Camosun Innovates—Camosun’s applied engineering department—has generated a new position that it hopes will help bolster the college’s automation and mechatronics fields. Imtehaze Heerah is the new Leading Edge Endowment Fund BC Regional Innovation Chair, and he hopes to unite academics with industry in a practical way.
“With the pandemic, over the last couple of years, it’s been a bit more challenging to find skilled people to work, so there’s a bigger need now for automation and mechatronic solutions in the industry, and this role is really just to help build capacity in those two fields at Camosun Innovates,” says Heerah.
Mechatronics is a field that combines mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and information technology to come up with sophisticated solutions to technological problems. Heerah says that his primary goal for his new position is to integrate Camosun Innovates into the local industry so thoroughly that it becomes a “go-to place,” where companies actively seek out Camosun’s help with practical engineering and manufacturing challenges.
“In the background, there’s always been that need for automation solutions. A lot of companies in town actually have fantastic products, but they’ve been making it manually, and they get to a point where they need to be able to make more, and faster,” Heerah says. “That’s where we come in, providing the expertise in the field, and also in allowing our students in our various programs to be able to work on those various projects. It’s a home-grown, specialty centre for this type of work.”
Another key component to Camosun Innovates’ operating structure is that it gives students practical, hands-on experience with actual industry work to further enrich their education. Heerah says that this amalgamation of theory and practice is a game-changer for students.
“The kind of projects that we work on over there is to provide students with an opportunity to work on real-life industry-based projects, which is slightly different from their curriculum activities,” he says. “It changes everything for them, because it’s going from being in class and learning about the foundational skills that you need, and also getting the option to apply it, and oftentimes, with a lot of these projects, they also get paid while they’re working on it, which is an extra benefit.”
Heerah says a significant goal of the program is to create an opportunity for students from different disciplines to come together to solve problems in a creatively unified fashion, which mirrors the experience they’ll have once they have a job working on real-world engineering projects.
“When people come to school, they get stuck in their own program, so typically, when I have my students, they just meet with their fellow mechanical engineering students, and that’s basically their experience over the next two, two and a half years, however long the program is, and the same thing can be said for students who are in the Civil Engineering program, the Arts and Science program, and so forth,” says Heerah. “What we’re trying to do here is actually trying to get students from different fields to collaborate, to come up with a really clever solution to some sort of problem, because ultimately, that’s really the nature of the field of mechatronics and automation.”
Heerah is excited for his new role, and believes that the program is perfectly primed to create active and meaningful impact within the local industry.
“It’s been in the works for some time, and it was just the right time to launch it, because we know that there’s a need for it; we know that we have the expertise from within,” says Heerah. “Whether it’s within the crew that we have at Camosun Innovates, or our own students here within the various programs, I think we’re at a point where we can put all those pieces together and come up with something amazing, within the college, and also for the community.”