April 22, 2015
Outstanding teaching, world-renowned research, exceptional citizenship, dedication to students, technological innovation—staff and faculty of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering were recognized for their leadership in these areas and more at Tuesday’s Celebrating Engineering Excellence gala.
ECE professors and staff took home six of the 12 awards conferred at the celebration, at which the entire U of T Engineering community was invited to get together and reflect on a successful 2014-15 school year.
The award recipients from ECE are:
Belinda Li — Agnes Kaneko Citizenship Award
Belinda is the administrative coordinator for the Energy Systems Group in ECE. Her positive attitude and consistent willingness to go beyond her expected duties and lend a hand have made her indispensable to the faculty and students she supports, as well as her administrative colleagues. Belinda always seeks out new opportunities to learn more, contribute more and improve administrative efficiency and student experience. She takes great pride in her work and genuinely cares about our students; she invited some of the graduate students in her group who could not make it home for Thanksgiving to her home for dinner. This is just one example of the dedication and consideration for others that make Belinda such an exemplary Faculty citizen.
Kelly Hayward — Harpreet Dhariwal Emerging Leader Award
Kelly joined ECE as program manager for ECTI in 2008, and was appointed Operations Manager in 2012. In this role, she is responsible for the management and oversight of nearly one-third of all the Faculty’s space. In addition to responding to emergencies such as water leaks and heating failure, Kelly has shown great leadership in pulling stakeholders together to find ways to maximize limited resources. Her outstanding communications skills and commitment to the Faculty’s mission have inspired her fellow staff members to contribute at the highest level. Kelly is a volunteer member of several committees and has served as co-chair of ECE’s Joint Health and Safety Committee. She is also the department’s Green Ambassador, working to make ECE and the Faculty more sustainable.
Darlene Gorzo, Jaro Pristupa and Joe Wong — Innovation Award
Darlene, Jaro and Joe are being honoured for their development of ECE’s Graduate Research Information Database (GRID). GRID was developed to address the University’s requirement for an annual meeting between all PhD students and their supervisory committees. With roughly 260 PhD candidates in ECE, scheduling these meetings demanded significant departmental resources. GRID solves this problem by providing a web-based virtual meeting place where students can submit a summary of their accomplishments and future plans, and supervisors can review this information and provide feedback. Administrative staff can also use GRID to collect and store other data related to the student’s progress, such as completion of course requirements. GRID has significantly streamlined a previously cumbersome process, resulting in considerable benefits to students, faculty and staff.
Mike Mehramiz — Quality of Student Experience Award
Mike has served as Manager of the Design Centre Lab in ECE since 2002. In this role he provides crucial support and guidance to students throughout the creation of their final year design project, as well as other design assignments. Mike continually seeks to improve the experience of students in his lab through innovative technological, ergonomic and operational enhancements. He recently completed an overhaul of the lab, which doubled its capacity and created a more user-friendly space in just a few months. The students he serves consider him a mentor, and often seek his advice on technical problems outside the scope of the lab. Mike received a U of T Excellence Through Innovation Award in 2012 for his role in developing and running a series of tutorials to teach ECE students electronic lab skills.
Jonathan Rose – Sustained Excellence in Teaching Award
Jonathan Rose‘s commitment to student success has made him an extremely popular educator and sought-after supervisor. He is known for his emphasis on teaching design and his innovation in laboratory and design courses. Jonathan developed a unique design course for graduate students called ‘Creative Applications for Mobile Devices.’ This groundbreaking course has yielded roughly 75 new mobile apps in disciplines ranging from music to medicine. Jonathan is also passionate about entrepreneurship, serving as chair of the Entrepreneurship Hatchery’s advisory board. A four-time recipient of ECE’s teaching award, he has also been recognized with the Faculty Teaching Award in 2012 and the U of T Faculty Award in 2014.
Frank Kschischang — Distinguished Professor of Digital Communications
Frank Kschischang‘s research is primarily focused on the development of new coding techniques to correct errors in digital communications systems—an essential part of keeping these systems operational. He has made seminal contributions in the area of error-correcting techniques, and his methods have been applied in wired and wireless systems, as well as optical networks. In the late 1990s, Frank co-invented the factor graph, a type of graphical model that implements and efficient algorithm for applications in error-control coding, signal processing and DNA sequencing. Now a standard tool used throughout machine learning and digital communications, the factor graph has also been implemented in many industrial standards.
Frank’s research contributions have led to significant national and international recognition. In 1999, he received the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award. In 2001 he was named Canada Research Chair in Communication Algorithms—one of the original cohort of CRCs at U of T. In 2010, the Canada Council for the Arts honoured him with the Killam Research Fellowship. He also received the 2012 Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research, awarded biennially to a leading researcher in the field. Frank is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Royal Society of Canada. He served a president of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2010 and is currently editor-in-chief for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the top journal in his field.
In addition to his research accomplishments, Frank is a talented and popular teacher. An excellent lecturer who receives outstanding teaching evaluations, he was a key architect of the “flexible curriculum” in ECE and served for several years as chair of the Faculty’s Curriculum Committee. Frank has received six departmental teaching awards over the years, as well as the Faculty Teaching Award. His remarkable record of teaching and research was recognized in 2010 with the University of Toronto Faculty Award.
“To these award recipients, thank you for everything you’ve done, and continue to do, to make our community stronger,” said Cristina Amon, dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca