Goals are priorities established to strategically advance the Faculty of Mathematics across all areas of our mission by unifying action and informing decisions.
To make progress toward our common goals, we will work to achieve the objectives and strategic actions identified for each goal.
Objective: Grow research groups focused on fundamental research
- Encourage and support the development of structured, interconnected groups focused on fundamental research.
- Build researcher connections around existing and emerging strengths, within and across units.
- Engage undergraduate and graduate students in research groups.
Objective: Enhance resources to support fundamental research
- Attract and support excellent faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students conducting fundamental research.
- Articulate opportunities to support researchers and research groups engaged in fundamental research.
Objective: Highlight the value of fundamental research and scholarship
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Build broad appreciation of the essential value of fundamental mathematics through outreach and communications.
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Identify fundamental research as a core strength for the Faculty of Mathematics in internal and external communications and marketing.
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Identify and advocate for the use of discipline-sensitive measures of research impact and excellence that accurately assess fundamental research.
Objective: Systematically revise curriculum to reflect our changing world.
- Encourage and facilitate regular curriculum review.
- Employ smaller-scale refreshes to update content.
- Consider the perspectives of students, recent graduates, domain professionals and industry partners in curriculum development.
Objective: Facilitate teaching development and innovation
- Enhance formative teaching evaluation from peers and students.
- Foster the adoption of evidence-based teaching approaches and educational technology that best meet students’ diverse needs.
- Incentivize, support, and reduce barriers to teaching innovation.
- Support scholarship of teaching and learning and the use of evidence to assess the effectiveness of teaching innovations.
Objective: Support the development of students as ethical, collaborative problem solvers
- Increase opportunities for student problem solving and collaboration through pedagogical approaches such as group learning and project-based assessments.
- Collaborate with campus experts to develop discipline-responsive content to engage all students in ethics.
- Nurture student accountability for learning.
Enrich the Graduate Program
Objective: Attract high quality graduate students
- Enhance funding available for research-based graduate students.
- Increase clarity and transparency in funding information communicated to prospective graduate students.
- Expand professional master’s programs in impactful key areas that are of interest to diverse prospective student audiences.
Objective: Realize a consistently high standard of graduate student supervision
- Establish and monitor expectations for graduate student supervision.
- Ensure clarity and consistency in the application and communication of graduate studies policies, procedures and decisions.
Objective: Support graduate work-integrated learning and connections to industry
- Expand work-integrated learning opportunities that are responsive to the unique needs of graduate students, including curricular integration in professional master’s programs.
- Increase opportunities for graduate student links with industry and supports for graduate students interested in industry paths.
Objective: Enhance graduate student teaching and teaching assistant experiences
- Encourage graduate student participation in teaching training programs provided within their units and by Faculty and University offices.
- Expand opportunities for graduate students to lead tutorials and teach classes.
- Identify and implement best practices across the Faculty related to teaching assistant roles, scheduling, evaluation and recognition.
Objective: Amplify research and education that is connected to local and global needs
- Identify and encourage research that addresses global challenges and contributes to the Global Futures (societal, health, sustainable, technological and economic) articulated in the Waterloo at 100 vision.
- Increase student engagement with global issues and societal challenges.
- Expand industry-partnered relationships with researchers and students.
Objective: Foster interdisciplinary research and education
- Increase opportunities, incentives and space for interdisciplinary research.
- Establish clear criteria that value interdisciplinary research for faculty recruitment, performance review and promotion.
- Facilitate and encourage co-supervision of graduate students across disciplines.
- Effectively support collaborative programs, options and specializations in select strategic areas.
- Encourage students to take courses outside their disciplines of focus.
- Foster opportunities for students in other Faculties to increase their mathematical, computational and statistical literacy.
Objective: Expand innovation, social and policy engagement, and entrepreneurship
- Develop systems, supports and incentives to facilitate public policy engagement.
- Increase student and employee exposure to entrepreneurship, including a focus on social innovation.
- Incentivize and facilitate the commercialization of intellectual property and the development of fundamental research towards industrial partnership and commercialization.
Objective: Expand the international reach of the Faculty of Mathematics
- Encourage and facilitate international research collaboration.
- Attract top international faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and visitors.
- Sustain outreach and recruitment work to further diversify the international communities from which the Faculty attracts strong students.