For nearly five decades, Paul Acchione (MechE 7T1, MEng 7T6) has been a champion of engineering across Ontario — and at his alma mater.  

A respected leader in Ontario’s energy sector, Acchione’s work helped shape the province’s nuclear power infrastructure. Through his advocacy with the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, he has also advanced policies that promote sustainable, reliable and affordable energy. 

His commitment, along with that of his wife Anna, to supporting future engineers has been equally inspiring. From his first gift to U of T Engineering’s Annual Fund forty-five years ago to the creation of the Paul & Anna Acchione First Year Engineering Award in 2025, he has consistently and generously paid forward the support he himself once received. 

For U of T Giving Day — a 24-hour fundraising campaign on March 26 — writer Kristina Kazandjian spoke with Acchione about his journey, the power of engineering and why investing in future students is one of the most meaningful legacies we can create. 

What initially drew you to engineering, and to U of T?   

From the time I was a child, I was captivated by how things worked. I was the kid who took my toys apart to see what was inside, who built a crystal radio at 12, and who disassembled my father’s car engine piece by piece. It didn’t run after I put it back together, but that failure taught me something important: I needed to learn more. Engineering wasn’t just an interest; it felt like something in my DNA. 

I began studying mechanical engineering but ultimately gravitated toward control systems, a field that demanded both mechanical and electrical expertise, and satisfied my lifelong curiosity about how complex systems function. I started university in my hometown of Windsor because, at the time, my family simply couldn’t afford for me to attend the University of Toronto, even with a first-year scholarship. 

But life has a way of opening doors. At a family wedding, I met Anna, who lived and worked in Toronto. We married after my first year, and I transferred to U of T. To this day, Anna jokes that my pension belongs to her because she helped me through school — and I’m happy to admit she’s right. 

Do you have a favourite memory from your time at U of T Engineering?  

Because Anna and I were married and living off campus, I wasn’t deeply involved in student social life. But my experience was rich in other ways. The friendships I formed during classes, labs and late nights working on projects, became some of my most meaningful.  

Many of those friends worked alongside me later in my career designing and building Ontario’s nuclear power plants. Others ventured far beyond Canada. A few, sadly, are no longer with us. But the shared memories of those formative years remain profound.

You spent your career in the energy sector and advocated for better policy and accessibility. What role do you believe engineers play in issues like sustainability and affordability? 

Engineers bring a practical, evidence-based perspective to energy policy. We understand the mechanics behind sustainability, reliability, affordability and abundance. Through the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE), our profession helped shape provincial policy, contributing to Ontario having one of the cleanest, most reliable and most affordable electrical systems in the world. 

But the work is far from finished. Right now, we waste more heat in generating electricity than it would take to heat every home in the province. Other countries with climates similar to ours have successfully integrated the electricity and thermal energy sectors, dramatically reducing overall energy consumption. Engineers must continue advocating for policies that enable this kind of sector coupling.  

Your first donation to the faculty was to the Annual Fund, and you’ve continued giving for 45 years. What inspired you to start giving back? 

Winning a scholarship helped me afford my first year of university, and that generosity stayed with me. When I graduated, I wanted to do the same for someone else. 

At the time, Anna and I were raising a young family, so large gifts weren’t possible. But the Annual Fund offered a way to make smaller contributions that, combined with others, created meaningful support for students. 

It felt good to be part of something larger, a collective effort to open doors for the next generation of engineering leaders.  

You and your wife recently established the Paul & Anna Acchione First Year Engineering Award. What impact do you hope it will have? 

Our hope is simple: to help one student each year begin their engineering journey with confidence and possibility, and to build a better future not only for themselves and their community.  

Engineers design the future we will live in. By supporting students, we’re investing in problem-solvers who will confront the challenges of tomorrow. 

What advice would you give to engineering students today who are just starting out?  

Seek out the challenges. In my career, the most rewarding moments came from tackling the hardest problems. 

