Six universities in Ontario have partnered to create a new fellowship to expand the pathways for Indigenous and Black students pursuing doctoral degrees in engineering to prepare them for academic careers as professors and industry researchers.
Announced today, the Indigenous and Black Engineering and Technology (IBET) Momentum Fellowships aim to address the urgent need to provide pathways that encourage and support the pursuit of graduate studies by under-represented groups. This lack of representation has hindered the enrolment of Indigenous peoples (First Nations, Inuit and Metis) and Black graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs.
IBET Momentum Fellowship recipients will receive financial support, mentorship, training and networking opportunities to foster a robust professional community for participating PhD candidates.
“It’s clear that U of T Engineering — as well as the engineering profession and academia in general — must accelerate our work to improve representation of Black and Indigenous students, staff and faculty members, at all levels,” says Chris Yip, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “Launching the IBET Momentum Fellowships is a start, and we plan to listen and evolve our program as we learn from its first candidates. Today, we are pleased to join our partner universities in launching this important initiative.”
In addition to U of T Engineering, the partnership includes the engineering and math Faculties at the University of Waterloo, and the engineering Faculties at McMaster University, the University of Ottawa, Queen’s University and Western University. The six partner universities share the understanding that greater diversity is needed among academic leaders in engineering and technology to reflect all populations and to ensure a full range of thought and problem-solving approaches.
The Momentum Fellowships are a central pillar of the new IBET PhD Project, which aims to change the academic landscape within the next five to 10 years by increasing the number of Indigenous and Black engineering professors teaching and researching in universities across Ontario. The project will also bring more diverse perspectives and voices into engineering research and the Canadian technology industries.
Two recipients each year will receive $25,000 annually for four years as they pursue doctorate degrees and specialized engineering research. Interested Canadian students can apply for the IBET Momentum Fellowships following their application to their graduate program.
Professor Matthew Mackay (MIE) is the 2020 recipient of the Wighton Fellowship. The Fellowship, awarded by the Sandford Fleming Foundation to just one recipient nationwide each year, recognizes excellence in the development and teaching of laboratory-based courses in undergraduate engineering programs.
Currently serving as Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE), Mackay has led a multi-year initiative to improve lab development and integration within the mechatronics stream.
Mackay completely redesigned the stream, creating new courses and revamping outdated courses to provide students with hands-on designing and building experience. As a result, mechatronics has gone from the least to the most popular stream in the program, taken by more than 90% of mechanical engineering students.
Beyond the mechatronics stream, Mackay implemented a “design spine” for MIE — a continuous stream of courses with tightly integrated design projects and supporting laboratory experiences, from first year through the fourth-year capstone design course.
He also created the course Mechanical Engineering Design I to ensure that regardless of a student’s path through the program, they can still engage with real-world design problems. In recognition of these contributions, Mackay received MIE’s Early Career Teaching Award in 2014 and the Faculty’s Early Career Teaching Award in 2017.
Mackay also spearheaded the creation of a central space for students engaged in traditional mechanical and mechatronics design. This makerspace, called the “M-Space,” has been active for five years. Mackay designed lab series and design projects leveraging the M-Space that were integrated into multiple mechanical engineering courses; each of these course elements gives students a start-to-finish design/build experience.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the makerspace has moved online, allowing non-contact prototyping services for students who need them. Mackay has also worked with the MIE lab team to move traditional labs online, so that students may remotely operate real hardware as part of their online learning.
“On behalf of the Faculty, I want to extend my enthusiastic congratulations to Professor Mackay for earning this rare distinction,” said U of T Engineering Dean Chris Yip. “This is terrific recognition of his tremendous contributions as a pedagogical leader in Engineering, as exemplified by his revitalization of our mechatronics program and his creation of new and innovative laboratory experiences. I am so proud of his efforts and, indeed all our faculty, who are working to create awesome learning experiences and opportunities for our students.”
Professors Natalie Enright Jerger and Andreas Moshovos (ECE) have been appointed the rank of IEEE Fellow. This designation by IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association, is reserved for members whose research in engineering, science and technology have shown significant value to society.
