We're looking for students who have innate hands-on inventorship skills, especially those who have been making things since childhood.

We provide mentorship opportunities through our courses, summer experiences, and collaboration in MannLab Canada, MannLab (located in Silicon Valley), MannLab Shenzhen, and MannLab Xiamen. Courses include Inventrepreneurship (Invention + Entrepreneurship), APS1041 and also ECE516.

See below for examples of past success, and there are dozens more. One thing they all have in common is the right combination of "nature" and "nurture", i.e., innate making skills since childood, combined with the right mentorship in MannLab Toronto + MannLab Silicon Valley (California) + MannLab Shenzhen.

Mann's approach to mentorship is ideally suited to students who, like him, have an innately natural aptitude at invention, making, building, and hands-on experience. We work with those who already have a great deal of skill, and help them become even better, to reach their full potential.

If you have innate hands-on skills at making things, and you want one-on-one mentorship to achieve great things, please feel free to get in touch as a student or TA through APS1041 or ECE516, or contact us directly.

Another way to reach us is through our Instructables (link).

You can also schedule a "doing" in which you will meetup with Prof. Mann and take 60 to 90 minutes to work on something together. This is your opportunity to "jam" with us. Think of it as a 2-way audition: you can show us what you can do, and you can also see what we can do (and how well we connect). The topic of this "doing" should fall at the intersection of something you're really skilled at, and something that you're really passionate about, and our area of expertise, as shown below:

Many of the people you'll meet in our lab are best-in-the-world at what they do. So consider the following analogy: A visit to our lab is like a chance to "jam" with the world's best jazz musician Miles Davis or John Coltrane. So imagine, for example, that you're really good at playing the violin but you're tired of playing the violin and want to learn how to play the saxophone but have never played sax before. When you come to our lab, you should bring your violin because that's where you're going to get the most out of your experience with the jazz greats. You "jam" for an hour or so with these jazz greats, and that's your chance to learn from them AS WELL AS IMPRESS THEM with what you can do. That's how you'll win their hearts and make them want to continue giving you great mentorship.

Analogously, come prepared to show us what you can do, at whatever you're best at.

So your first project should be, most importantly, something that you're well "grounded" (skilled) at! This way you will do well at it, and that sets the stage for expanding your skills into other areas over time.

See also, the Call for TAs poster and the Job posting.

MannLab students are founders of companies worth more than $1 billion

Professor Steve Mann teaches a course entitled "Inventrepreneurship" (Invention + entrepreneurship) and teaches students fundamental scientific principles that lead to innovative breakthroughs. Examples of success from Mann's students include:

• While he was Mann's PhD student, Ryan Janzen founded a transportation company, Transpod, raised $65,000,000 ($20,000,000 investment [Betakit 2016] plus 32,000,000 Euro grant) [Transpod 2018]. Janzen recently won the "Innovation of the Year Award".
• Mann's MaSc students James Fung (now with Google) and Chris Aimone, together with Mann, and others, co-founded InteraXon and raised $28,800,000. The InteraXon Muse product is now sold in Best Buy stores all across North America and is also available on Amazon.com. Interaxon's first product, the Muse, was described as "The Most Important Wearable of 2014" [Venturebeat, Gregory Ferenstein, May 24, 2014 12:39pm], "The King of Wearables" (BetaKit Canadian Startup News, Feature May 27, 2014). and #1 in the "Top six wearables..." of 2015. Regarding the new Muse 2 headband and brain health technology platform that was just released on 2018 October 30th, Mashable described it as "the holy grail for mindfulness", in an article entitled: "Muse 2 review: The world's best meditation tech just got even better"(Mashable).
  
  Caption: Muse2 Launch day at InteraXon, 2018 October 30th.
  See also Time-frequency analysis of visual evoked potentials using chirplet transform, Cui, Wong, and Mann, Electronics Letters 41(4), p217-218.
• While he was Mann's PhD student, Raymond Lo (now at Harvard University), together with Mann, and others, founded Metavision, raised $75,000,000, and manufactured the world's first extramissive spatial imaging augmented reality glass (Can. Pat. 2,896,985, US Pat. 9,720,505).
  
  Caption: Raymond Lo and Steve Mann with Metavision eyeglasses.
• While transitioning from MaSc. to PhD under Mann's supervision, Mir Adnan Ali founded two blockchain companies, CG-Blockchain and Blockchain Terminal, and raised $31,000,000 by ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Ali and Mann invented the concept of blockchain-sousveillance. Sousveillance is the "Little Data" ("Little Watching") counterpart to the otherwise one-sided "Big Data" ("Big Watching") of surveillance. See "FreeGlass...", Mann, Ali, Lo, and Wo, in IEEE i-Society. Adnan's childhood interests included quantum physics as well as building his own cathode ray oscillograph (vacuum pump, electron gun, phosphor from salvaged broken fluorescent light bulb) at the age of 12.
• Mann's own childhood interests included phenomenological reality and metaveillography of surveillance cameras:
  
  Caption: One of Steve Mann's childhood inventions, the Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine (SWIM).
  Lifelong passion and mastery over technology and its art and craft result in an authentic mentorship in the tradition of MIT and Stanford.