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Recent Submissions

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    Cultivating Home: Preserving Intergenerational Knowledge in The Chinese Food Garden
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-04-27) Yang, Eva
    The home food garden is more than a space for food production; it is a space that fosters memories and continually grows to intertwine with collections of personal stories. With a focus on personal and familial experiences, this research traces the exchange of gardening knowledge and practices across three generations of my family: my grandparents' farmlands in Guangzhou, China, their gardens in Scarborough after they migrated to Canada, my parents' garden in Richmond Hill, and my own garden in Cambridge. When my grandparents and her children lived in Guangzhou, cultivating food was deeply ingrained in their daily lives and was the main source of their diet. The gardens developed by each following generation became a point of connection to our ancestral roots. Drawing on theories of rhizomatic thinking and viewing the garden through the lens of ancestral plants, I base this thesis on the garden and follow my family’s migration to understand our agricultural heritage as it has been passed down, lost, or adapted to fit into host cultures. Learning from Atelier Bow Wow's approach to ethnographic research, I conducted interviews with collaborative drawings and gardened alongside each family member to gather information on the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In Ontario, I had the opportunity to garden with my family. To ensure participation at each step of the gardening process, the collaborative gardening began with this year’s growing season in March 2025 and ended in October 2025. I visited my grandparents’ and parents’ garden at least twice a month and documented it through photography and videography. From these interviews and gardening together, I identified four categories to analyze the collected data: Water, Soil, Tools, and Cultivation. To translate my family members' memories and knowledge into visual representations, informed by the spatial research of Huda Tayob and Jan Rothuizen. This research is presented as a series of four interconnected drawings, each related to one of the four categories. Each series of drawings is further dissected into the three different generations, highlighting what knowledge was passed on, what knowledge was forgotten, and what was reinvented to fit the new societal norms of the diaspora. The final proposal synthesized the research into a design for my current garden space, as an attempt to reintroduce lost or unused knowledge while integrating values of the host culture. The purpose of this research was to further understand how the garden functions as a space for the Chinese diaspora to create a sense of belonging and preserve cultural identity across generations. It was also an opportunity to explore how migrant identities were constructed through food practices as a means of actively engaging with and adapting to a new landscape and cultural practices.
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    Exploring 3D Printing as an Innovative Approach for Phosphor Design in Next-Generation MicroLED Devices
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-04-27) Ezekiel, Ubokobong
    Micro–light-emitting diodes (microLEDs) have emerged as a leading platform for next-generation emissive displays and solid-state lighting, offering exceptional brightness, energy efficiency, and modulation bandwidth. However, realising high resolution full-colour microLED systems remains constrained by the lack of scalable, high-precision phosphor-deposition technologies capable of producing uniform, tunable, and geometrically precise colour-conversion layers at the micron scale. Conventional phosphor-coating approaches, such as spin-coating, inkjet deposition, and particle–binder lamination, struggle to meet the stringent spatial and colourimetric tolerances demanded by microLED pixels. This work addresses the development of a novel colour conversion approach using engineered phosphor inks, with a focus on their formulation, printability, and optical performance for advanced display applications. An experimental framework is established to investigate the feasibility of depositing these phosphor-based materials via stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing to form uniform thin films. The study evaluates the printability of high-loading phosphor composites, identifying critical process limitations such as scattering-induced lateral curing and ultraviolet (UV) dose interactions, which define a practical feature resolution of 125– 150 µm for 25 vol% formulations. To enable consistent film fabrication, mechanical modifications to the printing platform including tilt compensation and enhanced structural rigidity are implemented, resulting in high-uniformity blanket films with controlled thicknesses of 86.8 ± 8 µm and 132.2 ± 7 µm. In parallel, the optical properties of the engineered phosphor ink and printed films are systematically characterized. Raw phosphor analysis confirms stable silicate amber emission centered at 595 nm, while polymer embedding significantly enhances emission intensity by more than 40× due to improved optical extraction. The printed films are further evaluated through colourimetry, spectral analysis, brightness measurements, and accelerated UV ageing tests. A full-factorial colour-point study comprising 63 remote-phosphor samples and 21 direct-print microLED samples quantifies the influence of thickness, solid loading, phosphor concentration, and yellow dopant level on CIExy chromaticity. Statistical analysis reveals that brightness is dominated by phosphor loading (βph ≈ 7.08, p ≈ 0.014), with yellow doping as a secondary contributor (βy ≈ 2.38). Coefficients of variation (0.40–0.48) highlight moderate spatial non-uniformity driven by residual thickness variation and particle aggregation. Accelerated UV-weathering tests show that small-milled particles exhibit significantly improved chromatic stability (∆E < 2 at 3500 kJ/m2), while unmilled and high-doping samples show marked degradation. A physics-based simulation framework is developed to replicate microLED excitation of printed phosphor layers, accurately predicting chromaticity drift as a function of film thickness and phosphor loading. Optimal colour conversion is identified at approximately 15 vol% phosphor and thicknesses exceeding 200 µm, demonstrating strong agreement between simulation and experimental results. These findings are supported by integrated simulation-driven validation and experimental measurements, enabling systematic analysis of performance trends and verification against industry-defined colour and reliability targets. Collectively, this work demonstrates that SLA 3D printing enables precise, tunable, and mechanically robust phosphor architectures, establishing additive manufacturing as a viable and scalable pathway for next-generation microLED colour conversion technologies.
