The Cheriton School of Computer Science is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural David R. Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. Established in 2019, this award was created to recognize excellence in computer science doctoral research and writing.聽
To be eligible, doctoral students must have defended their thesis during 2018. To be considered for the dissertation award, two nomination letters, typically from the student鈥檚 doctoral advisor and external examiner, along with a nomination statement, needed to be submitted by March 15, 2019 to a selection committee chaired by the School鈥檚 Director of Graduate Studies.
First-place winner

鈥淎ll three problems studied in this dissertation are challenging and of practical importance,鈥 wrote external examiner Professor Yashar Ganjali, Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, in his nomination letter.
鈥淭he work does a great job providing a mathematical model to each problem and presents reasonable solutions with great performance. Whenever possible, the presented solutions are compared to optimal results, and extensive evaluation has been presented for all three parts of the work.鈥
Second-place winners (tie)
, supervised by Professors Robin Cohen and Richard Mann, received second place for his PhD thesis titled聽, which he defended on June 29, 2018.聽
, supervised by Professor Ken Salem, also received second place for his PhD thesis titled , which he defended on July 30, 2018.聽
Each second-place winner will receive a $500 prize.
鈥淐ongratulations to Md Faizul Bari for winning first place and to Michael Cormier and Michael Mior for tying for second place,鈥 said Professor George Labahn, former Director of Graduate Studies. 鈥淎ll three David R. Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award recipients defended exceptional doctoral research projects and all are continuing in academia at universities in Canada and the United States.鈥