It’s as cold as it gets in Toronto this time of year, and my YouTube feed shows winter camping and woodworking. I recently watched a comparison of modern construction and old-school log cabins. While modern technology delivers homes with high R-value (the ability to resist heat flow), the cabins are far superior during a power and heating outage. The cabins were sealed exceptionally well and held internal temperature without additional heating. Beyond sealing, the main contributing factor was the sheer amount of energy trapped in the structure itself – within rock and lumber. This high thermal mass made the home resilient to quickly dropping temperatures.

For educators, researchers, and for Quanser itself, this resiliency matters. Quanser was founded by an engineering professor, Dr. Jacob Apkarian, in search of the right tools to improve his personal teaching outcomes and to create hardware validation platforms for controls research. Quanser highlighted very early, a set of much needed skills within its engineering department towards this focus. While some of these skills have changed with an evolving landscape, our staff and their collective knowledge have become a core part of Quanser’s unique position and identity, and frankly, significant thermal mass, shielding us from the effects of changing global seasons and academic requirements.

One of the key differentiating factors about this company for universities, faculty, and research labs has been the presence, initiatives and activities of an academic team dedicated to academic partnerships. In this blog, I want to expand on who these sparkling individuals are, the 25 year journey of this group, and how our efforts have impacted academia.

>> git pull curriculum_group_v0.1

Around 2002, Jacob was looking for an individual to join his small team of 4 engineers and focus on courseware development. Hervé Lacheray joined us at this point as our first curriculum writer, aiding with documentation and lab guides for the experiments Jacob developed. Paul Karam (PK) joined a bit later in the year as a curriculum developer as well. Michel Levis (Mitch) joined us in 2004 as a design engineer and pivoted to developing additional curriculum. In 2007, Quanser first released QUARC (our modern real-time software), and Amirpasha Javid (Pasha) was hired to complete its documentation and write additional lab guides for solutions such as the 3DOF Gyroscope. Mitch went on to lead the growing team of curriculum developers from 2008 to 2013.

This team standardized the courseware offering for our control plants. Every graduate or undergraduate workflow started with a Modeling lab (model the system you want to control), a Simulation lab (run a simulated controller on the model), a PID control lab (deploy the controller to the hardware plant) and a State-feedback lab (model based state-feedback controller deployed to the hardware plant). This was implemented and provided as MATLAB Simulink software files along with monolithic student and instructor workbooks. For faculty, this meant faster course adoption, consistent learning outcomes and hands-on lab experiences that brought theory to life.

early day Curriculum group shenanigans – that’s tissue paper trying to dampen the ping pong ball’s landing

We often talk about how Quanser’s ecosystem of solutions can fit a variety of educational pathways across a modern engineering program. In a similar manner, the skills developed by the curriculum team’s individuals led to a variety of efforts and growth across our organization.

  • With the development of our real-time software at the time (WinCon), Hervé pivoted to developing software features, eventually forming and leading Quanser’s Software team as a Senior R&D Manager, Software. This team today handles our core software development, giving us real-time frameworks like QUARC (for MATLAB Simulink), the Quanser SDK (for Python, C, C++ and more), as well as supporting firmware development for Quanser solutions.
  • PK’s development over the years in Controls and Robotics led him to manage Quanser’s Controls & Dynamics group, onto becoming the Director of R&D for over 12 years. He now heads all operations as our Chief Operating Officer, spearheading Quanser’s Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Production departments.
  • Mitch pivoted into application engineering in 2013, providing onsite client support and accelerating the integration of our solutions into research through specialized projects including collaborating with the MathWorks, contributing to our Mobile Controls Systems textbook app, and developing non-linear models for Quanser’s digital twins. Today, Mitch leads our out-of-the-box experience, engagement with academics, training and integration, and managing hardware and software failures in-field as our Customer Success Manager.
  • Pasha moved onto Application Engineering in 2011, Territory Management in 2013, and took on global territory management as our Director of Sales in 2021. As of 2025, Pasha provides exceptional insight to Academics traversing Research Grant programs across the globe as our Director of Research Partnerships.

Here are some team portraits for our BlogSpot page back in the day and their roles in our organization today!

Hervé Lacheray Paul Karam (PK) Michel Levis (Mitch) Amirpasha Javid (Pasha)
Senior R&D Manager, Software Chief Operating Officer Customer Success Manager Director of Research Partnerships 
>> git clone academic_applications_v1.0

In 2011, as Pasha moved onto application engineering, we hired his backfill: Peter Martin. After Mitch’s departure to application engineering in 2013, Pete managed the group from 2014 to 2021, growing it to 9 staff (including myself). Today, Pete leads Quanser’s electrical, software, mechanical, and systems engineering teams as the Director of Engineering. Pete’s passion for academic initiatives, educational pedagogy and Mechatronics contributed significantly to our academic presence, position, voice and direction as a company.

