Groundbreaking research by Professor Milos Popovic (IBBME) to restore movement in the hands of quadriplegic patients is featured in today’s The Globe & Mail.
Professor Popovic’s treatment focuses on functional electrical stimulation, in which electrical pulses are used to contract muscles in the patient’s body. This allows a patient to grasp things with his or her hand. Over the course of repeated treatments, the patient’s nervous system can be retrained so that he or she can eventually grasp items without using the electrical stimulation.
The experimental treatment is currently being studied through a national clinical trial being led by Professor Popovic and which is being funded through the Rick Hansen Institute.
Professor Popovic is a Core Professor in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Toronto Rehab Chair in Spinal Cord Injury Research at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.
Read the story to learn more about Professor Popovic’s work.
Professor Emeritus John Senders (MIE) is among a number of U of T professors who took home a 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for their “improbable research.”
The awards ceremony, which takes place at Harvard University, proves that research can be fun – and funny. Professor Senders won in the “public safety” category for “conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him,” as seen in this YouTube video from 1967. In it, he notes calmly that “the shorter the interval between looks, the more difficult that section of road is to drive,” as he speeds down a Boston highway with his view increasingly obscured.
For more information on Professor Sender’s research and other U of T winners, read the full article in Maclean’s.
The University of Toronto’s Human-Powered Vehicle Team placed third overall at the 2011 World Human-Powered Speed Challenge, held in Battle Mountain, Nevada.
The competition took place from September 12 to 17 on a flat and almost perfectly straight eight-kilometre stretch of highway in the Nevada desert.
The U of T team had a top speed of 117 km/h, which was a personal best for racer and PhD candidate Todd Reichert, who spent the last year cycling and speed skating, working with the Peak Centre for Human Performance, in Ottawa. He now boasts the title of ninth fastest human of all time.
He was joined on the road by fellow U of T racers Victor Ragusila, Trefor Evans and Aidan Muller, who all reached speeds in excess of 97km/h throughout the week.
The bike, named Vortex, was constructed by a team that included both undergraduate and graduate engineering students. The primary team members include Ragusila, Evans, Muller and Reichert, in addition to Marissa Goldsmith, Keith Hui, Alfie Tham, Rosemary Chiu and Vladislav Ternovsky.
The project gives students a chance to get hands on experience in engineering design as well as exposing them to leading-edge construction methods with carbon fibre and other space-age materials. To design a vehicle that can reach 117 km/hr on less than one horsepower requires a novel design approach.
“With a car, you can always get it to go faster by putting in a bigger engine,” says Reichert. “The starting point for a human-powered vehicle is one of limited resources in the form of a one horsepower engine. If you want to go faster, you have to be smarter. It’s a design philosophy that’s very important for today’s engineers.”
In addition to being designed for top speed, the bike is capable of carrying groceries, navigating tight turns and going over speed bumps. It was originally designed to race in the “Utility” class of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Human-Powered Vehicle Challenge. The team scored first place out of a field of more than 30 universities in the 2011 Challenge.
The team has already started work on next year’s design, which they believe will be able to break the current land-speed record of 133.3 km/hr.
Read about the team’s success in the Toronto Star .
The U of T Human-Powered Vehicle Team is not the only group of engineers surpassing personal bests. See what the Blue Sky Solar Racing Team has built here.
An invention by Mechanical Engineering graduate Bradley Pierik (MechE 0T9) that brings clean water to the developing world is profiled in today’s The Globe & Mail.
Pierik invented a hand-held device that purifies unfiltered water by pressing it through a fibre membrane. The product is now sold through his company, Twothirds Water Inc., and is focused on providing drinkable water in developing nations.
To learn more about the invention and Pierik’s novel engineering solution to a pressing global challenge, click here.
Rezwana Sharmin (EngSci 1T0 + PEY) has wanted to inspire young girls to pursue engineering since her very first year at U of T.
Sharmin got her first taste of it while working as an instructor’s assistant for the Faculty’s outreach program, Girls Science & Engineering Saturday. “The instructor was such an inspiration, to the girls, and to me. She made me and everyone else think, ‘Yes, I could do this.’”
Fast-forward to this year, and Sharmin has the opportunity to tell girls that, yes, they can do this too.
On October 1, engineering schools across Ontario hosted the event, which is organized in partnership with the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE). Go ENG Girl gives girls in grades seven to ten the chance to explore opportunities in engineering through a number of hands-on activities. Go ENG Girl also provides the students and their parents with the information they need to choose the right high school courses in order to study engineering at the post-secondary level.
U of T’s event is organized by the Engineering Student Outreach Office, which welcomed more than 130 participants.
Throughout the day, Sharmin, her fellow instructors, and volunteers led the girls through engineering-oriented activities including a design challenge that showed participants how science and engineering can save polar bears.
“It is crucial for U of T Engineering to host events such as Go ENG Girl,” said Dean Cristina Amon, “It is a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that engineering is about more than technology or machinery—it is a caring profession that improves people’s everyday lives and solves global challenges.”
This year’s event was Sharmin’s second time as a Go ENG Girl instructor. “The girls are so brilliant,” she said, “They come up with these creative ideas that just blow your mind.”
She hopes that events like Go ENG Girl will inspire more girls to become the engineers of tomorrow. “Girls should choose what they want to do, but sometimes they don’t consider engineering,” said Sharmin. “The ratio of girls to boys in my program is a little low, but each and every girl is amazing. So I want these girls to know that engineering is an option.”
At the University of Toronto’s Hart House, seven large blimps hover above students’ heads. The blimps – tied to the ground by delicate strings and filled with lights – was a spectacle to behold at Nuit Blanche on October 1.
Nuit Blanche is an annual night-long celebration of contemporary art with displays, exhibitions and performances occurring across Toronto, including on U of T’s St. George campus.
Led by U of T Engineering student Geoff Frost (EngSci 0T9 + PEY, IBBME MASc candidate), the Solar Blimp Design Team is unveiling an art installation that gave art goers a glimpse of their much larger and ongoing solar-powered blimp design project.
“The project itself is to build a moving ‘airship’ that is powered and navigated using solar energy,” said Frost, who hopes to complete it by the end of the year. “The art installation, on the other hand, is an immobile art piece. But we wanted to do it to involve students, the community, and to expose ourselves – us engineering students – to the world of art.”
The team of about 20 consists of mostly U of T Engineering students, but also includes students from political science at U of T, and architecture from the University of Waterloo.
Members of the Solar Blimp Design Team weren’t the only ones representing U of T Engineering, however. Several blocks away, in the lobby of the Keenan Research Centre, was the “Elephant in the Room.”
Students from the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) worked with architects to create a three-dimensional celestial elephant. The stars that made up the shape of the elephant were created with approximately 1,000 optical fibres, which were illuminated by proprietary light boxes. The sheer size of the installation meant it was a twinkling success amongst the Nuit Blanche crowd.