For Enright Jerger, becoming a Fellow is a reminder that “one’s career is something that develops over time and has a long arc.”
She was cited by IEEE for her “contributions to networks-on-chip (NoCs) for many-core architectures.” NoCs are a mechanism that allows multiple processors on a single chip to talk to one another, relieving some of the “congestion” that occurs as computer chips continue to shrink in size.
Though still a relatively young technology, NoCs are poised to take off: in recent years NoCs have become a central design feature in many-core architectures and are expanding into other functional designs.
Enright Jerger was there in the early years. NoCs were her research focus in 2009 when she joined ECE. She has since branched into other areas — approximate computing, machine learning and Internet-of-Things devices, to name a few — but recently has come full circle, collaborating with U.S. researchers to resolve message deadlocks on NoCs and make them more energy and resource efficient.
She says it has been exciting to see how her ideas shaped the development in the field, including the widespread adoption of the textbook she co-authored, On-Chip Networks, now in its second edition.
“I’m really proud to have helped educate students in the area, further driving innovation.”
For his elevation to Fellow, Moshovos was cited “for contributions to out-of-order processor microarchitecture and multiprocessor memory systems.” An out-of-order processor is one whose execution is dictated by the data readily available and not the original programming order, reducing idling time.
Moshovos’s research emphasized behaviour-based techniques. These in effect allow chip components to figure out on their own what the application prefers, which better serves computation needs and energy constraints.
Looking back on his career thus far, he singles out RegionScout, a filtering technique to monitor the coherence status of large regions of memory to improve system performance and power consumption. He developed this project after hours while serving a mandatory term with the Hellenic Armed Forces for a year and a half.
Professor Deepa Kundur, Chair of ECE, sees the elevation of Professors Enright Jerger and Moshovos as emblematic of the department’s research strength. “A sincere congratulations to both for achieving this milestone in their careers. It is a wonderful recognition of their stature in their fields.”
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with such talent throughout the years,” says Moshovos. “Truly — in every single piece of work I have been involved with. I’m humbled by this recognition of my peers, and very appreciative of the support from my colleagues and students at the University of Toronto and elsewhere.”
Enright Jerger seconds that sentiment and adds, “Awards really can be humbling.”
If she could, she would offer a piece of advice to her younger self: “Some research takes years to come to fruition, and there are setbacks and bumps along the way. But you get there eventually.”
To increase the performance of solar panels, a team of researchers based in Saudi Arabia, Italy, Germany and Canada has created solar cells that are both two-sided and two-layered. The prototypes bring together the best of two technologies: silicon and perovskites.
Out in the field, light primarily comes directly from the sun. Conventional tandem solar cells can already convert this light into electricity more efficiently compared to traditional silicon-only solar cells by absorbing additional wavelengths of light.
Now, the researchers have realized that even more energy can be gathered using a two-sided tandem configuration. Light reflected and scattered from the ground — referred to as “albedo” — can also be collected to significantly increase the current of a tandem solar cell.
The research, which was published today in the journal Nature Energy, outlines exactly how the team engineered the perovskite/silicon device to exceed the currently accepted performance limits for the tandem configuration.
“By exploiting the albedo, we can now generate currents higher than in conventional tandems, without increasing the manufacturing costs at all,” said Dr. Michele De Bastiani, the co-lead author of this study. The study’s authors include University Professor Ted Sargent (ECE) and ECE postdoctoral fellow Yi Hou.
The potential for capturing indirect sunlight has been studied in the past, but without experimental verification. In addition to U of T Engineering, KAUST researchers worked with collaborators from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Bologna to solve the scientific and engineering challenges required to include indirect sunlight in the energy gathering capacity of their modules.
With this knowledge at hand, they tested the bifacial tandem solar cell in outdoor conditions, achieving efficiencies beyond any commercial silicon solar panel.
“Bifacial silicon-only solar cells are rapidly taken an increasing share in the photovoltaics market, as they can lead to a performance gain of 20% relative. Exploiting this concept in perovskite/silicon tandems now opens opportunities for ultra-high power generation at affordable cost” concluded Professor Stefaan De Wolf (KAUST).
