Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi Honored with the University of Waterloo Alumni Award

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Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science, has been honored by the University of Waterloo with the  2022 Faculty’s Alumni Achievement Medal in recognition of his outstanding professional accomplishments in academic career, leadership and research.

Each year the University of Waterloo recognizes alumni including tech experts, researchers, advocates and business leaders who are making significant contributions to the industries, local communities and the world at large. The award committee unanimously chose Hajiaghayi for the medal in recognition of his exceptional professional achievements.

A Ph.D. from MIT (2005-Computer Science) and masters from the University of Waterloo (2001- Computer Science), Hajiaghayi’s research is driven towards algorithmic game theory and combinatorial auctions, network design, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, algorithmic graph theory, distributed and mobile computing, and computational geometry and embeddings.

An expert in design and algorithm, Hajiaghayi has received several accolades that include the NSF Career award, Google Faculty Research award (twice), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the University of Maryland (UMD) Research and Scholarship Award (RASA), the EATCS Nerode Prize, the UMD Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year award, and the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Coach Award.

Hajiaghayi is a Guggenheim Fellow, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, a Fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), and an Honoree of Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.

In addition, to being a professor in Computer Science Hajiaghayi holds joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning. He also holds a permanent membership of Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers. 

The award celebration ceremony will be held in person in the first week of June at the University of Waterloo.

 

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