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PhD student Michael Abebe is one of six recipients worldwide and the only recipient from Canada to receive a prestigious 2018 Facebook Emerging Scholar Award.

Launched in 2017, Facebook’s Emerging Scholar Awards support talented students from under-represented groups in the technology sector to encourage them to continue their PhD studies, pursue innovative research, and engage with the broader research community.

When you look at a scenic mountain photo typically everything in the distance is in sharp focus. But this scene might be even more captivating if something striking were in the foreground, perhaps a field of wild flowers in peak bloom. The problem is if the flowers are close to the lens relative to the mountains it’s impossible for all elements in the photo to be in perfect focus — if the flowers are sharp, the distant mountains will be blurry and vice versa.

Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics has been awarded a silver medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) International Circle of Excellence Awards for a video submitted to the fundraising for a campaign category.

The following is excerpted from an article by Simona Chiose, published in the Globe and Mail on April 16, 2018

When Joanne Atlee was an undergraduate student in computer science, more than a third of her class was made up of women. In graduate school, those ranks began to thin out, a decline that has continued through much of her career as a professor at the University of Waterloo. 

“All of a sudden I am an instructor at Waterloo and 10 per cent of the class is female and it’s ‘Oh no, what happened?’”

PhD candidate Mike Schaekermann is one of 39 recipients globally and the only candidate from Canada to receive a prestigious 2018 Google PhD Fellowship. Established in 2009 and awarded annually since, Google PhD Fellowships recognize and support exceptional doctoral students as they pursue their research, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor.