David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Recent PhD graduate Dr. Janani Sundaresan has been awarded Waterloo’s 2026 Alumni Gold Medal in recognition of exceptional academic achievements during her doctoral studies.

Conferred by Alumni Relations, the award consists of a 24-karat gold-plated medal embossed with the University of Waterloo’s seal.

A team of software engineering researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science has received a Distinguished Artifact Award for “Automated Dependency Optimization for Artifact-Based Build Systems,” a paper presented at ISSTA 2026, the 35^th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.

The research, conducted by PhD candidate Hongxu Xu, recent PhD graduate Zhenyang Xu, along with Professors Shane McIntosh and Chengnian Sun, was one of four papers to receive a distinguished artifact award, selected from 59 artifact submissions across 210 accepted papers out of a total of 888 submissions.

On Friday, October 2, the School of Computer Science held the 2026 Cheriton Research Symposium, an annual celebration of scholarly excellence made possible by David R. Cheriton’s generous investment in computer science education.

The event continued with an afternoon poster session, where 12 graduate students presented their research to faculty members, fellow students and poster judges.