Appendix

Marcela Carena

PhD Universität Hamburg, 1989

Marcela Carena is the Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Carena is an award-winning Distinguished Scientist, who has been jointly appointed as a particle physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and a physics professor at the University of Chicago, where she has been a member of both the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. She was formerly the Head of the Theory Division at Fermilab. Her research explores the possible connections between the Higgs boson, dark matter, and the origin of matter in the universe. She has been a leader in exploring radical new concepts such as supersymmetry and warped extra dimensions, particularly in showing how these ideas can be tested in experiments. She has worked closely with physicists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, in particular with those at Fermilab and the University of Chicago, creating and implementing strategies for discovery. Recently, she has been exploring ideas at the boundary between particle physics and quantum information, to tackle problems of quantum theory and the early universe. In 2022, Carena was honored as a US Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow for leadership and influential contributions to particle physics and promoting Latin American participation in US hosted experiments. In 2010, Carena won the Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and was a Simons Distinguished Scholar at the Kavli Institute in Santa Barbara in 2013. Earlier in her career she was a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN and was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship of the European Commission to conduct her research at DESY. Carena is the chair-elect of the Forum on International Physics of the American Physical Society. She has represented the United States at the Particle Physics Preparatory Groups for the 2020 European Particle Physics Strategy Update, as well as at the first community exercise for the Latin American Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure in High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. She was founder of a Department of Energy funded consortium for research in Quantum Information Theory, led by Fermilab and including several universities. She was also founder of an initiative to strengthen neutrino theory research impacting the flagship US neutrino experimental program.  She continues to be actively involved in efforts in Latin America and other countries to strengthen scientific collaborations at a global scale and open new opportunities for scientists from diverse backgrounds. She has been a member of several international scientific advisory panels around the world, including the NSERC of Canada, the Serrapilheira Institute and the ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research in Brazil; the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics and the DESY Physics Research Council in Germany. Carena is currently a member of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s committee setting a vision for the field of elementary particle physics for the coming decades. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales of Argentina. Previously to joining Perimeter Institute as its Executive Director, Carena was on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Perimeter and has chaired that committee since 2022. 

Freddy Cachazo (english)

PhD Harvard University, 2002

Freddy Cachazo is the Deputy Director (Interim) and Freeman Dyson Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2005. Cachazo is one of the world’s leading experts in the study and computation of scattering amplitudes in gauge theories, such as quantum chromodynamics and N=4 super Yang-Mills, and in Einstein’s gravity theory. His many honours include the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society (2009), the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada (2011), the Herzberg Medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists (2012), a New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (2014), and the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de recherches mathématiques (2016). In 2018, he was selected to inaugurate Harvard’s Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications lecture series on mathematical physics in honour of Raoul Bott. 

Bianca Dittrich 

PhD Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, 2005

Bianca Dittrich joined Perimeter’s faculty in 2012 from the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany, where she led the Max Planck Research Group “Canonical and Covariant Dynamics of Quantum Gravity.” Dittrich became the Perimeter Faculty Chair in 2023. Dittrich’s research focuses on the construction and examination of quantum gravity models and related topics in mathematical physics. Among other important findings, she has provided a computational framework for gauge invariant observables in general relativity, constructed new realizations of quantum geometry, identified holographic properties of background independent quantum gravity, and made crucial contributions to establish the continuum limit in spin foams. Dittrich has received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, which recognizes outstanding young scientists; an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities; an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award; and in 2024 the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de recherches mathématiques, which recognizes research excellence in mathematical and theoretical physics which recognizes research excellence in mathematical and theoretical physics. 

Asimina Arvanitaki 

PhD Stanford University, 2008

Asimina Arvanitaki is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute, where she has been a faculty member since 2014. She previously held research positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2008–11) and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (2011–14). A particle physicist working at the “precision frontier,” she designs innovative experiments to test fundamental theories beyond the Standard Model, drawing on cutting‑edge advances in metrology such as atomic clocks, resonant mass detectors, and the optical trapping and cooling of macroscopic objects. She has developed new methods to search for spin‑dependent forces with unprecedented precision and shown how astrophysical black holes can reveal new particles through the process of black hole superradiance, producing signals detectable by LIGO and future gravitational‑wave observatories. Her honours include the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (2017), the CAP‑TRIUMF Vogt Medal (2022), the Loeb Lectures at Harvard (2023), and the Frontiers of Science Award in Theoretical Physics (2024). 

Michael Borinsky

PhD Humboldt University of Berlin, 2018

Michael Borinsky joined Perimeter as a faculty member in February 2025. He previously held an Advanced Fellowship at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (2021–25), and a postdoctoral research position at Nikhef, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research in mathematical physics centres on the deep interplay between moduli spaces and quantum field theory, which are foundational structures in physics and mathematics. He applies modern mathematical techniques to advance both the accuracy and conceptual understanding of physical theories, while drawing on physical intuition to address profound problems in mathematics. 

