April 15, 2016
U of T Engineering recognized faculty and staff members from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the ninth-annual Celebrating Engineering Excellence reception on April 14. ECE staff and faculty took home three of seven awards conferred at the celebration, which also honours the recipients of awards and major research grants over the past year.
The award recipients from ECE are:
Matthew Chow
Agnes Kaneko Citizenship Award
Named in memory of a valued staff member, this award recognizes staff who have served with distinction and made contributions to the Faculty’s mission above and beyond their job description.
Matthew Chow joined ECE in 2005 as Junior Systems Administrator in the Research Computing Support Group. While this was envisioned as a junior role providing basic support to the group, Matthew’s ongoing efforts to educate himself and improve his technical skills, combined with his willingness to take on additional responsibilities, led him to contribute well beyond expectations. Among other contributions, he helped the group streamline their department’s research computing infrastructure, for which he received a U of T Excellence Through Innovation Award in 2012. Matthew was promoted to Infrastructure and Network Specialist for ECE in 2013. He continues to distinguish himself in his new role, training his colleagues in best practices, improving the structure and reliability of the ECE computer network, and helping researchers get the most computing value from their infrastructure funding.
Bruno Korst
Harpreet Dhariwal Emerging Leader Award
This award, renamed in memory of an esteemed staff member who received this honour in 2011–2012, recognizes a staff member who leads by example in their dedication to the Faculty’s mission.
Bruno Korst joined ECE in 2002 as the Communications Lab Engineer, and was promoted to Manager, Undergraduate HardwareTeaching Labs in 2007. Bruno has shown an outstanding commitment to advancing the teaching mission of the Faculty by continually improving equipment, operations and instruction in ECE’s teaching labs. He is a role model and mentor for staff and provides above-and-beyond support to our students. Bruno has designed many of the ECE labs himself and has served as a co-instructor on lab courses. He was instrumental in the major three-phase renovation to ECE’s Energy Systems Lab and took a leading role in the creation of the Faculty’s online safety training program, for which he was a co-recipient of the Faculty’s Innovation Award. Bruno’s contributions have also been recognized with two U of T Excellence Through Innovation Awards and ECE’s Gordon Slemon Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Design.
Alberto Leon-Garcia
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.
Alberto Leon-Garcia is a world leader in research on the design, operation and management of application-oriented multiservice packet networks. Most recently, he pioneered the concept of Software-Defined Infrastructure, a flexible, versatile, and evolvable infrastructure on which future application platforms will be built. Al has developed major research collaborations to advance this area of research. These include the NSERC Strategic Network on Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI), a partnership of industry, academia, and high-performance-computing centres investigating key elements of future application platforms. Al is currently SAVI’s Scientific Director, leading a team of 15 professors and more than 50 graduate students from 11 universities, working in partnership with 13 industry partners. He is also Scientific Director of Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation, a university-industry-government partnership creating smart-management applications to improve the safety and efficiency of public transportation.
“As we approach the end of another outstanding academic year, I am delighted to bring everyone together to celebrate the extraordinary contributions of our faculty and staff and to express our gratitude to everyone who makes this possible,” said Dean Cristina Amon. “On behalf of the Faculty, I congratulate the richly deserving recipients of our staff and research awards, as well as 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