News

Management Engineering alum, Kamilla Karthigesu (BASc ’16) went from spending her nights watching Survivor to watching herself on the show’s 50th season, her second appearance after reaching the final four on Survivor 48 where she formed a secret alliance with the season’s winner, Kyle Fraser.  

You can read the full story here: From Waterloo to Fiji: Meet the Waterloo alum on Survivor 50 | Waterloo News | University of Waterloo 

Management Engineering sits at the intersection of engineering rigor, systems thinking, operations research, and organizational design; the exact foundation of one of the most in-demand careers in technology: Technical Program Management. A TPM owns the delivery of complex, cross-functional programs end to end, requiring technical credibility and organizational range in equal measure. That is Management Engineering’s graduate profile, almost word for word. What makes graduates of the program genuinely irreplaceable is malleability, trained to see the structure of systems rather than the surface of any one industry, they can enter any domain and lead.

Professor Dr. Sirisha Rambhatla was among the winners at the 2026 Kitchener Waterloo Oktoberfest BMO Women of the Year. This award celebrates women forging Waterloo Region through innovation, service and leadership. 

MSE students earned multiple awards at the 2025 Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) Conference in Edmonton.  Waterloo students received Bronze Level Recognition, while undergraduates Matthew Chan, Adel Pazoki, Aniq Premji, Sunischit Thapa, and Larissa Troper were runners-up in the national Student Paper Competition.

Individual accolades went to Esma Akgun and Mina Torabi Milani, both earning runner-up awards for their research.

A paper by a team of Management Science and Engineering researchers recently received an Honorable Mention (Top 4 Finalist) at the prestigious POMS College of Healthcare Operations Management (CHOM) Best Paper Award. The paper addresses the challenge of hospital-acquired Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which affects approximately 20,000 Canadians annually.

A paper co-authored by Management Science and Engineering professor Lukasz Golab and his Data Science Master’s student Anastasiia Avksientieva won the best demo paper award at the 2025 International Conference on Extending Data Base Technology (EDBT).  

Dr. James Bookbinder was the recipient of the 2024 Award of Merit from the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS).

CORS brings together operational research professionals with annual conferences held across Canada, special interest groups, traveling speaker programs and student support. The Award of Merit is presented annually to a current or past member of CORS in recognition of significant contributions to the profession of operational research.

Management Sciences professors Samir Elhedhli, Fatma Gzara, and Mehrdad Pirnia were recently featured in an informative event that delivered practical insights for industry on the application of artificial intelligence to address supply chain challenges.

Dr. Kourosh Malek, a Management Sciences PhD alumnus and currently Head of AI and Data Analytics at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH was also a featured panelist. 

This year, along with most other things around the world, our Management Sciences Annual Spring Awards ceremony was abruptly put on hold due to the covid-19 global crisis.

That can't stop Management Sciences from celebrating the achievements of our undergraduate Management Engineers (MGTE) and our Management Sciences graduate students (MMSc, MASc & PhD)!

Help us Congratulate all our winners!

A management engineering Capstone Design project that explored the need for pay-and-display parking machines in Toronto took top prize in an international competition. Milan Preet Kaur, a recent management engineering graduate, presented her team’s Capstone project at the 2019 Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) Undergraduate Operations Research Prize Competition, which took place at the