Kevin Costello 

PhD University of Cambridge, 2003

Kevin Costello is the Krembil William Rowan Hamilton Chair in Theoretical Physics. He joined Perimeter in 2014 from Northwestern University, where he had been a faculty member since 2006. Costello works on the mathematical aspects of quantum field theory and string theory. He is the author of Renormalization and Effective Field Theory, a path-breaking monograph introducing powerful new mathematical tools into the theory of quantum fields, and co-author of Factorization Algebras in Quantum Field Theory. Costello’s previous honours include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society. In 2018, he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society (UK). In 2020, he was awarded the Leonard Eisenbud Prize of the American Mathematical Society and was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2022, he received the John L. Synge Award from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding research in mathematical sciences. Costello is part of a team of 11 scientists working on the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography. 

Neal Dalal 

PhD University of California, San Diego, 2002

Neal Dalal joined Perimeter in October 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had been an assistant professor since 2011. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study and a senior research associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). His research probes the fundamental physics of cosmology, the structure of the universe, and the formation of galaxies, and he has developed several tests of the nature of dark matter using cosmological data. 

William East 

PhD Princeton University, 2013

William East joined Perimeter as a Director’s fellow in 2016 and became a member of the faculty in January 2018. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University (2013–16). East uses numerical methods and high-performance computing to study violent astrophysical phenomena – such as black hole mergers and the collision of dense stars – as a probe of extreme gravity and new fundamental physics. For his thesis, he was awarded the Nicholas Metropolis Award of the American Physical Society (2015) and the Jürgen Ehlers Prize of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (2016). He is currently a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and is a recipient of an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities. 

Dominic Else 

PhD University of California, Santa Barbara, 2018

Dominic Else joined Perimeter in 2022 and is a member of the Institute’s Clay Riddell Centre for Quantum Matter. His research focuses on quantum many-body systems, with a particular focus in recent years on strongly coupled gapless systems and “strange metals.” In 2021, Else won the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for his “pioneering theoretical work formulating novel phases of non-equilibrium quantum matter, including time crystals.” 

Laurent Freidel 

PhD L’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 1994

Laurent Freidel joined Perimeter Institute first as a visitor in 2002 and then as faculty in 2006. He served as Faculty Chair from 2021 to 2023. Freidel is a mathematical physicist who has made many notable contributions in the field of quantum gravity, including introducing the concept of corner symmetry to resolve entanglement, or developing spin foam models. He has also introduced several new concepts in this field, such as local holography, group field theory, relative locality, and metastring theory and modular spacetime. He possesses outstanding knowledge of a wide range of areas, including gravitational physics, integrable systems, topological field theories, two-dimensional conformal field theory, string theory, and quantum chromodynamics. Freidel has held positions at Pennsylvania State University and L’École Normale Supérieure and has been a member of France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique since 1995. He is also the recipient of several awards. Freidel is part of a team of 11 scientists working on the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography. 

Davide Gaiotto 

PhD Princeton University, 2004

Davide Gaiotto holds the Krembil Galileo Galilei Chair in Theoretical Physics. He joined Perimeter in 2012. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (2004–07) and a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2007–12). Gaiotto works in the area of strongly coupled quantum fields and has made major conceptual advances. His honours include the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society (2011), the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (2013), and the Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Science (2024 and 2025). He is also one of the principal investigators in the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD. 

Jaume Gomis 

PhD Rutgers University, 1999

Jaume Gomis joined Perimeter Institute in 2004, declining a European Young Investigator Award from the European Science Foundation to do so. Prior to that, he worked at the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral scholar (1999–2002) and as the Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellow (2002–04). His main areas of expertise are string theory, quantum field theory, and mathematical physics. Gomis was awarded an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities in 2009 for a project aimed at developing new techniques for describing quantum phenomena in nuclear and particle physics. In 2019, Gomis was awarded the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de recherches mathématiques for his contributions to string theory and strongly coupled gauge theories. 

Lucien Hardy 

PhD University of Durham, 1992

Lucien Hardy joined Perimeter’s faculty in 2002, having previously held research and lecturing positions at various European universities, including the University of Oxford, Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Durham, the University of Innsbruck, and the National University of Ireland. In 1992, he found a very simple proof of non-locality in quantum theory, which has become known as Hardy’s Paradox. He has worked on characterizing quantum theory in terms of operational postulates and providing operational reformulations of both quantum theory and general relativity. This is seen as a stepping stone en route to finding a theory of quantum gravity. Hardy proposed the quantum equivalence principle, seen as a possible bridge between quantum field theory and quantum gravity. Most recently, he has worked on a time symmetric operational formulation of quantum theory. 