Under Pete’s leadership, we transitioned from a single-product courseware to multi-solution lab content for undergraduate education and STEM outreach, and expanded into research applications  across realms of unmanned aerial vehicles, self-driving, robotic manipulators, energy systems, mechatronics, and more. Pete’s initiatives also saw the rebranding of the group as R&D Academic Applications in 2018, still to date monikered the Academic team or simply AA. Our content also shifted away from the monolithic workbooks and 4-lab courseware per control plant. We focused on smaller lab content for a 2-3 hour holistic experience per topic. As an example, the Qube Servo courseware saw 20-30 labs developed for an Introduction to Controls course.

Abbey Desjarlais joined us in 2015 as a curriculum developer as well. She first led development and later managed the project team developing qdex – Quanser’s environment for creating mobile education and STEM apps, and led the adoption of agile methodologies across engineering. Since 2023, Abbey enables data-driven decision-making and process automation across all departments as the Business Intelligence and Efficiencies Manager.

This team very quickly became the well-rounded technical experts supporting clients and new academics exploring adjacent pathways with our solutions.

Pete presenting at the ACE Symposium Pre-covid remote work with Abbey Murtaza making sure the math checked out 
>> git push -u academic_applications_v2.0
 

I joined the Academic Applications team in 2016, and was given an opportunity to manage the team in 2021. This post-covid time saw changes that not only affected our ability to design and deliver solutions, but also the type of solutions that academics had demand for. Increased remote/hybrid lab opportunities, the need for digital twin technologies, supply-chain difficulties and associated changes to hardware, as well as changes in the Robotics, Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence domains are but a few worth mentioning.

During my tenure as the Academic Applications R&D Manager, the team adopted Python-based courseware and research applications, ROS workflows, and library/framework-centric approaches to academic resources. We also migrated our internal development and eventually public releases to GitHub. These changes were coupled of course with Quanser’s transformation from a Controls company towards a Robotics and Applied AI company.

This period also witnessed an increasing collaboration between my team and sales & marketing at Quanser. We visited academics at universities all over the world, incorporating feedback, integrating Quanser systems, collaborating on research, giving guest lectures, writing technical blogs, opinion-pieces and webinars, etc. We also developed solution-agnostic background review material for students. Finally, we created lab experiences that met your course learning outcomes regardless of the programming language students utilized.

Lorena training staff on the Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio at Queen’s University John giving a lecture on Control Systems at Tec De Monterrey University
Mitch Rushton with a disintegrated QCar 2 at Quanser HQ Academic Applications camping trip 
>> git init academic_solutions_v0.1

In the later half of 2025, Quanser recognized the need to scale applications for research, education, outreach and PBL experiences separately from product/solution development itself. This was implemented by giving the Academic Applications R&D team increased autonomy and independence from our engineering cycles. As such, the Academic Solutions department was initialized, allowing us to generate research examples and courseware in parallel and adapt to changing academic needs quicker. More importantly, we became the first in-house academically equivalent “user” of Quanser Solutions.

As the Director of Academic Solutions, I am now equipped with a brilliant team with the expertise in listening, understanding, engaging and collaborating with educators and researchers. They are proficient in developing complex applications in robotics, controls, mechatronics and applied AI, but also capable of understanding your research goals, technical validation requirements, learning outcomes, lab requirements and university growth aspirations.

This year is going to bring you a lot of new things. By the end of 2026, you can look forward to,

  • Quanser Solutions in your lab, whether that is the hardware you know and love, or the associated digital twins you use
  • Quanser Solutions in Isaac Sim, ready to simulate and learn with Isaac Lab
  • ROS-centric application workflows for mobile robotics with QBot Platform, and manipulator robotics with QArm & QArm Mini
  • Autoware integration for self-driving with our QCar 2 platform
  • Your content, your labs and your research hosted and shared with the world on our content repositories
  • Much much more…

yours humbly, the Academic Solutions department (left to right: Lorena, Zinan, Rachel, Murtaza, John & Morteza)

>> git log

From engineering development, persuasive marketing content development, online and onsite academic engagement, business intelligence, and territory management, individuals from the academic team have taken on numerous positions at Quanser, employing and deploying insights into the corresponding aspects of our organization. This thermal inertia of individuals in both the depths and width of our organization has led to resiliency and efficiency, and a steady capacity to grow sustainably.

Stay tuned, I’ll be elaborating on what we are up to this year. You’ll be hearing from me a lot more.

Talk soon, Murtaza.