Find what you love and pursue the difficult questions within it. One day, you’ll look back with pride on the people you worked alongside and the projects you had the good fortune to be part of. 

If there’s one lesson you’d like readers to take away from your journey, what would it be?  

Engineering offers a deeply rewarding career that makes life better for others. If you are in a position to help a student begin that journey, why not do it? Whether it’s a small gift to the Annual Fund or a larger commitment to a named award, every contribution has the power to change someone’s life. 

Many young people struggle with the rising costs of education. If we can ease that burden, even a little, we should. Let’s pass our good fortune forward. 

And finally, if you are able, consider supporting the causes you care about in your will. For Anna and me, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering is one of ours.

Professor Giuliano Pretti has joined the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering as an assistant professor.

“We wholeheartedly welcome our newest faculty member to the department,” says CivMin Chair Professor Marianne Hatzopoulou. “Students will benefit from the exciting new elements Professor Pretti brings to the department in teaching and research. Join us in offering our newest professor a warm welcome to CivMin.”

Writer Phill Snel spoke with Pretti to learn more about his research direction, passion for teaching, and what attracted him to Toronto. He has relocated from Italy to join the department.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Let me start by first saying that it is a great pleasure and honour to be at the University of Toronto, and I’m very much looking forward to working in such a vibrant and stimulating environment. That said, my name is Giuliano, and I’m originally from Italy. I began my educational journey in my hometown of Brescia, in northern Italy, where I earned both my Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and my Master’s degree in structural engineering. It was during this time that I became passionate about numerical tools and analyses, particularly when applied to geotechnical problems. I’m primarily motivated to design new computational models that help us better understand complex engineering phenomena.

I was fortunate to continue developing these interests during my PhD at Durham University in the UK, where I worked extensively on the Material Point Method (MPM), a specific numerical technique. The MPM method is particularly well-suited to modelling solids undergoing extreme deformations, such as those encountered in landslides or during the installation of driven piles. Later, I continued this work as a postdoctoral researcher still at Durham, and I’m now grateful for the exciting opportunity to carry my research forward here in Toronto.

Could you explain the focus of your research?
My main area of expertise is computational geotechnics, especially when soils subjected to extreme deformations start to deform consistently and behave more like liquids. These topics have a wide range of applications in soil mechanics, since basically all infrastructure is either founded on soil or, in some cases — such as earth dams — entirely made of it, and soil is not a standardized material, which can make it particularly unpredictable.

Much of my recent work has been applied to power cable risk assessment in the offshore wind industry. These cables are typically buried in the seabed and are exposed to hazards such as anchor strikes. Together with the team at Durham, I’ve helped develop tools that support industry decisions on appropriate cable burial depths, accounting for soil conditions and maritime traffic. To do this, we created a physics-based software capable of realistically modelling the anchor embedding process across different types of soil.

Why did you choose U of T?
I believe the University of Toronto embodies everything a leading research university should offer: outstanding people and exceptional infrastructure. Both are essential for producing impactful, forward-looking research. Even though I’m still at the very beginning of my time here, I’ve already found my colleagues to be incredibly welcoming and supportive and I see great potential for meaningful collaborations.

U of T is widely recognized as a global centre of excellence, and I will try my best to contribute to that reputation with my own expertise. I’ve also been impressed by the postgraduate students I’ve met so far — they demonstrate all the qualities needed to succeed. From an infrastructure standpoint, being part of such a large and well-resourced institution opens up tremendous opportunities, and I fully intend to make the most of what U of T has to offer.

What are you most looking forward to in your new position?
I’m particularly eager to further develop my research through collaborations and student supervision. I’m deeply passionate about my work, and I enjoy challenging and being challenged on ideas, discussing them in great detail, and leveraging all the inputs to create new models that can make a contribution.

At its core, engineering is about exploring solutions that haven’t yet been explored and translating them into tangible impact. More broadly, I think I am simply looking forward to doing my job as a researcher and as an advisor.

