Professors Stewart Aitchison (ECE) and Harry Ruda (MSE) have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), one of Canada’s most prestigious academic honours.
The RSC is the senior national body of distinguished Canadian scholars, artists and scientists. It consists of nearly 2,000 Fellows, who are selected by their peers for outstanding contributions to the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities.
“Professors Aitchison and Ruda are acknowledged as groundbreaking leaders in their fields, not just in Canada but on a global level,” said Dean Cristina Amon.
“They are most deserving of this honour and we are delighted that the RSC has recognized their extraordinary achievements.”
Stewart Aitchison, the Faculty’s Vice-Dean, Research, is a world leader in the field of nonlinear optics, and considered the leading researcher in the area of spatial optical solutions. His research has resulted in 214 journal publications, which have been cited more than 4,800 times, and in more than 250 conference publications.
In addition, Professor Aitchison has seven patents, which have led to the creation and growth of four new companies. From 2004 to 2007 he was Director of the Emerging Communications Technology Institute, where he worked towards the establishment of open access micro- and nano-fabrication facilities. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London) and the Optical Society of America.
Harry Ruda is an international leader in the synthesis and understanding of the behaviour of semiconductor nanostructures, with seminal contributions dating back to the early 1980s. These contributions are represented in 215 articles in leading journals, 125 papers in international conference proceedings, nine books, 15 patents, and more than 2,000 citations.
Professor Ruda is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology, Canada’s first centre for nanotechnology, which is known internationally for its innovative and leading-edge work on semiconductor nanostructures. He also co-founded the National Centre of Excellence in Photonics, which supports the research of 90 of Canada’s top professors at 20 universities.
Professors Aitchison and Ruda will be inducted into the RSC at a ceremony at the National Gallery of Canada on November 27th.
Follow the link to read the story about the Royal Society of Canada fellows and medallists for 2010 on the University of Toronto website.
Freshly selected to command the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield characterized the opportunity as a coup for Canada among nations exploring space. Hadfield will lead the station and its six crew during the latter half of a six-month stay that begins in December 2012.
“To be trusted with their lives and with that entire station on behalf of all the world’s space-faring nations, most specifically on behalf of Canada is a tremendous honour,” Hadfield said.
The announcement at Canadian Space Agency headquarters in Longueuil, Que. on Thursday is another feather in the cap of Canada’s space program. Hadfield will be only the second non-American and non-Russian to command the station, a partnership of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada. Bob Thirsk became the first from this country to spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
“Canadians have been known to achieve remarkable things on a limited budget,” said Professor Robert Zee (UTIAS), Director of the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory. “We’ve made numerous contributions to the international effort in space, not only in collaboration with other nations on specific missions, but also in building our own technologies and our own spacecraft, and having our own missions.”
Follow the link to read the full article on the Toronto Star website.
When he was nine years old, Rob Spence used a gun to explode a pile of cow dung at his grandfather’s farm. The recoil seriously damaged Spence’s right eye. Twenty-five years and many painful surgeries later, Spence had surgery to remove it.
Now Spence, 38, a Toronto filmmaker, is leading a team of inventors, engineers and ocular experts trying to perfect a prosthetic eye camera. His sixth prototype of what he calls the eyeborg was unveiled this week at the Other Film Festival in Melbourne, Australia, a festival for and about people with disabilities.
“It’s like a cellphone. If you stuck a cellphone inside your head it wouldn’t work as well,” says Professor Steve Mann (ECE), author of Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer.
Professor Mann filed a patent in 2000 for an implantable camera prosthetic eye, the basis for the eyeborg prototypes. Progress has been slow because there is little financial interest in the project.
“There’s a big jump between prototype and production, something that is working well and is robust in the field,” says Professor Mann, who is working separately on eye glasses to help the visually impaired see better.
Follow the link to read the full article on the Toronto Star website.
The Virtual Music Instrument, a specialized software program Eric Wan (ECE 1T0) played a role in helping to develop, is among several projects the computer engineering graduate has been involved with aimed at helping children with disabilities. The work is being done at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, the largest facility of its kind in Canada.
Unlike many of his peers, Wan has a true understanding of the importance and need for such technologies to assist youngsters with disabilities. At age 18, he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis — a condition resulting from inflammation of the spinal cord — four days after getting a measles vaccination.
In the midst of his studies at the University of Toronto, Wan met Professor Tom Chau (IBBME), senior scientist at Bloorview Research Institute located at Holland Bloorview. The pair was connected through a respiratory therapist Wan had worked with while in long-term rehab.
