Awards, Honours and Rankings

For graduating PhD students, completing their dissertation defence is a significant milestone and convocation is an exciting time to celebrate their accomplishments with friends and family.

Six exceptional graduating PhD students have been chosen to share about their academic journey filled with innovation, resilience and passion. Read their stories below.

Faculty of Arts

Convocation is a special time to celebrate a significant milestone. These ten students have been selected by their peers, in recognition of their social and academic contributions to the Waterloo community, to represent the graduating class of 2022.

Faculty of Arts

Ola Idris

Convocation is a time for celebration, reflection, and inspiration. It’s a time to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of students and to celebrate accomplishments. It’s a time to reflect on unforgettable moments that shaped growth and direction throughout university life. And it’s a time to be inspired to action, to make a positive impact beyond the campus of the University of Waterloo.

Karina Sukhina

Karina Sukhina woke up to the sound of the first bomb that landed on Kyiv at five a.m. February 24.

While at first uncertain about what she’d heard, Sukhina and her boyfriend Nazarii Kulyk were soon packing their bags and heading for safety.

“It was an awful time,” she says. “I can’t stop thinking about the morning Kyiv was bombed. We were so stressed for the next couple of weeks.”

Two researchers from the Faculty of Mathematics have been awarded University Research Chairs.

Awarded by the Office of the Provost, a University Research Chair recognizes exceptional achievement and pre-eminence in a particular field of knowledge.

Chaitanya Swamy 
Professor, Department of Combinatorics and Optimization  

Farzaan Nathoo-Khedri 
Valedictorian, Faculty of Mathematics  

Having an undergraduate program upended by the pandemic and the move to remote classes was not just a challenge academically, but also with respect to the community aspect of the university experience.

Waterloo Engineering graduates were recognized for their involvement and leadership in the community by the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce at its annual Business Excellence Awards Gala.

Alumni received awards in three categories for the contributions made through innovative companies they founded or co-founded.  

Statistics are so common in our everyday lives that the subject can easily be taken for granted.

But whether it is about pressing global issues related to the pandemic or more local concerns related to the housing market, statistics inform almost any decisions for policymakers and citizens alike.

Because statistics are so commonplace, it is easy to forget that a lot of work goes into creating the statistical tools that help us understand the world and make the best decisions. Having the most refined statistical tools means better outcomes.

Researching in mathematics means engaging in unconventional thinking. For Patrick Naylor, a newly-minted PhD graduate from the Department of Pure Mathematics, the unconventional is the everyday.

Naylor works in the field of low-dimensional topology, which in a nutshell means he explores the characteristics of dimensions beyond those we experience as reality.

Each year at Spring Convocation, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (GSPA) and the Graduate Student Association (GSA) recognize outstanding professors who went above and beyond in their work as supervisors.

The nominations and adjudication for the annual Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision use submissions from former graduate students themselves, who rate and reflect on their experiences working with faculty members.

This year’s winners are Claudio Cañizares, Jay Dolmage and Gord Willmot.