Congratulations to Sina Kalantarzadeh, recipient of the 2026 Governor General’s Gold Medal at the master’s level. Kalantarzadeh graduates this June with a MMath specializing in Combinatorics and Optimization.
“It is a great honour to receive the Governor General’s Gold Medal, and I will always be proud of it,” Kalantarzadeh says. “I cannot fully describe how I feel…I can only say that it feels wonderful to see that my efforts and time have paid off. I hope everyone gets to experience the feeling of having their work recognized."
The Governor General’s Gold Medal is one of the highest student honours awarded by the University of Waterloo. It is given to one master’s graduate and one PhD graduate every spring in recognition of outstanding scholastic achievement.
Kalantarzadeh’s research is in combinatorial optimization, which is about finding the best solution among many discrete choices, often in networks or graphs. During his master’s research, he worked on two major projects. The first was in mixed-integer programming, which models optimization problems where some quantities are continuous and others must be whole numbers. “For example, if you want to build a road while minimizing cost, some parameters, like material amounts, can vary continuously, while others, like the number of workers or machines, must be integers,” he explains. “I studied cutting planes, which are extra mathematical constraints that help solve these problems more efficiently.
His second project concerned network separation problems. “Imagine a network such as a social-media platform, a transportation, system, or a communication network,” he says. “Sometimes we want to separate certain pairs of points by removing links, while paying the smallest possible cost. This is called the minimum multicut problem. I studied how well linear programming methods can approximate this problem, especially for planar networks.”
Kalantarzadeh chose to come to Waterloo because of the vibrant and unique Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.
“The spirit of the C&O department is truly unique; it inspires every student to search for the reasons behind mathematical phenomena,” Kalantarzadeh says. “Many experts are here, and many theories have been built here. Every professor is passionate about contributing to the field. The spirit of Bill Tutte is still present, and we experience it every Friday at the Tutte Colloquium.”
Kalantarzadeh thanks his family, especially his mother, who “planted in me a love of mathematics.” He is also grateful to his advisors, Dr. Ricardo Fukasawa and Dr. Joseph Cheriyan, and his mentor, Dr. Nikhil Kumar, a Reader in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. “I have learned so much from them,” he says.
You can learn more about the award, and see a list of past and present winners, on the Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs website.