News and Events

Dr. Frank A. DeMarco, his son Dan and daughter Terry react to a speech during a lab naming ceremony in Frank’s honour on May 28, 2016 in the Ed Lumley Centre for Engineering Innovation. Former colleagues and students, friends, UWindsor staff and members of his family donated $100,000 to the university’s engineering and science faculties in honour of Dr. DeMarco’s illustrious career.

Dr. Frank A. DeMarco has a lot to celebrate.

His illustrious career at the University of Windsor spans four decades and boasts notable roles — professor, researcher, coach, athletic director, first dean of engineering, and inaugural vice-president — that have earned him a legacy that few will ever be able to match.

He and his wife, Mary, have been married for nearly 73 years, raised 12 children and dote on 39 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He even has his own Wikipedia page.

And on Feb. 14, 2021, DeMarco will become a centenarian. 

“Your long and productive life is an inspiration to us all,” the university’s first graduating class of engineering wrote in a letter to DeMarco, congratulating their former mentor on the milestone.

“Our numbers were very small, only 25 in total, but we are impressed at how the Engineering Faculty has grown into a world class organization during the past 60 years and we recognize that this is due in large part to your efforts in the initial years. We can say for certain as we look back over the many years working in our profession, that we were well-prepared for this work by our engineering studies.”

An engineering alumnus has been featured among Canada’s top 100 professionals in a publication that highlights top tier business leaders.

Md Mizanur Rahman (MASc 2003) was recognized for nearly two decades of diverse experience as a professional engineer in Redwood Media’s Top 100 Magazine.

Rahman not only serves as president and chief executive officer of MR Engineering Limited, he is the senior structural engineer for the company headquartered in Edmonton.

“The University of Windsor played a vital role in my engineering career in Canada,” says Rahman, a civil engineering grad. “I will never forget the extraordinary guidance, mentorship, and support of Dr. Faouzi Ghrib, Dr. Nihar Biswas and Dr. Tirupati Bolisetti.”

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A life-changing experience wasn’t exactly what Dustin Rivard was expecting when he embarked upon a co-op placement as a test engineer in a bearing department.

The mechanical engineering student jumped at the chance to work in Germany for a year with the Schaeffler Group, a global automotive and industrial supplier, figuring it would be a great opportunity to work and travel.

“I rave about this opportunity to every engineering student I know,” says Rivard BASc ’17. “First, I tell everyone they need to do co-op; It provides you with the connections that help you get the career you want, not to mention just giving you experience. Second, the chance to live and work in another country for a year turned into an incredible, life-changing experience.”

The Schaeffler Group co-op partnership with the University of Windsor, established in 1998 by the Faculty of Engineering’s Dr. Peter Frise, is one of many unique industrial relationships at UWindsor that offers students education that goes beyond the traditional classroom. Since its inception, more than 200 engineering, business and computer science students have ventured to the company’s German headquarters in the small town of Herzogenaurach in central Bavaria to gain 12 months of real-word experience. 

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This guest column written by Dr. Edwin Tam, associate professor, civil and environmental engineering, was featured in the latest issue of WE, the Faculty of Engineering’s annual magazine.

The current, global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is poised to create a humanitarian crisis in terms of the loss of human life, long term health impacts, and socio-economic upheaval. However, the severity of such impacts varies widely by country, by region, and even city and by city. It would seem as if population size and density would account for the differences experienced by different communities, but these alone cannot explain all inconsistencies: early on, similarly sized regions or cities did not experience the impacts equally, and now months later, there are still widely varying incidents of COVID-19 within the same region as the world faces ongoing waves of the pandemic. 

What are the physical characteristics, demographic profiles, infrastructure, policies, and practices of a community that enhance its resiliency to withstand and overcome a pandemic based on the experiences with the outbreak of COVID-19? Our team – which includes Anneke Smit from Law, Tirupati Bolisetti from Civil Engineering, and Myron Hlynka and Mohamed Belalia from Mathematics and Statistics – is researching what are preferred characteristics and actions for municipalities to improve their resiliency to respond and just as importantly, recover from pandemic scenarios. The initial research is funded by WE-Spark and the VP of Research here at the University of Windsor.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted how critical the medical services, transportation of goods and services, information technologies, and municipal utilities are to maintaining a functioning community. What differs by location is the resiliency to sustainably deliver goods and services, and the disruption to work, education, and social activities. There are also controversies – does the infrastructure and systems, such as transit, contribute to the pandemic? How they can be managed? Large, dense urban centres face greater challenges because of the need to coordinate large scale responses, containment, public communication, and much more. At the same time, their size, systems, and institutions may afford them the greatest medical, supply, and resources to respond. In contrast, remote, rural regions have fewer infections, but are concerned they may be overwhelmed should infections surge. Mid-sized municipalities that possess sufficient infrastructure but do not have significant high densities could potentially represent an optimal size to withstand a pandemic. 

But unlike in other disaster scenarios such as flooding, where infrastructure such as roads might be unusable due to physical destruction, most infrastructure systems remain intact in a pandemic crisis. The response measures to a pandemic therefore permit the selective curtailing of targeted municipal systems to reduce transmission. However, reducing services can have unexpected, unintended consequences - including health and related socio-economic impacts, which disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, and may have long-term sustainability impacts. Public transit is a primary example.