Yin-Chen He 

PhD Fudan University, 2014

Yin-Chen He joined Perimeter in July 2018 from Harvard University, where he had been a Moore Postdoctoral Fellow since 2016. Prior to that, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. He is a condensed matter researcher interested in strongly correlated systems, particularly quantum spin liquids, quantum criticality, conformal field theory, topological phases of matter, quantum field theory, and numerical simulations. He was awarded the Frontiers of Science Award by the International Congress of Basic Science (2024). 

Timothy Hsieh 

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015

Timothy Hsieh  joined Perimeter in 2018 from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had been a Moore Postdoctoral Fellow since 2015. Hsieh is the director of Perimeter’s Clay Riddell Centre for Quantum Matter. His research focuses on exotic states of matter whose physical behaviours are dictated by the mathematical structures of topology. His research interests also include quantum materials, entanglement, and applications of synthetic quantum systems for quantum simulation. He is also the recipient of an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities (2021) and of collaborative grants from Google for research on quantum simulation. 

Junwu Huang 

PhD Stanford University, 2017

Junwu Huang joined Perimeter as a postdoctoral fellow in 2017 and became a member of the faculty in June 2022. He designs novel small-scale experiments to look for light weakly-coupled particles as dark matter in the universe, and new searches based on astrophysical and cosmological observations for a variety of new physics beyond the Standard Model, including axions, dark photons, (cosmic) strings, and new vacua in the landscape. Recently, he is also interested in the prospect of using intensity interferometry to resolve the brightest objects in the universe. 

Luis Lehner 

PhD University of Pittsburgh, 1998

Luis Lehner is the Carlo Fidani Rainer Weiss Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute. He began a joint appointment with Perimeter and the University of Guelph in 2009, joined Perimeter as a full-time faculty member in 2012, and served as Deputy Faculty Chair from 2014 to 2017 and as Faculty Chair from March 2018 to 2021. He was previously a member of Louisiana State University’s faculty (2002–09). Lehner’s many honours include the Honor Prize from the National University of Cordoba, Argentina; a Mellon pre-doctoral fellowship; the CGS/UMI outstanding dissertation award; and the APS Nicholas Metropolis award. He has been a Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Fellow, a CITA National Fellow, and a Sloan Research Fellow, and he is currently a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program. Lehner also serves on the Scientific Council of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics – South American Institute for Fundamental Research and the Oskar Klein Centre of the University of Stockholm. He is also the theorist in residence for the Gravitational Wave International Committee. In 2019, he was named as one of TD’s 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadians. Lehner was recently appointed as a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina. 

Alex May 

PhD University of British Columbia, 2021

Alex May joined Perimeter’s faculty in the summer of 2023. Before joining Perimeter, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford (2021–23). For his thesis, May was awarded the CAP-DTP Wallace Thesis prize by the Canadian Association of Physicists (2022). May’s research is at the interface of quantum information and quantum gravity. He has initiated the application of ideas in quantum cryptography to quantum gravity, which has led to new insights into how gravity emerges from quantum mechanics and new theorems in classical gravity. He has also used ideas in quantum gravity to establish new connections among subjects in cryptography. 

Robert Myers 

PhD Princeton University, 1986

Robert Myers is the Director Emeritus and BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute. A native of Deep River, Ontario, he joined Perimeter as a founding faculty member in 2001, was its Scientific Director from 2007 to 2008, and served as Faculty Chair from 2011 to 2018 and Director from 2019 to 2024. Prior to coming to Perimeter, he was a professor of physics at McGill University. Myers’ research focuses on foundational questions in quantum theory and gravity. His contributions span a broad range, including quantum field theory, gravitational physics, black holes, and cosmology. Several of his discoveries, such as the “Myers effect” and “linear dilaton cosmology” have been influential in seeding new lines of research. His current research focuses on the interplay of quantum entanglement and spacetime geometry and on applying new tools from quantum information science to the study of quantum gravity. Among his many honours, Myers has been awarded the Herzberg Medal by the Canadian Association of Physicists (1999), the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics by the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de recherches mathématiques (2005), the Vogt Medal by the Canadian Association of Physicists and TRIUMF (2012), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Waterloo (2018), and the CAP Lifetime Achievement Award (2023). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006 and a CAP Fellow in 2024. Myers has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential scientists, appearing on the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics list of “Highly Cited Researchers” five times. He has been a member of CIFAR in the Cosmology and Gravity program (1998–2017) and an associate member in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program (2017–22). He has served on numerous advisory boards, including the Banff International Research Station (2001–05), the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (2012–16), the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute (2015–19), and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (2018–present). He has also served on the editorial boards of Annals of Physics (2002–12) and the Journal of High Energy Physics (2007–present). Myers remains active in both teaching and supervising graduate students through his cross-appointment as an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He has supervised and co-supervised over 150 postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and master’s students throughout his career, over 50 of whom now hold faculty positions around the world, including at Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford. 

