Class notes

Alumni on the move and getting noticed…

MMath '83: Bruce Armstrong is running for the District 58 seat in Indiana’s Statehouse.

PhD '83: ICANN’s ccNSO Council nominated Patricio Poblete as an ICANN Director. In 1975 he was one of the founders of the University of Chile’s Department of Computer Science, the first of its kind in Chile.

BMath '85: Retired teacher Maureen Dagg wrote a letter about the state of education

BMath '85: Ophelia Lazaridis and her husband Mike generously donated $8M to local hospitals through the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Family Foundation.

BMath '87, DMath ‘18: Dave McKay shared his thoughts on re-entering the economy carefully after COVID-19 in the Globe and Mail.

BMath '90: Eric Yau became the Chief Operating Officer of Precisely.

MMath '91, PhD '96: Steven Woods, Google’s Canada engineering and Kitchener site lead was interviewed by mobile syrup about working amid COVID-19.

BMath '93: Bill Bryce, VP Products for Univa, wrote his Univa 2020 Predictions in the vmblog.com

BMath '93: Todd Van Allen has his own comedy show, but still uses his math skills according to the St. Thomas Times Journal.

BMath '94: Stephane Charbonneau wrote an article for Security InfoWatch.com.

BMath '95: Top executive Chief Risk and strategy officer Barbara Zvan decided to step down after 25 years with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. 

BMath '97: Driss Zouak is the Director Innovation and Products at Sparrow, an employee communication app. It just announced an add-on to Microsoft Teams to make it a communication hub.

BMath '01: Lylan Masterman joins Raines International’s Advisory Board.

BMath '01: Blair Schultz named to the Board of Directors of Solstice Gold.

BMath '02: Zeeshan Hamid, Regional Councillor for Ward 4 in Milton, has been tracking COVID-19 data in Ontario

BMath '02: Lianne Hannaway was elected to the Board of Directors for Heybryan

BMath '05: Sam Abdulrrazek named a partner at BDO Canada and joins the technology consulting practice. 

BMath '05 and BMath '03, MMath '05: Peter Szulczewki who left Google and co-founded a company with Danny Zhang was covered in the Financial Post.

BMath '05: Ray Reddy’s startup Ritual is pitching Ritual as a way to help restaurants and cafés survive amid COVID-19. Ritual also shared news about the launch of Ritual in Asia

BMath '06: Masroor Mahmud was appointed as GE's Chief Executive Officer for Pakistan

BMath '07: Databricks just opened a major engineering centre in Toronto. Matei Zaharia is a co-founder of Databricks.

BCS '20: Cam Eldridge just joined CommerceBear as a full stack engineer.

Kudos!

BMath '79: Cindy Forbes appointed as the newest board member for the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. 

BMath '84: Glenn A. Ives voted in as a board member of Kinross Gold Corporation and Wheaton Precious Metals.

BMath '84: Arctic Wolf, co-founded by Kim Tremblay, raised US$60M in Series D funding.

BMath '06: Steve Balaban, CFA, Faculty Advisor, led a team of students to the winning title for the local level of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. The team consisted of 3 Accounting and Financial Management students and one Computing and Financial Management (CFM) student, John Guttmann (4B). 

BMath '06: Saranya Murthy received a Wogrammer Journalism Fellowship for Spring 2020.

MMath '07: Aaron Tikuisis, an Associate Professor at UOttawa, was awarded the Israel Halperin Prize. This award is only given once every five years to outstanding Canadian researchers in operator theory who are within 10 years of their PhD.

Professor Richard J. Cook (Statistics and Actuarial Science) was named University Professor.

Professors Shai Ben-David (Computer Science), Penny Haxell (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Alexander Schied (Statistics and Actuarial Science) were designated University Research Chair.

Professor Florian Kirschbaum was recognized as an outstanding young researcher by CS-Can/Can-Info.

Wes Graham received the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously from CS-Can/Info-Can.

Professor Charmaine Dean (Statistics and Actuarial Science) was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

Professor Matt Kennedy (Pure Mathematics) was awarded the Israel Halperin Prize by the Canadian Annual Symposium on Operator Theory and Operator Algebras.

Professor Jun Liu (Applied Mathematics) was awarded the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society and Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (CAIMS/PIMS) Early Career Award for 2020.

Professor Jo Atlee (Computer Science) received the 2020 IEEE TCSE Distinguished WISE Leadership Award.

Research Professor Maura Grossman (Computer Science) received a 2020 Faculty Teaching Award from Osgoode Hall Law School.

In memoriam

BA '66: Jim Nagel (Math 3-year General) passed away on March 21, 2020.