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    Probabilistic Assessment of Heatwaves and Building Energy Demand under Changing Climate
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-04-27) Khan, Kunwar Aneeq
    Climate change is expected to increase building cooling demand not only by raising average temperatures, but also by intensifying extreme heat conditions that produce short duration peaks and prolonged periods of elevated cooling use. This thesis investigates these effects for Toronto using an integrated framework that combines future climate projections, building energy simulation, and probabilistic modeling of extremes. The study begins with a review of the literature on climate change impacts on buildings, future weather datasets, and probabilistic approaches for assessing building energy performance. A bias-corrected future climate ensemble is then used to generate EnergyPlus simulations for a prototype building over the period 2003--2094. From these simulations, annual and hourly cooling demand metrics are derived and analyzed together with heatwave characteristics identified using Environment and Climate Change Canada heat-warning criteria. The probabilistic component of the thesis applies non-homogeneous Poisson processes, Weibull models, maximum value distributions, and Gumbel models to characterize both climate and building response extremes. These models are used to examine changes in heatwave occurrence, cumulative heat exposure, annual extreme heatwave severity, annual peak cooling load, and cooling demand during heatwave periods. The results show that future warming leads to more frequent and more severe heatwaves, with upward shifts in cumulative heat exposure and annual heatwave extremes. The building energy analysis shows a corresponding intensification of cooling demand. Annual cooling energy use increases, annual peak cooling loads rise, and cooling demand during heatwaves becomes progressively larger, especially toward the upper tail of the distribution. The analysis also shows that stationary models are generally less suitable than non-stationary formulations for representing these future changes. The thesis demonstrates that future cooling related building risk cannot be understood adequately using deterministic summaries or stationary assumptions alone. By linking evolving heatwave behavior to changes in simulated building demand within a probabilistic framework, it provides a rigorous basis for assessing climate-driven cooling extremes in buildings.
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    Operational witnesses of non-classicality via Bell inequalities and contextuality
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-04-27) Srivastava, Sanchit
    This thesis investigates operational signatures of non-classicality in quantum systems, examining the relationship between Bell inequalities, contextuality tests, and discrete Wigner negativity across four case studies. The first analyzes multipartite entanglement and genuine multipartite nonlocality in multiqubit systems, deriving analytical expressions for Svetlichny inequality violations for generalized Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) and maximal-slice states; the results indicate that the entanglement–nonlocality relationship depends on state structure rather than scalar entanglement measures alone. The second uses an optimized Bell inequality as a contextuality witness for the spin-1 quantum kicked top, revealing correlations between violation strength and the regular-versus-chaotic structure of the classical phase space. The third examines two qutrit Unruh–DeWitt detectors coupled to the Minkowski vacuum, showing that an initially noncontextual product state can develop contextual correlations through vacuum-mediated interactions, with contextuality onset coinciding with discrete Wigner negativity. The fourth constructs logical Bell inequalities for odd prime dimensions that connect single-qudit Wigner negativity to inequality violation. Each of these tests constrains a different class of classical model: locally causal hidden variables, noncontextual hidden variables, or positive Wigner representations. A recurring theme is that a violation of such an inequality certifies a property of the observed measurement statistics, rather than directly quantifying an underlying quantum resource.
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    Fabricating of Stable Thin Film Microdevices with UV Laser
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-04-27) Menezes, Jace
    Short-term and long-term stability remains a limiting factor in the practical deployment of micro-scale sensors and actuators, where small structural, thermal, or material changes can produce disproportionate performance drift over time. This thesis investigates drift mitigation strategies in two ultraviolet (UV) laser–fabricated micro-devices that operate in distinct but complementary domains: NiCr thin-film strain sensors for mechanical sensing and laser-induced graphene (LIG) microheaters for thermal actuation. Although these devices serve different functions, both exhibit degradation mechanisms rooted in microstructural instability, insufficient mechanical constraint, or poorly controlled thermal boundary conditions. For NiCr strain sensors, short-term resistance drift under constant mechanical load is addressed through the introduction of post-fabrication infill materials that mechanically encapsulate the laser-ablated traces. A systematic comparison of infill chemistries and viscosities demonstrates substantial reductions in noise, hysteresis, and short-term drift, supporting mechanical stabilization as the dominant mitigation mechanism. For LIG microheaters, long-term thermal stability is improved by incorporating an aluminum backing layer during fabrication, which fundamentally alters heat dissipation during UV laser processing. This substrate-mediated thermal boundary control produces denser LIG microstructures and enables stable Joule heating with minimal drift over 1000 thermal cycles and extended continuous operation. Across both device classes, this work demonstrates that stability can be engineered through deliberate control of mechanical constraint and boundary conditions, rather than relying solely on material substitution or complex control electronics. The results establish practical, fabrication-compatible strategies for improving short-term and long-term reliability in UV-laser-fabricated micro-devices and provide experimentally grounded hypotheses to guide future stability-oriented micro-device design.