Industry Minister Tobin Announces Canada's First Chairs In Design
Engineering
$4.8 million to enable innovation
(Halifax, Nova Scotia) Brian Tobin, Minister of Industry
and Minister responsible for NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council) today announced at Dalhousie University federal funding
of $4.8 million for design engineering chairs at five Canadian universities:
Dalhousie University, l'Université de Sherbrooke, l'École
Polytechnique, the University of Manitoba and the University of Calgary.
Each chair is supported by industrial partners.
"Design engineering is the enabler of innovation," said Tobin.
"These five chairs - and there are more in the pipeline - will
generate the knowledge and training that will give us the home-grown
base of Canadian innovators that our industries are urgently seeking
."
"A gap in Canada's innovation system is the shortage of design
engineers," said Dr. Tom Brzustowski whose agency created the Chairs
in Design Engineering and ran the national competition for them. "Design
engineering is an essential step in bringing new goods and services
to market - the process we call innovation. Design engineers are the
people who take an invention and turn it into an economical and safe
product that meets people's needs."
In addition to the Chairs, in May 2000 NSERC helped launch C-DEN, the
Canadian Design Engineering Network, a network linking the people who
teach design engineering in Canada's engineering schools.
Dalhousie University (NSERC award: $810,000)
The NSERC Chair in Design Innovation will promote the
teaching, practice and culture of total design in Atlantic Canada. Total
design is focussed on the customer, and incorporates in the design process
all the factors necessary for successful new products, processes and
procedures. This Chair will develop new theories and methodologies relevant
to small and medium-sized enterprises and will be sharing this knowledge
with industrial partners and incorporate it into engineering programs
at Dalhousie University.
Université de Sherbrooke (NSERC award: $1 million)
This Chair in Design Engineering will enable the development
of new methods for teaching design engineering that deal with, among
other things, the evaluation of design projects, the definition of industrial
partnerships, and the conduct of feasibility studies within the context
of the selection of design projects. The research will also help develop
innovative methods for improving the safe design of machines. Lastly,
the Chair will promote design engineering in engineers' training and
introduce to manufacturing companies new and modern approaches for the
development of products.
École Polytechnique (NSERC award: $1 million)
The NSERC Environmental Design Engineering Chair will
be focussing on creating computer-oriented tools that help companies
and individual facilities analyze their processes holistically, and
make sophisticated business and environmental decisions based on good
data. The chair will be looking at process integration tools, such as
heat and mass exchange networks analysis, capital effectiveness analysis,
life cycle analysis (LCA), data-driven process modeling, on-line data
reconciliation, controllability analysis, and supply chain analysis.
University of Manitoba (NSERC award: $1 million)
The NSERC Design Engineering Chair will focus on creating
'design-ready' engineers. The program will introduce engineers-in-residence
(retired design engineers and active design engineers, seconded from
industry) into the undergraduate programs so that students have direct
contact with those who design for a living. Industry-based design units
that focus on local design problems will be established to expose students
to design office realities and industry to student creativity.
University of Calgary (NSERC award: $1 million)
The NSERC Chair in Life Cycle Environmental Design Engineering
will focus on the design of environmentally-friendly products and processes.
The chair will consider the environmental impact at every stage of the
product or process life cycle, right through to eventual disposal or
recycling. The program will aim to establish a strong educational, design
and development base through close interaction with industrial partners
and other institutions involved with the Canadian Design Engineering
Network (CDEN).
NSERC (the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada)
invests in people, discovery and innovation and is the national instrument
for making strategic investments in Canada's capability in science and
technology.
For more information contact:
Francis Lionnet, NSERC Communications
Tel: (613) 992-9001
E-mail: francis.lionnet@nserc.ca.
Stacey Lewis, Dalhousie University,
Tel: (902) 494-1327
E-mail: stacey.lewis@dal.ca.
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