Gratitude to the University of Waterloo faculty.

Thank you for coming home to lead the university that trained you, bringing a power engineer's practicality and a three-time alumnus's love to Waterloo's next chapter.

Thank you for chirped pulse amplification, the graduate-student invention that now powers eye surgery and physics labs worldwide, and for showing every young scientist that curiosity, not celebrity, is the point.

Thank you for co-founding the Institute for Quantum Computing and for warning the world early and clearly that our cryptography must be rebuilt before quantum computers arrive, then helping build the replacements.

Thank you for Spaun, the brain model that actually behaves, and for bridging philosophy and engineering to ask what it would truly take to build a mind.

Thank you for turning Kolmogorov complexity from an abstraction into a working tool of computer science, and for the textbook that taught the field how to measure information itself.

Thank you for Off-the-Record Messaging and a career of building privacy into the internet's plumbing, proving that ordinary people's conversations are worth world-class cryptography.

Thank you for building mathematical kidneys and hearts that reveal how medicines act differently in women and men, and for mentoring with an openness that makes mathematics feel like a place to belong.

Thank you for the materials breakthroughs, from lithium-sulfur cathodes onward, that keep pushing batteries toward the energy densities a clean grid and electric world will need.

Thank you for founding social robotics as a field of care, building robots that help autistic children practice connection, and always asking what machines owe the humans beside them.

Thank you for moving between Piers Plowman scholarship, Griffin-shortlisted poetry, and fantasy the New York Times ranks among the year's best, showing students that a serious scholar can also be a working artist.

Thank you for six decades of rigorous, contrarian moral philosophy argued in good faith, and for the chamber music concerts you have hosted for your community for over fifty years.

Thank you for the theory of survey estimation that underpins how nations measure themselves, and for decades of building Canadian statistics through quiet, generous leadership.