Every term the Engineering Faculty at UWaterloo gives out a small number of awards to students in recognition of their academic and research achievements. This term, we had two students in the lab receive awards, Majid Ghasemi and Josh Sun.

Josh Sun

Ph.D. candidate Josh Qixing Sun has been carrying out exciting research in multiple areas, and putting in a huge amount of work which really came to fruition this past term. He had a paper finalized in a journal, an ICML paper accepted, successfully completed his proposal exam for his research on vision-language-navigation, all while completing the second half of a Mitacs internship on antibody-discovery, which produced one of those research papers.

In all of these projects, Josh has been the leading force for collaboration, publishing initiative and has done the bulk of the core technical work and writing, with guidance and editing from myself and his collaborators. For all these reasons, as well as his outstanding academic grades, Josh greatly deserves the award.

Majid Ghasemi

Majid Ghasemi only began his doctoral studied this past September 2025, but already he has dove into his research topics on ethical decision making with reinforcement learning with gusto, submitting having accepted multiple workshop papers and initial results. He accomplished a lot in his first two terms, getting two short papers into a national conference and two more into international workshops. All this while showing up an outstanding performance in multiple grad courses, TAing a coures, and now beginning an internship with an industry partner.

Congratulations Josh and Majid, well deserved!