Waterloo Engineering doctoral students have secured $2.4 million in the first round of the Canada Graduate Research Scholarships – Doctoral, the federal government’s new award for outstanding doctoral researchers.
Twenty students from across the Faculty earned the scholarships, each worth $120,000 over three years. Winners were chosen equally on their research potential and on their experience and achievements inside and outside academia.
The scholarships are the first to be awarded under the Canada Research Training Awards Suite (CRTAs), which, in 2025, merged the doctoral awards of Canada’s three federal research funding agencies into one program and added 1,200 doctoral awards nationally each year. University of Waterloo students won 50 of this year’s scholarships, worth $6 million in total.
This year’s Waterloo Engineering recipients are:
- Gerard Jaque Agravante (chemical engineering)
- Bavesh Balaji (systems design engineering)
- Shawn Benedict (chemical engineering)
- Negin Bouzari (chemical engineering)
- Michael Chislett (civil and environmental engineering)
- Mahdi Hasanzadeh Azar (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Ahmed Hegazy (electrical and computer engineering)
- Nazmul Hossain (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Joshua Kurien (systems design engineering)
- Angéline Lafleur (electrical and computer engineering)
- Jonah Leinwand (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Qianying Mao (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Benjamin Masters (biomedical engineering)
- Ali Rezaei (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Andres Schang (electrical and computer engineering)
- Michael Spinazze (electrical and computer engineering)
- Lyndon Tang (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
- Maggie Man-Yan Wong (chemical engineering)
- Xiaoye Zhao (mechanical and mechatronics engineering)
The awards provide recipients with three years of stable support to pursue ambitious research and to add to the pipeline of highly skilled talent Canada needs to compete on a global scale.