News

Recent PhD graduate Nikhita Joshi has won the Governor General’s Gold Medal, one of Canada’s highest academic honours.

To be considered for the University-wide competition, doctoral students must first be selected as the recipient of their faculty’s top doctoral prize. After winning first place in the Faculty of Mathematics’ Doctoral Prize competition, Nikhita was named the faculty’s nominee for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. She is one of three students receiving this honour at Spring Convocation.

PhD candidate Niloy Saha, Research Professor Noura Limam, Postdoctoral Researcher Yang Xiao, and University Professor Raouf Boutaba have received the Best Paper Award at NOMS 2026, the 39^th IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, held May 18–22 in Rome, Italy.

Their paper, Rethinking Telemetry Design for Fine-Grained Anomaly Detection in 5G User Planes, introduces a sketch-based telemetry system called Kestrel that was empirically shown to detect quality-of-service anomalies in 5G user planes with 10 per cent greater accuracy than existing selective telemetry schemes while reducing export bandwidth by a factor of 10.

Professor Gautam Kamath and his colleagues, Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra and Alistair Stewart, have been awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize for their landmark paper, Robust Estimators in High-Dimensions without the Computational Intractability.

The Gödel Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science and is widely regarded as the field’s most prestigious honour.

Professor Jian Zhao has received the 2025 Early Career Research Award from CS-Can | Info-Can, the national organization that represents and advocates for computer science research, education and academic leadership across Canada.

Presented annually since 2009, the Early Career Research Award recognizes outstanding contributions to computer science research and is conferred upon exceptional faculty members at Canadian computer science departments, schools, and faculties who are within 10 years of completing their PhD.

On Saturday, May 2^nd, students exhibited technology at the University of Waterloo that tackled real-world problems, from helping Parkinson’s disease patients through augmented reality to creating an emergency alert system for seniors living alone.

Three computer science graduate students have received the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize.

Since 2019, the Faculty of Mathematics has recognized the achievements of its top graduating and graduated doctoral students. This year’s recipients are Nikhita Joshi, Ahmed Alquraan and Negar Arabzadeh, who have received prizes of $1,500, $1,000 and $500, respectively. Notably, this is the first time all recipients are from the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

As the first-place recipient, Nikhita has also been nominated for the University-wide Governor General’s Gold Medal, which is awarded at Spring convocation.

Professor Claudia Maria Bauzer Medeiros (PhD ’85) has received a 2026 ACM Presidential Award recognizing her long-standing and significant contributions to the Brazilian and Latin American computing communities as well as to the Association for Computing Machinery.

Ryusuke Sugimoto has received the 2026 Eurographics PhD Award, the 2025 Alain Fournier PhD Dissertation Award, and the SCA Doctoral Dissertation Award, three major honours celebrating excellence in doctoral research.

These distinctions recognize his dissertation, Toward General-Purpose Monte Carlo PDE Solvers for Graphics Applications.

Mars Xiang and Max Jiang are joint recipients of the 2026 Germain-Erdős Undergraduate Award in Mathematical Research. Now in its third year, the award recognizes undergraduate students who have made outstanding contributions to fundamental mathematical research.

Established through a donation from David Ash (BMath ’87), the award is named in honour of two pioneering mathematicians, Sophie Germain and Paul Erdős.

Professor Marina Meila has been appointed the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Reliable Structure Discovery. Tier 1 Chairs are awarded to outstanding researchers recognized by their peers as world leaders in their fields. Each chair is valued at $200,000 annually for seven years and may be renewed for an additional seven-year term.

In addition to her appointment as a CRC, Professor Meila has received $100,000 in research infrastructure support through the Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund.