Thesis Submission Notices

The following theses have been submitted to the Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Office and are available for review by contacting the Administrative Team, Graduate Studies by email.

If you wish to attend a virtual defence as an audience member, please email to request an invitation. Please note that the number for virtual attendees may be limited and it may not always be possible to accommodate all requests. Invitations are sent the day before the defence. For defences that are Held-Without-Public-Disclosure, requests must be submitted at least 4 business days in advance to allow adequate time for signing the required NDA form. 

July 2024

July Defenses

Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Sepehr Hajebi
Title: Foreshadowing the Grid Theorem for Induced Subgraphs
Supervisor(s): Sophie Spirkl
Department/School: Combinatorics and Optimization

Location: Hybrid

Date: Thursday, July 4, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Luke Hagar
Title: Design with Sampling Distribution Segments
Supervisor(s): Nathaniel Stevens
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Remote

June 2024

June Defenses

Date: Thursday, June 27, 2024 at 11:00 AM EST

Candidate: Zhongwen Zhang
Title: Unsupervised Losses for Clustering and Segmentation of Images: Theories & Optimization Algorithms.
Supervisor(s): Yuri Boykov
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Alexandra Bühler
Title: Estimands in Randomized Clinical Trials with Complex Life History Processes
Supervisor(s): Richard Cook; Jerry Lawless
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 at 9:30 AM EST

Candidate: Hank Chun-Hao Chen
Title: Hopf 2-Algebras: Homotopy Higher Symmetries in Physics
Supervisor(s): Florian Girelli
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: Hybrid

Date: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 at 9:30 AM EST

Candidate: Stéphanie Abo
Title: Multiscale Modelling of Biological Rhythms and Systems
Supervisor(s): Anita Layton
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: In Person

Date: Monday, June 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Ala’ Alalabi
Title: Controller and Observer Design for Partial DifferentialAlgebraic Equations
Supervisor(s): Kirsten Morris
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: Hybrid

May 2024

May Defenses

Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Nicholas Olson-Harris
Title: Some Applications of Combinatorial Hopf Algebras to Integro-Differential Equations and Symmetric Function Identities
Supervisor(s): Karen Yeats
Department/School: Combinatorics & Optimization

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, May 17, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Joseph Scott
Title: Meta-Solving via Machine Learning for Automated Reasoning
Supervisor(s): Vijay Ganesh, Jo Atlee
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Remote

Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Yuan Wang
Title: Space-time Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin Method for the Advection-Diffusion Problem
Supervisor(s): Sander Rhebergen
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: Hybrid

Date: Monday, May 13, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Liang Chen
Title: Collective Dynamics of Large-Scale Spiking Neural Networks by Mean-Field Theory
Supervisor(s): Sue Ann Campbell
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, May 10, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Pablo Millan Arias
Title: Deep Unsupervised Learning for Biodiversity Analyses: Representation learning and clustering of bacterial, mitochondrial, and barcode DNA sequences
Supervisor(s): Lila Kari
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, May 10, 2024 at 3:00 PM EST

Candidate: Mojtaba Valipour
Title: Symbolic Regression and Sequence Modelling with Conditional and Dynamic Language Models
Supervisor(s): Ali Ghodsi
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Monday, May 6, 2024 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Alexey Smirnov
Title: Discrete total variation in multiple spatial dimensions and its applications
Supervisor(s): Lilia Krivodonova
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: Hybrid

April 2024

April Defenses

Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Andrew Na
Title: Efficient Machine Learning Methods for Solving Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equations in Finance
Supervisor(s): Justin Wan
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Greg Philbrick
Title: Writing My Own Line Drawing Software as an Artist
Supervisor(s): Craig S. Kaplan
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Zhaoran (Eric) Hou
Title: Sequential Monte Carlo for Applications in Structural Biology, Financial Time Series and Epidemiology
Supervisor(s): Samuel Wong
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, April 17, 2024 at 1:30 PM EST

Candidate: Mengyao Zhang
Title: On Convergence Analysis of Stochastic and Distributed Gradient-Based Algorithms
Supervisor(s): Jun Liu, Xinzhi Liu
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: M3 4206

Date: Friday, April 12, 2024 at 11:00 AM EST

Candidate: Joseph Yossef Musleh
Title: Algorithms for Drinfeld Modules
Supervisor(s): Eric Schost
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, April 12, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Jie Jian
Title: Edge Estimation and Community Detection in Time-varying Networks
Supervisor(s): Peijun Sang, Mu Zhu
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Shaokai Wang
Title: Deep Learning Methods for Novel Peptide Discovering and Function Prediction
Supervisor(s): Bin Ma
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Friday, April 5, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Kira Selby
Title: Distributions in Semantic Space
Supervisor(s): Pascal Poupart
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Hybrid

Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Trang Bui
Title: Design and analysis of experiments on networks
Supervisor(s): Stefan Steiner, Nathaniel Stevens
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Hybrid

March 2024

March Defenses

Date: Thursday March 14, 2024 at 5:30 PM EST

Candidate: Aarti Malhotra
Title: Emotions and Context in Decision-making for a Socially Intelligent Agent
Supervisor(s): Jesse Hoey
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Online

Date: Wednesday March 13, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Banafsheh Lashkari
Title: Measurement System Assessment Studies for Multivariate and Functional Data
Supervisor(s): Shoja'eddin Chenouri
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: Online

February 2024

February Defenses

Date: Thursday February 29, 2024 at 3:00 PM EST

Candidate: Siddhartha Sahu
Title: Optimizing Differential Computation for Large-Scale
Graph Processing
Supervisor(s): Semih Salihoglu
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: Online

Date: Friday February 2, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Andrew Jena
Title: Graph-Theoretic Techniques for Optimizing NISQ Algorithms
Supervisor(s): Michele Mosca
Department/School: Combinatorics and Optimization

Location: Online

January 2024

January Defences

Date: Monday January 29, 2024 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Nils Lukas
Title: Analyzing Threats of Large-Scale Machine Learning Systems
Supervisor(s): Florian Kerschbaum
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: DC 3317

Date: Thursday January 18, 2024 at 2:30 PM EST

Candidate: Chuanzheng Wang
Title: Safety-critical Control for Dynamical Systems under Uncertainties
Supervisor(s): Jun Liu; Stephen Smith
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: M3 3127

Date: Friday January 12, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Chendi Ni
Title: A General Neural Network Methodology for Multi-period Portfolio Organization
Supervisor(s): Yuying Li; Peter Forsyth
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: DC 3317

December 2023

December Defences

Date: Tuesday, December 19, 2023 at 1:00 PM EDT

Candidate: Joshua Jung
Title: Graph Mapping for Knowledge Transfer in General Game
Playing
Supervisor(s): Jesse Hoey
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: DC 3317

Date: Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM EDT

Candidate: Christopher Salahub
Title: Exploration in Pairwise Measures of Dependence and Pooled Significance
Supervisor(s): Wayne Oldford
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: M3 3001

Date: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 at 1:00 PM EST

Candidate: Mahsa Panahi
Title: Statistical Methods in the Search for a Dominant Cause of Variation
Supervisor(s): Stefan H. Steiner, Jeroen de Mast
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: M3 3001

Date: Friday, December 1, 2023 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Donovan Allum
Title: Simulations of Radiatively Driven Convection and Spatially Heterogeneous Solar Radiation Intensity in Ice-Covered Lakes
Supervisor(s): Marek Stastna
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: MC 5479

Date: Friday, December 1, 2023 at 2:30 PM EDT

Candidate: Maxwell Fitzsimmons
Title: Properties of Difference Inclusions with Computable Reachable Set
Supervisor(s): Jun Liu
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: MC 6460

November 2023

November Defences

Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2023 at 12:00 PM EST

Candidate: Johra Moosa
Title: Improving Peptide Identification in Proteomics Data Analysis through Repeat-Preserving Decoy and Decoy-Free Retraining
Supervisor(s): Bin Ma
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: DC 2314

Date: Wednesday November 29, 2023 at 10:00 AM EST

Candidate: Lijia Wang
Title: Joint Modeling, Variable Selection, and Multiply Robust Estimation in Mediation Analysis with Multiple Mediators
Supervisor(s): Yeying Zhu, Richard Cook
Department/School: Statistics and Actuarial Science

Location: M3 3127

Date: Monday November 27, 2023 at 3:00 PM EST

Candidate: Esha Saha
Title: Expanding the Scope of Random Feature Models: Theory and Applications
Supervisor(s): Giang Tran
Department/School: Applied Mathematics

Location: M3 4206

Date: Friday November 10, 2023 at 9:00 AM EST

Candidate: Glaucia Melo dos Santos
Title: Adaptive Human-Chatbot Interactions: Contextual Factors, Variability Design and Levels of Automation
Supervisor(s): Paulo Alencar, Daniel M. Berry, Donald D. Cowan
Department/School: Computer Science

Location: DC 2310