A lot of adjectives have been used to describe the year 2020 — unprecedented, unusual, challenging — but Dean Chris Yip would choose a different one: inspiring.
“What I saw across our Faculty was people rising to the challenge,” he says. “That innovative spirit is what engineering is all about, and I think many of the creative solutions we developed will still be valuable when the pandemic is over.”
Writer Tyler Irving sat down with Dean Yip to reflect on the past few months and look forward to the next year at U of T Engineering.
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Many U of T Engineering professors are in the top 2% of their fields in terms of research publications. How has their focus changed under COVID-19?
Our researchers are amazing. They developed models to understand the spread of the virus, created new anti-viral materials to protect people, and shared their expertise around building ventilation and simulation of health care scenarios.
Going forward, engineering innovation will impact how we optimize freight transport in an era where so much is being delivered online, or how we deploy our health-care resources. It will also help address pre-existing challenges highlighted by the pandemic, such as how to deliver better telecom in rural areas and how to build up the infrastructure for manufacturing bioproducts such as vaccines and pharmaceuticals.
How will engineering education change as a result of the past year’s challenges?
Everybody — instructors, TAs, students, me — wants to return to in-person learning as soon as it is safe to do so. But over the past year, a lot of work has gone into creating meaningful online learning experiences, and I think that will still be useful in the future.
For example, we now have a rich library of video lectures that are ideal for use in a “flipped classroom” scenario. In this model, students aren’t sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor talk; they have done that already by watching the videos ahead of time. Instead, they are using their time in class to work together on problem sets, try experiments and ask questions of the professor and each other.
This model also allows more time for lab experiments, demos, field trips and other things we want to do more of.
U of T Engineering is known for its commitment to developing global perspectives, what we call Engineering For The World (E4TW). How could that look in the future?
We obviously want to get back to providing opportunities for students to travel around the world through research exchanges, PEY Co-op placement abroad and capstone projects with international partners. I hope one day all of our students will get at least one global experience by the time they graduate.
But new models are emerging, such as the innovative InVEST program championed by Professor Elham Marzi, which enables students to collaborate virtually with peers from other institutions around the world. That’s a great way to get a feel for what it’s like to work in a team of people who have different backgrounds without having to ship somebody across an ocean.
And of course, Toronto itself is home to communities from all over the world. I think we can leverage those to find out how the new technologies we are working on could resonate overseas.
This year has been challenging for mental health. How will U of T Engineering support that going forward?
Our students really miss being able to talk to a friend after class, saying “I didn’t understand that lecture at all, did you?” and hearing “Yeah, let’s try and figure it out together.”
Obviously, we want to bring that back, but are also enhancing our resources with respect to mental health in general. One of the things we’ve done is just create more spaces to talk, like the Dean’s World Tour we held during the fall break.
We’re going to continue to listen to what students are telling us in terms of workload and assessments, trying to reduce the stress they feel while keeping our programs rigorous.
What about equity, diversity and inclusion?
Diversity makes us better engineers. We’re about to launch a new initiative designed to improve inclusion and access pathways for Black and Indigenous students, and are partnering with universities across the country to advance equity at our schools, in academia and across the engineering profession. We’re also working closely with both undergraduate and graduate students to reinforce that commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion at every level.
We know that we still need to work on having a more inclusive environment inside engineering. We will build on the suite of programs and resources we currently have in place and listen to what the community is telling us.
Any final thoughts?
It’s tempting to think of this as a year when we all pushed pause, but here at U of T Engineering, we never did that. We kept going, finding new and creative ways to apply our expertise. That’s going to serve us well as we start to spin back up.
All that said, I can’t wait to get back on campus. There is no substitute for just dropping in on people to see what they’re up to. That’s what energizes me, and it’s going to be great to have it back.
It takes only a fraction of a second for light to travel through your eye to create an image in the brain, enabling you to see these words on your screen.
This ability, however, can be weakened – sometimes resulting in total blindness – when key structures in the eye are lost due to conditions such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which affects millions of people, and retinitis pigmentosa (RP), one of the most common inherited diseases of the retina.
