Math Faculty Awards & Opportunities

The Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award was established to recognize the outstanding research contributions of our colleagues. The research accomplishments of our world-class faculty are presented at the Fall Faculty Reception and provide a mechanism for promoting and encouraging research within the University of Waterloo.

This award provides $2,500 for one or two early or mid-career faculty members in the Faculty of Mathematics.

Eligibility:

1. The award may be based on a body of work developed over the past five years, or for a single influential paper published in the past five years, measuring the quality, quantity and impact of the work.
2. Nominee should be early-career faculty (who have held their first independent academic position within the last five years) or mid-career faculty (who have held their first independent academic position within the last ten years). The eligibility period is adjusted to take into account eligible leave(s), in accordance with NSERC guidelines. Please contact the MRO mathres.office@uwaterloo.ca if you have any questions regarding your eligibility.
3. Members of the Faculty of Math Distinguished Award committee are ineligible.
4. Chairs/Director, Associate Deans, and the Dean are ineligible while holding their administrative positions.

5. Winners would not be eligible for the next four competitions. Researchers who have had release time for the purpose of research (for example, Steacie and Killam winners) would not be eligible until two years later after their term has ended.

Nomination and selection process:

The unit Chair/Director or delegate is to nominate two faculty members from each unit: one early-career researcher and one mid-career researcher, for the award. The deadline to submit the nomination packages each year is May 31 (if the deadline falls on the weekend, then the deadline is automatically extended to the next business day). The nominator should forward the nomination packages of their nominees to the Math Research Office (mathres.office@uwaterloo.ca).

The nomination package must include:

• A letter of nomination (limited to two pages) indicating the candidate’s career stage and a discussion, as appropriate, of candidate’s research achievement in relation to peers at the same career stage; quantity and quality of contributions; leadership in research community; research impact in (or outside) of discipline; awards received; etc.
• The candidate’s full CV.
• The recipient of the award is selected by the Faculty of Mathematics Distinguished Awards Committee in June with an announcement to follow in July.

Award Winners:

• 2026: Oliver Pechenik (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Yaoliang Yu (Computer Science)
• 2025: Sepehr Assadi (Computer Science), David Del Rey Fernandez (Applied Mathematics), Wenhu Chen (Computer Science)
• 2024: Xi He (Computer Science) and Graeme Smith (Applied Mathematics)
• 2023: Mario Ghossoub (Statistics and Actuarial Science) and Gautam Kamath (Computer Science)
• 2022: Aukosh Jagannath (Statistics and Actuarial Science) and Florian Kerschbaum (Computer Science)
• 2021: Eduardo Martin-Martinez (Applied Mathematics) and Sophie Spirkl (Combinatorics and Optimization)
• 2020: Pengfei Li (Statistics and Actuarial Science) and William Slofstra (Pure Mathematics)
• 2019: Jesse Hoey (Computer Science), Laura Sanità (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Ben Webster (Pure Mathematics)
• 2018: Jason Bell (Pure Math), Luke Postle (Combinatorics and Optimization), and Daniel Vogel (Computer Science)
• 2017: Matthew Kennedy (Pure Math) and Ruodu Wang (Statistics and Actuarial Science)

This program is currently on hold.

The Faculty of Mathematics owes much of its reputation and stature to the quality of its eminent professors. The Faculty of Mathematics recognizes exceptional scholarly achievement and pre-eminence in a particular field of knowledge through the designation “Math Faculty Research Chair.” The number of such appointments does not generally exceed 5 per cent of the tenured faculty, underlining the highly prestigious nature of the Math Faculty Research Chair designation. A faculty member with this title will receive a teaching reduction of one course and $50,000 in research funding per year. A faculty member with the title does not get a teaching reduction during a sabbatical or other leave, and the teaching reduction is not necessarily additive with any other teaching reduction. The Math Faculty Research Chair title and benefits will be relinquished if another major research chair is awarded.

At steady state, the intention is to make at most three appointments each year. The number of appointments will be reviewed annually by the Dean in consultation with the Dean’s Advisory Council and the program will be reviewed after an initial period of five years.

