Two exceptional graduate students have been awarded the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal for their scholastic achievements during their time at McMaster.
This week, Ahmed Moussa and Claude Cournoyer-Cloutier are receiving the prestigious gold medal, awarded to students who have achieved the highest academic standing at the graduate level.
Every year, two graduating McMaster students are awarded the medal. The award, which was established in 1873, is one of the most prestigious awards students in Canadian schools can receive.
Learn more about this year’s recipients
Ahmed Moussa
Ahmed Moussa is graduating with a PhD in Civil Engineering. He is an award-winning researcher who is committed to harnessing artificial intelligence to build resilient, intelligent and equitable infrastructure systems.
An NSERC-designated Vanier Scholar and Valedictorian of the German University in Cairo, Moussa is exploring how AI can enhance resilience and sustainability across the built environment.
Moussa has advanced multi-sector collaborations that connect academia, industry and government. He is deeply committed to mentorship, inspiring emerging engineers and scientists to think creatively and act ethically in an evolving digital era.
Moussa believes meaningful innovation begins with empathy — and that intelligent systems should make the world smarter, fairer, and more compassionate.
Claude Cournoyer-Cloutier
Claude Cournoyer-Cloutier is graduating with a PhD in Astrophysics. She previously received her MSc in Astrophysics from McMaster in 2021.
Cournoyer-Cloutier is committed to making physics and astronomy more inclusive and is a firm advocate for incorporating practices of equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching and outreach.
In her role as head teaching assistant for two first-year physics courses, she implemented several new marking practices to make grading more equitable and transparent.
During her PhD, she gave more than 100 shows for McMaster’s on-campus and portable planetariums. She was the graduate student representative on department meetings for several years, and on a faculty hiring committee in 2021-2022.
In her research, Cournoyer-Cloutier uses numerical simulations to study the formation of massive, dense clusters of stars. She has played a central role in an international collaboration since Day 1 of graduate school.
In final last year of her PhD, she started co-supervising student projects and is keen to continue doing so.
Cournoyer-Cloutier recently started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, where she will continue her research over the next few years.