Engineering students and faculty pitch world-changing ideas – Faculty of Engineering

Engineering students and faculty pitch world-changing ideas

Undergrads and graduate students will be competing for more than $8,000 in prize money, while six winning interdisciplinary faculty teams will receive $100,000 in seed funding.

From using computers to predict genocide to vaccines that don’t need to be refrigerated to 3D-printed organs, engineering students and faculty have a lot of big ideas to make the world a better place.

This week, they’re getting a chance to showcase those ideas in a series of high-paced pitch competitions, culminating in the Big Ideas Pitch Week finals, held October 4 from 5 pm to 8:30 at the Faculty Club.

Undergrads and graduate students will be competing for more than $8,000 in prize money, while six winning interdisciplinary faculty teams will receive $100,000 in seed funding as part of the Seeding Big Ideas Research Competition.

Four teams that received Educating the Engineer of 2025 teaching research awards will also be presenting their projects.

Presentations will be following a three-minute format established by Three-Minute Thesis (3MT), which is an annual competition held in more than 200 universities worldwide. The graduate competition is an official 3MT event – the first-ever held by the Faculty of Engineering.

The Faculty of Engineering will be livestreaming the event on Facebook and Youtube.

Undergraduate finalists are:

  • Jessica Trac
  • Natasha Varghese
  • Hannah McPhee
  • Yumna Irfan

Graduate finalists are:

  • Andrew LeClair
  • Eva Mueller
  • Vincent Leung
  • Sam Peter

Faculty finalists are:

  • Tohid Didar
  • Qiyin Fang
  • Zeinab Hosseini-Doust
  • Zoe Li
  • Zahra Motamed
  • Michael Noseworthy
  • Todd Hoare
  • Heather Sheardown
  • Kathryn Grandfield
  • Igor Zhitomirsky

Come to Big Ideas Pitch Night!

Learn more about the competition.