As a new professor, what one piece of advice would you give to students?
It’s always hard to give general advice, as I believe that anyone has their own path and experience. As a general suggestion, I would circulate back to passion and intrinsic motivation. When you’re driven by something that genuinely resonates with you, something that pushes you to go the extra mile with a bigger purpose in mind, I believe you’re doing more than just studying or working; you’re growing as a human being.

This kind of motivation can move mountains (with appropriate geotechnical caution), and as we move into the future, we will need people equipped to face unexpected challenges with curiosity and resilience.

Finally, is there anything fun, or unusual, about yourself you’d like to share with our CivMin audience?
I played football — or soccer, depending on where you’re from — for 19 years. Through the sport, I learned a great deal about teamwork and the importance of individual contributions within a collective effort. Although I stopped playing some time ago, I still fondly remember the thrill before matches.

With my alma mater’s team in Brescia, we won a gold medal at the Italian National University Championships in 2013. I certainly wasn’t the star player, but I look back with great pleasure on the journey and the shared experience that led to such an unexpected and rewarding outcome.

Professors George Eleftheriades (ECE) and Yu Sun (MIE) have been elected as international members of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The NAE provides engineering leadership in service to the United States and globally; its members rank among the world’s most accomplished engineers. 

Eleftheriades is a pioneer in the field of metamaterials, which are artificial electromagnetic materials that can bend waves and process light in ways not found in nature. He has not only created new classes of metamaterials, but has also applied them to invent a whole range of groundbreaking electromagnetic devices. The applications for this technology are wide-ranging, and include sub-wavelength imaging for medical diagnostics, very small and efficient antennas for communications, wireless power transfer and light harvesting, and even “cloaking,” where incident waves are bent around an object in a way that renders it transparent.   

Eleftheriades was also a trailblazer in the early development of metamaterial antennas. These antennas, with extremely wide-scan angle coverage, are used in wireless communications, defence systems, and collision avoidance automotive radar systems. For example, metamaterial antennas have been used to implement ground terminals for broadband internet through low-earth orbit satellites to provide internet access to remote and impoverished regions. Several innovations by Eleftheriades have been transferred to the commercial sector through collaborations with industrial partners such as Dell Canada, Google, Nortel, RIM, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei Canada and Mitsubishi Electric.   

Eleftheriades is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Royal Society of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He has received many of the most prestigious awards in his field, including the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Distinguished Achievement Award, and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award. 

Sun has made seminal contributions to our ability to manipulate micro- and nanometer-sized objects, which is critical for both scientific discovery and industrial applications. He invented the world’s first fully closed-loop controlled robotic nanomanipulation system that can operate inside the high vacuum chamber of electron microscopes for automated single transistor probing and in-situ electromechanical materials testing. His nanomanipulation instruments have been licensed to industry for semiconductor failure analysis and materials testing, and are now used worldwide.  

Sun has also applied his expertise in nano-instrumentation to make breakthroughs in robotic surgery at the cellular level. He developed the world’s first robotic system for performing precision surgery on single moving sperm and ovarian cells. His robotic cell surgery technique resulted in the first human robotic fertilization and has significantly improved clinical outcomes in infertility treatment. To tackle tumour surgery at the single-cell level, he spearheaded the development of magnetic cell manipulation instruments generating multi-modal magnetic fields to mechanically kill cancerous cells from the inside. 

Sun is one of only a handful of Canadians to be elected to all three of the national academies — the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and IEEE. 

“On behalf of the faculty, congratulations to Professor Eleftheriades and Professor Sun on this significant recognition,” says Christopher Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering.  

“Their election to the NAE demonstrates the international reputation of our faculty members and the global impact of their research.”  

A new strategic partnership between the University of Toronto and Ericsson will advance the technological capabilities that underlie cell phone networks — leading to faster, more efficient and more cost-effective service in Canada and beyond. 

