In 2005, after spending the first 17 years of his life in Lagos, Nigeria, Diran Otegbade (ElecE 1T0) left his family and familiar surroundings to attend U of T Engineering.
He understands first-hand the hardships that most international students face. Not only are they expected to keep up with a rigorous course load, they are expected to do so while acquainting themselves with a new culture and education system. In addition to that, international student tuition fees are more than three times higher than fees for domestic students, and have more than doubled within the last decade.
Otegbade was fortunate — he received full financial support from his parents. But it still took time for him to adjust to life in Toronto.
Prior to graduating, he knew that he wanted to offer support for future generations of international students. In 2013, he pledged $25,000 to establish a needs-based scholarship for African students at the University.
“It can be really challenging for international students to become accustomed to their new country and surroundings, and that can have an effect on a student’s grades in the first few semesters,” Otegbade said. “The scholarship is a financial aid to partially help reduce financial burdens and act as an incentive for people to do better — and I think it goes a long way.”
U of T Engineering’s Jamie Hunter recently sat down with Otegbade to talk about his career and continued involvement with U of T Engineering.
You spent more than three years as a project manager with IBM Canada. You currently own an asset management and accommodation services company. How did you transfer your engineering skills to the real estate industry?
The key thing when building a career is to develop transferable skills. I never really worked a day as an electrical engineer. I passed through the knowledge-building process at U of T Engineering and I was fortunate enough to graduate with a degree in the field, but the skills that I learned — especially problem solving and communication — have helped me in my day-to-day role in the real estate industry advising people and running an asset management company.
You made your first pledge to U of T Engineering as a young alumnus, three years after you graduated. Why is it important that younger alumni get involved as donors and/or volunteers?
It’s necessary for young alumni to get involved with their alma mater because you are putting yourself in a position at an early age to give back and make the U of T Engineering experience even more enjoyable for the next generation of students. You are living beyond yourself, which, at the end of the day, is the key to a meaningful life. As you get older, the pressure of balancing multiple commitments becomes a lot more taxing.
I’ve always had an interest in giving back and still do. From a young age, I was taught by my mother to give tithes and offerings at church, and by my parents to get involved with the community and give to the less privileged. It’s part of me and not something that can be taken away. For example, my dad had his 60th birthday last year. To celebrate, we went out to over 10 impoverished communities in Lagos to feed over 6,000 people. The cost was taken care of by my family.
Can you tell us more about the scholarship you established?
My high school education fees were subsidized by a church. In university, I received a financial award from a multi-national company that supported indigenes in my country. Both were preceding events that inspired me to do that same. The purpose of the scholarship was to create a support and awards system for the international students who are coming into the University from Africa. Part of the criteria of the scholarship is the need for some improvement from one term to the next with no minimum GPA requirement. I wasn’t the brightest student but my grades became progressively better from one semester to the next. The annual monetary value of the scholarship is $1,000, and for now is available to support international students from African countries. I encourage other alumni of African descent or people that have any form of interest in the continent to also consider supporting these students at the Faculty and the University at large.
As a student, you were actively involved with National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) during all four years of your degree. As an alumnus, you are helping to build a network of African alumni — many that you met at NSBE — in Toronto. Can you expand on that?
I’ve become involved with the founding of the African Alumni Association at U of T. My involvement is part of my commitment to create a network and a support system for the increasing number of international African students who come to U of T. I’ve reached out to people at all three U of T campuses across the GTA to help foster a network of African alumni and students. New students, particularly MasterCard Foundation Scholarship Program scholars, have a support system they can turn to.
The founders of the African Alumni Association hold local events on campus, but moving forward we are planning to host alumni events in Africa, starting in Lagos in December 2015. The plan is to start with Nigeria and move to other areas that are clustered with Africans who went to U of T.
How do you see your relationship with U of T Engineering continuing to evolve into the future?
I think The Entrepreneurship Hatchery is an incredible initiative started by one of my professors that teaches entrepreneurship in the Faculty. I’m an entrepreneur: I like seeing new ideas and innovations. The Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship, with its cross-Faculty and University-wide collaborative focus, is also a fantastic initiative. I have long-term interests in both initiatives and hope to get more involved as time goes by.