Wan was brought on board as an undergrad to work with the Paediatric Rehabilitation Intelligent Systems Multidisciplinary lab, which focuses its efforts on children and youth with disabilities and special needs and on their families, by drawing on applied science and engineering.
“It was really interesting applying my skills in making software or electronic gadgets that enabled people to be able to do more, and so to improve their quality of life,” said Wan, who had a long-held interest in computer programming, learning the basic type of programming languages at age eight.
Follow the link to read the article on the Toronto Star website.
Engineering at U of T emerged a winner on Thursday when its researchers received several funding awards from Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation.
No fewer than four Engineering faculty members received Early Researcher Awards (ERA), which provide significant financial support to emerging leading researchers to build their research teams.
Mansoor Barati (MSE) received an award for his novel approach to energy recovery from slag, turning waste heat from metal production into an energy source. Metal manufacturing produces a high-temperature liquid waste, known as slag, which must be cooled in the air or in water, releasing a vast amount of heat in the process. Professor Barati is investigating a new approach for harnessing the energy of the waste heat. Energy recovery from slag presents a tremendous potential for both energy savings and carbon dioxide emission reduction.
Philippe Lavoie (UTIAS) took an award for his research on reducing harmful emissions from aircraft through active flow control. His work will seek more effective ways to control the flow of air over civil aircraft by manipulating the dynamics of airflow around airplanes to produce improved flow characteristics that can reduce drag, structural vibration, noise and harmful emissions. His findings hold great potential for reducing the environmental impact and cost of operating airplanes.
Matthew J. Roorda (CivE) received an award to support his research using global-positioning system data to develop models of commercial vehicle operations in urban areas. This research intends to provide policy makers with better decision-support tools to analyze and predict the impact of public sector decisions on the freight transportation network. This research could provide policy makers with better tools to analyze and predict the impact of public sector decisions on the transportation network, leading to more responsive and effective solutions.
Lidan You (MIE) hopes to one day grow living replacement bone tissue that could treat osteoporosis-related fractures, which affect more women in Canada than breast and ovarian cancer combined. Her Early Researcher Award will support her work on rational mechanobiological-based design of tissue-engineered bone by first establishing what a “healthy bone cell” is, then testing different biomaterials for their ability to direct adult stem cells to become bone cells.
Engineering researchers also received several Ontario Research Fund-Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program awards.
Dionne Aleman (MIE) will study high-performance computing infrastructure for large-scale healthcare optimization; using mathematical modelling, Professor Aleman’s goal is to ensure that Ontario’s health care system delivers medical care as accurately as possible through quantitative analysis.
Tom Chau (IBBME) will further his work in helping severely disabled children interact with other people and their environment. Working in the Paediatric Rehabilitation Intelligent Systems Multidisciplinary (PRISM) Lab, Professor Chau is studying body signals with the goal of equipping the children with the tools they need to direct their own care.
Craig Steeves (UTIAS) will develop lightweight materials for the aerospace industry which can reduce environmental effects and minimize damage from fatigue and impact. Professor Steeves’ work could give the aerospace industry a significant advantage over its competitors, and has important applications for other transportation industries including auto and rail.
“We are delighted that the hard work and outstanding research of our faculty members have been acknowledged through these prestigious awards,” said ProfessorStewart Aitchison, Engineering’s Vice-Dean of Research.
The University of Toronto will receive $4.2 million through ORF-RI to support 25 projects and the work of 29 principal investigators (PIs), and $2.5 million through ERA to support 18 projects and the work of 18 PIs.
Follow the links to learn more about the ORF-RI program and to read the story on the U of T website.
The science fiction of melding man and machine has played out for decades onscreen, from The Six Million Dollar Man to The Terminator. But the bionic hybrid age may well be flickering to life – real life – in the Calgary lab where scientists who made history fusing snail brain cells to a computer microchip six years ago are poised to try the same feat with human cells.
Professor Molly Shoichet (ChemE, IBBME), a biomedical researcher at the University of Toronto who holds the Canada research chair in tissue engineering, described a “growing momentum” in the bio-engineering field as collaboration increases between engineers, biologists, and surgeon scientists.
In this case, Professor Shoichet said the Calgary researchers “have made a strong case for what they achieved,” recording the activity of neurons. But she cautioned that the new paper involved only a small sample size of neurochip recordings, and these, she noted, were not based on mammalian brain cells, but mollusc neurons.
Follow the link to read the full article on The Globe and Mail website.