Awards


Dr. Haslholfer

Robert Haslhofer has been awarded the 2023 Coxeter-James Prize by the Canadian Mathematical Society.  This prize recognizes young mathematicians who have "made outstanding contributions to mathematical research." Lauded by his colleagues as “one of the most distinguished and most promising mathematicians worldwide in Riemannian geometry and geometric analysis,” Dr. Haslhofer’s scientific work with various collaborators include novel characterizations of Ricci flows, study of mean curvature flows through neck singularities, and impressive contributions to stochastic analysis on path spaces. Read more about this award here. 

 


Dr. Aretakis

Stefanos Aretakis is this year's winner of the 2023 Cathleen Synge Morawetz Prize. This prize was awarded for an outstanding research publication, or a series of closely related publications on the topic of Applied Mathematics for Dr. Aretakis’ groundbreaking work on instability in extremal black holes (what has come to be known as Aretakis instability), conservation laws for wave equations, and their long-term behaviour in asymptotically flat backgrounds.

Read more about this award here.

 


Linbo Wang

Linbo Wang is the recipient of the 2022 ICSA Outstanding Young Researcher Award. This award honours members who received a doctoral degree dated 2016 or later and has demonstrated outstanding research in statistical theory, methodology and/or applications and potential for continued success. Wang received his award for outstanding research in causal inference, notably in instrumental variable estimation, variable selection, and identification of causal effects; for innovative developments in categorical data analysis; and for important contributions to biomedical data analysis and personalized medicine.

 


Ashton Anderson

Ashton Anderson has been awarded the 2021 Outstanding Early Career Computer Science Researcher Prize from CS-Can/Info-Can. This award recognizes early-career Computer Scientists at Canadian universities within 10 years of their PhD who have made significant research contributions in their academic careers.

Anderson’s research covers a diverse range of questions at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data, and society. He has pioneered computational methods to quantify online phenomena including political polarization and has developed human-centered machine learning systems. Read more about this award here.

 


Alexander Kupers

Alexander Kupers, an Assistant Professor in the Department of CMS, has won the prestigious 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship. The Fellowship recognizes and rewards outstanding early-career faculty who have the potential to revolutionize their fields of study.

Kuper’s research focuses on the mathematics of shape, also known as topology. In particular, it tries to understand how simple shapes such as discs and spheres can have complicated symmetries. He is one of five U of T researchers to win the coveted fellowship this year. Read more about this award here.  

 


Balint Virag

Bálint Virág has been awarded the 2022 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize for his exceptional contributions to mathematical research in the area of probability. Virág's research has touched on a number of areas of probability, including random matrix theory, Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality, random sorting networks and more.

Not only has he contributed to a wide range of research, Virág also has an excellent track record training students and postdoctoral fellows. He is an educator who has invested in training the next generation of leaders in the field of probability. Read more about this award here.

 


Robert Haslhofer

Robert Haslhofer is the recipient of the 2020 André Aisenstadt Prize in Mathematics. The Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM) awards the prize to recognize outstanding research achievement by a young Canadian mathematician in pure or applied mathematics.

Haslhofer's research interests are centered around Geometric Analysis, Differential Geometry, Partial Differential Equations, Calculus of Variations, Stochastic Analysis, General Relativity. Read more about this honour here.

For more information about the André Aisenstadt Prize, please click here.

 


Graeme Hirst

Graeme Hirst received the 2020 Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. Hirst joined the U of T Computer Science department in 1984 and continues to work as both a professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies, in the Department of Computer Science.

Hirst has served the ACL community in many ways, but the main reason he is the 2020 awardee is his work as the ACL's treasurer for 10 years from 2008 until 2017. He also served the ACL community by taking on the role of book review editor of the Computational Linguistics Journal as well as serving on the Executive Board of NAACL for many years, several of which as Chair. 

Read more about this award here.

 


Gennady Pekhimenko

Gennady Pekhimenko has been named 2019 CIFAR AI Chair, a recognition of pioneering work in areas that could have global societal impact. Being named a CIFAR chair is an honour and a sign that the community recognizes the value and promise of machine-learning research.

Pekhimenko is associated with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence which was created in 2017 to attract and retain top talent in the field. Read more about this honour here.