The initiative officially launched on U of T’s St. George campus on February 18, highlighting possible topics for future collaboration and identifying opportunities for recruiting students. It brings together Canada’s preeminent research university with one of the largest players in telecommunications research and development in the world. 

The partnership was awarded to U of T after a national Request for Proposals, in which Ericsson invited Canadian universities to demonstrate how they could help develop deep fundamental insights and advances that will eventually lead to the next generation of products. 

It follows more than a decade of previous collaboration between Ericsson and researchers at U of T, and will set the framework for a deeper relationship that could extend into the next decade. 

While it will strengthen the research and development ecosystem within the Greater Toronto region, its impact will be felt at a national level, contributing to better connectivity and stronger infrastructure to support future technologies 

“This partnership will foster cutting-edge research, develop world-class talent, and support the creation of secure and reliable technologies for the future of wireless communications,” said Marcos Cavaletti, Head of Ericsson’s Ottawa site. 

“As 5G continues to drive profound changes across industries and societies, Ericsson and the University of Toronto are committed to tackling these challenges together.” 

U of T Engineering professor Ben Liang (ECE) and his team have been working with Ericsson since 2013. 

“One of my PhD students started an internship with Ericsson, and that’s how we got started,” says Liang.  

“After that, they had a national call for proposals, and our team was successful with that. Every year since then, I’ve had some collaboration with them.” 

Liang says he’s worked on both the software and hardware sides of wireless communications infrastructure. 

“A lot of it relates to questions about how to optimize the allocation of resources, and that includes both spectrum resources and power resources,” says Liang. 

“Power is expensive, so if you use less, you lower the cost of the service. And improving the use of spectrum means you can move more data through the network, which leads to faster download and upload speeds.” 

“We are also investigating longer-term challenges, such as enabling multiple network service providers to share the same hardware infrastructure in crowded venues, and how artificial intelligence and wireless networking can be tightly integrated in future systems.” 

Another U of T Engineering professor, Ravi Adve (ECE) has also had long-standing collaborations with Ericsson. 

“We started in about 2017, through a collaboration with another professor who is now at Ontario Tech University,” says Adve. 

“We’ve been looking at a lot of the same things as Ben and his team, but we’ve also been looking at things like system architecture.” 

“Right now, the model is to have a big base station that covers a large region. An alternative approach would be to deploy more, but smaller stations. They would use less power and be more efficient, because users are closer to a station on average. However, this approach brings up new challenges that need to be addressed, so that’s what we’re working on.” 

Both Liang and Adve hope to continue collaborating with Ericsson under the new partnership agreement, and additional faculty members from across U of T are expected to join them. 

Another key aspect of the partnership is a talent development stream. This initiative will include contributions from a number of centres and programs across U of T Engineering, including the Centre for Analytics & Artificial Intelligence Engineering (Carte), the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP) and the new MEng Extended Full-Time Co-op program, which launched last fall. 

The talent development stream will train highly qualified personnel who are not only well-versed in the development of new wireless communications technologies, but who have the sector-wide perspective and leadership training to oversee their future implementation. 

“We’re very proud that U of T has been successful in this process,” says Professor Leah Cowen, U of T’s Vice-President, Research & Innovation. 

“We have a long and positive track record of catalyzing next-generation technology with Ericsson, and with these types of industrial collaborations in general. It’s a win-win proposition, enabling us to apply the expertise of our researchers, enhance the skills of our students, and elevate the global competitiveness of a major global technology innovator with major R&D operations right here in our own backyard. This strategic partnership is a great opportunity to take things to the next level,” she says.

“Ontario is proudly home to a robust sector of researchers whose ground-breaking discoveries cement the province as a global innovator in technology,” says Nolan Quinn, Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security.

“Our government proudly supports this partnership between Ericsson and the University of Toronto, which will equip our researchers with the cutting-edge tools they need to design, drive and lead the future of mobile communications technology.”