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) has recognized Professor Greg Evans (ChemE) as one of Ontario’s most outstanding university teachers. He will receive a 2014-2015 OCUFA Teaching Award at a ceremony in Toronto on October 24.
In addition to exemplary classroom teaching, Evans is a leader in the development of innovative educational initiatives and opportunities for undergraduate engineering students. He has developed new courses that go well beyond the delivery of technical content, including implementing unique collaborative assignments that encourage ‘success skills’ such as teamwork, professionalism, communication and leadership.
Evans has also made exceptional contributions as an educational leader. From 2003-2005 he served as chair of first year for the Faculty. He then served as vice-dean, undergraduate from 2005-2007. During this period he spearheaded significant curriculum development and added a number of new curricular and extracurricular learning opportunities. He steered the expansion of communication instruction (including the creation of the Engineering Communications Program) and the expansion and integration of design education into the curriculum.
He currently serves as associate director of the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead). This program, which developed out of the previous Leaders of Tomorrow initiative, is unique in Canada, and perhaps beyond, in that it integrates leadership development through curricular and extracurricular facets of the engineering student experience.
Evans also spearheaded the creation of the Collaborative Program in Engineering Education (EngEd), which gives students and faculty the opportunity to explore learning concepts at the nexus between engineering and education, from the engineer’s perspective. He serves as inaugural director of the program.
“On behalf of our entire Faculty, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Professor Greg Evans on this richly deserved recognition,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “His dedication to excellence and innovation in engineering education has been critical to strengthening U of T Engineering’s curricular and co-curricular programs, enhancing our students’ technical and professional competencies to lead in a complex global engineering environment.”
Evans has been recognized for his teaching contributions with several prestigious awards and honours. These include the Joan E. Foley Quality of Student Experience Award and the Northrop Frye Award from U of T, the Engineers Canada Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education, the Alan Blizzard Award for collaborative teaching and the Faculty Teaching Award, U of T Engineering’s highest recognition for teaching. Earlier this year, he received the President’s Teaching Award, U of T’s highest teaching honour.
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) has honoured a team of U of T Engineering alumni for designing a wearable device that helps blind people read.
On September 12, Ruben Larsson, Fraser Le Ber, Chang Liu and Rustom Shareef (all EngSci 1T4 + PEY) accepted the CNIB’s E. (Ben) & Mary Hochhausen Access Technology Research Award for C-HEAR, a hands-free, headphones-style device that combines optical character recognition (OCR) with text-to-speech (TTS) technology.
C-HEAR enables a user to take a photo of a page of text at a comfortable reading distance and then listen to the text played back with minimal delay. The team developed the technology last year in their fourth-year Engineering Science capstone design course.
“We feel really honoured,” said Liu. “The award was presented to us at the CNIB’s headquarters, and it wasn’t until we arrived that we realized the magnitude and impact that our little capstone school project may have in the future. It really brought a lot of meaning to the work that we did. It really put things into perspective for us.”
“I want to congratulate the team for choosing such an interesting and impactful project and for achieving such a wonderful result,” said Mark Kortschot (EngSci), professor and division chair. “The mission of Engineering Science at the University of Toronto is to help our bright young students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to make a significant difference in the world, and this award shows that they are doing just that.”
C-HEAR’s “brain,” according to Liu, is a single-board $30 Raspberry Pi. The team built all of their codes and input/output interaction for the device on the credit card-sized computer. The device features play/pause and rewind functionality and a rechargeable battery with up to five hours of life.
Liu and Shareef focused on turning the picture into a text file while Larson and Le Ber dedicated their time to converting the text to a sound file. All four collaborated on the integration of the technologies.
The few products currently available on the market that combine OTR/TTS capabilities — G.P. Imports’ Image to Speech mobile application, for example — fall short of what Liu feels those with vision loss require.
“They are all smartphone-based apps,” he said. “We felt that a smartphone may not always be available to someone who is visually impaired. The other problem with those products is that they weren’t properly developed or maintained.”
What does it take to make an engineer a leader? And why is leadership in the profession so important?
These fundamental questions are what Professor Doug Reeve (ChemE) and his colleagues in the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) are exploring in the Engineering Leadership Project (ELP). It’s an emerging partnership between ILead and industry and government leaders to develop the next generation of engineers.
