Students, Prof Earn Accolades
July 24, 2009 - Campus Bulletin
University of Guelph students are leading the pack on the national and world stages this summer.
For the second year in a row, U of G engineering students earned top spot at the national round of the Institute of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) Present Around the World Competition. Alyssa Randall and Danielle Boucher caught the judges’ eyes in Toronto July 11 when they presented their design for an electronic pediatric stethoscope.
The stethoscope filters out extraneous noise and slows the sound of a heart beat, allowing the doctor to more accurately diagnose heart defects in newborns and young children, said Randall, who is entering the final year of her co-op program in biological engineering. She and Boucher worked on the design with teammates Janith Peduruge and Dane Reynolds for their third-year project.
IET is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology sectors and with more than 150,000 members in 127 countries in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. Competitors are judged on both their design and presentation skills. With the victory, Boucher and Randall earned the chance to represent Canada at the IET international competition in London, England in November.
In June, B.Comm. student Matthew Ball, graduate student Nicole Beechey, B.Comm. graduate Emily Bogaert and M.Sc. student Blair Cameron teamed up and tied for first place in the Student Case Competition at the 19th annual Food and Agribusiness World Forum and Symposium in Budapest, Hungary.
The U of G team, coached by marketing and consumer studies professor Melanie Lang and business professor Elliott Currie, competed against nine other teams from Australia, the Netherlands, Hungary and the United States. The Guelph team members impressed the judges with their strong teamwork, poise and professionalism in a two-day event that incorporated two agri-management cases. They tied for first with the MBA team from California’s Santa Clara University and received their award at a formal presentation attended by numerous dignitaries, including the Hungarian minister of agriculture and rural development, József Gráf.
A U of G integrative biology professor had back-to-back cover stories in two field journals this summer. Prof. Ryan Gregory’s research was the feature story in the July issue of the Journal of Zoology. He conducted the research on genome size diversity in dragonflies and damselflies with former master’s student Alexis Ardila-Garcia. In June, Gregory’s research on patterns of genome size diversity in the ray-finned fishes was on the cover of Hydrobiologia, an international journal of aquatic sciences. He conducted that study with former U of G student Emily Smith.
