Monika Bialy wins major NSERC award

A software Ph.D. student has been honoured with a prestigious award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Monika Bialy is a recipient of an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoral Program (CGS D) award. The scholarships provide financial support to high calibre scholars who are engaged in a doctoral program in the natural sciences or engineering. Awards are offered to top-ranked applicants. Bialy will receive $70,000 over two years.

“The CGS D award will significantly support my research over the next two years, and allow me to intently focus on my goals of advancing and contributing to the software engineering domain,” Bialy said. “My research centres heavily around McMaster’s collaboration with a major automotive partner, and knowing that NSERC considers my proposed research as having significant merit adds to my motivation to continue working diligently on this project.”

Bialy is part of a team of engineers working on the next generation hybrid vehicles for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Bialy’s role is to refactor code, or restructure existing computer code, in vehicle parts such as transmissions to make it work better without changing how it behaves within its complex software ecosystem.

“Monika’s work is an excellent example of a successful industry/government/academic partnership,” said Mark Lawford, professor of Computing and Software and Bialy’s co-supervisor. “She is publishing high quality academic research that is having an immediate impact in industry practice. McMaster’s ability to bring together interdisciplinary teams to address the engineering problems of tomorrow is allowing graduate students like Monika to reach their full potential. I’m very pleased that NSERC has recognized her past research success and future potential.”

Bialy was also featured in a McMaster Engineering’s #ThinkEngineering campaign.