Looking to establish a partnership with U of T? Come in through the Blue Door! 

An AI tool developed by U of T Engineering professor Nicole Weckman (ISTEP, ChemE) can quickly diagnose infections caused by Candida auris (C. auris) —  a pathogenic fungus that has risen to the top of global threat lists for hospital-acquired infections. The organism has been behind many deadly disease outbreaks in hospitals and has developed resistance to multiple common antifungal drugs, making it difficult to diagnose and treat. 

The new diagnostic platform is called digital SHERLOCK (dSHERLOCK) and was introduced in a study published recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering. It was developed by Weckman and her collaborators while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. 

The tool builds on an earlier technology known as Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unlocking (SHERLOCK), which was created by Professor James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at MIT and a founding member of the Wyss Institute. It uses CRISPR-Cas proteins to detect unique DNA sequences that can help identify which pathogen is causing an infection. 

dSHERLOCK takes this system to the next level by bringing in the power of AI. Machine learning algorithms are used to measure and analyze the fluorescence produced by thousands of tiny CRISPR reactions at once, which allows quantitative measurements of how much of a pathogen is in a sample in less than 20 minutes.   

The international research team — co-led by Collins and Professor David Walt of the Wyss Institute’s Diagnostics for Human and Planetary Health platform — was assembled in response to several outbreaks of C. auris infections in hospitals around the world. 

These outbreaks highlight the need for enhanced diagnostic tools to help prevent the spread of infections in our healthcare systems. The appearance of treatment resistant C. auris strains also poses major health risks to immune-compromised individuals, such as patientsreceiving chemotherapy or nursing home residents.  

“There are two challenges to dealing with C. auris outbreaks,” says Weckman.  

“The first challenge is diagnosing that the infection is caused by C. auris and the second challenge is determining which antifungal treatment will be most effective.”  

Currently, determining if C. auris is resistant to a particular antifungal treatment can take up to a week, whereas patients suffering from the infection require immediate treatment. 

Weckman joined the team at the Wyss Institute in 2020 to help dive deeper into SHERLOCK’s CRISPR-mediated detection mechanism to speed up the diagnosis process.  

“My postdoctoral work with Professor Collins was focused on developing streamlined, one-step CRISPR diagnostics that detected C. auris genes and single base mutations in C. auris DNA that are associated with resistance to antifungals,” says Weckman. 

“We found that CRISPR reactions detecting DNA with a mutation generated fluorescence at a different rate than DNA without the mutation. We then used machine learning to analyze the fluorescence signals allowing us to quantify how much of a particular mutation was in the sample in only 40 minutes,” she says. 

“The capabilities that we are introducing with dSHERLOCK satisfy the major clinical requirements for a next-generation assay to rapidly identify and quantify the C. auris burden in easily obtained patient samples,” says Collins, who is co-senior author of the study. 

“This has not been possible using previous diagnostic methods and is a technological feat that, in addition to CRISPR engineering, required us to deeply integrate the SHERLOCK technology with the Walt group’s cutting-edge single molecule detection technology and a tailored machine learning approach.”  

Since establishing her research group at the University of Toronto in January 2023, Weckman has carried on her research into detecting antimicrobial resistant Candida infections. 

She received a New Connections Grant from the Emerging & Pandemic Infections Consortium to collaborate on this project with Dr. Robert Kozak, clinical microbiologist at Shared Hospital Laboratory located at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology at the University of Toronto.. 

Weckman Lab member Amy Heathcote (ChemE MASc, 2T5) recently completed her MASc designing CRISPR diagnostics for three other Candida species that can cause severe invasive infections: Candida albicans, Candida parapsilosis and Candida glabrata. 

Heathcote also investigated how to engineer CRISPR systems to reliably detect antimicrobial resistance mutations, even for particularly hard to detect DNA sequences of interest. 

Researchers are optimistic about the potential future applications of dSHERLOCK against other infections and viruses. 

