UNB students take home social awareness award

Rachel Savidge / Submitted  

The brightest engineering students from across the country were at UNB competing for the top spot at the Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) this past March Break.

CEC is an annual event which was first held at University of Waterloo in 1985 and has since been hosted by universities from coast to coast. This year UNB hosted the competition, which was held from Mar. 5 - 8.

This year’s theme was “Inventing the Future.” The competition challenged the students to think about the long term impact of their design, whether environmental, social or economical.

The competition was divided into six categories and called upon engineering students to demonstrate their skills in communication, leadership, teamwork and design.

To be invited to the competition, teams competed in their respective regional competitions and the top two teams from each region were invited to compete at the CEC.

Two teams from each regional block competed in each of the six categories.

As hosts, UNB engineering students took CEC to heart.

The trophies displayed above were all hand made for presentation at the awards dinner held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Fredericton.

UNB’s ‘Smart Skin’ team, comprised of electrical engineering students Arpad Kormendy and Kumaran Thillainadarajah, won this year’s social awareness award.

Their Smart Skin project was aiming to give back a sense of touch to amputees by embedding nano material in prosthetic skin.

When the Smart Skin team was asked how they felt about winning this award and their experience at CEC, Kumaran said, “The competition was a lot of fun and a very good learning experience. We got to see the cool projects that other engineering students across the country are working on.

“It was flattering to receive that recognition from a national engineering competition and it will also help us build momentum as we compete in the final six of NBIF [New Brunswick Innovation Foundation] later this month.”

The full list of winners can be found at www.cec2009.ca.