Dean's Distinguished Visiting Professorship

The Dean's Distinguished Visiting Professorship (DDVP) is a program at the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Waterloo. Each calendar year a leading international researcher in Mathematics, Statistics or Computer Science will be selected and invited to be resident for one academic term. During this term the DDVP shall give a public lecture and a full-term course in any area of interest within the Faculty. The course may be taken for credit by graduate or senior undergraduate students. 

The Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Professorship provides a stipend of $75,000 CAN for visitors to be a resident throughout a term. The DDVP is selected by a committee representing the Faculty of Mathematics.

Candidates may be nominated by any faculty member at the Faculty of Mathematics. Nominations can be made to the Chair of the selection committee.

Upcoming DDVP

Sanjeev Khanna (selected for Winter 2024)

Sanjeev Khanna
Dr. Sanjeev Khanna is a Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Khanna received his undergraduate degrees in computer science and eceonomics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, his M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his PhD in computer science from Stanford University. 

Dr. Khanna has contributed to the fields of approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, combinatorial optimization, and sublinear algorithms. His doctoral work, "A Structural View of Approximation," was the recipient of the 1996 Arthur Samuel prize for the best PhD dissertation in the Computer Science department at Stanford. Dr. Khanna is a Guggenheim Fellow (2007) and a Sloan Fellow (2000). He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 1999, where he has received the S. Reid Warren Jr. Award and Lindback Award for distinguished teaching. 

Dr. Khanna serves on the editorial board of Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, and has previously served on the editorial boards of SICOMP, ACM TALG, Algorithmica, JCSS, and as an area editor for the Encyclopedia of Algorithms. In 2018 the Association for Computing Machinery named him an ACM Fellow for his contributions to approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, and sublinear algorithms. 

Past DDVPs

Mostafa H. Ammar (Fall 2022)

Mostafa Ammar
Dr. Mostafa Ammar is a Regents' Professor with the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Ammar received S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D from the University of Waterloo. 

Dr. Ammar's research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in many areas within networking research, most recently in disruption-tolerant networks, mobile cloud computing, network virtualization, packet scheduling in modern networks, and adaptive video streaming. He has supervised dozens of PhD students; many have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry. 

Dr. Ammar has served the networking research community in multiple roles. Most notably, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) from 1999 to 2003, and he was the co-TPC Chair for the IEEE ICNP 1997, ACM CoNEXT 2006 and ACM SIGMETRICS 2007 conferences. He received many awards throughout his career. He is most proud of receiving the 2018 Alumni Achievement Award for Academic Excellence for the University of Waterloo. Dr. Ammar is Fellow of the ACM and Fellow of the IEEE. 

DDVP Lecture: Riding Along with the Time-Traveling Network Researcher

Remote video URL

Carsten Thomassen (Fall 2019) 

Carsten Thomassen
Dr. Carsten Thomassen is Professor of Mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. 

Dr. Thomassen is one of the foremost graph theorists in the world. His groundbreaking work has covered a broad spectrum of topics including graph colourings, flows, embeddings, algebraic graph theory, random graphs, and algorithmic graph theory. Together with Bojan Mohar, he co-authored a book Graphs on Surfaces. 

Professor Thomassen is a member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Graph Theory. He held a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Science (Cambridge University) in 2008, and delivered an invited lecture at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematics.