Camille Zimmer awarded prestigious scholarship from Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation

September 05, 2023

by Ivan Watson

Throughout her life and academic career, Camille Zimmer has combined her love of learning with a passion for green engineering, clean water and sustainability as well as a strong commitment to helping others achieve their potential. Now, on the cusp of completing her PhD in Public Health and Environmental Engineering at UVic, she is being honoured as the recipient of the prestigious Claudette MacKay-Lassonde Graduate PhD Award from the Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation (CEMF)

“It’s really great and the overall feeling is of gratitude and relief,” she says. “The scholarship funds will be very helpful now that I’m in the home stretch of my PhD and will provide an opportunity to help me plan the next steps in my career.”

Zimmer was born in Nanaimo but grew up in Calgary where she attended university. While still in high school, her math teacher, who also was an engineer, encouraged her to attend a GoEngGirl event at the University of Calgary, with hundreds of other young women from high schools from around the city.

“It was totally transformative,” she says. “There were cool activities and panel discussions and I met a woman who was doing environmental engineering and I just fell in love with everything. No one in my family was an engineer so I don’t think it would have been on my radar otherwise.”

Inspired, she attended the University of Calgary two years later for a bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering. In 2017, she moved to Victoria to start her master’s degree in UVic’s new green civil engineering program and after graduation, continued her academic career here, beginning her PhD in 2019.

Over the years at UVic, she has established herself as a force to be reckoned with, both in terms of her top academic achievements and her commitment to strengthening the culture and community of the faculty through mentorship and innovative new outreach activities, especially helping young women and girls in STEM.

“When I first arrived at UVic I could see there was so much potential for doing outreach for girls for engineering,” she explains. “I founded the Victoria chapters of both GoEngGirl and GoCodeGirl to encourage girls to explore a future in engineering and computer science.”

GoEngGirl and GoCodeGirl are national initiatives arising from a partnership between McMaster University and the Professional Engineers of Ontario, with local chapters in major universities across Canada. At UVic, they are annual events organised in collaboration with Science Venture that see hundreds of girls from local elementary and secondary schools participate in hands-on and experiential learning opportunities with the aim of inspiring them to consider a future career in engineering and computer science.

Zimmer’s work in establishing UVic’s outreach initiatives and commitment to mentorship were cited as two key reasons for her being awarded this year’s Claudette MacKay-Lassonde Graduate award at the PhD level. It is an ambassadorial award and recipients must demonstrate they are leaders, ambassadors for the profession, and serve as role models for other women who dream of becoming engineers. The $15,000 award is given annually at both the Master’s and PhD levels.

At UVic, Zimmer’s PhD research has focussed on clean water and drinking water treatment.

“Specifically, I study small-scale drinking water treatment devices that people might use when they are out camping in the backcountry,” she explains. “I did field work here on the west coast of Vancouver Island, on the Juan de Fuca trail, interviewing backpackers who were treating their water and testing the water quality from the devices they were using to see how well their were working.”

Her research aims to both assess and make recommendations on improving portable water treatment devices, with potential positive impacts across a range of uses and industries.

“The main result is that improvements for the framework for testing need to be made, and not all the devices that people are using are working as advertised,” she says. “The method of testing is new, so my hope is that it can be applied in other applications and improvements will be made.”

Her PhD dissertation is entitled, “Assessing Point of Use Water Treatment Technologies under Real-Use Conditions: The Field Challenge Test Technique” and is based on her extensive field work. She will defend her dissertation with her oral examination on September 8. Not one to sit still for long, she will head to Europe a few days later to take up a three-month Green Talent Fellowship at a large research institute in Germany.

Looking ahead, she is passionate about the evolving field of green civil engineering and the potential to make a long-term impact through her career.

“I think that there are so many interesting challenges to work on, and so many nerdy things I’m excited to do,” she says. “One of the biggest challenges will be in terms of climate change and water supply and water quality and coming up with mitigation strategies, and monitoring and tracking our water supply quality I’m excited to work on those things and to help come up with solutions.”