Three UWindsor graduate students won awards at the 2023 NSERC CREATE oN DuTy! program annual general meeting held this year at the University of Toronto May 9 to 11.

All the students are part of the Institute for Diagnostic Imaging (IDIR). Their supervisor, IDIR director Roman Maev, says it is great to celebrate their hard work and talents.

Graduate students competed against their peers from four universities: Université Laval, École de Technologie Supérieure, University of Toronto, and University of Windsor.

Traditionally, there are six awards given out and this year three were claimed by the UWindsor contingent:

• Danilo Stocco, PhD student in mechanical, automotive and materials engineering (MAME), received first place in Best Doctoral Presentation.
• Andrew Ouellette, PhD student in physics (now a post-doctoral fellow at IDIR), placed third in Best Doctoral Presentation.
• Vlad Tusinean, masters in computer science student, finished second in Best Master’s Presentation.

Dr. Maev says it is a prestigious and important federal six-year program to help four participating Canadian universities from Ontario and Quebec improve education in the non-destructive and materials characterization field.

Once a year, one of the founding universities hosts a meeting to disseminate the progress each student has made with their industrial partners and awards are given to the best three master’s and three postdoc/doctoral students.

“This year it was in Toronto at the Toronto University campus, and I am proud to report to the University of Windsor that my student team consisting of one postdoc, two PhD students, and one master’s student, took home half of these awards,” says Maev, a physics professor.

“This is a big achievement and obviously demonstrates IDIR’s significance at the federal level in the training of highly qualified personnel in that field.”