Perimeter Institute: A quarter-century retrospective — Chapter Four

In 2025, Perimeter Institute is starting a new chapter.

Marcela Carena became Perimeter’s fourth executive director just as the Institute was poised to embark on its next 25 years of exploration. Carena is a distinguished particle physicist who previously served as Head of the Theory Division at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a physics professor at the University of Chicago.

“Perimeter is inspiring the next generation of explorers across Canada and globally,” Carena said. “Ultimately it’s the people who make all the difference.”

At a time of huge advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, Perimeter has new choices to make about how it will contribute to this new era.

Carena intends to continue Lazaridis’s legacy – to think creatively and do physics in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative way.

“That has been our basic model, and I think it has been super-successful,” Carena said.

The future, with dramatic advances in both artificial intelligence and quantum technology, is full of unknowns and full of potential. Given the immensely powerful new tools that will become available, the way scientists do science 25 years from now could be profoundly different.

 “Perimeter’s culture of being flexible and forward thinking is ideally suited for leading proactively in an epoch of rapid change,” Carena said. With its academic and industry partners, Perimeter can help Canada get ahead of the curve and be a leading science and technology hub in the world, she added.

In June 2025, Perimeter held an event in Montréal with several partners including: Two Small Fish Ventures, a tech venture capital fund; Institut Courtois, a new research institute at the Université de Montréal focused on the development of new quantum materials and AI; and IVADO, a research, training and knowledge mobilization consortium in artificial intelligence.

The public discussion explored how AI is already being employed to help find solutions for hard-to-crack optimization problems and to accelerate scientific discoveries.

Carena foresees building on such collaborations in academia and industry.

Perimeter doesn’t have labs to build the next gadget. But it can, and does, collaborate with experimentalists, in both universities and industries, Carena says. “Partnerships, in Canada and internationally, will be key.”

Perimeter is also working to build the pipeline of talented young people who will become new generations of Canadian and international physicists.

Perimeter will continue to do what it does best: develop and explore fresh, new ideas in theoretical physics. What is dark matter made of? What is dark energy and how does it work? What is the nature of spacetime? What happens inside a black hole?

Some of these questions that Perimeter tackles may seem perplexing to people on the outside. But this work is also constantly telling us something new about nature and how it works, and that can have surprising applications, Carena adds.

For example, theorists at Perimeter are studying quantum information scrambling inside black holes, but this is also related to quantum error correction codes in quantum computing.

Lazaridis said he is pleased the board and advisory committees led a robust and successful search “that culminated in the recruitment of such an accomplished, talented, respected and experienced new executive director for Perimeter’s next chapter.”

Mike Serbinis, board chair for Perimeter Institute, said this institution’s vision is ultimately much broader than a mere 25 years.

“Perimeter was designed and organized around the principle of breakthroughs. We are here to make breakthroughs in our fundamental understanding of nature and the universe. We think in terms of centuries, and we are now 25 years into that 100-year view,” Serbinis said.

The role of fundamental physics in today’s emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing was evident in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, which went to John Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffery Hinton of the University of Toronto for their work in the 1980s on “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

“I picked up some statistical physics in my attempts to understand how the brain works,” Hinton said in a lecture at Perimeter in 2025.

Serbinis points out that back in the 1980s, no one could have predicted that Hinton’s ideas would lead to the powerful AI we have today – another example of theoretical science leading to major technological disruptions.

Like Lazaridis, Serbinis holds on to the long view. “We are building for the next century of civilization. The discoveries sparked at Perimeter will ripple out for generations.”

Paul Smith, Perimeter’s Institute’s managing director and chief operating officer, said Perimeter can play a connecting role, building multi-institutional collaborations to develop talent and drive transformative discoveries.

Some real-world transformations are closer than people think, Smith added. Perimeter already has initiatives in areas such as quantum causal inference, which draws out predictions from complex networks of causes and effects. It could advance artificial intelligence for areas such as health care. The Perimeter Institute Quantum Intelligence Lab, directed by Roger Melko, supports research into combining quantum computing and artificial intelligence to spark new breakthrough technologies.

Smith said other areas including quantum gravity, might take longer, but still hold great promise for future technologies and scientific progress. “One can envision Perimeter maybe giving birth to new fields of basic science,” he said.

He said Perimeter has remarkable capacity to attract and retain more talent in Canada, and also to export Perimeter’s passion and philosophy to the world through the careers of its graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

Perimeter’s independence, public and private support, freedom and creativity, ability to attract and foster talent, and its strengths in public and educational outreach – is a model for other institutions, Serbinis said. “I think we will see a continuing evolution of places of higher education and research looking more and more like Perimeter.”

Lazaridis, who founded the Institute, looks forward to what is to come.

“I am so proud of all that Perimeter and its researchers and staff have achieved so far,” Lazaridis said. “The next 25 years are bound to be even more exciting,” he added.

Lazaridis said he is confident Perimeter will continue to grow and make new breakthroughs, in everything from quantum information to possibly even uniting general relativity with quantum theory, which would open a whole new window into the workings of nature.

“Who knows what wonder, insight and value that will unlock for the world?”

This is the final part in a series celebrating Perimeter’s history for the Institute’s 25th anniversary celebrations. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. You can also learn about some of the breakthroughs made at Perimeter in its first quarter century here.

We can’t wait to begin the next 25 years of exploration together!