Three computer science graduate students at the University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science have swept the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize, marking the first time in the award’s eight-year history that all winners come from a single department. Nikhita Joshi took first place and a $1,500 prize, Ahmed Alquraan earned second place and $1,000, and Negar Arabzadeh received third place and $500, the Cheriton School of Computer Science announced on May 26, 2026.
Since 2019, the Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize has recognized the top doctoral graduates in the faculty. Joshi, as the first-place winner, has also been nominated for the university-wide Governor General’s Gold Medal, which will be handed out at spring convocation in June 2026. Her research, supervised by Professor Daniel Vogel, explored how interface constraints can unlock user potential — for example, restricting text highlighting can boost reading comprehension — and how AI-assisted writing tools affect feelings of ownership. She is now an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Paris-Saclay.
Ahmed Alquraan’s PhD work under Professor Samer Al-Kiswany led to DROPS, a resource management system for serverless functions. The system was adopted by Microsoft and deployed across all Azure regions, where it supports millions of user functions and has reduced infrastructure costs by tens of millions of dollars. Alquraan is continuing his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Waterloo.
Third-place winner Negar Arabzadeh, supervised by Professor Charles Clarke, developed novel evaluation methods for information retrieval using Fréchet Distance. Her research has been cited more than 1,700 times since she began her PhD. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
The sweep reinforces the Cheriton School’s standing as Canada’s top computer science program for five straight years, according to Maclean’s rankings. Recognized for training top-tier computing researchers, the school has produced graduates now advancing work at leading institutions worldwide.
