U of T Engineers got a big boost for their work in the developing world, thanks to grants from Grand Challenges Canada (GCC). Four of eight grants awarded to U of T researchers go to Engineering faculty: Timothy Chan (MIE), Radhakrishnan Mahadevan (ChemE), Javad Mostaghimi (MIE) and Edmond Young (MIE).
“This is a testament to the outstanding quality and standard of research here, and reflects the global impact U of T Engineering has,” said Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), Vice-Dean, Research, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.
Overall, the U of T research includes applications ranging from implementing a low-cost test for diagnosing malaria in Tanzania to reducing ambulance response times in Bangladesh.
The U of T researchers have been granted a collective $890,095 from GCC, through is ‘Stars in Global Health’ program. The focus of the funding – which comes from the Government of Canada – is on healthcare innovations that could transform the way disease is treated in the developing world.
“Innovation powers development leading to better health and more jobs. I feel proud that Canada, through Grand Challenges Canada, has supported almost 300 bold ideas to date in our Stars in Global Health program,” said Dr. Peter A. Singer, chief executive officer, GCC and a professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine. “This is one of the largest pipelines of innovations in global health in the world today.”
In addition to the projects of U of T researchers, GCC funded 75 other initiatives being led by researchers from a variety of other countries.
“On behalf of the U of T research community, congratulations to these global health experts,” said Professor Paul Young (CivE), Vice President, Research and Innovation at U of T. “We are thrilled that these scientists are contributing to the global fight to improve health and health care in developing countries. The health challenges people face are as difficult as ever, but researchers like these people will make a vital impact in collaboration with others around the world. We are deeply thankful to Grand Challenges Canada for this important investment.”
The U of T Grand Challenges Canada recipients from Engineering and their videos are:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrEfm98N2wU?feature=player_embedded]
Professor Timothy Chan, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
AERO: Ambulance Emergency Response Optimization system for developing countries
“We will reduce ambulance response times by developing a software system leveraging existing infrastructure that optimizes ambulance pre-positioning locations, and provides real-time travel time estimation and route optimization info to drivers.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnOL9n06xJI?feature=player_embedded]
Professor Radhakrishnan Mahadevan, Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry
Low cost TB drugs created using synthetic biology (India)
“An estimated 9 million people are infected with multi drug-resistant TB; 1.4 million die per year. Successful completion of this University of Toronto-led project will lead to an innovative yeast-based bioprocess for the low-cost synthesis of antibiotic and lower the cost (now $5,000 per patient) of treating the disease in the developing world.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFlCQPUhjoA?feature=player_embedded]
Professor Javad Mostaghimi, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Development of Antibacterial Copper Coatings for Reducing Healthcare-Associated Infections
“Copper and its alloys are known to efficiently kill bacteria. The idea is to deposit a well-adhered thin layer of copper-based coatings on frequently touched surfaces of two intensive care units and compare them to a standard ICU over a long period.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muVuusz-ewU?feature=player_embedded]
Professor Edmond Young, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Simple liquid microculture assay for diagnosing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis
“Current methods of detecting TB remain inadequate for low-resource settings. Our idea is to develop new technology for detecting TB via direct liquid microculture that is cheap, easy to use, and able to assess resistance to many drugs at once.”
Additional U of T recipients of grants from Grand Challenges are:
Professor Shana Kelley, Biochemistry
Lab-free, low-cost malaria testing
Professor Stephanie Nixon, Physical Therapy and Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Free new online resources for the rehabilitation of HIV-related disability patients in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
Professor Barry Rosen, U of T Obstetrics and Gynaecology and University Health Network
Taking a LEEP! Implementing a “See and LEEP” strategy for women in Western Kenya with positive cervical cancer screening
Professor G. Andrew Woolley, Chemistry
A simple yeast-based blood screening assay
Six members of the U of T Engineering community have been recognized by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) with Ontario Professional Engineers Awards.
Professor Stavros Argyropoulos (MSE) has been awarded a Research and Development Medal. Alumni Michael Branch (ElecE 0T3) received the Young Engineer Award, Carlos de Oliveira (CivE MASc 0T6) garnered the Entrepreneurship Medal and Charles Richard Donnelly (MinE 7T6, MASc CivE 8T1) received the Engineering Medal in the Engineering Excellence category. Anthony (Tony) Pasteris, president of Minerva Canada (a valued partner to the Faculty in safety education), received the Citizenship Award. University Professor Michael Sefton (ChemE, IBBME) is this year’s recipient of the Gold Medal, Ontario’s most prestigious engineering honour.
Throughout his 40-year career, Professor Argyropoulos has conducted pioneering research on the kinetics and assimilation of additions in liquid metals, thereby reducing the time and cost involved in developing new metal alloys. In addition, he has made significant contributions to the engineering profession through his teaching and mentoring of young engineers, his partnerships with industry and his leadership in technical societies. Professor Argyropoulos’ research was recognized with the Canadian Metal Chemistry Award in 2009. In 2010, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.
Michael Branch is the founder and CEO of Inovex Inc., a web and mobile software firm specializing in products and services for the healthcare and energy sectors. He has been instrumental in developing Inovex’s lineup of secure healthcare data collection and decision-making tools for physicians and public health policy drivers in Ontario. A committed volunteer within and outside the engineering community, Branch is currently the President of the University of Toronto Engineering Alumni Association. He also serves as a Board Member of Streetwise Actors and a member of the Haltech Regional Innovation Centre.
Carlos de Oliveira is President and CEO of Cast Connex Corporation, a company specializing in technology that enables steel structures to better withstand earthquakes. He co-founded Cast Connex (with Michael Gray) in 2007, based on a technology he developed during his MASc thesis work at U of T. de Oliveira has overseen the research, development and commercialization of several innovative product lines, from prototype development through to marketing and sales. Under his leadership, Cast Connex’s products have been adopted worldwide by industry-leading architectural and construction firms.
Charles Richard (Rick) Donnelly serves as Global Director of Water Power at Hatch Ltd. in Niagara Falls. As a globally recognized leader in dam safety, he has travelled the world over – U.S., Chile, Peru, Uganda, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, India and Iran – to conduct hydroelectric feasibility studies. His expertise includes designing and constructing concrete and embankment dams, tunnels and underground structures. For his excellence as an engineering professional, Donnelly has been honoured with many awards, including Ontario’s highest award for dam safety both in Canada and internationally. Over the course of his illustrious career, he also authored nearly 100 technical papers.
Throughout his career, Tony Pasteris has developed and taught various safety, health and environment training programs around the world. In 2006, he was appointed president of Minerva Canada, a not-for-profit organization which promotes the integration of occupational health and safety into the curricula of Canadian engineering schools. Over the past seven years, Pasteris has significantly grown this organization and created a network of partner schools (including U of T) and faculty members committed to creating a safety education curriculum for Ontario universities.
University Professor Michael Sefton is a pioneer in tissue engineering and a leader in biomaterials, biomedical engineering and regenerative medicine. He was the first to recognize the importance of combining living cells with synthetic polymers to create artificial organs and tissues. A former president of the U.S. Society for Biomaterials, Professor Sefton has been a leader in his profession and in the academic community. As director of IBBME from 1999-2005, he led its development into one of the best institutes of its kind in North America. His many honours include the Killam Prize in Engineering and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada.
“I am delighted that OSPE and PEO have recognized these outstanding members of our community for their accomplishments, their leadership and their service,” said Cristina Amon, Dean, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. “On behalf of the Faculty I offer my heartfelt congratulations and my thanks for their exemplary contributions to the engineering profession.”
The Ontario Professional Engineers Awards recognize engineering excellence and community service. Eleven awards in total will be given out this year. The recipients will be honoured at a gala at the Toronto Congress Centre on November 23, 2013.
Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) and the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine have developed the first-ever method for creating living, three-dimensional human heart tissue that behaves like mature heart tissue.
Importantly, the method can be used to make models of both healthy and arrhythmic beating heart tissue. Findings were published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) this week.
Arrhythmia is a relatively common condition in which the feedback of electrical pulses of the heart is interrupted, leading to heartbeats that might be too slow, too fast, or irregular. For some people, it can be a life-threatening condition. Having good, flexible models, such as this, can help advance strategies for treating heart disease.
Generally, beating human heart cells aren’t easily grown, and there have been barriers in developing models of heart disease on this small scale. The researchers, however, figured out the right mix of structures and cell-types associated with heart function to do this.
