Join us on May 2, 2018 for the Graduate Engineering Career Fair, your opportunity to meet employers who are recruiting students and alumni with graduate degrees in engineering.
Employers are seeking current MASc, MHSc, PhD, MEng and MEngCEM students, and alumni to fill a wide range of roles, including:
- full-time opportunities
- part-time opportunities
- internships
- research internships
- summer positions
Please note, only U of T Engineering students and alumni are eligible to attend. Students will be asked to swipe their TCards.
See website for more details and to register:
ZHEN (JASON) HE
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Sustainable wastewater treatment demands maximized resource recovery and minimized resource consumption. Recovery of valuable resources such as energy, nutrient, water, and other value-added products, will help offset resource consumption by wastewater treatment. Bioelectrochemical systems (BES), as an emerging treatment concept, have attracted a great deal of attention in the past decades. BES rely on the interaction between microorganisms and solid electron acceptor/donors to achieve bioelectricity generation (in microbial fuel cells – MFCs), hydrogen production (in microbial electrolysis cells – MECs), desalination (in microbial desalination cells – MDCs), and organic synthesis (in microbial electrosynthesis cells). Nutrients such as ammonia and phosphorous can also be recovered through electricity-driven processes. BES have been greatly advanced in the aspects of microbiology, chemistry, materials, electrochemistry, and reactor design/operation. However, there is still a lack of successful pilot-scale demonstrations. This presentation will provide an overview of historical development of BES, current status of representative BES technologies, and perspectives towards future research and development.
ZHEN (JASON) HE is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 2009 to 2013, and then an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech from 2013 to 2017. He received a BS from Tongji University, an MS from the Technical University of Denmark, and a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, all in Environmental Engineering. He is directing the Environmental Biotechnology & Bioenergy Laboratory with a focus on resource recovery from wastes/wastewater. The ongoing research projects in his lab include bioelectrochemical systems for wastewater treatment, forward osmosis, nutrient removal and recovery, and algal bioreactors. He has published over 160 journal papers, which received more than 8,000 citations according to Google Scholar. He established the Virginia Tech Center for Applied Water Research and Innovations (CAWRI) as an inaugural director. Dr. He is also an Associate Editor for three journals, Science of the Total Environment, Water Environment Research, and Journal of Environmental Engineering, and is on the Editorial Board of the Chemical Engineering Journal. He was the 2017 President for Chinese-American Professors in Environmental Engineering and Science (CAPEES).
Keynote: Engineered bacterial strains to improve gut health through targeting NOD2
Professor Dana Philpott
Department of Immunology, University of Toronto
Also includes: 3 & 15 minute presentations, and poster session
Food provided!
Research in my laboratory over the past nine years has focused on the generation of hydrogel biomaterials to support the formation of a reparative niche within diseased or injured sites that can block or prevent inhibitory signals from dominating the repair process, while providing pro-repair signals that can guide new tissue formation. The goal of our approach is to use engineered materials to “unlock” the regenerative capacity of damaged or diseased tissue to promote repair. The premise of our approach is that all tissues in the body have the capacity to repair through local stem or progenitor cells, but that due to unfavorable environmental conditions during the normal healing process they are not able to do so. Our general strategy has been to combine our biomaterials engineering with designing materials that promote the formation of a space filling vascular plexus that could serve as part of a reparative niche directly at the wound site. The idea is that this vascular plexus would lay the groundwork for the recruitment of endogenous stem cells located in the local tissue surrounding the damaged area and generate an environment that would foster repair rather than scaring. In this talk we focus on our efforts to bioengineer hydrogels for brain repair after stroke. In particular our efforts to engineer injectable hydrogel materials that gel in situ and present multivalent aggregates of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), fibronectin fragment proteins, and the appropriate mechanical properties.
