Six students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario were honored on March 25, 2026, for providing massive financial and research benefits to their employers during recent work placements.
Computer science student Vinayak Bector is projected to save the artificial intelligence firm xAI more than $3 million a year by improving how its chatbot translates different languages. He became one of the highest contributors to the company’s computer code during his time there as a web developer.
In the science field, Allysa Greidanus helped a company called deutraMed unlock nearly $40 million in deuterium resources by creating a new way to decontaminate 40 tons of industrial heavy water wastewater. Her work was so successful that the company offered her a full-time job and helped solidify a five-year research grant for the university’s Murphy Lab.
At the Odette Cancer Centre, health sciences student Christina Yang finished a clinical trial activation process in one month that usually takes six months. This allowed a breast cancer clinical trial to move forward without delay and earned her a provincial EWO Co-op Student of the Year award.
These awards marked 20 years of the university recognizing top performers in its work program, which currently connects students with more than 8,000 employers. Other winners were recognized for design projects that brought in $70,000 in revenue and for speeding up the evaluation of digital health tools for doctors.
