David R. Cheriton Faculty Fellowships in Computer Science

The David R. Cheriton Faculty Fellowships are a prestigious recognition. The awards support the work of leading faculty in computer science with an emphasis on supporting research that addresses problems associated with designing and implementing efficient and reliable computing systems, along with their effective integration.

These fellowships help the University of Waterloo and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science continue their innovations in information technology teaching and research.

Current Cheriton Faculty Fellows

2023–2026

Khuzaima Daudjee

Khuzaima Daudjee is a Research Associate Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He designs and develops systems that store and manage data. His research thrusts are large-scale data management, storage, and provision of systems-level support for applications such as streaming, graph processing and machine learning.

Khuzaima’s work has been recognized with several awards, among them two SIGMOD Best Demonstration Awards (2020 and 2021) and an ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing Best Paper Award. He has served as Associate Editor of PVLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, Distributed and Parallel Databases, and Information Systems. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to computer science, Khuzaima has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Toshiya Hachisuka

Toshiya Hachisuka is an Associate Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, affiliated with three research groups: Computer Graphics, Scientific Computation, and Computational Mathematics. 

His research focuses on the numerical and mathematical aspects of light transport simulation for realistic image synthesis. By combining applied mathematics, computer science, and physics, he has been working on various problems related to visual simulation of objects.

Before joining the University of Waterloo in 2020, he worked as an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. He received a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. 
 

2022–2025

Eric Blais

Eric Blais is an Associate Professor in the Algorithms and Complexity Theory group within the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research interests span theoretical computer science with special focus on sublinear-time algorithms, randomness in computation, and complexity theory. 

His recent achievements include being the recipient of a prestigious best paper award at FOCS 2020 for work with his colleague Professor Shalev Ben-David that extended Yao’s minimax theorem. In 2021, Professor Blais received an Ontario Early Researcher Award to develop new theoretical foundations for sublinear-time algorithms.

He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT from 2012–14.

Semih Salihoğlu

Semih Salihoğlu is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research focuses on graph databases, distributed systems for processing graphs, and algorithms and theories for evaluation of database queries. His systems work focuses on developing systems for managing, querying, or doing analytics on graph-structured data. He has co-architected and co-developed several graph data management, processing, visualizing, and debugging systems.

Some of his most notable systems include the GraphflowDB graph database management system and the GPS graph processing system. He has served as the PC co-chair for SIGMOD’s demonstration track and co-chaired the GRADES-NDA workshop, the premier workshop on graph data management, and serves on its steering committee. He has a PhD from Stanford and is a recipient of the 2018 VLDB best paper award.

2021–2024

Jesse Hoey

Jesse Hoey is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where he leads CHIL — the Computational Health Informatics Laboratory. He is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute and an affiliate scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. 

Dr. Hoey holds a PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia and has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers. 

His primary research interest is to understand the nature of human emotional intelligence by attempting to build computational models of some of its core functions, and to apply them in domains with social and economic impact. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and an Area Chair for the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021).

M. Tamer Özsu

M. Tamer Özsu is a University Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. Previously, he was the Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Mathematics. His research is on distributed data management and the management of non-conventional data. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an elected member of Science Academy, Turkey and a member of Sigma Xi. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Books (2014–20) and Synthesis Lectures on Data Management (2009–14). University Professor Özsu is the recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, and The Ohio State University College of Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award. 

Previous Cheriton Faculty Fellows