News

A team of undergraduate students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has been named a Top 3 Finalist in the prestigious IEEE EMC+SIPI Student Hardware Design Contest, earning international recognition for their innovative work in electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) engineering.

Competing under the name Team Watt-erloo, students Jake Peters, Alanna Rudolph, Amirbahador Mansoori, and Dhyey Bhatt advanced to the final round of the competition and will present their project at the IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Signal & Power Integrity (EMC+SIPI) in Dallas, Texas.

Supervised by ECE adjunct professor, Dr. George Shaker, the team developed a project that characterizes the electromagnetic interference (EMI) generated by an Arduino-based robotic vehicle and validates targeted mitigation techniques to improve system performance and reliability.

As graduation approaches this June, Computer Engineering student Aung Khant Min is being recognized with two distinguished honours: the University of Waterloo President's Award of Excellence and the Ontario Professional Engineers Foundation for Education (OPEFE) Gold Medal.

Min achieved the highest cumulative academic average (CAV) among Engineering students graduating this June. In recognition of this achievement, Min will receive the President's Award of Excellence, one of the University's highest student honours, as well as the OPEFE Gold Medal.

Four PhD students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) have earned the NSERC Canada Graduate Research Scholarship – Doctoral (CGRS D), one of Canada's most prestigious and competitive awards for doctoral researchers.

The 2026 recipients are:

• Ahmed Metwally Hegazy
• Angeline Lafleur
• Andy (Andres) Schang
• Michael Ross Spinazze

Awarded through a national competition, the CGRS D recognizes exceptional PhD students whose academic excellence, research achievements and leadership potential position them among Canada's most promising emerging scholars.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Waterloo proudly congratulates graduating student Cait Aitchison on being named a recipient of the 2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Scholarship Plus Initiative. Awarded to outstanding students pursuing careers in the power and energy sector, the scholarship recognizes academic excellence, leadership potential, and a demonstrated commitment to advancing the future of sustainable electricity systems.

Dr. Ladan Tahvildari, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, has once again been named an IBM Champion, earning the distinction for 2026. This recognition highlights her continued leadership and contributions to the global IBM technology community, building on her selection as an IBM Champion in 2025.

The IBM Champion designation is awarded annually to individuals who demonstrate exceptional advocacy, technical expertise, and meaningful engagement within IBM’s technology ecosystem. Recipients are recognized for their contributions to advancing innovation, sharing knowledge, and supporting the broader technology community through research, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.

ECE PhD student Soomin Shin has been awarded a $15,000 scholarship from the Waterloo Data and AI Institute, recognizing her innovative research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and real-world physical systems.

Supervised by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Shin is a member of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL), where researchers explore how robots can interact with people in meaningful, socially aware ways. Her work focuses on building scalable social robot systems that can operate sustainably in real-world environments by integrating advanced AI capabilities.

A research team from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has earned international recognition at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025) — the premier global event in computer vision research.

Under the supervision of Dr. Fakhri Karray, MASc student Md Rezwanul Haque, ECE alumnus S. M. Taslim Uddin Raju, and Dr. Md. Milon Islam received the Best Poster Award and secured 2nd Place in the Continuous Sign Language Recognition Challenge (Unseen Sentences Task) at ICCV 2025.

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 deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Kostadinka Bizheva, fondly known as Dida, whose pioneering work in biomedical optics advanced both science and clinical practice.

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.”