By: Carolyn Farrell, Director, Awards and Honours, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering

Professor Chul Park, Professor Yu Sun, and Professor Emeritus Charles Ward, from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, have been honoured by the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) for their achievements in this field.

Chul Park was awarded the Robert W. Angus Medal for outstanding contributions to the management and practice of engineering. Yu Sun was elevated to CSME Fellow for excellence in mechanical engineering. Charles Ward received the Jules Stachiewicz Medal for outstanding contributions to heat transfer in Canada.

“Professors Park, Sun and Ward have all made outstanding contributions to mechanical engineering,” said Cristina Amon, Dean, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. “They are most deserving of these accolades and we are delighted that CSME is honouring them for their achievements.”

Chul Park is a world leader in the development of innovative technologies for the cost-effective manufacture of microcellular foamed plastics. He holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Advanced Polymer Processing Technologies and is the Founder and Director of the Microcellular Plastics Manufacturing Laboratory; one of the world’s premier research institutions in the refining of microcellular plastics foaming technology. Professor Park holds 20 patents and his patented microcellular technology has been licensed by over 200 companies. He has published his research in a total of 573 publications. Chul Park is a CSME Fellow and has also received the CSME’s G.H. Duggan Medal for Advanced Materials Research (2001). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Plastics Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Less than six years after completing his PhD, Yu Sun is already a pioneer in the area of microrobotic manipulation of biological cells and a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Micro and Nano Engineering Systems. Professor Sun has developed a series of micro devices and systems for characterizing mechanical properties of single cells for both fundamental cell mechanics studies and clinical disease diagnosis. One of these devices is a microrobotic system to inject DNA into the pronucleus of mouse embryos in aid of cancer research, which has recently been licensed for commercialization. Publication of these results in 2007 has already led to over 2200 downloads of the article from the Public Library of Science website. Since joining the Faculty in 2004 Professor Sun has been awarded almost three million dollars in research funding and has eight patents granted or pending. He has also established a first-of-its-kind research center on the manipulation and characterization of nanomaterials with Hitachi Canada Inc.

Charles Ward is the Director of Thermodynamics and Kinetics Laboratory at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on transport processes at interphase boundaries. One of his most significant contribution is the development of a theoretical framework known as the “Statistical Rate Theory”, a kinetic theory for predicting the rate of molecular transport across the interface between macroscopic phases. The Statistical Rate Theory increases in importance as engineers increasingly work at the nano and micro scales, where traditional methods cannot accurately represent the physical processes involved. Recently Professor Ward has been doing groundbreaking work on the phase changes of water. These are of crucial importance in a number of areas ranging from weather prediction to the efficient design of many industrial processes. Professor Ward has published 99 refereed journals and 3 patents. He is a previous recipient of the Robert W. Angus Medal (1988).

The CSME Awards Ceremony will take place on June 1, 2009 during the CANCAM 2009 conference at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

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