Chairholders:

• Program on hold since 2024.
• 2023: Sophie Spirkl (Combinatorics and Optimization), Aissa Wade (Pure Mathematics) and Sepehr Assadi (Computer Science)
• 2022: Pengfei Li (Statistics & Actuarial Science) and Rahim Moosa (Pure Mathematics)
• 2021: Kirsten Morris (Applied Mathematics) and Matthew Satriano (Pure Mathematics)
• 2019: Richard Cook (Statistics & Actuarial Science) and Levent Tunçel (Combinatorics and Optimization)

The Faculty of Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award is designed to recognize and celebrate research excellence. Awards valued at up to $5,000 will be provided annually to graduate students who are currently registered full time (or who were last registered within the last two academic terms) in the Faculty of Mathematics. The nominees must have authored or co-authored an outstanding research paper as of January 31^st in the year of selection. Students must be nominated by their supervisor, with the final selections made by the Faculty of Mathematics Research Advisory Committee.

Eligibility & selection criteria:

• Graduate students registered full time in any program in the Faculty of Mathematics. Students who were last registered within the last two academic terms will also be considered.
• Interested applicants must have written a research paper on any topic covered by the Faculty of Mathematics. Papers can be single-authored or multi-authored, providing that the contributions of the graduate students is roughly equal. The recipient(s) will be selected by the Faculty of Mathematics Research Advisory Committee (RAC) annually in February based on originality, importance, and potential impact of the research paper.

• To be eligible for the Award, as of January 31 in the year of award selection, the nominee's paper must be published in or accepted to a journal or reviewed conference proceedings or passed the first round of the normal refereeing process for a journal.

• To be considered, a faculty member must nominate a paper authored (or co-authored) by a graduate student under his/her supervision to the Chair of the unit/department, by the due date set by the unit/department. Units/departments will review and rank applications and will submit selected nominations to the office of the Associate Dean Research by the deadline below.
• Nomination letters must clarify: (1) the student's contribution to the work; (2) authorship order as it pertains to the discipline; and (3) impact of the work.
• If more than one graduate student contributed to the research paper of a successful application package, the monetary award will be split equally amongst the students.

Value: up to $5,000

Level: Masters, Doctoral

Program: Mathematics→Applied Mathematics, Combinatorics & Optimization, Computational Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics for Teachers, Pure Mathematics, Statistics & Actuarial Science

Citizenship: Canadian/Permanent resident, International/study permit student

Selection process: Student selected automatically by Faculty/Department

Term: Winter

Deadline: Annually by February 15

For further information about this award please contact the applicable department Graduate Co-ordinator

Past Recipients:

• 2026: Pulkit Sinha (Computer Science), Ruikum Zhou (Applied Mathematics), and Xiao Zhong (Pure Mathematics)
• 2025: Sean Monahan (Pure Mathematics), Sepehr Hajebi (Combinatorics and Optimization), and Alexandra Buhler (Statistics and Actuarial Sciences). Web Story.
• 2024: Janani Sundaresan (Computer Science) and Liyuan Lin (Statistics & Actuarial Science)
• 2023: Jacob Campbell (Pure Mathematics) and Mahbod Majid (Computer Science)
• 2022: James Davies (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Greg Philbrick (Computer Science)

Interested in research on campus? The Faculty of Mathematics has several opportunities for undergraduates to develop their research skills, which are administered through each department. If you are interested in getting involved with undergraduate research projects and awards, check out our Student-Supervisor Matching Platform.

Please refer to the individual units for more details on available research opportunities, which may include NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA), Mathematics Undergraduate Research Award (MURA), Undergraduate Research Assistantship (URA), and internships:

• Applied Mathematics
• Combinatorics and Optimization
• Computer Science
• Pure Mathematics
• Statistics and Actuarial Science

The Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research - The Faculty of Mathematics is unique in offering a prestigious award for excellence in undergraduate research - the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

Professor Ming Li and his family have created this award in honour and memory of his late wife, Jessie Wenhui Zou. With this award, the family wishes to support research activities at the undergraduate level within the Faculty of Mathematics to carry on Jessie’s passion for education.

The spirit of this award is to acknowledge research achieved by students at any time during their undergraduate career. The undergraduate student must be in their last year of study, but the research can have been conducted any time during their undergraduate career. This award will provide $1,000 to one Faculty of Mathematics undergraduate student.

This program is currently on hold.

The Faculty of Mathematics William T. Tutte Postdoctoral Fellowship intends to attract high-calibre scholars to conduct research in Applied Mathematics, Combinatorics and Optimization, Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science or any related fields.

Past Recipients:

• 2024: Hao Wu (Computer Science)
• 2023: Robert Andrews (Computer Science), Farshad Moradi Kashkooli (Applied Math) and Aleksander Milivojevic (Pure Math)
• 2022: Jerome Quintin (Applied Math) and Vishwas Bhargava (Computer Science)