News

Four PhD candidates at the Cheriton School of Computer Science — Abdulrahman Diaa, Artur Back de Luca, Ross Evans and Bihui Jin — have each received a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship–Doctoral.

Each scholarship provides $40,000 annually for three years, for a total of $120,000 per recipient. The awards recognize outstanding doctoral researchers and support the development of the next generation of research talent.

Recent PhD graduate Dr. Janani Sundaresan has been awarded Waterloo’s 2026 Alumni Gold Medal in recognition of exceptional academic achievements during her doctoral studies.

Conferred by Alumni Relations, the award consists of a 24-karat gold-plated medal embossed with the University of Waterloo’s seal.

A team of software engineering researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received a Distinguished Artifact Award for “Automated Dependency Optimization for Artifact-Based Build Systems,” a paper presented at ISSTA 2026, the 35^th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.

The research, conducted by PhD candidate Hongxu Xu, recent PhD graduate Zhenyang Xu, along with Professors Shane McIntosh and Chengnian Sun, was one of four papers to receive a distinguished artifact award, selected from 59 artifact submissions across 210 accepted papers out of a total of 888 submissions.

On Friday, October 2, the School of Computer Science held the 2026 Cheriton Research Symposium, an annual celebration of scholarly excellence made possible by David R. Cheriton’s generous investment in computer science education.

The event continued with an afternoon poster session, where 12 graduate students presented their research to faculty members, fellow students and poster judges.

Research Professor Maura R. Grossman has received two recognitions highlighting her scholarly contributions at the intersection of law, data governance, and artificial intelligence.

Professor Ian Goldberg has been named a 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the nation’s highest honour bestowed upon scholars, artists and scientists.

Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the nation’s highest honour for scholars, artists and scientists.

Four outstanding incoming undergrad students are joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as Schulich Leaders, through the Schulich Leader Scholarships program, Canada’s most coveted undergraduate scholarship program for students pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

This year’s cohort includes Business and Computer Science student Angela Ho, and Computer Science students Jerry Li, Bill Xu and Sophia Xu.

Jeffrey Zang is a first-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo. At 15, he landed his first internship and completed four software internships before his 19^th birthday.  

Since high school, he has competed in 17 hackathons, where he built projects from an eye-tracking device to a conversational robot resembling former President Barack Obama. He became the youngest co-chair of Hack the 6ix, Toronto’s largest hackathon. With his help, the hackathon garnered more than 1,100 attendees and secured nearly $50,000 in sponsorship from companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte. He went on to organize six hackathons.

Recent PhD graduate Negar Arabzadeh has won the Early Career Researcher Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR).  

Negar won the award in SIGIR’s Community Engagement category, which recognizes outstanding professional service in the information retrieval community. The award ceremony took place at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, held in Melbourne, Australia.