“We can now combine this compositional knowledge with electrical stimulation and mechanical stimulation to obtain a truly biomimetic system necessary for cardiac research,” said corresponding author Associate Professor Milica Radisic, from IBBME and the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Science. She is also the Canada Research Chair in Functional Cardiovascular Tissue Engineering.
Radisic was named one of the “Top Researchers Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review, and was awarded the 2012 Young Engineer Achievement Award by Engineers Canada. The research was performed under the supervision of Professor Peter Zandstra (IBBME), who was named a University of Toronto Inventor of the Year in 2011-12 and recipient of the 2013 Till & McCullough Award. He is the Canadian Research Chair in Stem Cell Bioengineering.
The study marks the first time that researchers defined and formulated the precise type and ratio of cell types that produce highly functional cardiac tissue.
“Hearts are not just composed of one type of cell,” said fourth-year IBBME PhD Student Nimalan Thavandiran and first author of the study. But until now, researchers did not know how to mix different cell types in engineered heart tissue so the tissue would achieve the composition and maturity level of the native human heart.
Thavandiran solved this mystery by separating out specific heart-related cell types derived from human pluripotent stem cells and mixing them back together. Using various metrics associated with functional hearts – contraction, electrical activity and cell alignment – Thavandiran was able to develop a formula for engineering highly functional heart tissue.
“The composition of the cells is vital,” said Thavandiran. “We discovered that a mixture of 25 per cent cardiac fibroblasts (skin-like cells) to 75 per cent cardiomyocytes (heart cells) worked best.” The carefully composed cell ratios were then grown in three-dimensional ‘wires’ that mimic the structure of human heart tissue.
“An exciting result of our study is our ability to have a miniaturized model that can be used to measure normal and diseased human heart responses to drug therapies,” said Zandstra, study coauthor.
After discovering the right combination of cells, the researchers then designed the first-ever, three-dimensional arrhythmia tissue model. And with this combination, the researchers were able to engineer a circular tissue model associated with arrhythmia.
The team then applied electrical pulses to the arrhythmic tissues, ‘zapping’ the irregularly beating tissue into a state of regular contractions. The work opens the door to better understanding and treating arrhythmias.
Stressing the urgent need for highly functional heart tissue to perform important drug screening research, Thavandiran said, “We’re making a really big push to bring this model to the marketplace.”
The team has been working with the Centre for the Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) to commercialize their tissue modelling platform.
Professor Emeritus Andrew K.S. Jardine (MIE) was honoured by the International Society of Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM) with the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award for his exceptional dedication and contributions to advancing the field of Engineering Asset Management. Professor Jardine is the second ever recipient of the award.
Professor Jardine’s research includes preventive maintenance on machinery to ensure reliable operation, investigating the frequency needed to check protective devices, such as pressure safety valves, and determining the life-cycle cost of equipment and when it should be replaced.
As director of the Centre for Maintenance Optimization & Reliability Engineering (C-MORE), he and his team apply real-world research in engineering asset management in areas such as condition-based maintenance, spares management and maintenance and repair contracts.
In his acceptance speech, Professor Jardine remarked, “Today, organizations have become convinced that asset management decisions have to be based on evidence, as opposed to the view of the expert. To this end, I have been very fortunate to have collaborated over the years with many organizations throughout the world to ensure that their asset management decisions are based on evidence.”
Professor Jardine is also an accomplished author. His second book, Maintenance, Replacement and Reliability (1973), is in its sixth printing, while the bestsellingMaintenance, Replacement & Reliability: Theory and Applications (2006), co-authored with A.H.C. Tsang, is now in its second edition (2013). He is also the author of two reliability optimization software programs licensed to organizations in transportation, mining, electrical utilities and process industries. “
Congratulations to Professor Jardine for this significant recognition by the International Society of Engineering Asset Management,” said Professor Jean Zu, Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. “Professor Jardine and the C-MORE research group, under his leadership, have contributed greatly to the field of Asset Management. On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate him on this great distinction.”
ISEAM is a multidisciplinary professional learned society dedicated to the development and recognition of Asset Management as an integrated and important body of knowledge.
