Welcome to Applied Mathematics

Zohreh (Zoya) Abbasi, a PhD candidate at the Department of Applied Mathematics, has been awarded the Samit & Reshma Sharma Graduate Scholarship in Mathematics. Zoya is the first recipient of this competitive prize, which was established in 2024 by the Samit & Reshma Sharma Foundation. The scholarship is awarded annually to a student in a thesis-based master’s or doctoral program in the Faculty of Mathematics who “demonstrates outstanding academic achievement & research excellence for graduate studies with most significant practical impact in applied mathematics.” Zoya is also the recipient of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship from the 2024-2025 competition.

Zoya’s research leverages the features of multi-agent systems in the modeling and controller design for epidemic diseases, exploring how networked agent interactions can inform strategies for effectively controlling the spread of disease.

Congratulations, Zoya!

Christopher Pollack, a PhD student at the Department of Applied Mathematics, has won third place in the 2025 University of Waterloo GRADflix competition, for which contestants submit a video describing their graduate research to a non-specialized audience in no more than one minute. Christopher’s video, Symmetries: The Universal Foundation of Physics, is available for viewing online. Christopher was also a finalist in the 2024 competition. Congratulations, Christopher!

On Friday, 24 January 2025, the Department of Applied Mathematics held its first graduate mini-conference. The one-day event featured 14 talks by graduate students with representation from each of the five research areas of the department. The members of the organizing committee were: Khush Bhavsar, Florian Girelli, Vyom Patel, José Polo-Gómez, and María Rosa Preciado-Rivas.

Congratulations to Maliha, Hassaan, and Jiayue!