Sonia Anand wins prestigious CCS Research Achievement Award - Faculty of Health Sciences - McMaster University

The 2026 Faculty of Science Alumni Achievement Award ceremony returned to celebrate the outstanding impact of 8 accomplished Science alumni. Each year, the awards showcase the wide variety of paths our alumni take following their degree in Science, and reminded attendees of the potential for science to transform our world. Congratulations to all of our 2026 award recipients: Dr. Emily Pass (BSc ’19), Colleen Doyle (BSc ’10, MSc’14), Peter Lowe (BSc’88), Sam DiLoreto (BSc ’93), Brenda DiLoreto (BSc ’93), Joe Han (BSc’06), Dr. Robert Britton (BSc ’96) and Dr. Karen Maxwell (BSc ’95). The 2026 Faculty of Science ceremony was held on Monday, October 5 in Federation Hall, with our award recipients and their supporters in attendance, alongside faculty and staff members from Science. This year’s ceremony celebrated and recognized the contributions each award recipient has made on their respective communities, the field of science and the reputation of the University of Waterloo.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.