uOttawa News

OTTAWA, June 18, 2015  —  The University of Ottawa is proud to announce that Professor Hanan Anis has been awarded the Chair in Entrepreneurial Engineering Design (CEED) within the scope of the Chair in Design Engineering (CDE) Program of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. This will bring $1M in NSERC funding to the Faculty of Engineering over the next five years. With a strong background in design engineering and entrepreneurship, Professor Anis’ experience underscores the imperative need to integrate these two fields, something that will bring a new perspective to the CDE program.

“Statistics show that more and more new graduates will be employed by small and medium-sized enterprises,” acknowledged Professor Anis, who teaches at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is Coordinator for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Faculty of Engineering. “Entrepreneurship has increased considerably among the current generation of students, and the barrier to reaching success is lower, thanks to better access to technologies, crowd funding and open innovation.”

The uOttawa CEED aims to strengthen design engineering by empowering students to design, build and test solutions to engineering problems while keeping in mind proven market opportunities and business constraints, and will use entrepreneurship as a unifying theme. The Chair aims to help the next generation of graduates understand business models and become acutely aware of how and where their own product or venture fits within a complex value chain of customers, suppliers, and partners. Moreover, the Chair will help students pitch their engineering solutions in economic and societal terms that resonate with stakeholders who are not subject matter experts.

“Technological entrepreneurship and design are two pillars for engineering education in the twenty-first century. With this new Chair, the uOttawa Faculty of Engineering joins a select few Canadian engineering schools that are home to both an NSERC Chair for Women in Engineering and Science as well as an NSERC Chair in Entrepreneurial Engineering Design,” stated Claude Laguë, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. “In addition, uOttawa can proudly say that it is the only institution where both chair holders are women.”

“NSERC is proud to support leading women engineers, like Hanan Anis, who are using their knowledge to bridge research and entrepreneurship,” said B. Mario Pinto, President of NSERC. “Her work will inspire the next generation of female engineers, providing mentorship, increasing diversity, and helping to eliminate barriers.”

About Hanan Anis

Professor Anis’ career path has taken her full circle, namely from academia as a graduate student, through industry and business (1994-2004), and back to academia (2004-present). During her time in industry, she was an integral part of several multidisciplinary design teams that successfully delivered numerous complex, state-of-the-art fiber-optic system products to market. Since joining the University of Ottawa in 2004, Professor Anis has taught management-related courses in creativity and innovation, product development and technology entrepreneurship, as well as technical courses in optical networks, optoelectronics and photonics, components and biophotonics. Professor Anis’ research focus is in biophotonics, which includes biosensors, nonlinear microscopy and femtosecond fibre lasers.

Media inquiries:

Kina Leclair
Media Relations Officer
University of Ottawa
Office: 613-562-5800 (ext. 2529)
Cell: 613-762-2908
kleclair@uOttawa.ca

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