Professor Peter Zandstra (IBBME, ChemE) will be a keynote speaker at the 241st national meeting and exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), which takes place from March 27-31 in Anaheim, California. The event will host nearly 9,500 presentations on new discoveries that span science’s horizons, from astronomy to zoology.
Professor Zandstra will be speaking on the subject of stem cells and regenerative medicine. New technologies will be required to harness the vast potential of stem cells and regenerative medicine strategies, and Zandstra’s lecture topic will be “Synthetic stem cell niche engineering in vitro and in vivo.”
Read more about the 241st ACS meeting and exposition here.
Engineering Alumni Chirag Variawa (MSE 0T9, MIE PhD candidate) and Keith Thomas (MechE 8T7) have been elected to the 2011-2012 U of T Governing Council.
Variawa is the first graduate student governor from Engineering. As of July 1, Variawa will represent graduate students from across the University’s Constituency II, which includes Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering (School of Graduate Studies Divisions III & IV).
Variawa credits the Engineering Leaders of Tomorrow program as his platform and motivation to pursue a role in university governance. “As the current co-chair of the graduate constituency of this program, I’ve experienced first-hand how leadership affects team dynamics, communication and growth,” he said.
Now a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, Variawa believes that his current research in artificial intelligence for engineering education will benefit from his involvement with Governing Council.
“Chirag has been highly engaged in LOT both as an undergraduate and graduate student,” said Professor Greg Evans (ChemE), Co-Leader with Professor Doug Reeve (ChemE) of Engineering Leaders of Tomorrow. “It’s therefore gratifying to see him take some of what he has learned and put it into practice. His enthusiasm for leadership and commitment to making a positive difference is inspiring.”
Thomas, who is the CEO of Vive Nano, a company based on technology developed in U of T’s Department of Chemistry, was elected to the Alumnus Constituency. Prior to launching Vive Nano, he built and managed Vector Innovations, a healthcare software firm. Thomas has also led a number of large-scale projects – restructuring companies in 3 countries, managing strategy and operations projects and completing corporate finance transactions at Citibank in the U.S. and Europe.
Dow Kokam, a leading large-format battery system producer, announced today that it will supply eCAMION Inc., a Canadian green-energy solutions provider, with advanced lithium-ion technology to provide stationary energy storage solutions for a Canadian utility project supported by Sustainable Development Technology of Canada.
The project will integrate Dow Kokam’s proven lithium-ion battery cells with eCAMION’s battery pack design to provide three light-weight, high-energy density, 250-kilowatt hour energy storage systems that will be embedded at the community level. The lithium-ion battery storage system will be tested with Toronto Hydro Electric System.
The integration of the Dow Kokam and eCAMION lithium-ion battery energy storage system will improve power availability and reliability within the smart grid network, while supporting renewable electricity installations. The utility project combines Dow Kokam’s lithium-ion cell technology with eCAMION’s packaging design, along with a power management system from the University of Toronto Centre for Applied Power Electronics (ECE) that provides real-time control for power transfer between energy storage units and the smart grid.
Three U of T researchers, including two engineering professors, received more than $5 million in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) for projects on regenerative medicine and nanomedicine.
Representatives from the Government of Canada, CIHR and CSA were on campus March 16 to make the announcement.
“CIHR is delighted to partner with the Canadian Space Agency to support research aimed at developing technologies and approaches to improve patient outcome,” said Professor Jane Aubin of molecular genetics and medical biophysics, scientific director of CIHR’s Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis.
“By working together, CIHR and the CSA are supporting scientific research and innovations that have applications for health care on earth and in space and provide real benefits for Canadians,” said Gilles Leclerc, director general of Space Exploration at CSA.
Nanomedicine delivers medical technologies that function at the molecular level to diagnose and treat disease while regenerative medicine stimulates the renewal of bodily tissues and organs.
The following U of T researchers received a total of $5,487,662 in funding:
• Professor Shana Kelley of biochemistry and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and her team are using nanotextured microstructures to develop a diagnostic device that detects low levels of prostate cancer cells circulating in blood. This could lead to routine screening for prostate cancer, helping to diagnose the disease earlier and to distinguish aggressive forms of the disease from non-aggressive.
• University Professor Michael Sefton (ChemE, IBBME) is leading a team working on providing blood supply to regenerated organs and tissues — so far, the lack of an adequate blood supply has been a barrier in the survival of replacement tissues and organs created using regenerative medicine.
• Professor Gang Zheng (IBBME) is leading a group working on bridging the gap between the fabrication of nanoparticles for pre-clinical research and creating agents suitable for human trials. They are focusing on nanotechnology-enabled image-guided interventions for lung cancer and vascular lesion diseases.