Professor Tatiana Segura received her BS degree in Bioengineering from the University of California Berkeley and her doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University. Her graduate work in designing and understanding non-viral gene delivery from hydrogel scaffolds was supervised by Prof. Lonnie Shea. She pursued post-doctoral training at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne under the guidance of Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell, where her focus was self-assembled polymer systems for gene and drug delivery. Professor Segura’s Laboratory studies the use of materials for minimally invasive in situ tissue repair. On this topic, she has published over 60 peered reviewed publications. She has been recognized with the Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, the American Heart Association National Scientist Development Grant, and the CAREER award from National Science Foundation. She was Elected to the College of Fellows at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE) in 2017. She spent the first 11 years of her career at UCLA department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and has recently relocated to Duke University, where she holds appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Neurology and Dermatology.
Hosted by Dr. Molly Shoichet Snacks and Refreshments will be served
Abstract: Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter generally in the 1–100 nm dimension range. Detailed understanding of chemical interactions and recent technological advances have created the possibility of designing nano-structured materials tailored for specific applications. Professor Gu heads an interdisciplinary research group that combines functional polymers and polymer metal oxide materials to solve problems in health and environmental protection. This seminar will showcase several major activities in Gu’s lab for healthcare and environmental remediation applications.
Biography:
Prof. Frank Gu is a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Gu received his Ph.D. from Queen’s University, Canada, where he majored in chemical engineering. Following completion of his graduate program, he pursued postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. In July 2008, Dr. Gu joined Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Gu has established a frontier research program in Nanotechnology Engineering, with important advances in medical and life science applications. Leading-edge projects have produced new materials and tools for targeted drug delivery, rapid pathogen detection, and passive water treatment. His research has had tangible impacts on his field and industry, including mucoadhesive nanoparticles for the treatment of Dry Eye Disease, and photocatalytic water treatment technologies that are the core technology of H2nanO, a Canadian startup company. Dr. Gu has authored and co-authored more than 200 journal and conference publications, as well as 25 U.S. and World patents and applications.
Professor Clara Santato, Polytechnique Montreal
Dominik P.J. Barz
Department of Chemical Engineering, Queen’s University
dominik.barz@queensu.ca
Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are versatile technologies which have evolved over recent decades due to the increasing capabilities to miniaturize structures and devices. However, the majority of micro devices is still powered by external, macro-scale power sources. Interconnection problems, unwanted electronic interactions (noise), and difficulties in controlling the power delivered are some of the problems which can be associated if macro-scale power sources are coupled with micro-scale devices. One possible approach to ease such difficulties is through the utilization of integrated power sources. In this talk, we report on the fabrication and characterization of two different devices which can be easily integrated on MEMS (and microfluidic) devices which are made from glass-like (silicon dioxide) substrates:
- i) A micro battery where we employ different microfabrication techniques, such as Physical Vapour Deposition, to fabricate thin-films of nickel hydroxide and metal hydride which serve as battery electrodes. These electrodes are arranged in a co-planar design and ionically connected with an alkaline gel electrolyte.
- ii) A supercapacitor which is made by printing of graphene oxide (GO) inks on glass using a micro-dispensing technique. The printed GO electrodes are subsequently treated to obtain reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The micro dispensing technique utilizes a liquid jet which, in contrast to ink jet printing, should not break up and form droplets. However, we operate at very high Froude numbers and parameters to obtain stable print regimes are not known. We introduce a combined empirical and analytical approach to infer the critical jet length to nozzle diameter ratio and the jet shape function.
Dr. Dominik P.J. Barz is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University. He received a Diplom-Ingenieur FH (B.Eng.) in Mechanical Engineering at Aachen University, Germany in 1996. He then held several positions in industry and public sector companies in Germany such as a lab engineer at the Mercedes Benz Fuel Cells Lab at FHTG Mannheim and a (Senior) Research Engineer working on Lab-on-a-Chip technologies at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH. During these full time employments, he pursued further (part-time) studies and graduated with a Diplom-Ingenieur (B.Sc.+M.Sc.) with distinction in Chemical Engineering from TU Dresden and as a Doctor of Engineering Science with distinction in Mechanical Engineering from University of Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT). He then joined Cornell University, US working with Prof. Paul Steen on interface and transport phenomena in porous media. He joined Queen’s University as a faculty in 2010 and took up the post of an Associate Director of the Queen’s-RMC Fuel Cell Research Centre.
