Graham Research and Graham Postdoctoral Fellowships

The Graham Research Fellowship and the Graham Postdoctoral Fellowship take their name from J. Wesley “Wes” Graham (1932–1999), the first director of the University of Waterloo’s computing centre, a humble visionary known as the father of computing at the University of Waterloo, and an academic who devoted his career to making computers available to everyone.

Wes Graham, the “Father of computing” at the University of Waterloo, in the Red Room that housed an IBM 360 Model 75, the most powerful computer in Canada at the time. Wes Graham was pivotal in acquiring advanced computer hardware during the early days of computer science at Waterloo.

In honour of his many contributions to the University of Waterloo, the Waterloo community and the tech sector, a number of his colleagues established the J.W. Graham Information Technology Trust in 2000, an endowment housed at the University of Waterloo. In 2018 the Trust in conjunction with the Faculty of Mathematics and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science launched two fellowships — the Graham Research Fellowship, which supports a faculty member’s research in artificial intelligence, data science and bioinformatics, including applications to healthcare and health informatics, and the Graham Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, which supports an outstanding postdoctoral researcher.

Awardees of these fellowships are announced and recognized at the School’s annual Wes Graham Research Symposium series, the first of which was held on June 21, 2018.

Current Graham Research Fellows

Edith Law (2020–2022)

Edith Law is an Associate Professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, and co-directs the HCI Lab. Her research focuses on the development of new technologies (e.g., scientific and medical crowdsourcing systems, agent-mediated education technology) that integrate machine and human intelligence, enabling them to augment each other’s abilities. She is also interested in understanding how people make sense of intelligent systems, including issues related to transparency, engagement, and trust. Though mainly focused on HCI, her research has tangible impact in other disciplines, including scientific fields such as ecology and neurology. Her work has won several best paper awards and honourable mentions at top-tier HCI conferences, such as CHI and CSCW.

Edith’s research is funded by NSERC Discovery Grant, NSERC-CIHR Collaborative Health Research Project (CHRP), the CFI-JELF program, University of Waterloo Interdisciplinary Trailblazer Fund and several Waterloo-Bordeaux Joint Grants. Before joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science, she was a CRCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and received her PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. 

Maura R. Grossman (2020–2023)

Maura R. Grossman is a Research Professor and the second Director of Women in Computer Science in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and an eDiscovery attorney and consultant in Buffalo, New York. Previously, she was of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where for 17 years, she represented Fortune 100 companies and major financial institutions in civil litigation and white collar criminal and regulatory investigations, and advised the firm’s lawyers and clients on legal, technical, and strategic issues involving eDiscovery and information governance, both domestically and abroad.

Maura graduated with an A.B., magna cum laude, from Brown University.  She earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University, and a J.D., magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, from the Georgetown University Law Center.  While at Georgetown, Maura served as Executive Notes and Comments Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal.

Graham Postdoctoral Fellow

Moojan Ghafurian (2018–2020)

Moojan Ghafurian has a PhD in information sciences and technology from Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests and background are in human-computer interaction, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Her expertise includes designing and running behavioural experiments with human subjects and qualitative and quantitative research to understand human behaviour, emotions and biases. Her research explores computational models of how humans interact with computers to inform user-centred design that is applied to assistive technologies for the care of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.

Previous Graham Research Fellows