News

Twenty-one researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have secured a combined $1,331,500 in funding through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

This year, NSERC is investing $630 million to foster discovery research, training and talent development in Canada. The funding will empower researchers to tackle pressing problems and strengthen Canada’s position as a global innovation hub.

Rising distributed systems researcher Ahmed Alquraan has received the 2026 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Since 2019, this annual award recognizes outstanding doctoral research at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and includes a $1,000 prize.

Two Waterloo Region high school student teams are celebrating landmark achievements in the 2026 Technovation Girls competition.

For the first time in the Waterloo chapter’s history, a team has advanced to the Technovation Girls World Summit, while another team has been recognized as the second-ranked intermediate-level team in North America.

Professor Dave Tompkins has received the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching. Each year, the Faculty presents one or two awards to instructors who have demonstrated outstanding teaching skills and a deep commitment to student education. The prestigious award includes a public citation and a cash prize.

Professor Victor Zhong, principal investigator, and co-investigator Professor Jimmy Lin have been awarded $1,641,776 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program. This funding is complemented by more than $1.8 million in combined cash and in-kind contributions from industry partner BASF Canada, bringing the total project value to roughly $3.5 million.

An international research team led by computer scientists at the Cheriton School of Computer Science has developed a machine learning algorithm that could help researchers uncover protein changes that are difficult to detect with existing tools.

Professor Yaoliang Yu has received the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award.

Established in 2017 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Faculty of Mathematics, the $2,500 award recognizes early- and mid-career faculty members for outstanding research contributions. Professor Yu won the award in the mid-career category.

Eight faculty members at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have received the 2025 Outstanding Performance Award.

Established in 2005 by the University of Waterloo, this prestigious recognition honours faculty members who demonstrate excellence broadly.

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.