It became the sixth university in Canada to become part of the prestigious Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) Thursday when its business partners gave the UOIT a cumulative donation of $680 million in equipment and software.
Representatives from the five founding PACE partners were on hand, along with UOIT president Ron Bordessa, and Kimberley Christian, a manufacturing engineering graduate student and teaching/research assistant, for the official inauguration of the university as a PACE partner.
"This is the single largest in-kind donation to UOIT and, undoubtedly, one of the largest ever to any Canadian university. It's important for the university itself, the faculty and students. We'll have no problem moving out of our comfort zone to move into this new role," said Mr. Bordessa.
"I've been able to use PACE programs for my design thesis. I integrated the existing system into a 3-D format, then tested and validated my system on top of the other one. I've also taught first-year engineering students some PACE concepts," said Ms. Christian.
The UOIT is one of only 45 universities world-wide who are part of PACE. The schools work collaboratively on projects, such as the global vehicle collaboration project, which allows students to design and test vehicles technologically with no physical labour.
The donation is to fund math-based technology for every aspect of the automobile-design process, a technology General Motors has been using since the mid-1990s and wants to have fully operational at the university.
"The automotive sector is one of the highest technology sectors. We found that the young people GM was hiring then, usually from the best schools, didn't have the technological know-how for our technology. It took us 14 months to train them, but we wanted the technology to be integrated to the university program," said Elaine Chapman-Moore, manager of global PACE partnerships for GM product development.
Ms. Chapman-Moore said the universities didn't have the money for the required technology and eventually partnerships with GM and the other four founding companies happened.
"Siemens, known by another name at that time, gave the software while Sun Microsystems refurbished our (GM's) hardware. EDS owned the assets to the systems, HP provided free workstations, and GM provides infrastructure," she said.
The university began using various aspects of the technology in September 2005, said Remon Pop-Iliev, an associate engineer in the faculty of engineering and applied science. His chairmanship in the faculty is funded by GM and the Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council of Canada. Mr. Pop-Iliev, the person responsible for connecting the UOIT with the necessary technology that GM uses, said there are 845-to-860 faculty of engineering students per year being trained on varying kinds of PACE software.
Ms. Chapman-Moore said the UOIT's close proximity to Oshawa's GM plant, its automotive focus, and its newness were all factors in asking the university to become a PACE partner.
"A lot of universities want to become PACE partners. They must be a strategically identified institution by General Motors -- we use a very stringent assessment process," she said.
Electronic Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Sun Microsystems and GM were the PACE founding partners, a collaboration that came about naturally based on which company could provide which equipment to PACE universities, said Ms. Chapman-Moore.
