Engineering awards boost Newfoundlanders and massive Synchotron project

Two Newfoundland engineers won top honours when the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers announced the winners of its 2002 awards this week. The ceremony was held in St. John’s, home of the Gold Medal Award-winner, Dr. Wallace Read, P.Eng.
As the former chairman and CEO of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, Read was the guiding force behind the development and expansion of the province’s electric power system. He wins the highest mark of personal recognition for a professional engineer.
Emad Rizkalla, P.Eng., also of St. John’s, won the Young Engineer Achievement Award, which goes to someone aged 35 or under. Rizkalla is the co-founder of an IT firm, ZeddComm Inc. whose clients include Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Canon Corp and Health Canada.
From across the country, UMA Group of Saskatoon won the National Award for Exceptional Engineering Achievement for a massive science project, the Canadian Light Source Synchotron. The project was featured in Canadian Consulting Engineer magazine’s December 2000 issue. The synchotron is a football-field sized apparatus that produces the brightest light possible, billions of times more intense than the sun. Researchers and scientists all over the world are relying on synchotron light to allow them to see matter at the sub-atomic level.
The Synchotron accelerator is being built adjacent to the Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory at the University of Saskatoon. The 9,000-square metre building houses a massive booster and storage rings which are enclosed in a concrete tunnel. A Danish company, Danfysik is desingning and building the booster ring. The project is the largest science project to be built in Canada in 30 years, costing $173 million.
Other winners at the Newfoundland ceremony were Pierre Desjardins, ing., president of Vendel and Sovenca of Laval, who won the Meritorious Service Award for Professional Service.
William McDonald, P.Eng., of Winnipeg won the Meritorious Service Award for Community Service. Dr. James Graham, P.Eng., professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Manitoba, won a Medal for Distinction in Engineering Education.
Awards for the support of Women in Engineering went to Dr. Valerie Davidson of the University of Guelph and Dr. Claire Deschenes, ing., of the Laval University.
Sara Ehrhardt, a third-year engineering student at the University of Waterloo, won the Gold Medal Student Award. She founded the internship program for Engineers Without Borders and led a community development construction project in Guyana. She is originally from Moncton, New Brunswick.