New Students Looking for a Supervisor (advice from professor Van Oorschot):


Canadian students considering a graduate degree: I am always interested to receive email from prospective students who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada. Your email may be the most important thing that I read today! Young students are our future leaders (although you may not believe that yet). Good grades, and some background in security (how else would you know that you are truly interested?) are naturally helpful. Here is the computer and network security textbook used in our undergraduate systems security course in the School of Computer Science at Carleton. I look forward to your email.

International grad students: If you are neither a Canadian citizen nor a permanent resident of Canada, it is unlikely that I will be able to give you a personal response, due to the large volume of email inquiries---but reading what follows may increase your chances. Prospective international Master's students at Carleton also face significant international tuition fees (these are reduced for PhD students), aside from relatively high living expenses. These fees present an insurmountable barrier to many non-residents, and I am unable to fully offset them with research funding. If you are so fortunate as to be able to partially fund your own significant expenses, then fill out this information form; for Master's students, this serves as a filter to test how serious you are. If you are a prospective international PhD student and would like a response, send within your email a preliminary PhD research proposal---that is what I will be looking for as a signal that you are serious and qualified. In all cases, I suggest reading my advice page: "Will you be my Master's/PhD supervisor or post-doctoral host?" and related questions.

Current PhD students (supervised, *co-supervised):


*Ali Jahromi, *Srivathsan Morkonda Gnanasekaran

Past students, graduated (*co-supervised):


PhD: Srivathsan Morkonda* (Dec.'23), Christopher Bellman (Aug.'22), Furkan Alaca (May'18), AbdelRahman M. Abdou* (Aug.'15), Gerardo Reynaga* (Aug.'15), David Barrera (Aug.'14), Mansour Alsaleh (Dec.'11), Glenn Wurster (Apr.'10) M. Mannan (Apr.'09), Sonia Chiasson* (Jan.'09), David Whyte* (Sept.'08), Julie Thorpe (Jan.'08), Tao Wan* (Jan.'06), Mike Just* (Dec.'98)

Masters: Cheldon Mahon (Apr'21), Christopher Bennett* (Jan'21), Reza Samanfar (Jun.'20), Hemant Gupta (Aug.'19), Daniel McCarney (Aug.'13), Carson Brown (Dec.'10)*, David Barrera (Aug.'09), Jennifer Sobey (Sept.'08)*, Tim Furlong (Apr.'07), James Kelly (Aug.'06), M. Mannan (Aug.'05), Glenn Wurster (Apr.'05), Vashek Matyas (Dec.'94)

Post-doc: Xavier de Carné de Carnavalet (2019-2020) A.M. Abdou (2015-2017), Jeremy Clark (2011-2013), Glenn Wurster (2010), Sonia Chiasson (2009), Tara Whalen (2009), James Muir (2005-2007), Deholo Nali (2005-2007), Hajime (Jim) Inoue* (2005-2007), M. Vargas Martin (Jan.'03-Aug.'04)

Mathematics Genealogy Project

Miscellaneous thesis advice:


Some advice on how to organize your thesis (from Prof. John Chinneck, SCE, Carleton)
Some guidelines on PhD thesis scope and structure (from UBC faculty of grad studies)
Thesis elements that may be expected by PhD external examiners (from UBC also)
On theory vs. building real things (engineering), and persevering when your papers are rejected (Feng Hao)
Networking: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students (Phil Agre on how the research world works and how people in it operate).

Last updated: Dec 2023