The third annual Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research will be awarded to graduating student Gareth Davies (PDF) at convocation on June 13.
Gareth was nominated by Professor Janusz Brzozowski, with whom he worked as an undergraduate research assistant. He is completing a Bachelor of Mathematics degree, with a Pure Mathematics major and Computer Science (CS) minor.
"He has clearly demonstrated his ability to do independent original research and to produce elegant solutions to non-trivial problems," says Professor Brzozowski. Brzozowski and Davies have co-authored papers from two projects:
- Maximally atomic languages, Proc.14th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages in Szeged, Hungary, May 27-29, 2014.
- Most complex regular right-ideal languages, Proc.16th International Workshop on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems in Turku, Finland, August 5-8, 2014.
Strong nominations in support of Niall MacGillivray (Actuarial Science and Statistics) and Hao Sun (PDF) (Combinatorics & Optimization and Pure Mathematics) were also put forward.
About the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research
Professor Ming Li and his family have created this award in honour and memory of his late wife, Jessie Wenhui Zou.
Jessie was born August 27, 1968 in Wuhan, China. She received a PhD degree from Wuhan University in physics when she was 26 years old. Jessie loved the field of finance and continued to pursue her studies and graduated from the University of Waterloo’s statistical finance master’s program in 2000. During this time, she also studied computer science at Waterloo and took a course in Java programming (CS 134). Upon graduation, she worked at the Bank of Montreal, specializing in risk control management.
With this award, the family wishes to support research activities at the undergraduate level within the Faculty of Mathematics to carry on Jessie’s passion for education.
The Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research is valued at $1,000 and presented annually to an undergraduate student enrolled in his or her final year of any program within the Faculty of Mathematics. Students must have demonstrated excellence in research and have been nominated by a faculty member who has supervised that research. The awardee is chosen by the Faculty of Mathematics Research Advisory Committee, chaired by the associate dean, research.
See past awardee and nominees: