Eleven Perimeter researchers have been awarded more than $2 million in grants to pursue long-term research of high potential.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants Program is the Council’s largest and longest-running funding mechanism. It provides researchers with the flexibility to explore promising research avenues as they emerge.

The recently announced Discovery Grant recipients are:

• Faculty members Timothy Hsieh and Beni Yoshida
• Associate Faculty members Avery Broderick, Matthew Johnson, Sung-Sik Lee, Matilde Marcolli, Roger Melko, Ben Webster, Huan Yang, and Jon Yard
• PSI Fellow Maïté Dupuis

Altogether, the researchers received grants totaling $2.235 million over five years.

Three researchers also received Discovery Accelerator Supplements, valued at $120,000 over three years. The supplements provide additional resources to researchers with highly innovative research programs in order to accelerate progress and maximize scientific impact.

The supplements went to Broderick, for his program “Resolving Black Holes: Black Hole Astrophysics in the Era of the Event Horizon Telescope”; Marcolli, for her research on “New Geometric Models for Theoretical Physics and for Computational Linguistics”; and Webster, for his program “Diagrammatic and geometric techniques in representation theory.”

Early Career Supplements, given to researchers who have held an independent academic position for fewer than three years, were also awarded to: Dupuis, for her program “Understanding some physical features of quantum gravity”; Hsieh, who proposed “New Routes from Topological Materials to Quantum Computing”; and Yoshida, for his research “Decoding a black hole: quantum information theory meets quantum gravity.”

Discovery Grants are awarded following a national, peer-reviewed process to evaluate applications based on three criteria: the excellence of the researcher, the merit of their research proposal, and their achievements in, and plans for, research training.

Perimeter researchers have achieved a 100 percent success rate on Discovery Grant applications to date, far surpassing the national average that ranges from 59 to 75 percent success over the past five years.