But an interdisciplinary team of scientists, funded by the University of Toronto’s Medicine by Design initiative, believes there is a possibility this outcome can be changed. Their plan: use retinal stem cells to restore vision.
“This is extraordinarily difficult research, but we’ve seen some progress in restoring some vision in mice,” says University Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, BME, Donnelly). “Now, by bringing together an integrated team of experts, we think we can take the next big step.”
Shoichet’s team includes Temerty Faculty Medicine professors Valerie Wallace, a senior scientist at the Krembil Research Institute at University Health Network, Derek van der Kooy (Donnelly), and Julie Lefebvre, a scientist in the neuroscience and mental health program at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids).
The team is one of 11 that is sharing nearly $21 million in funding from Medicine by Design over three years. Funded by a $114-million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, Medicine by Design is a strategic research initiative that is working at the convergence of engineering, medicine and science to catalyze transformative discoveries in regenerative medicine and accelerate them toward clinical impact.
To appreciate the challenges the team faces, first you need to understand just how our eyes see.
Light passes through your eye and hits the retina. Photoreceptor cells in the retina absorb light and convert the energy into electrical signals that go to the brain, enabling vision. The photoreceptors have a symbiotic relationship with the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE), where the RPE cells support photoreceptor survival and function.
Age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, however, cause the photoreceptors and RPE to die. Without them, we can’t see.
But could the photoreceptors and RPE be created from stem cells, then transplanted into eyes to restore the lost vision?
“We have been able to transplant photoreceptors and RPE cells into the eyes of mice that have lost their vision in a model of AMD,” says Shoichet. “We have observed some vision repair, which is exciting. But at the same time, most of the transplanted cells perish and some of the ones that survive seem to transfer their proteins to the mouse photoreceptors in a process that Wallace and her team describe as material transfer.”
The researchers came upon the material transfer problem when they used green fluorescently labeled photoreceptors for transplantation. Doing this enabled the team to follow integration of the photoreceptors more easily – or so they thought.
“We saw many green cells in the retina after transplantation, which we thought meant that our stem cells were taking root in the retina. That made us feel good,” says Shoichet.
But Wallace soon discovered something was amiss.
As it turned out, the green colour wasn’t coming from the transplanted cells. Rather, it was being taken up by existing cells.
“That is the material transfer that Dr. Wallace’s lab identified,” Shoichet explains. “One photoreceptor transfers its material – in this case the green fluorescent protein – to another. We thought the transplanted cells were integrating, but now it was not clear that all of them were.”
It was a frustrating moment for the team. Then they realized they could, in Shoichet’s words, “turn lemons into lemonade and build on what we’ve learned.”
The scientists now propose taking cell transplantation a step further and actually manipulating material transfer to overcome the mutations prevalent in RP, which is a genetic disease.
With that as the goal, each scientist is concentrating on a distinct task as part of an overall plan. Lefebvre’s team has designed a tool that will enable them to evaluate the success of getting the cells to survive and integrate into the neural circuitry that sends visual signals to the brain. Wallace’s group, meantime, will go deeper in studying the material transfer process and how to manipulate genes to overcome mutations like RP. And van der Kooy’s lab will work on developing a source of photoreceptors from human stem cells.
Shoichet’s lab will focus on making the retina more receptive to transplanted cells using innovative protein delivery strategies coupled with cell transplantation. She and van der Kooy recently published a paper where they showed, for the first time, that by transplanting RPE and photoreceptors together, some vision is restored.
“There is certainly a tough challenge to this work, but our integrated team approach makes us much more likely to achieve the result we want as opposed to working separately,” says Shoichet.
She praises Medicine by Design for its support and for the inspiring challenge that came from executive director Professor Michael Sefton (ChemE, BME), the initiative’s executive director.
“Michael asked us all to conduct research that is truly transformative,” Shoichet says. “Medicine by Design is funding a new way of thinking about cell therapy by supporting our work. It’s exciting to do these studies and think about moving from mouse models to one day restoring vision in humans.”