Conferences, Workshops, Seminars, and Colloquia

Perimeter’s conference and workshop series provides the ideal environment for new ideas and collaborations to flourish. Researchers based at Perimeter and from across Canada are invited to submit proposals for conferences in Perimeter’s nine research areas. Conferences for the year are chosen based on interest from the Perimeter community, as well as their cross-disciplinary, timely, and original nature.  

In 2024/25, five conferences and workshops were held at Perimeter, bringing 355 scientists to the Institute to participate. This is less than average due to the seasonal nature of conferences, typically held in the summer months, which were outside of the truncated 2024/25 fiscal year. Although remote attendance is not tracked, Perimeter continues to offer free virtual-only access for all conferences and workshops and makes all conference and workshop talk recordings available in a timely manner, usually within just a day or two. All recorded conference and workshop sessions are freely available to the international research community through PIRSA and SciVideos.

In addition to the conferences and workshops hosted at the Institute, Perimeter annually sponsors a number of conferences, workshops, and advanced schools held throughout Canada. These events raise Canada's scientific profile and contribute to a lively and rich national physics ecosystem. In 2024/25, Perimeter sponsored six Canadian conferences and workshops. A full list of conference sponsorships is below. 

Perimeter hosts annual seminar series across all nine of its research areas as well as a weekly colloquium during the academic year. Visiting scientists, resident researchers, and candidate postdoctoral and faculty recruits deliver seminars and colloquia on their latest research, presenting cutting-edge results and innovative new theories. All seminars and colloquia at Perimeter are available for all Perimeter residents to attend, either in person or virtually, with online options continuing to be offered to broaden reach and increase accessibility.

In 2024/25, Perimeter hosted 180 seminars and 15 colloquia. Perimeter’s speaker series aims to highlight the brightest minds in physics and to increase the representation of women across its seminar and colloquia programs. This year, 26 percent of Perimeter’s seminars and colloquia were given by women and additional gendered speakers.

Seminars and colloquia are recorded using Perimeter’s state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment and, with few exceptions, promptly uploaded to PIRSA to be freely available to the wider scientific community. The PIRSA repository now includes 16,646 publicly available recordings, which were viewed 304,597 times in 2024/25 alone by viewers in 174 countries. Recorded talks on Perimeter’s PIRSA repository have become a valuable resource, particularly for those who are not based at major research centres, providing access to high-quality presentations on cutting-edge topics in theoretical physics.

With support from the Simons Foundation, Perimeter has partnered with other organizations around the world to create an international hub to expand on PIRSA: SciVideos. This repository contains the full PIRSA catalogue as well as videos from prestigious international organizations including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Switzerland), the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR, India), the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing (US), Strings (International), and SNOLAB (Canada), with an active effort to expand the number of partners. The total number of videos on the SciVideos platform has risen to 19,214, with 1,271 videos added in the past year, accessed from 88 countries around the world.