Meet our Graduate Students

MEET OUR ECE FACULTY AND GRADUATE STUDENTS


What have our students accomplished?

Electrical and computer engineering PhD student, Laith Alkhawaldeh, was awarded Best Student Paper at the IEEE PES ISGT-Asia 2025 conference, held in Guangzhou, China from October 31 to November 2, 2025.

Alkhawaldeh’s paper titled “Adaptive ADMM for Distributed Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading,” presents a distributed optimization framework for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading among residential prosumers.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is proud to celebrate the outstanding achievement of Dr. Ahmed Sayed, a former PhD student in our department, who has been awarded the Best PhD Thesis Award from Drones. Drones is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by MDPI—a pioneer in scholarly, open-access publishing, supporting academic communities since 1996.

Electrical and computer engineering PhD student, Trevor Blaikie, has been selected as the winner of the NAMBE 2024 Best Journal Paper Award. Trevor’s research, supervised by Dr. Zbig Wasilewski, earned top recognition for the paper titled “Optimizing GaAs/AlGaAs growth on GaAs (111)B for enhanced nonlinear efficiency in quantum optical metasurfaces.”

Sarah Odinotski

Sarah Odinotski

Sarah received her BASc. in Nanotechnology Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 2022 and is currently pursuing her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

“I chose the Nanotechnology Engineering program because of its interdisciplinary nature; Each field has its own ‘language’ and it is an invaluable skill to be able to translate and connect these languages to tell a bigger story.”

“Staying at Waterloo to pursue my PhD at the Institute for Quantum Computing was an easy decision because I knew I would have the resources and support to not only succeed but carry out impactful research.”

Sarah’s research is focused at the intersection between semiconductor physics, microfabrication, medicine, and quantum sensing. Her group’s goal is to make a “perfect” detector, capable of capturing even the smallest quantifiable form of light - a single photon. Sarah works on designing and fabricating these devices, using UWaterloo’s state-of-the-art cleanrooms in the quantum nano fabrication and characterization facility.

“Though this detector has applications spanning defense, quantum computing, and communication, I’m interested in integrating it with medical imaging systems for diagnostic purposes.”

Sarah is a Vanier Scholar, having not only received one of the most prestigious Canadian PhD scholarships but was ranked 4th across Canada. She was also named the Faculty of Engineering’s 2022 Co-op Student of the Year and the Kitchener-Waterloo’s 2022 Woman of the Year Award for the Young Adult Category.