.

“Have we questioned what our core values are in our lives and where we should contribute our intelligence?”

Find out more about how U of T Engineering is celebrating National Engineering Month.

You may have heard of a pacemaker for improving function of a human heart, but have you ever considered one for bowel functions?

In a study published this week in Nature Communications, a group of researchers have uncovered a previously unknown process in the human digestive system. This discovery could lead to successful ‘pacemaker’ treatments for bowel disorders.

Science has been aware since the late 19th century that the human gut processed nutrition and eliminated waste by breaking down food in a mechanical way, called segmentation. It was always thought that nerves in the gut did all the work.

This research changes that understanding.

The research team – consisting of scientists at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME), McMaster University and Wuhan University in China – blocked off nerves in the gut using Tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin.

Originally, the team thought segmentation would cease once the nerves in the gut were blocked. To their surprise, this important action continued, prompting the researchers to dig deeper.

“There’s no question that the nerves are crucial,” said Professor Berj Bardakjian (ECE, IBBME), a contributing author of the study. “The thing is, it was thought to be the only effect.”

Led by the Huizinga lab at McMaster University, the team discovered that a layer of interstitial cells lining the gut, known as the interstitial cells of the Cajal (ICC) actually interacts with smooth muscle in the gut to create the segmentation action necessary to proper digestion via an oscillating action, action in the form of coupled biological clocks.

The discovery may lead to dramatically different outcomes for people who have difficulty absorbing nutrients, such as those with nerve damage in the gut, certain cancers, and even irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease.

“Now that we’ve made this discovery we can make models [of this process], and once we have those we can design devices to go in and deal with motility issues,” said Bardakjian, whose lab was responsible for making sense of the data retrieved from the other two research partners.

Bardakjian added that there was still work to do.

“To be fair, this discovery will only help with the segmentation action of the gut. The nerves will still be required to trigger the propulsion mechanism. But once we have a working device, nutrition can at least be absorbed. And, once that stage is complete, the next challenge would be to see how we can fix the propulsion mechanism.”

“The bottom line is,” he continues, “those cases that were helpless because the nerves in their gut were damaged can now face very different outcomes.”

Achieving the impossible is all in a day’s work for speakers at this year’s TEDxUofT. Four members of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering community were among the 12 speakers at Saturday’s event, which featured astonishing talks on topics from invisibility cloaking to human-powered flight, revolutionizing the drug development pipeline to overhauling democracy.

George Eleftheriades, a professor of electromagnetics in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, gave the audience a crash course in metamaterials, an emerging field that’s inventing new materials with properties that don’t exist in nature. Professor Eleftheriades has used metamaterials to develop a super-microscope that resolves images on a micrometer scale, lenses for improving MRI technology, and recently he and a PhD student demonstrated the world’s first thin, active invisibility cloak in their laboratory.

Professor Eleftheriades explained the electrical engineering approach he and his student took to develop the new active cloaking technique, using specifically attuned electromagnetic waves to cancel any light, radio or x-ray radiation reflecting off the object to be cloaked. Cancelling these reflective waves renders the object invisible, without needing to physically cover or coat it with a thick metamaterial shell. “The cloak doesn’t depend on the size of the object, the shape of the object, or the composition of the object,” said Professor Eleftheriades. “I think the collective goal is to see these in use in the relatively near future.”

Engineering alumni Todd Reichert (EngSci 0T5, PhD 1T1) and Cameron Robertson (EngSci 0T8, MASc 0T9) kicked off the day with a talk on the importance of failure. “Don’t be afraid to fail – fail early and fail often,” said Robertson. “Small failures are key to invention and innovation.”

Invention and innovation are Reichert and Robertson’s calling card – together they founded AeroVelo, their company for building, testing and amazing the world with various types of human-powered vehicles. In June 2013, their team’s Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter took home the American Helicopter Society’s Igor I. Sikorsky Prize worth $250,000 – the prize had never been won in the 33 years since its establishment.

Reichert and Robertson spoke about the trials and tribulations they faced in building and testing the Atlas and other high-speed human-powered vehicles. “The question is not ‘Do we have the time to succeed?’ it’s ‘Do we have the time to fail?'” said Reichert. “And if we don’t have time to fail, we don’t have time to innovate.”

“Navigating the space between failure and success is really navigating the space between doubt and confidence,” he added. This fall AeroVelo will be trying to break the human-powered speed record, currently held at 134 kilometres per hour.

IBBME’s Professor Alison McGuigan spoke of revolutionizing the current slow and expensive drug development pipeline with a Swiss roll.

Today, promising drugs are first tested inexpensively in the lab. If they perform well, they advance to more expensive animal trials, then onto terribly expensive and time-consuming human trials. The average time to get a drug discovery to market is 12 years, she said. But she and her research group may change all that by increasing the quality of lab testing protocols – in essence, giving drugs a better chance of failing early and cheaply, before advancing needlessly to animal or human trials.

“Our 2D plastic dishes with no variation don’t predict our 3D human environment where there’s lot of variation,” said Professor McGuigan.

McGuigan’s group has developed a way to simulate the complex nature of a tumour in the body by arranging tumour cells on a two-dimensional substrate and rolling it up into a three-dimensional configuration, like a Swiss roll, the popular dessert cake. This makes it easy to test the efficacy of new drugs with thorough knowledge of where each cell was located and how well each cell responded to treatment.

