When University of Waterloo professor Dr. Carolyn Ren was a child, her father came home one day with a tape cassette recorder. This was China in the early 1980s and such devices were hard to come by, particularly in their rural village. Everyone was curious to see it, no one more so than Ren who was transfixed by its ability to play music as if by magic. She had to understand how it worked so took the device apart. Unfortunately, she couldn't put it back together again. Determined to never get stuck in such a situation again, the young Ren set her sights on becoming an engineer.
Ren joined the University's Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering in 2004 and launched the Microfluidics Laboratory shortly thereafter. With a team of postdoctoral fellows, graduate and co-op students, she leads innovative research in a range of life-improving applications from cancer diagnostics to wearable medical technologies.
"I've always been interested in figuring out how things work and then making them work better-there's always room for improvement," Ren says. "Whatever the system-mechanical, electrical or medical-it needs to help people live well. All our lab's research has an end-user in mind because what's important for us is seeing something we've developed being useful in the real world."
Waterloo's Microfluidics Lab (WML) focuses on improving the delivery of health care. The team's expertise in the precise control of fluids at the microscale helps, for example, pharmaceutical companies develop more targeted drug delivery systems and doctors perform more accurate, real-time disease diagnoses. All to the benefit of patients whose recoveries improve thanks to better, faster treatments.
Turning research into real-world solutions
Alongside her academic work, Ren has co-founded four startups in the Waterloo region and holds nine active patents, capitalizing on the University's unique intellectual property policy which ensures that any business idea developed on the Waterloo campus belongs to its creators. This entrepreneurial ethos is supported by a local ecosystem that includes Velocity, the University's startup incubator, the Faculty of Engineering's Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Technology, and the Accelerator Centre, all of which help entrepreneurs commercialize their ideas and build businesses.
Ren's latest venture is called Air Microfluidics, co-founded in 2020 with her then student Run Ze Gao who completed his PhD in 2023 and is now a post-doctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Working with the WML team of graduate research students, the company has developed technology that improves compression therapy for medical and athletic use.
Commercialization is already underway with industry partners CAIR, a Dutch startup working on a wearable, medically approved, compression device to treat lymphedema, a chronic and often painful condition that affects many breast cancer survivors, and Strivonix, a Waterloo spinoff company co-founded by Ren and Waterloo Engineering alumni Jordan Savage (BASc '22, MASc '24) and Caleb Horst (BASc '02, MASc '04) that's developing activewear with built-in compression massage capabilities for sports recovery.
Thanks to Air Microfluidics' technology which powers much lighter and smaller pneumatic pumps than those currently used to treat swollen tissue caused by fluid buildup, both CAIR and Strivonix's products are wearable and enable mobility.
"Traditional compression therapy systems weigh about one kilogram and are bulky, like a backpack, which limits use," Gao, says. "Our new tech weighs about 200 grams and is sleek and small, like a smartphone, making it more versatile without any loss of functionality. Given that people can now wear their compression treatment and carry on with their lives unimpeded, they're more inclined to do so which improves health outcomes."
Like Gao, Strivonix co-founder Savage is Ren's prior student. Both Ren and Gao have equity in Strivonix and Gao is listed as a co-inventor. The company aims to launch its product in the sports market this summer. Ren and Gao plan to use their profits to invest in the clinical trials needed to achieve medical approval for CAIR's compression device in health-care settings.
Dr. Run Ze Gao, Waterloo Engineering alum and co-founder of Air Microfluidics.
"Entrepreneurship is baked into the Waterloo experience," Gao says. "Researchers have the freedom to push innovation for commercialization and own their creations. I love publishing papers, but I love producing patents too - and I can't wait to see our tech making a real difference in people's lives."
For Ren, there is great satisfaction in supporting her students' research and entrepreneurial ventures as their supervisor and co-founder.
"Whether it's a tape cassette recorder or lymphedema treatment tech, at its core, being an entrepreneur is taking something apart to understand how it works and then trying to make it work better" Ren says. "And doing it as a team learning together makes it incredibly rewarding."
Go to An award-winning wearable for women's health and read about more health-tech research developed by the Waterloo Microfluidics Lab.