 


Graeme Hirst

Graeme Hirst has been named a 2019 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Hirst has been a respected professor in the Computer Science department and active member of the University of Toronto community for nearly four decades. He is being recongized for his deep and influential work in numerous topics in NLP, Knowledge Representation, Linguistics, and related areas, as well as for his sustained service of ACL as Treasurer and other positions, and for teaching and advising over many years. Read more about this honour here.

 


Bianca Schroeder

Bianca Schroeder has been renewed as the Canada Research Chair, tier two, in data centre technologies. Read more about this honour here.

She was also given the 2019 USENIX Test of Time award for her 2007 paper Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You? A paper which presents and analyzes field-gathered disk replacement data from a number of large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and internet services sites.

 


David Fleet and Daniel Roy

David Fleet and Daniel Roy are among four University of Toronto researchers who have been awarded research chairs in artificial intelligence by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), a pillar of Canada’s AI strategy.

They join eight other researchers at U of T as Canadian CIFAR AI Chairs. All are associated with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

 


Michael Goldstein

Michael Goldstein has been named a 2018 Simons Fellow in Mathematics. The program seeks to make sabbatical research leaves more productive by extending them from a single term to a full academic year.

Forty Simons Fellowships in Mathematics are awarded each year to tenured faculty in US and Canadian universities on the basis of the applicant’s scientific accomplishments in the five-year period preceding the application and on the potential scientific impact of the work to be done during the leave period. Read more about this honour here.

 


Sohee Kang

Sohee Kang is the recipient of a 2018 University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Award. This award recognizes faculty members who are effective teachers and demonstrate an exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation. At most four awards of $3,000 each are offered annually.

Professor Kang is active in both developing and testing new pedagogical technologies to facilitate students’ learning and to maximize teaching effectiveness. She is currently on the development team creating a mathematics communication and collaboration environment for the classroom, a Web-based application called MC2 (Mathematics Classroom Collaborator). Read more about this award here.

 


Bob Haslhofer and Giulio Tiozzo have been awarded 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships to continue their promising work.

The highly competitive and prestigious Sloan fellowships are awarded to early-career researchers in a handful of disciplines in US and Canadian universities in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Read more about this honour here.

 


Stefanos Aretakis

Stefanos Aretakis is the recipient of a 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Sciences.

The award, which is worth $100,000 plus $50,000 in matching funds from the University, will support his research on mathematical problems in general relativity. Aretakis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto St. George and in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

 


Graeme Hirst

Graeme Hirst received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association. The award recognizes a lifetime of scientific accomplishment and extraordinary contributions to AI. It is considered the CAIAC’s highest honour.

Hirst won for his many significant contributions to the field of AI. These include his countless research publications across several areas of computational linguistics and natural language processing, his influence in advancing others who then contribute to AI themselves, and his work with multiple AI organizations. Read more about this award here.

 


Anya Tafliovich

Anya Tafliovich has won the 2017 UTSC Faculty Teaching Award. This is a prestigious honour, and extremely well-deserved, for her finely honed skills and dedication as an instructor, for her curriculum contributions to CMS software engineering courses, and for her accomplishments in pedagogical research.

Tafliovich joined the Department of CMS in 2010 as a faculty member teaching courses of all levels. She is involved in a number of short- and long-term research projects, both in Computer Science Education and Software Engineering Education, and in Computer Science. Read more about this award here.

 


Daniel Roy

Daniel Roy has received a 2017 Google Faculty Research Award, and more recently, a 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science. These prestigious awards recognize Roy's foundational research on machine learning, probabilistic programming and Bayesian non-parametrics.

Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and, by courtesy, Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a founding faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His group works on foundations of machine learning and statistics.

 


A paper by Nick Cheng and Brian Harrington, entitled The Code Mangler: Evaluating Coding Ability Without Writing Code, received the Exemplary CS Education Paper award at the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.

Such awards are given to the top papers at this prestigious conference.

 


John Friedlander

John Friedlander and his co-author Henryk Iwaniec have been awarded the 2017 Joseph L. Doob Prize from the American Mathematical Society for their 2010 book entitled Opera de Cribro. The prize is given every three years and was presented at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in January 2017.

Written by two of the top masters of the subject, Opera de Cribro is an insightful and comprehensive presentation of the theory and application of sieves. In addition to providing the latest technical background and results, the book looks to the future by raising new questions, giving partial answers, and indicating new ways of approaching the problems. Read more about this award here.