Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Jeffrey Shallit is one of five foreign members elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters for 2020.
James Petrie places a high premium on intellectual freedom. After graduating with a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia (UBC), he accepted a position as a firmware engineer for a leading multinational technology company. “A few months in, I realized I was missing the opportunity to view problems through a wider lens and pursue the things that interested me most,” he remembers.
“While working as an instructional support assistant (ISA), I remember the first time a professor asked for a volunteer to teach a lecture while he was at a conference,” remembers Josué Kurke. “My hand shot up. I donned a professorial kind of jacket with the elbow patches and went all out. Over time, I’ve realized that I feel most at home in front of a classroom. I want to spend my career talking to people about math.”
With most classes continuing online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics has had to adapt other aspects of campus life, such as orientation.
The Fall 2020 orientation week, which runs from September 1st to September 7th, is completely virtual.
The nearly 2,600 incoming Faculty of Mathematics students are therefore experiencing an orientation like none before. The faculty’s orientation teams have expended great effort to recreate the fun and interactive aspects that are usually experienced by incoming students.
Not long after beginning his graduate program at Waterloo, Matthew Sullivan discovered a passion for Ultimate Frisbee. Today, he serves as the chief of the Ultimate Frisbee intramural program while continuing to referee and play as often as he can. Close to 450 students sign up to play every autumn. “Things like age, gender, or program don’t matter out there,” says Matthew. “Any student can go out and play. Like all the intramural sports at Waterloo, Ultimate provides a great way to de-stress, stay in shape, and balance the academic with the social.”
The start of the Spring Term, at the height of COVID, had instructors moving their courses to a remote format with students spread across time zones. It changed delivery, assignments and testing as in the case of Anton Mosunov, an award-winning lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics who altered the MATH 135 midterm to an oral exam.
PhD candidate Stavros Birmpilis, co-supervised by Cheriton School of Computer Science Professors George Labahn and Arne Storjohann, has won one of two Distinguished Student Author Awards at ISSAC 2020, the 45th International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation.
A world-leading University of Waterloo spinoff company, that decodes blood samples for potential treatments for illnesses like cancer and COVID-19, is expanding operations with the help of a $5-million USD investment.
Bin Ma, a University of Waterloo computer science professor who cofounded Rapid Novor in 2015, says the company’s technology is the most advanced in the world when it comes to deciphering the complex workings of antibody proteins, a process called sequencing.
Irene Melgarejo Lermas has never been one to shy away from a challenge. At the recommendation of a friend who studied at Waterloo, she moved from her native Spain to study quantum field theory at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). In addition to tackling a complex subject in her second language, she was assigned to teach a class of 200 undergraduate students during her first semester. “I didn’t have any teaching experience at the time,” she remembers.