Research Professor Maura R. Grossman has received two recognitions highlighting her scholarly contributions at the intersection of law, data governance, and artificial intelligence.
Professor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the nation’s highest honour for scholars, artists and scientists.
He is among 105 individuals across Canada, and seven at the University of Waterloo, elected as RSC Fellows this year in recognition of their exceptional scholarly, scientific and artistic achievements.
Professor Pascal Poupart has been awarded $170,000 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program.
This funding is complemented by $85,000 from industry partner Manulife Financial, bringing the total project support to $255,000. Manulife is also providing significant in-kind contributions, including synthetic data, technical infrastructure for simulated business environments, and access to its technical experts.
In spring 2026, Professor Dan Brown appeared before the Senate of Canada’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss intellectual property and safety concerns raised by the rise of generative AI. He highlighted concerns about the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI systems and the potential impact of these technologies on creative professionals, particularly writers and creators from minoritized communities.
In this Q&A, Professor Brown discusses the opportunities and limitations of generative AI and explores the ethical, legal and societal questions these technologies raise about creativity, copyright, and the future of creative work.
Professors Victor Zhong and 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.
Titled “Deep Research Agents for Natural Science R&D,” the three-year project will co-develop and deploy an end-to-end intelligent research assistant capable of retrieving, reasoning over, and acting on diverse experimental data sources. Developed in partnership with BASF Canada, the project aims to transform chemical informatics from static information retrieval into dynamic, action-oriented knowledge systems that accelerate scientific discovery.
Professor Yaoliang Yu has received the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award. Established in 2017 to commemorate the 50thanniversary 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.
Professor Marina Meila has been appointed the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Reliable Structure Discovery. Tier 1 Chairs are awarded to outstanding researchers recognized by their peers as world leaders in their fields. Each chair is valued at $200,000 annually for seven years and may be renewed for an additional seven-year term.
A team of researchers has won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FORGE 2026, the 3rd ACM International Conference on AI Foundation Models and Software Engineering, held as part of ICSE 2026, the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
The award recognizes recent master’s graduate Evelien Riddell, whose thesis forms the foundation of the paper, along with MMath student James Riddell, PhD student Gengyi Sun, research engineer Michał Antkiewicz and Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki. Their paper is titled “Stalled, Biased, and Confused: Uncovering Reasoning Failures in LLMs for Cloud-based Root Cause Analysis.”
Professor Pascal Poupart has received a $50,000 grant from CIBC to support artificial intelligence research through PhD-level training. The award marks the first research collaboration between CIBC and the University of Waterloo focusing specifically on AI, and reflects the bank’s commitment to growing AI talent in Canada by funding doctoral research.
Titled Representation Learning for Tabular Data with Heterogeneous Feature Types, the CIBC-funded research will support PhD candidate William Loh, who is supervised by Professor Poupart.
Marina Meila has been named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, recognizing her expertise in advancing the theoretical foundations of interpretable and explainable machine learning.
What follows is a Q&A in which Professor Meila discusses her research journey, current projects, and future directions as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.