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski 

PhD Harvard University, 2019

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski  is a high-energy theorist who joined the Perimeter faculty after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science, arriving in Waterloo in Spring of 2022. Her early work includes discovering infinite dimensional symmetry enhancements of the S-matrix, a new observable memory effect in gravity, and a framework for generalizing these features of infrared physics to other theories. As the founder and principal investigator of Perimeter’s Celestial Holography Initiative, she is leading a team of amplitudes, mathematical physics, and quantum gravity researchers in a concerted effort to tackle the problem of uniting our understanding of spacetime with quantum theory by encoding our universe as a hologram. She serves as a deputy director of the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography and has been active in organizing tech-for-physics initiatives at Perimeter Institute and community-building efforts within hep-th/Strings. 

Kendrick Smith 

PhD University of Chicago, 2007

Kendrick Smith is the Daniel Family James Peebles Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2012. He is also the Director of Perimeter’s Centre for the Universe. Smith is a cosmologist with a foot in the worlds of both theory and observation. He is a member of several experimental teams, including the Simons Observatory and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). He is the project scientist for the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD). His work has been recognized by international prizes, including the Gruber Prize and the Breakthrough Prize (2012, with the WMAP team); the Canadian Governor General’s Award (2020), the Lancelot Berkeley Prize (2022), the NSERC Brockhouse Prize, and the Marcel Grossman Award (2024, with the CHIME team); and the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (2020, with two colleagues). He holds a second PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. 

Lee Smolin 

PhD Harvard University, 1979

Lee Smolin is one of Perimeter Institute’s founding faculty members. Prior to joining Perimeter, Smolin held faculty positions at Yale University, Syracuse University, and Pennsylvania State University. Smolin’s research is centred on the problem of quantum gravity – where he helped to found loop quantum gravity – though his contributions span many areas, including quantum foundations, cosmology, particle physics, the philosophy of physics, and economics. His 200+ papers have generated more than 25,000 citations to date. He has written five non-technical books and co-written a book on the philosophy of time. Smolin’s honours include the Majorana Prize (2007), the Klopsteg Memorial Award (2009), the Buchalter Cosmology Prize (2014), and election as a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Canada. Smolin was named the “Third Most Influential Physicist” by Academic Influence (2022). 

Robert Spekkens 

PhD University of Toronto, 2001

Robert Spekkens joined Perimeter’s faculty in 2008, after holding an International Royal Society Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. His field of research is the foundations of quantum theory, where he is known for his work on the epistemic view of quantum states, the principle of non-contextuality, the nature of causality in a quantum world, and the quantification of various properties of quantum states as resources. Spekkens co-edited the book Quantum Theory: Informational Foundations and Foils, and he leads the Quantum Causal Inference Initiative at Perimeter. He was awarded the Birkhoff-von Neumann Prize of the International Quantum Structures Association in 2008 and won first prize in the 2012 Foundational Questions Institute essay contest, “Questioning the Foundations: Which of Our Assumptions Are Wrong?” 

Pedro Vieira 

PhD École Normale Supérieure and the Theoretical Physics Center at the University of Porto, 2008

Pedro Vieira is the Clay Riddell Paul Dirac Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2009. Prior to that, he was a junior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) from 2008 to 2009. Vieira’s research concerns the development of new mathematical techniques for gauge and string theories in their non-perturbative regimes. He focuses both on a very special theory known as N=4 SYM as a workhouse for developing such tools and on the S-matrix bootstrap program, which constrains the possible space of all physical theory, in particular strongly coupled gauge and string theories. He is a principal investigator on the Simons Collaboration on the Non-perturbative Bootstrap. His many honours include a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society (2015), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Physics from Tel Aviv University (2018), and the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (2020). 

Chong Wang 

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015

Chong Wang joined Perimeter as a faculty member in 2018 from Harvard University, where he had been a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows since 2015. Wang works on the theory of quantum condensed matter physics, including topological phases of matter, quantum criticality, quantum Hall effects and spin liquids, and their relationship to modern aspects of quantum field theory. 

Beni Yoshida 

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012

Beni Yoshida joined Perimeter’s faculty in July 2017, having initially arrived at the Institute as a senior postdoctoral researcher in 2015. Prior to that, he was a Burke Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (2012–15), where he worked in John Preskill’s group. Yoshida’s research focuses on applications of quantum information theory to problems of quantum many-body physics and quantum gravity. In particular, he has used the techniques of quantum coding theory to construct toy models of the AdS/CFT correspondence and discovered information retrieval processes from black holes by using the quantum information scrambling phenomena. Yoshida was honoured with the Nishinomiya Yukawa Memorial Prize in Theoretical Physics in 2021. 