“There’s absolutely no doubt that there is an important transition in the engineering profession,” said Reeve, explaining that many people in business and government have been expressing an urgent need for engineers to embrace leadership development.
“If we can mobilize [engineers’] brainpower, mobilize their work ethic, mobilize their logical facility, this would do all kinds of good things for the profession, for business and industry and for society,” he said.
Reeve is the founding director of ILead, a five-year-old multidisciplinary hub in the U of T Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering that offers unique courses and other programming to help engineering students develop critical skills in self-leadership, teamwork, communication and organizational leadership.
Last year, Reeve and ILead’s research team, Dr. Cindy Rottmann and Professor Robin Sacks, completed the first phase of the ELP. The goal of this segment was to conduct a careful study of how leadership manifests itself in the practice of engineering. Funding came from the Dean’s Strategic Fund and four companies: Hatch, ERCO Worldwide, Vale and Google.
The findings from the first phase concluded that engineers can lead in three distinct ways, which were published in the journal Leadership Quarterly in summer 2014:
- by passing along their technical expertise;
- by collaborating effectively with others in the workplace;
- and by translating their innovations into practical solutions.
Following these conclusions, Reeve launched the second phase of the project last year, known as ELPII, through a new initiative called “The Community of Practice of Engineering Leadership”. It received two more years of funding through the Dean’s Strategic Fund, and six organizations that employ engineers in leadership positions have signed on so far: Hatch, ERCO Worldwide, ChemTrade Logistics, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), Accenture and Toronto Hydro. Reeve expects more to join in the time ahead.
Reeve explained that the intent of ELPII is to further explore how engineers lead, and also to connect engineering students with engineers in the workplace to enrich student development.
“Getting the job done requires another set of skills once you have the correct technical solution,” he said. “That set of skills is what we’re looking to define in our research with engineers in the workplace, and then to deliver to our students through ILead.”
ELPII focuses on three transitions that engineering students may experience as they move into the workforce:
- The first hurdle is getting engineering students to self-identify as leaders, as many do not think of themselves as such.
- The second is making the transition from school to work, and Reeve said this is often a “rude awakening” for students who are typically proficient at calculus but then get dropped into a work environment and need a whole new set of skills to be successful.
- The third transition is moving from being an able technician to becoming a manager of other employees, and that requires yet another set of skills, said Reeve.
The research project includes conducting case studies of senior engineering leaders, while having them reflect on their own path to leadership and how they made their transitions.
“These case studies will give us outstanding material for curriculum, and we can use this material to have engineering students explore leadership in an engineering context and in a Canadian context.”
This integration of industry thinking into the engineering curriculum has been embedded in other Faculty programming as well.
For example, the 700+ undergraduates who take part in a 12- to 16-month Professional Experience Year (PEY) internship program, typically after third year, will have had some instruction in leadership before they start. These placements are often a student’s first exposure to a workplace and their experiences are of great interest to ILead’s research, said Reeve.
On the co-curricular level, ILead is also connecting students with industry through meet-and-greet luncheons, CEO panel discussions and student visits to a CEO’s own environment. Students appreciate having access to these senior leaders, and they in return have expressed their enjoyment in telling their stories and meeting bright, interested young people.
“The CEOs get to talk to the next generation of engineering talent, and they like that”
Reeve said the Faculty has been investing in leadership programming since 2002 and is the leader in this kind of work in engineering schools in Canada. The University is the lone Canadian member of a group of “like-minded” schools in the U.S. — including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), Northeastern University, Tufts University and Rice University — at the fore of engineering leadership education.
“We are certainly very well advanced in terms of the strength and breadth of our programs, and our industry outreach compares very favourably with these schools in the States,” he said.
“We think of ourselves of being at the forefront of this work.”
Learn more about the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead).
Professor David Sinton (MIE) has been named to the 2015 cohort of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Now in its second year, the College recognizes and brings together an emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leaders from multiple disciplines.
Sinton is a pioneer in applying small-scale fluid mechanics research, known as microfluidics, to improve energy technologies, such as fuel cells and those used for oil extraction. Prior to his research contributions in this area, the field of microfluidics was almost entirely focused on biological applications.