Professor Jardine was recognized October 31 during the 8th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM) held jointly with the 3rd International Conference on Utility Management & Safety (ICUMAS) in Hong Kong. For more information about Professor Jardine’s research, visit the C-MORE website.
Sixteen students and four faculty members from the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) depart today to visit Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, China.
The four-day visit is the first face-to-face meeting for the cross-cultural capstone design project teams and their supervisors.
Capstone design is a fourth-year course requirement, where students apply their disciplinary knowledge and skills to conduct an engineering analysis and design for an industry-based need. A total of five projects, three from MIE and two from PKU, are included in the cross-cultural branch of capstone, where the project is shared between two international universities.
While the lengthy travel time and jetlag must be faced, Sahil Gupta (MechE 1T3 + PEY) has never before been to China, and is excited to meet his project teammates on the other side of the world.
Since the start of the term, Gupta and his three MIE team members have been communicating with their four PKU counterparts over Skype.
“Our PKU teammates have to submit their own program deliverables, as do we, and it’s interesting to see what the differences there are,” said Gupta of the group collaborating to compile one report.
His team’s project is a Portable Assisted Mobility Device (PAMD), a small power-assisted vehicle that can transport an individual and small item of luggage, but is also lightweight enough to be taken on public transport and carried. Their project is also part of the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) global challenge, a two-year project for which U of T Engineering received PACE’s second place for industrial design.
“We’ve been reworking last year’s design and seeing if there are alternatives,” said Gupta. He and his teammates will develop a PAMD prototype this year.
“Getting a different perspective from external input can really change the way you think, and help you develop more ideas,” said Gupta of the experience to date. “Given how businesses operate today, we as engineers will work with more people globally.”
The brief visit to Peking University will require all teams to prepare for project presentations on Sunday. The students will then have one day to see local sites with their new PKU friends.
“The cross-cultural capstone is an exceptional opportunity for some of our brightest undergraduates to work with students abroad,” said Professor Kamran Behdinan (MIE), NSERC Chair in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design and coordinator of international capstone design projects.
The PKU students will have an opportunity to visit Toronto when they participate in final project presentations during the MIE Capstone Design Showcase in April.
Invisibility cloaking is no longer the stuff of science fiction: two researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering have demonstrated an effective invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable and adaptive to different types and sizes of objects.
Professor George Eleftheriades (ECE) and PhD student Michael Selvanayagam have designed and tested a new approach to cloaking – by surrounding an object with small antennae that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field. The radiated field cancels out any waves scattering off the cloaked object. Their paper ‘Experimental demonstration of active electromagnetic cloaking’ appears today in the journal Physical Review X.
“We’ve taken an electrical engineering approach, but that’s what we are excited about,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s very practical.”
Picture a mailbox sitting on the street. When light hits the mailbox and bounces back into your eyes, you see the mailbox. When radio waves hit the mailbox and bounce back to your radar detector, you detect the mailbox. Eleftheriades and Selvanayagam’s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennae that radiate a field away from the box, cancelling out any waves that would bounce back. In this way, the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar.
“We’ve demonstrated a different way of doing it,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s very simple: instead of surrounding what you’re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennae, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.”
Their experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennae. The system can be scaled up to cloak larger objects using more loops, and Eleftheriades says the loops could become printed and flat, like a blanket or skin. Currently the antenna loops must be manually attuned to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel, but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennae, adjusting to different waves in real time, much like the technology behind noise-cancelling headphones.
Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006, but early systems were necessarily large and clunky – if you wanted to cloak a car, for example, in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively ‘shield’ it from electromagnetic radiation. The sheer size and inflexibility of the approach makes it impractical for real-world uses. Earlier attempts to make thin cloaks were not adaptive and active, and could work only for specific small objects.
Beyond obvious applications, such as hiding military vehicles or conducting surveillance operations, this cloaking technology could eliminate obstacles – for example, structures interrupting signals from cellular base stations could be cloaked to allow signals to pass by freely. The system can also alter the signature of a cloaked object, making it appear bigger, smaller, or even shifting it in space. And though their tests showed the cloaking system works with radio waves, re-tuning it to work with Terahertz (T-rays) or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures.
“There are more applications for radio than for light,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s just a matter of technology – you can use the same principle for light, and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research.”