Concordia students excel at the 2024 Quebec Engineering Competition
Students from Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science made their mark at the recent Quebec Engineering Competition in Quebec City. One individual and three teams had qualified for the Canadian Engineering Competition in Calgary, which happened from March 1 to 3.
The QEC, hosted by Laval University this year, is an important annual gathering for engineering students, educators and professionals. It features a range of activities designed to foster innovation and collaboration among future engineers. This year’s theme was the Conquest of Space.
Gloria Anastasopoulos is in her final year of a mechanical engineering degree with a focus on biomedical engineering. She won first place in the Engineering Communication category while presenting her team capstone project, "Simulating Microgravity with a Random Positioning Machine." It delved into the development and applications of devices capable of simulating microgravity or planetary gravity conditions, such as those found on Mars. Random positioning machines (RPMs) achieve this by continuously altering an object's gravitational vector, particularly rotating cell cultures to assess low gravity's impact on their structure and behaviour.
"I love participating in competitions like this one because they provide a platform to challenge myself against my peers and also grow with them,” Anastasopoulos says.
Gloria Anastasopoulos (centre) won first place in the Engineering Communication category.
Anastasopoulos’s presentation highlighted the limited opportunities for conducting real microgravity investigations, noting the constraints of space-station experiments and the brief zero-gravity periods provided by parabolic flights. She presented RPMs as a viable, cost-effective alternative that could be critical to advancements in space health, tissue engineering and cancer research. Her research aims to design and construct an RPM for Sainte-Justine Hospital, and her presentation reflected on the device's broad societal, economic and environmental implications.
Team effort
In addition to Anastasopoulos's achievement, Concordia teams excelled in various competition categories.
Jared Taylor, Alexandre Giroux, Ilayda Kultural and Mathias Desrochers secured second place in the Junior Design category with their innovative design solutions.
Camille Granade, Chloe Law, Jack Spiratos and Ben Marcotte claimed third place the Programming category.
Claudia McWilliams, Tylar Bianchi, Gregory Aldous, Mehnu Mahapatuna and Sufiyan Elberdi also earned third place for their project creativity in the Innovative Design category.
The students faced off against more than 200 of their undergraduate engineering peers from around the country when they gathered at the national competition in early March.
Find out more about Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science.