“We congratulate the talented researchers who are leading these projects and believe their work on integrating new technologies into health research holds the potential to dramatically change the way we treat and diagnose disease,” said Professor Peter Lewis, U of T’s Associate Vice-President, Research.
Read the full article at U of T’s website.
Steve Mann (ECE) is attaching electronic devices to his body in his youth. The purpose? To experience a reality that has been technologically mediated. Steve Mann is a cyborg. That is, he’s a human with both biological and artificial parts. Others know him as a professor of engineering at the University of Toronto, and a devoted techno-futurist. Mann’s signature invention is the WearComp, a series of wearable computer devices. One example is the EyeTap, a set of computerized glasses that enhance or diminish objects entering the wearer’s field of view. Using computer technology, he can control what he wishes to see and not see.
Precisely ten years ago, Mann released a book detailing his life as a cyborg. CyborgL Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer is Mann’s manifesto. He’s an inventor with purpose — one deeply rooted in a personal ideology that has shaped his life. Although Mann’s understanding of technology ten years ago was considered radical, his writings forecasted what we have now lived over the past decade of our digital revolution. Vicarious soliloquy
Over the years, Mann has delivered talks at universities and conferences about wearable computers and technologies. He does so in the comfort of his own home. Wearing the WearCam, a camera attached to his head that projects onto a screen in the conference auditorium, Mann presents his talks using pictures he draws at his desk. He also occasionally looks at himself in the mirror to assure the audience that it is in fact he who is speaking.
The point is to let the audience connect with him on a different level. Instead of simply watching him speak, the audience can “become” him by seeing exactly what he sees. Mann describes this as a deeper identification with another person.
The implications are compelling. How will our perspective on human rights change when we can experience, at least visually, exactly how repressed and mistreated individuals live in their societies? How will aid to a country following a natural disaster change when we can experience the disaster for ourselves?
Humanistic Intelligence (HI)
Artificial intelligence aims to create intelligent machines that can fulfill roles previously played by humans. Mann argues against this goal. Instead, he advocates the advancement of humanistic intelligence.
HI is about using technology to enhance human capacity. Under the HI model, users of a given device can take control any time they wish. The technology is responsive to the users: we shape the computer’s behaviour, rather than having computers shape our activities according to pre-programmed assumptions.
Do we want to wake up in a world where only a computer knows how to drive the bus? Mann hopes for a world where a human bus driver is equipped with a brain-implanted microchip that enhances his attention to make him a safer and more efficient driver.
Read the full article at The Varsity .
By Godfrey Mungal, Dean, School of Engineering, Santa Clara University
When I studied engineering at the University of Toronto and California Institute of Technology, it was all left-brain work. My classmates and I knew that career success depended on linear, logical and analytical talents. Left-brain thinking also dominated much of my career as a professor at Stanford and initially as dean of Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering.
But the world’s engineering problems are complex and require use of both sides of the brain, so engineering schools have been changing curricula to work on the right brain too, so students will become ethical, compassionate and innovative engineers.
Engineers Without Borders emanated from the University of Colorado to create positive change for developing communities. A decade after its birth, EWB has 206 chapters, more than 100 projects in 34 countries and more than 4,000 members, many of them from universities.
Stanford’s “d school,” or institute of design, is a hub for students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve problems in a human-centered way.
Institutions like Rice and Santa Clara send students all over the world to immerse themselves in different cultures and find engineering solutions to challenges like clean water. Because of its Jesuit mission, Santa Clara has taken its curriculum one step further by requiring students to engage in service and community-based learning.
Santa Clara civil engineering junior Ashley Ciglar has built forms for concrete slabs and framed houses without power tools in Mexico, where she saw families living in shacks without water or electricity. She welled with emotion when a mother cried tears of joy upon seeing the house the students had built for her family. She created water distribution and filtration systems in Honduras and Nicaragua, has done more than 20 service projects near campus and is pursuing a fellowship to train farmers in methods to adopt organic practices.
Until they engage both sides of their brains in college, students like Ciglar do not fully understand the needs of the world, nor the solutions offered by engineering. They expand their education beyond formulas and equations to include an awareness of the real world, and how they can personally make a difference. It’s an empowering realization.
Engineering curricula are quite full at every school, but we can find innovative ways of incorporating interdisciplinary learning and right-brain focus. We also need to engage students in more and deeper discussions about ethical decision-making, globalization and concern for others.
As I like to tell first-year students, becoming a great engineer involves the head, heart and hands. You can learn the core of your profession — math, physics and science — at any university. But today’s students need to deepen their empathy for the plight of others, as Ciglar and many other engineering students at top schools do.