“Being able to get this information easily is very important,” said Professor McGuigan. “Going forward, we can imagine taking this a step further and introducing genetic variation.”

The diversity of the 2014 TEDxUofT speaker list underlined the breadth of cutting-edge research and thinking being carried out across the university by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and alumni.

“I think it’s a good idea to disseminate to the general public what we do here at U of T,” said Professor Eleftheriades. “It’s good to show society that we’re doing interesting things here – things that are a good use of taxpayers’ money.”

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience, in the spirit of the TED mantra of “ideas worth sharing.”

Pink shirts, pink balloons, pink cupcakes – and a cannon.

On February 26, hundreds of U of T Engineering students, staff and faculty headed to the Sandford Fleming Atrium in support of Pink Shirt Day, a growing cross-Canada initiative to stop bullying.

Hosted by Engineering Positive Space for the second year at U of T, the pink-shirted participants gathered to celebrate diversity and constructive relationships. Passing students stopped to inscribe anti-bullying messages on helium balloons, while others enjoyed pink desserts supplied by Veda, and mingled amongst each other in a shared positive spirit.

The event also went off with a bang. The Lady Godiva Memorial Band and the Cannon Guard made a special appearance to fire the Skule Cannon. If the ear-splitting sound wasn’t heard beyond the building’s walls, their joyous musical march certainly was.

“What was most gratifying to me,” said Peter Weiss, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Engineering Communications Program, “was the extent to which we heard, when planning and asking for the participation of groups like LGMB, Cannon Guard or Veda: ‘Yes. Of course. This is a tradition!’”

“What a great tradition to establish. I am so proud of the leadership role U of T Engineering has taken in promoting inclusivity in the Faculty, in the university and beyond.”

Pink Shirt Day began in 2007 when a group of Nova Scotian teenagers wore pink shirts in protest of homophobic bullying at their high school. Since then, the one-day celebration has spread across Canada and beyond.

It was an evening filled with live marimba music, international cuisine and energetic debate.

To mark the end of this year’s Black History Month on campus, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) U of T Chapter hosted the first annual ‘Reflect, Unite, Celebrate: A Black History Month Affair’. The event brought together U of T students and alumni to celebrate the heritage, traditions and culture of African-Canadians.

“Every one of us has a very different background – African, Caribbean, British, you name it – and it makes us unique,” said Andrew Brown (MIE 1T3 + PEY), President of NSBE’s U of T Chapter. “Part of Black History Month is to celebrate that uniqueness. We all have something to offer, and it’s something different.”

The evening opened with a trio of marimba players, led by Dimpho Radebe (IndE 1T4 + PEY), NSBE’s Administrative Director, that literally had guests dancing out of their seats. The melodic tones of the marimba, which originated in Zimbabwe, continue to grow in popularity across Canada, she said.

Guests also participated in a lively round-table discussion moderated by biomedical engineering PhD student Mikhail Burke (MSE 1T2). The debate focused on modern-day issues of young engineers in the workplace, including those of different ethnicities, ages, sexual orientation and gender.

“[NSBE] has had a very positive impact on my own perception of black engineers and the influence we can have,” said Burke, “not just on each other, but within the engineering realm and the wider community.”

NSBE’s U of T Chapter also held a series of outreach workshops with students in nearby high-schools for Black History Month. Along with sharing practical advice on time management and study tips, the sessions also allowed teenagers to interact and ask questions of older peers already in university. NSBE is hoping to continue these workshops in May and June.

With over 23,000 members worldwide, NSBE was founded in 1975 and is the largest student-managed organization in the world. Their mission focuses on increasing the number of culturally responsible and professionally successful black engineers, with a strong emphasis on giving back to local communities.

Find out more about NBSE on their website.

Professor Stewart Aitchison (ECE) has been elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). Originally established in 1783, the RSE is Scotland’s national academy of science and letters. Benjamin Franklin and economist Adam Smith were among its Founding Fellows. Of the more than 1500 RSE Fellows, there are only 62 Corresponding Fellows (Fellows who are not resident in the UK).

Professor Aitchison is one of the world’s most prominent researchers in the field of nonlinear optics, particularly the area of spatial optical solitons. His pioneering work in this area has led to the creation of new all-optical devices for signal processing applications, the demonstration of “the world’s fastest switch” in 1991, and the development of new types of light sources. In parallel, his work on optical biosensors has resulted in a lab-on-a-chip device that enables accurate monitoring of HIV in remote communities. His 250 journal publications have been cited over 9,850 times. He also holds eight patents, which have led to the creation of four new companies.

Professor Aitchison served as Vice Dean, Research for the Faculty from 2007-2012. During his term he oversaw a 45 per cent increase in federal funding and a 75 per cent increase in major partnership funding in the Faculty. He also supported the creation of a Faculty-wide energy initiative and helped initiate major projects on sustainable cities and research collaborations with India. He is currently the U of T Associate Scientific Director for the Network Centre of Excellence, IC-IMPACTS, which funds collaborative research between Canada and India in the areas of safe infrastructure, clean water and public health.

“We are delighted that this prestigious academy has recognized Professor Aitchison’s world-leading research achievements,” said Cristina Amon, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “His election confirms the global impact of the research being conducted at the Faculty and the outstanding international reputation our professors have earned.”

Professor Aitchison will be formally inducted into the RSE in a ceremony in Edinburgh on May 19, 2014.