April 19, 2018
U of T Engineering faculty and staff gathered on April 18th to recognize outstanding faculty and staff members for their leadership, citizenship, innovation and contributions to the Faculty’s teaching, service and research missions at the 11th annual Celebrating Engineering Excellence reception. This annual event honours the recipients of Engineering’s staff, research and teaching awards, as well as those who received awards and major research grants over the past year. ECE staff and faculty took home six of eleven awards conferred at the celebration.
The award recipients from ECE are:
Vaughn Betz 
Early Career Teaching Award
This award recognizes an early career instructor who has demonstrated exceptional classroom instruction and teaching methods.
Since joining ECE in 2011, Vaughn Betz has created a new graduate course, completely revamped a core second year course, and extensively revised the labs for a second. Beyond his own courses, his modernization of development tools has had a significant impact on the whole programming curriculum in ECE. Vaughn has leveraged his extensive industrial experience to better link theory and practice in his courses, creating assignments and case studies which engage our students and effectively prepare them for engineering practice. His teaching evaluations are uniformly outstanding; students praise his engaging lecture style, approachability, and willingness to make time for them outside of class. Vaughn received the ECE Departmental Teaching Award in 2013 and the Gordon R. Slemon Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Design in 2016.
Kelly Chan 
Sustained Excellence in Leadership Award
This award recognizes a staff member who has demonstrated leadership in supporting the Faculty’s mission over a sustained period.
Kelly Chan has served in a series of progressively more responsible roles within the Faculty since 1991, and is currently Administrative Coordinator for ECE. Over the years she has cultivated an extraordinary knowledge of policies and procedures and built strong relationships with key stakeholders throughout the University and beyond. Kelly demonstrates leadership in every task she undertakes and consistently evaluates each aspect of her role to ensure that everything is being done to the highest standard. Rather than waiting for a problem to arise and then solving it, she works to make sure it never does. Kelly has created a community among the administrative staff in ECE and serves as a role model and mentor to her colleagues. She received the Agnes Kaneko Award in 2004 and the ECE Outstanding Staff Member Award in 2017.
George Eleftheriades 
Safwat Zaky Research Leader Award
This award recognizes leadership in innovative interdisciplinary and multiple-investigator initiatives that have enhanced the Faculty’s research profile within the broader community.
George Eleftheriades is one of the founders of the fields of metamaterials and metasurfaces, making pioneering contributions to both the science behind these materials and their applications. His leadership of large-scale high-impact research projects has attracted significant funding for cutting-edge infrastructure and equipment and established U of T as a leading centre of excellence in these fields. George was also instrumental in developing working relationships with several key industrial partners, such as Qualcomm, Huawei and Intel, and spearheading partnerships with the Department of National Defense focused on the security applications of metamaterials. George is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has received some of IEEE’s most prestigious awards.
Manfredi Maggiore 
Faculty Teaching Award
This award recognizes a faculty member who demonstrates outstanding classroom instruction and develops innovative teaching methods.
In addition to his excellent classroom teaching, Manfredi Maggiore has taken on a leadership role in course development. In 2011, he created the course ‘Robot Modeling and Control’, which is now a core course for the Robotics and Mechatronics Minor and the Robotics Engineering major in Engineering Science. In addition, his efforts in developing lecture notes, tutorials and labs for ECE’s systems control courses have had a lasting impact on the teaching of control engineering at U of T. In 2004-2005, while supervising the Control Systems Lab, Manfredi proposed and oversaw the creation of a unified experimental curriculum for all systems control courses, which led to the current organization of our laboratories in this area. Manfredi has garnered the ECE Departmental Teaching Award three times since 2004.
Shawn Mitchell 
Harpreet Dhariwal Emerging Leader Award
This award, named in memory of an esteemed staff member who received this honour in 2012, recognizes a staff member who leads by example in their dedication to the Faculty’s mission.
Shawn Mitchell joined the ECE Graduate Office in 2012, serving first as the Graduate Office Assistant before assuming the role of Graduate Studies Administrator in 2017. After taking on this leadership role in response to the unexpected absence of a senior staff member, Shawn dedicated himself to developing the knowledge and skills required to effectively manage one of the largest graduate offices at U of T. He has not only ensured that the office continues to run smoothly, but has improved and streamlined several processes and procedures. Shawn has also shown leadership in fostering a culture of inclusivity in the Faculty and the University. He has served on the Engineering and St. George Campus Positive Space Committees, and was captain of the U of T Pride and Remembrance Run team from 2015 to 2017.
Ding Yuan 
McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction
This award recognizes exceptional performance and distinction in early career research, typically on the part of a pre-tenure member of the Faculty.
Ding Yuan’s exceptional research in software failure diagnosis and software reliability has already made a substantial impact on the global software industry. His work has been disseminated throughout the field, appearing multiple times on Hacker News, as well as industry conference presentations and influential blogs. It has also triggered thorough code reviews from Hadoop, the world’s most widely-used big data analytics system. Ding’s research has led to multiple U.S. patents, and is used and licensed by companies including Huawei Technologies and Microsoft. Aspirator, the software-testing tool developed and open-sourced by Ding, has detected hundreds of software defects in the world’s most popular data analytics systems, which have subsequently been repaired. The Internet services we use every day are more reliable thanks to Ding’s contributions.
“As we wrap up another tremendous academic year, it’s my great privilege to bring everyone together to celebrate the extraordinary contributions of our faculty and staff and to express our gratitude to everyone who makes our continued achievements possible,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate the richly deserving recipients of our staff, teaching and research awards, as well as all those who received recognition over the past year.”
With files from Carolyn Farrell
This story originally appeared in U of T Engineering News.
More information:
Jessica MacInnis
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; jessica.macinnis@utoronto.ca