Sisi Zhou 

PhD Yale University, 2021 

Sisi Zhou joined Perimeter Institute as a junior faculty in September 2023. Prior to that, she was an IQIM postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (2021–23), supervised by John Preskill. She earned her PhD degree from Yale University in 2021, supervised by Liang Jiang. Her research interests centre around theoretical quantum information science, with specific focuses on quantum metrology and quantum error correction. In particular, her research demonstrated how quantum error correction can achieve the ultimate sensitivity limits in noisy quantum metrology. 

Niayesh Afshordi 

PhD Princeton University, 2004

Niayesh Afshordi is jointly appointed with the University of Waterloo, where he is a full professor of Physics and Astronomy. Previously, he was an Institute for Theory and Computation Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2004–07) and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Perimeter Institute (2008–09), where he began his associate faculty appointment in 2009. Afshordi’s research spans interdisciplinary problems in fundamental physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, with notable contributions to the study of quantum models of black holes, the big bang, and dark energy – areas that are now being explored through gravitational wave and cosmological observations. His recent work has expanded into public health, applying his modelling skills to COVID-19 epidemic dynamics to inform health policy, as well as physics and radiation therapy. On another front, he has instigated large-scale collaborations between philosophers, physicists, and astronomers to explore the nature of quantum spacetime. Afshordi is also active in science communication, having contributed to videos that have reached over 1.4 million views; his popular science book, Battle of the Big Bang, was published in May 2025 by the University of Chicago Press. Among his honours, Afshordi has received the Discovery Accelerator Supplement from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, and the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal from the Astronomical Society of India. He also won first prize in the Buchalter Cosmology Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 2019 and third prize in 2015. 

Alexander Braverman 

PhD Tel Aviv University, 1998

Alexander Braverman joined Perimeter in 2015, jointly appointed with the University of Toronto. He was previously a faculty member at Brown University (2004–15) and held lecturer positions at Harvard University (2000–04) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1997–99). Braverman specializes in several areas with applications to mathematical physics, including algebraic geometry, representation theory, number theory, and the geometric Langlands program. He has been a Clay Mathematics Institute Prize Fellow and a Simons Fellow in Mathematics. 

Avery Broderick 

PhD California Institute of Technology, 2004

Avery Broderick began a joint appointment with Perimeter and the University of Waterloo in 2011. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2004–07) and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA, 2007–11). Broderick is an astrophysicist with broad research interests, ranging from how stars form to the extreme physics in the vicinity of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. He is a key member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which revealed the first image of a black hole event horizon to the world in April 2019. He studies how black holes accrete matter and launch the ultra-relativistic outflows observed, probing the nature of gravity in their vicinity. Broderick is a co-winner (with the EHT collaboration) of the Diamond Achievement Award and the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, along with several other awards. 

Alex Buchel 

PhD Cornell University, 1999

Alex Buchel is jointly appointed with Western University. Before joining Perimeter’s faculty in 2003, he held research positions at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999–2002), and the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan (2002–03). Buchel’s research efforts focus on understanding the quantum properties of black holes and the origin of our universe, as described by string theory, as well as developing analytical tools that could shed new light on strong interactions of subatomic particles. In 2007, he was awarded an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities. 

Cliff Burgess 

PhD University of Texas at Austin, 1985 

Cliff Burgess joined Perimeter’s faculty as an associate member in 2004 and was jointly appointed to McMaster University’s faculty in 2005. Prior to that, he was a member of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study and a faculty member at McGill University. Over two decades, Burgess has applied the techniques of effective field theory to high energy physics, nuclear physics, string theory, early-universe cosmology, and condensed matter physics. With collaborators, he developed leading proposals for the nature of dark matter and dark energy as well as string theoretic models of inflation that provide its most promising framework for experimental verification. Burgess’ recent honours include a Killam Fellowship, fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada, and the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. He was awarded the Buchalter Cosmology Prize in both 2016 and 2017. His book Introduction to Effective Field Theories was named the Best Book in Physics and Chemistry in 2022 by the Association of American Publishers. 

Anton Burkov 

PhD Indiana University, 2002

Anton Burkov joined Perimeter in 2020. His cross-appointment is as a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, where he has been since 2007. Burkov is a theoretical quantum condensed matter physicist, with a particular interest in topological and strong correlation phenomena in quantum matter. He is well known for innovative work on gapless topological phases of matter, such as Weyl and Dirac semimetals, with several of his publications on this subject in the “ISI Web of Knowledge Highly Cited Papers” list. He is one of the principal investigators (and the only one from Canada) in the US Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Center on Topological Semimetals. Burkov was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023. 

David Gosset 

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011

David Gosset is jointly appointed with the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and has been an associate professor at the University of Waterloo since 2018. Prior to that, he held positions as a postdoctoral fellow at IQC and at the California Institute of Technology and as research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gosset’s research focuses on quantum algorithms and complexity theory. Among other awards and honours, he earned the Outstanding Paper Prize at the 2019 Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award in 2016 and 2018, and the Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech for 2015–16. He is currently a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the quantum information science program. 

Wenjie Ji 

PhD Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020

Wenjie Ji began a joint appointment with Perimeter and McMaster University in 2024. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Ji works in the field of quantum matter theory and its connections to quantum computation. Her research has focused on first-principles understanding of generalized symmetries, including the correspondence between structures of symmetries and long-range entanglement in topological quantum matter. 

Matthew Johnson 

PhD University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007

Matthew Johnson began a joint appointment with Perimeter and York University in 2012. Prior to that, he was a Moore Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter. Johnson is a theoretical cosmologist whose interdisciplinary research seeks to understand how the universe began, how it evolved, and where it is headed. Johnson has made contributions to fields ranging from inflationary cosmology and string theory to numerical relativity and cosmic microwave background radiation data analysis. His research has attracted competitive funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Foundational Questions Institute, and the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology grant program administered by the University of Chicago. He is an external partner in the UK-based Quantum Simulators for Fundamental Physics consortium and a member of the Simons Observatory collaboration. 

Theo Johnson-Freyd 

PhD University of California, Berkeley, 2013

Theo Johnson-Freyd is jointly appointed at Dalhousie University, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Johnson-Freyd is a mathematical physicist whose research focuses on higher algebraic aspects of quantum fields and condensed matter. Prior to appointment to his current position in 2021, he was a senior postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter, and from 2013 to 2016 was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Ralph Boas Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. He is the co-author of Berkeley Lectures on Lie Groups and Quantum Groups. Johnson-Freyd is a principal investigator for the Simons Collaboration on Global Categorical Symmetries and a recipient of an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement. 

Raymond Laflamme,1960–2025

PhD University of Cambridge, 1988

Raymond Laflamme  was jointly appointed at IQC at the University of Waterloo, where he served as founding Executive Director from 2002 to 2017. He also held the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis John von Neumann Chair in Quantum Information at the University of Waterloo. He held research positions at the University of British Columbia and Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge, before moving to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1992, where his interests shifted from cosmology to quantum computing. Since the mid-1990s, Laflamme had elucidated theoretical approaches to quantum error correction and in turn implemented some in experiments. Laflamme was Director of the Quantum Information Processing program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) from 2003 to 2016. He was an advisor to the Quantum Information Science program at CIFAR and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017. In 2012 he received an Honorary Degree from the Université de Sherbrooke. He was a Canada Research Chair from 2002 to 2023. He was awarded the 2017 CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics by the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Centre de recherches mathématiques. With colleagues, Laflamme founded Universal Quantum Devices, a start-up commercializing spin-offs of quantum research, and led QuantumLaf Inc., a consulting start-up. 

Sung-Sik Lee 

PhD Pohang University of Science and Technology, 2000

Sung-Sik Lee joined Perimeter in 2011 in a joint appointment with McMaster University, where he is a professor. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Pohang University of Science and Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lee’s research focuses on strongly interacting quantum many-body systems, quantum field theory, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and quantum gravity. His recent work has included low energy effective field theories for non-Fermi liquids and models of quantum matter that exhibit emergent spacetime. 

Debbie Leung 

PhD Stanford University, 2000

Debbie Leung joined Perimeter in 2019. She started as a faculty member of IQC and the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo in 2005. She is currently a University Research Chair, and she was previously a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (2005–15). Before that, she was a Tolman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology, after spending four months at the Workshop on Quantum Computation (September–December 2002) at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, following a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Physics of Information group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (2000–02). After completing a BSc in physics and mathematics from Caltech in 1995, she received a PhD in physics from Stanford under the supervision of Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto and Professor Isaac Chuang. 

Roger Melko 

PhD University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005

Roger Melko joined Perimeter in 2012, while retaining his appointment with the University of Waterloo, where he has been since 2007. Prior to that, he was a Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2005–07). Melko leads the Perimeter Institute Quantum Intelligence Lab (PIQuIL), heads the Quantum Stream at Creative Destruction Lab, and is a faculty affiliate at Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He is a condensed matter theorist who studies strongly correlated many-body systems, focusing on exotic emergent phenomena, quantum criticality, and entanglement. He emphasizes numerical methods as a theoretical technique, particularly the development of novel algorithms and machine learning methods for his research. Among his honours, he has received the Herzberg Medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists, the Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, and a Canada Research Chair in Computational Quantum Many-Body Physics. In 2021, he was awarded the Brockhouse Medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Division of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. 

Michele Mosca 

DPhil University of Oxford, 1999

Michele Mosca is jointly appointed with IQC at the University of Waterloo. He is a founding member of Perimeter Institute, as well as a co-founder of IQC. He is a professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics. He co-founded the quantum-safe cryptography training program CryptoWorks21, the not-for-profit Quantum-Safe Canada, and the ETSI-IQC workshop series in quantum-safe cryptography, which brings together a broad range of stakeholders working toward globally standardized quantum-safe cryptography. He co-founded evolutionQ Inc., to support organizations as they evolve their quantum-vulnerable systems and practices to quantum-safe ones, and softwareQ Inc., to provide quantum software services and tools. His research interests include quantum computation and cryptographic tools that will be safe against quantum technologies, and he is globally recognized for his drive to help academia, industry, and government prepare our cyber systems to be safe in an era with quantum computers. Mosca co-authored the respected textbook An Introduction to Quantum Computing. He has received numerous honours, including the Premier’s Research Excellence Award (2000–05), the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation (2002–12), the University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo (2012–19), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013), the St. Jerome’s University Fr. Norm Choate Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), and a Knighthood (Cavaliere) in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2018). 

Christine Muschik 

PhD Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, 2011

Christine Muschik joined Perimeter in 2019, in a joint position with IQC in Waterloo, where she has been since 2017. Muschik works on developing novel methods for quantum information processing and on quantum simulations of problems from high energy physics. She has devised groundbreaking protocols for harnessing dissipation (setting a new record for entanglement lifetime in 2011), for the first deterministic teleportation between matter systems over a macroscopic distance (Nature Physics 2013), and for new types of quantum simulations (Nature 2016, 2019). Her work on quantum simulations of problems from high energy physics was selected by Physics World as one of the top 10 breakthroughs in physics in 2016. Muschik has received a Simons Emmy Noether Fellowship at Perimeter (2018), a Sloan Research Fellowship for outstanding early-career researchers (2019), and a New Frontiers grant for high risk, high-reward innovations (2019). In 2020, she was named a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Global Scholar. In 2022, she received a University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo and an Ontario Early Researcher Award. 

Ue-Li Pen 

PhD Princeton University, 1995

Ue-Li Pen joined Perimeter in 2014. He is the Director of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan and is jointly appointed with CITA at the University of Toronto, where he has been a professor since 1998. Pen is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies systems where basic physical effects can be isolated from astronomical complexities. His research projects include the non-linear dynamics of the cosmic neutrino background, 21cm intensity mapping, pulsar VLBI scintillometry, and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). Pen is known for developing innovative tools to create new fields of research. His groundbreaking work on 21cm intensity mapping opens a new window for the precision study of dark energy and neutrinos. His use of natural plasma in our galaxy as a giant telescope spawned the field of scintillometry, enabling new glimpses into enigmatic pulsars and the unsolved fast radio bursts. Among his honours, Pen is a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Gravity and the Extreme Universe program. In 2018, he became just the second researcher at a Canadian institution to receive a Simons Investigator Award from the Simons Foundation since the program’s introduction in 2012. He was part of the CHIME research team that received a Governor General’s Innovation Award in 2020, the Lancelot Berkeley Prize from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2021, and the Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering from NSERC in 2022. He was also one of the 347 members of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration to win the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He has been elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), announced in September 2022, for his outstanding scientific achievements. 

Will Percival 

PhD University of Oxford, 1999

Will Percival is jointly appointed at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Distinguished Research Chair in Astrophysics, and is the Director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. Percival is a cosmologist working primarily on galaxy surveys, using the positions of galaxies to measure the cosmological expansion rate and growth of cosmological structure. He currently serves as co-spokesperson for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration and as a science coordinator for the Euclid experiment. Over the next decade, the galaxy surveys enabled by these experiments will transform our knowledge of dark energy, the physical mechanism accelerating the present-day cosmological expansion rate. Among his many honours, Percival has received the 2008 Fowler Prize of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Distinguished Scientist fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016. He has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential scientists, appearing on the Thomson Reuters / Clarivate Analytics list of “Highly Cited Researchers” multiple times. 

Sergey Sibiryakov 

PhD Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2004

Sergey Sibiryakov joined Perimeter in 2020 from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and CERN, where he had been a faculty member since 2013. He is jointly appointed with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. His research interests range from particle physics phenomenology to cosmology and the theory of gravitation. He is co-author of a series of groundbreaking works establishing consistency of the approach to quantum gravity known as “gravity with anisotropic scaling.” Sibiryakov’s previous honours include the Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences Prize for Young Scientists and several grants and fellowships from Russian and Swiss foundations. 

Ben Webster 

PhD University of California, Berkeley, 2007

Ben Webster joined Perimeter in July 2017, jointly appointed with the Department of Pure Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Virginia, Northeastern University, and the University of Oregon. Webster’s research centres on connections between representation theory, mathematical physics, geometry, and topology, including knot homology, the geometry of symplectic singularities, and categorification. Among his honours, he has received a Sloan Research Fellowship and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in the US. He has received grant funding from the Sydney Mathematical Research Institute and recently supervised students on Mitacs Globalink Fellowships. In 2019, he was awarded the Golden Jubilee Research Excellence award from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics. 

Katherine (Katie) Mack 

PhD Princeton University, 2009

Katie Mack joined Perimeter in June 2022 to become the inaugural Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication. She previously held the position of assistant professor at North Carolina State University after carrying out postdoctoral fellowships at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge and at the University of Melbourne. Her primary research interests are in theoretical cosmology, astroparticle physics, early-universe theory, and galaxy formation. She is particularly interested in the physics and astrophysics of dark matter, and how we might find clues about dark matter’s fundamental nature by examining its impact on the formation and evolution of the earliest cosmic structures. She was selected as a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Azrieli Global Scholar in 2022 and a TED Fellow in 2020. She holds grants through the Sloan Foundation and the CIFAR Catalyst Fund. Her science writing has appeared in a number of major publications including the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC Science Focus, and Cosmos Magazine, and her first popular book, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), was selected as a 2020 New York Times Notable Book. In recognition of her service to physics education through public engagement, she was selected by the American Association of Physics Teachers for the 2024 Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award. 

Maïté Dupuis 

PhD École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 2010

Maïté Dupuis is the Director of Training, Educational Outreach, and Scientific Programs and an adjunct associate professor in the Applied Mathematics department and in the Physics and Astronomy department of the University of Waterloo. Dupuis was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Gravity of the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nüremberg in Germany. In 2013, she became a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Applied Mathematics department of the University of Waterloo. In 2017, she joined the Perimeter Institute Academic Programs department as a teacher, supervisor, and mentor. She is working on quantum gravity – more particularly, non-perturbative approaches to quantum gravity. She was named Assistant Director of Academic Programs in 2020. She is a co-founder of the Inclusive PI Platform and has served as co-chair since its inception in 2018. 

Ghazal Geshnizjani 

PhD Brown University, 2005

Ghazal Geshnizjani joined Perimeter as teaching faculty in 2023 and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. She is a theoretical cosmologist with a focus on early universe cosmology. Notably, she was part of the team that in 2007 discovered the Cuscuton modified theory of gravity – a minimal extension of general relativity that avoids introducing additional propagating degrees of freedom. Her work has been featured in Quanta Magazine and highlighted by PBS Space Time. Geshnizjani is also one of the founders of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics, where she remains actively involved in supporting the program and mentoring postdoctoral fellows and students. Beyond her research and teaching, Geshnizjani is actively involved in outreach, authoring the children’s book Bella the Black Hole. She regularly engages with young students, recently reading to early-age learners through a collaboration with Let’s Talk Science, and frequently gives talks and attends mentoring events for high school students. She has received several awards, including the Equity and Inclusive Community Employees Award from the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and she was named an Inspiring Iranian–Canadian Woman in STEM in Canada by the Yara Leadership Society. 

Lauren Hayward

PhD University of Waterloo, 2017

Lauren Hayward is the Associate Director of Training Programs at Perimeter and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. She works within the field of computational quantum matter physics, and her research interests involve using numerical methods to study phenomena such as phase transitions and quantum entanglement. She develops academic and outreach programs, and has taught courses in statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, and machine learning. She is the co-host of the podcast series Conversations at the Perimeter, where she interviews scientists working to unravel the mysteries of the universe. With the Perimeter outreach team, she was a co-recipient of the 2024 Excellence in Physics Education Award from the American Physical Society. 

Aldo Riello 

PhD Aix-Marseille Université, 2014 

Aldo Riello joined Perimeter as teaching faculty in 2024, after completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute and working as a PSI Fellow. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Riello works in the mathematical foundations of gauge theory and gravity, focusing on questions inspired by the role of the observer in quantum gravity. He also investigates questions at the interface between non-perturbative background independent approaches to quantum gravity, topological quantum field theories, and discrete quantum geometries. 

Mark Healy  
Director of Communications and Public Engagement

Mike Klander 
Director of Government Relations and External Affairs

Emily Petroff 
Director of External Relations

Stefan Pregelj 
Senior Director of Finance and Operations