Bio
Professor Karim has focused recent efforts on designing a growth-oriented strategy for entrepreneurship and commercialization at Waterloo through the development of a new framework to align entrepreneurship, innovation education, and commercialization activities across the university to maximize Waterloo’s societal impact. His goals include reducing barriers to commercialization and entrepreneurship, expanding access for both intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship education to a broad university audience and cultivating a vibrant network to further build upon past Waterloo successes.
Dr. Karim has extensive experience as an entrepreneur. He is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of KA Imaging, a University of Waterloo spinoff that commercializes his lab’s X-ray imaging innovations into solutions for medical, industrial, veterinary, and security markets. Dr. Karim has walked the challenging path of an entrepreneur including securing capital, markets, and growing a successful company. KA Imaging has commercialized three products with devices in service in seven countries around the globe.
Karim S. Karim received his BASc and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, both from the University of Waterloo, and an MBA from the Rotman School at the University of Toronto. He was at Simon Fraser University from 2003 to 2007 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science and is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Professor Karim served as the Associate Director for the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology from 2011 to 2017 and as the Executive Director for the past two years. From 2017-2020, Dr. Karim served as the Associate Dean of Outreach in the Faculty of Engineering.