CUBEC
Canadian Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Conference
Start-Up Panel
Dr. Colin Dalton
Neuraura Biotech
Colin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary and the Director of the Microsystems Hub, a multiuser micro-fabrication research facility for both academic and industrial users. His research interests include electrokinetic fluid manipulation in microfluidic systems, microneedle arrays for painless drug delivery and brain-machine interfaces. He is also the Co-Founder and CTO of spin out company Neuraura Biotech, based on his research with his co-founder, Pierre Wijdenes. Neuraura’s mission is to unlock safe and effective treatments for brain-related disorders using its proprietary miniaturised sensing technology to understand the electrical workings of the brain.
Dr. Heather Sheardown
20/20 OptimEyes Technologies
Heather Sheardown is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering with a cross appointment to the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine and an adjunct appointment with the School of Optometry at the University of Waterloo. She holds a two term Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Ophthalmic Biomaterials and Drug Delivery and has published more than 150 peer reviewed papers on this subject. She is currently the Scientific Director of C20/20, an ORF funded incubator aimed at the commercialization of ophthalmic biotechnologies, and the Chief Scientific Officer of 20/20 OptimEyes, a McMaster based company focused on developing and commercializing a micelle based technology.
Julian Mulia, MEng
NanoTess
Julian Mulia co-founded NanoTess with the vision to avoid unnecessary suffering through nanotechnology innovation starting with chronic wounds. Within one year NanoTess graduated from CDL-Rockies, oversubscribed their financing round, and won provincial, federal and military funding. Julian graduated from the University of Calgary with a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering and a Master's in Software Engineering. Prior to NanoTess, Julian worked as a management consultant, advising Fortune 500 C-Suite clients on Strategy, Operations, and establishing their innovation ecosystems and intrapreneurship practices. He has lived, worked or travelled to more than 42 countries so far, loving what life has to offer. Julian strongly believes that “Life begins and the end of your comfort zone.”
Dr. Martin Brouillette
Soundbite Medical
Dr. Martin Brouillette holds a B. Eng. from McGill University and both a Master's and a Doctorate in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Brouillette is currently Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada where he heads the Shock Wave Research Laboratory. He is the originator of several technology development projects in bio-engineering and micro-engineering, based on gas dynamics and shock wave physics. He is the holder of numerous patents for biomedical devices and sensor systems for aerospace applications and at the origin of three start-ups exploiting these technologies.
Top 10 Research Papers
Emily Blivin
Emily is a California native who earned a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and a MEng in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Portland in Oregon. She worked in fracture plating and bicycle helmet R&D before moving to Germany in 2017 to conduct research in the Institute for Biomechanics at BG Unfallklinik Murnau. Emily began her PhD studies in 2019 at UBC Vancouver in the Orthopaedics and Injury Biomechanics Group. Her thesis work concerns femoral augmentation to prevent hip fracture and uses a dual experimental-computational set-up to simulate a sideways fall impact, which will be captured using high speed x-ray.
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Laura Stankiewicz
Laura is currently completing her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at UBC. In her research, Laura uses emerging multi-omic sequencing and imaging techniques to investigate T cell development in the thymus. She uses these insights to guide the development of an in-vitro stem cell-to-T cell differentiation platform that can serve as a cell source for immunotherapies.