He is the recipient of several awards including a Helmholtz Association Microsystems Scholarship, the ASME ICNMM outstanding leadership award and a DAAD Research Scholarship. During 2016-2017, he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Research Fellowship that he spent at the Centre of Smart Interfaces, TU Darmstadt, Germany.
His academic and industrial experience has been in areas encompassing both Mechanical and Chemical Engineering subjects and, hence, his current research includes transport & interface phenomena, microfluidics, as well as the miniaturization of electrochemical devices.
Dr. Dennis Clegg
Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
University of California, Santa Barbara
One promising option for the treatment of ocular disease is to develop cellular therapies using RPE and neural retinal cells derived from pluripotent stem cells. One strategy for treating dry age related macular degeneration is to implant differentiated, polarized monolayers of hESC-RPE or iPS-RPE on an extracellular matrix-based scaffold, whereby cells are provided with a supportive substrate to stimulate cell survival, differentiation and function. We describe recent efforts to develop tissue constructs to replace ocular tissue and translate them to the clinic. A phase 1/2A clinical trial is currently underway to assess the safety of an implant consisting of a monolayer of H9 hESC-RPE on a synthetic scaffold.
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Dr. Clegg earned his BS degree in biochemistry at UC Davis and his PhD in biochemistry at UC Berkeley, where he used emerging methods in recombinant DNA to study the sensory transduction systems of bacteria. As a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSF, he studied neural development and regeneration. He has continued this avenue of research since joining the UCSB faculty, with studies of extracellular matrix and integrin function in the developing eye. His current emphasis is in stem cell research, with a focus on developing therapies for ocular disease. Dr. Clegg is the recipient of the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award in the Physical Sciences, the Pacific Coast Business Times Champions in Health Care Award, the National Eye Institute Audacious Goals award, and served as Chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from 2004-2009. He has been a Frontiers of Vision Research Lecturer at the National Eye Institute, a Keynote Lecturer at the Stem Cells World Congress, and a TEDx speaker. He is founder and Co-Director of the UCSB Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering, and has served on advisory boards for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the National Institutes of Health Center for Regenerative Medicine. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of The California Project to Cure Blindness, a multi-disciplinary effort to develop a stem cell therapy for Age-Related Macular Degeneration.
Solid waste is the great unwanted byproduct of our modern society. Every Canadian is responsible, directly or indirectly, for creating about one tonne of solid waste per year. Solid waste is variable, heterogeneous, complex, and difficult and costly to manage by any means other than landfill. So, generally, government regulations or incentives are needed to drive innovation and make waste processing affordable. In Canada these tend to be weak and inconsistent. One result is that Canadians still send 8 million tonnes per year of untreated organic solid waste to landfill. But all is not lost. This presentation is based upon the premise that organic solid waste can be anaerobically digested, using a process which is robust, versatile, and commercially realizable, despite the lack of supporting regulations. The products are digestate which can be composted, and biogas which can be converted into renewable energy. The critical steps are the elimination of almost all forms of mechanical pretreatment, and the employment of solid state anaerobic digestion. The technology, its origins, its performance at lab scale, its economic prospects and plans for commercialization are all described.
Nigel Guilford is a senior executive with a background in science and engineering and more than forty five years of experience, both domestic and international, in the development and commercialization of technology, and the development and operation of companies, both large and small, primarily in the environmental sector. His particular obsession is garbage, and extracting value from it in the form of renewable energy. Research for his Ph.D., completed in 2017, centred on new ways to anaerobically digest organic solid waste. For the past 26 years he has worked through his own consulting firm, Guilford and Associates Inc.