Awards, Honours and Rankings

The University of Waterloo is recognizing three graduate student researchers who have made a significant contribution in their respective fields with the award of a Governor General’s Gold Medal.

The Governor General’s awards are presented to outstanding students at different academic levels. Bronze medals are awarded to promising secondary-level students. Collegiate bronze is awarded to diploma-level students. Silver medals are awarded at the undergraduate level.

As part of celebrations for spring convocation, the University of Waterloo proudly welcomes a new group of honorary doctorates.

Honorary doctorates are bestowed upon exceptional people who have contributed to the Waterloo community or to the country at large. Including some of Canada’s finest artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, philanthropists and distinguished public figures, an honorary doctorate is among the highest recognitions of extraordinary service and excellence the University bestows.

That’s the secret behind Paramvir Singh’s success. The new graduate earned his Bachelor of Environmental Studies (BES) this June and graduated at the top of his class receiving the Alumni Gold Medal for outstanding academic achievement in the Faculty of Environment as well as the Departmental Award for distinguished academic achievement in Geomatics.

Alongside her academic career, Bumbulis was a competitive swimmer. She had been swimming competitively since she was eight, and by high school, she was swimming up to four hours a day, six days a week.

Naomie Seh Abomo, a fourth-year civil engineering student at the University of Waterloo, has been awarded Canada’s 3M National Student Fellowship Award. She is one of just 10 students from across the country to receive this prestigious national fellowship in recognition of her outstanding leadership and dedication to her community.

As this year’s recipient of the McNaught-Taillon Leadership Award, Vivek Goel, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo, is being recognized for his outstanding individual contributions to Canadian health care through exemplary leadership and mentorship in the advancement of health policy, health information and health informatics. 

Nicholas Cheng (MSc in Pharmacy in progress) won the Winter 2023 Social Impact Fund Grand Prize for his project Entomatia, which uses food waste as feed for mealworms to extract a serum to replace fetal bovine serum (FBS).

The $10,000 prize from the GreenHouse Social Impact Fund will be used for infrastructure costs and to generate a prototype serum for further scale-up.

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Gautam Kamath has been named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Vector Institute Faculty Member in recognition of his contributions to differential privacy, machine learning and statistics. He is among eight outstanding researchers in the latest cohort of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs to receive this prestigious national recognition.

Sarah Rourke, who will graduate this spring with a Bachelor of Science, will pursue a master’s degree in physics at McGill University. She is among 30 students from 10 countries selected for these awards worth more than $3.3 million combined. The awards were created with a generous gift of $200 million from John and Marcy McCall MacBain. Rourke is the second Waterloo student so honoured.