“The dSHERLOCK platform has much broader utility beyond the C. auris threat: by allowing us to refit the specifics of the CRISPR-based detection machinery it can be relatively easily adopted to detect, quantify and characterize multiple other pathogens that pose serious health problems,” says Walt. 

Weckman — who is also the Paul Cadario Chair in Global Engineering and a Core Research Faculty member with the Centre for Global Engineering (GGEN) at the University of Toronto —is encouraged by the ability to deploy this platform in international healthcare settings.  

“Two of the major advantages of the CRISPR diagnostic platform are that it can be easily redesigned to detect many different infectious pathogens and it can be run at room temperature without the need for costly equipment,” says Weckman.  

“Our group is looking at how we can use this technology, beyond C. auris diagnosis, to help tackle global challenges in healthcare, water quality, and agriculture,” says Weckman.

Engineering talent tends to run in families — and for the Ying family, the engineering spirit also lies at the heart of a gift that will long outlast themselves. 

Yvonne Ying (EngSci 9T6), Irene Ying (ChemE 0T4) and Ivan Ying (ChemE 0T5) all graduated from U of T Engineering before going on to complete medical degrees: Irene and Ivan studied medicine at U of T, while Yvonne went to the University of Calgary. Their older sister Ethel Ying is also a physician, having graduated from U of T’s Faculty of Medicine (now known as the Temerty Faculty of Medicine) in 1997. 

Recently, all four siblings came together to create two new annual student awards in honour of their parents: the Pamela & Wei Ming Ying Engineering Award and the Pamela & Wei Ming Ying MD Award. Both awards are based on financial need, and both will be matched by funding from the university itself. 

“Our father has a PhD in engineering, and he was a professor of mechanical engineering in Singapore and Hong Kong,” says Yvonne. 

“Honestly, I think he’s a little disappointed that we all became doctors instead of engineers,” says Ivan. 

“But I do think having an engineering background helps a lot in the work we do. If you think of a project like the fourth-year plant design course we take in chemical engineering, it’s all about teamwork and problem solving. That’s good preparation for the day-to-day work of medicine, and many other fields as well.” 

Irene says that while she was always interested in using mathematics and science, her decision to choose U of T Engineering was in no small part influenced by the experience of her older sibling. 

“I liked the practical aspects of it, the chance to use my knowledge to take on big challenges,” she says. 

“But I also remembered the parties that Yvonne used to have at our house while I was still in elementary school: dozens of her friends from U of T Engineering would come over, and they’d stay all night. I was impressed by the camaraderie, by how tight-knit this group of people was. I knew it was a community I wanted to be part of.” 

“It’s true, so many of them have become lifelong friends,” says Yvonne. 

“We’re still getting together for dinner, even though we graduated decades ago. It’s those foundational bonding experiences, like the plant design course that Ivan mentioned, that keep you connected.” 

All three alumni say that one of the purposes of the new awards is to help ensure that future generations will get to have the same formative experiences they did. 

In creating them, they are honouring not only their father’s legacy as a professor of mechanical engineering, but also their mother’s beliefs about the importance of giving back. 

“Our parents have always emphasized the importance of education and of being grateful for the opportunities we’ve had,” says Yvonne. 

“We are very lucky to be from Toronto and to have a great educational institution in our back yard. It’s been the foundation for the careers we’ve had since.” 

It’s not the first time the Ying family has donated to U of T: their names are also featured on a bench in the Myhal Centre, a chair in Convocation Hall, and even on the paving stones outside Front Campus. 

But these awards are particularly special, so much so that they kept them secret from their parents — revealing them only as a Christmas gift this past winter. 

“At this point in their lives, they already have everything they need, and they’ve been clear that they don’t want more things,” says Irene. 

“A gift like this is far more meaningful, because it will keep on giving in perpetuity.” 

Join the Ying siblings in fostering the next generation of engineering leaders — explore more ways to support U of T Engineering.