News

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.

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.