This article is published in the June 2021 issue.

CRA Education Committee Selects New Graduate Fellow


Nadia AdyCRA’s Education Committee (CRA-E) has recently selected its 2021 CRA-E Graduate Fellow – Nadia Ady from the University of Alberta.

Nadia (she/they) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computing Science at the University of Alberta supervised by Patrick Pilarski. She earned her B.Sc. in Honors Mathematics at the University of Alberta in 2014. Nadia is thrilled to have this opportunity to serve CRA and gain experience collaborating towards an important purpose: ensuring that students receive opportunities to discover research and how fulfilling it can be.

Over her academic career, Nadia has been involved with student development as a writing tutor, teaching assistant, undergraduate conference organizer, instructional designer, and supervisor of high-school student research. She is passionate about helping others communicate their research and ideas effectively and was recently recognized as an outstanding reviewer at both NeurIPS 2020 and ICLR 2021.

Nadia researches curiosity: working both to better understand what happens when humans are curious and how we might offer machine learning algorithms the benefits of curiosity. When she’s not busy succumbing to her curiosity about curiosity, you can often find Nadia involved in west coast swing—dancing, studying, or teaching.

The CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program was established in 2015 to give graduate students the opportunity to contribute to CRA-E projects and promote computer science research and undergraduate education at the national level.