News

Sivabal Sivaloganathan, a professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics since 1990 and the chair of the department from 2016 to 2023, passed away on March 2, 2025, after a brief illness. Over his career, Siv made a profound impact on the department and touched the lives of countless colleagues and students at Waterloo and beyond. We will miss him dearly.

Read more about Siv’s life and legacy on the Waterloo News website.

Applied Mathematics professor David Del Rey Fernández has been named the Pratt & Whitney Canada Chair in Industrial Artificial Intelligence. Del Rey Fernández and his team will build on their expertise in robust numerical algorithms and artificial intelligence to develop machine learning-enhanced simulation techniques. The partnership with Pratt & Whitney Canada will provide graduate students with valuable opportunities to engage in real-world industrial research and potential help shape the future of aircraft design and testing.

To learn more, read the full story from Waterloo News.

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.

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!

The Department of Applied Mathematics and the Centre for Computational Mathematics hosted the annual holiday party in Federation Hall. It was an occasion to unwind, socialize, and celebrate the community’s many achievements over the past year. May you have many successes to celebrate and memories to cherish in 2025!

Three master’s and three doctoral degrees in Applied Mathematics were awarded at the 2024 Fall Convocation. Congratulations to the graduates!

A new study by researchers at the University of Waterloo has uncovered a crucial mechanism in the evolution of regulatory systems in E. coli that could have far-reaching applications in cancer therapy and biomanufacturing for products such as insulin or mRNA vaccines.