Building a fairer future.
Ruby Sinclair never saw engineering as just a technical pursuit. To her, it's a way of understanding the world, of building bridges between people, and of asking better questions about the future we’re creating and the type of impact we want to make.
Born in Kingston, Ontario and raised in the francophone school system, Ruby never felt like she belonged just to “one path” - visual arts, creative writing, STEM, policy and advocation, she always felt a part of it all. She thinks this is the reason she chose to pursue engineering, because she sees engineering in every facet of society and life. What guides her—particularly through her studies in Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s University—is a deep desire to create meaningful impact, grounded in the values she was raised with: curiosity, care, and community.
What set Ruby on this path wasn’t a love of machines, but the power engineering must change the world. At ten years old, she learned that women are significantly more likely to be seriously injured in car crashes because seatbelts and airbags were never really designed with them in mind. That fact stuck with her, not just because it was unjust, but because of how ordinary and widely accepted it had become. And the injustice didn’t just stop there; other technologies like facial and voice recognition, public transit infrastructure, medical diagnostic tools, AI hiring algorithms; she realized inequality is embedded into our technology, and when it excludes, can quietly perpetuate harm. And she’s been chasing that desire to make a change ever since, whether that be by speaking on Queen’s Women in Engineering Alumni Panel, publishing a book titled Invented, or simply meeting new mentors through communities like the Zenith and Cansbridge Fellowships.
Ruby is drawn to spaces where complexity lives, whether that's designing biomedical devices for low-resource clinics, working on lunar mobility systems for extreme environments, or helping a startup in Seoul bring motion-sensing technology to global markets. She also believes that engineers need to tell better stories, about who innovation is for and where it’s needed most. That belief has guided her into unexpected places: co-hosting a campus radio show, building mentorship platforms for first-year students, and leading community fundraisers like Relay for Life at her high school, raising over $15, 000. In every case, her work is about reaching the communities that are too often overlooked and making sure the tools we build actually serve the hands that hold them.
As the first ever recipient of the Claudette-MacKay-Lassonde Excellence Scholarship, an honour that connects her to a lineage of women who didn’t just enter engineering: they reshaped it by increasing access, creating organizations to tell stories, and by supporting those around them. She sees this moment not as recognition, but as a responsibility: to carry forward a more inclusive vision of what it means to build.
Ruby doesn’t fit easily into boxes. She’s an engineer who loves design, a strategist who values uncertainty, a leader who thinks listening with empathy is the most underrated skill. But at the heart of it all, she’s someone who wakes up asking how we can do better, for each other, for our systems, and for the generations still to come.