Inspired by issues with fluid transport in fuel cells, Sinton’s first breakthrough led to a radical new understanding of how water is moved in porous fuel cell electrodes. This greatly enhanced the efficiency and performance of the cells in terms of power density and fuel utilization.
Building on this success, Sinton applied microfluidics to improve oil recovery processes that operated at massive scales. His insights underpinned several new reduced-carbon-footprint strategies for heavy oil extraction. The advances demonstrate the potential of microfluidic technology to improve the efficacy and reduce the carbon footprint of Canada’s largest energy processes.
Sinton has received several awards for his research, including the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering’s I. W. Smith Award and the McLean Award from U of T. He is a fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada.
“The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists is an exciting addition to the venerable Royal Society of Canada,” said Sinton. “I’m delighted and honored to be included.”
The College was created to gather scholars, artists and scientists at a highly productive stage of their careers into a single collegium where new advances in understanding will emerge from the interaction of diverse intellectual, cultural and social perspectives.
The initiative’s mandate is to address issues of particular concern to the group of interdisciplinary collaborators, for the advancement of understanding and the benefit of society, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary approaches fostered by the RSC.
“I am delighted to congratulate Professor David Sinton on earning this tremendous honour, which recognizes his pioneering research and places him among the finest emerging scholars in Canada,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “He has made exceptional contributions to the fields of energy and microfluidics that could reduce the carbon footprint of oil extraction and point to more sustainable ways of meeting the world’s energy needs.”
“The Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering is proud to have such a breadth of excellent scholars, who continue to make important contributions to engineering research and society,” said MIE Chair Jean Zu. “On behalf of the department, I extend my congratulations to Professor Sinton.”
The new members of the College will be inducted at the Society’s Annual General Meeting in Victoria, B.C. on November 27.
First-year engineering students Christopher Choquette-Choo (Year 1 EngSci) and Daniel McInnis (Year 1 MechE) have been recognized with 2015 Schulich Leader Scholarships.
Started in 2012 by business mogul and philanthropist Seymour Schulich, the program awards 50 students annually across Canada who are pursuing undergraduate degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and have demonstrated significant leadership qualities. Choquette-Choo and McInnis each received $80,000.
“These awards are a testament to the innovative leaders and creative program solvers that our engineering programs attract,” said Micah Stickel, chair, first year engineering. “On behalf of the Faculty, I offer my deepest congratulations to both of these students, and I thank Seymour Schulich for encouraging young leaders across Canada.”
U of T’s Xarissa Thompson spoke with Choquette-Choo and McInnis about the award and why he chose to study engineering at the University of Toronto.
What got you started volunteering? What have you learned from engaging with your community?
Christopher: I learned that I prefer to work as part of a team. In groups I’m usually the last person to talk, because I watch and listen to everyone else first. I value diverse perspectives, because then you can work to encompass everyone’s needs. You can bring what you’re good at to the table and the group will counterbalance everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.
Daniel: I volunteered at a retirement home that had a unit for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. It could be very sad, but it helped me appreciate what I had and understand that there are solutions to all kinds of problems if you work on it. When I was a student trustee for the Ottawa Catholic School Board, we worked to get our school board to raise student scholarship amounts by 50 per cent. We also found out about resources our board had that no one knew about, and tried to find a way to increase awareness and enrich our programs. The best part of all of it was getting the adult perspective on things and then being able to contribute the student point of view.
What do you want to do to combine your interest in science and your background in community work?
Christopher: I’ve always wanted to be an inventor. My father was a handyman and I learned about things like electrical circuits when I was pretty young. I’m studying Engineering Science, which has a bit of everything, and my interest is in the biomedical, robotics and aerospace fields. I’m really passionate about innovation and I want to use engineering and design to make society better in some way.
Daniel: In high school I entered science fairs and competed nationally. I had a couple of concussions from playing hockey, so I designed a helmet and did drop tests to compare it to other helmets on the market. I currently have a Canadian patent issued and a U.S. patent pending on an improved hockey and football helmet design. One of the things I’m excited about is that I’ve only scratched the surface of where I can go. It’s not just about the little details; it’s about knowing what you want to do and working with people to make it happen. In terms of having an impact, engineering gives me that opportunity.
Learn more about the Schulich Leader Scholarships.