Cole Fredericks is a 2025 Canada Student Merit Award winner. He achieved this award for obtaining the highest standing of his class in the fourth and final year of his degree. Here is a brief biography of the winner.
Along the way, Cole won two NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards, as well as a Globalink Research Award internship to pursue his research abroad, working closely with researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain. There, he attended the 20th Anniversary Nanomotors International Conference and won an award for exceptional poster presentation. Deeply immersed in his research, he reached three publications before graduating, one of which he published as the first author.
Beyond studying, research work, and publishing academic articles, Cole is involved in various singing events on campus and around the Kitchener-Waterloo area, taking part in two a cappella ensembles and two barbershop quartets. He has also worked very closely with the University of Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, being invited to interviews that were posted to their website and attending recruitment events to share his experiences and to provide support to prospective students.
Inspired to progress further in his field, Cole began his graduate studies in Chemical Engineering, fueled by the achievement of an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Research Scholarship and by his recent admittance as a nanofellow to the Waterloo Institute of Nanotechnology. He is now looking towards the microfabrication of polymer hydrogels and the miniaturisation of his soft robots for eventual biomedical implementation in vivo.
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