Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, was founded in 1999 by BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis. His initial gift of CAD 100 million, announced on October 23, 2000, was then believed to be the largest private donation in Canadian history. Research began in 2001, the main building opened in 2004 and the Stephen Hawking Centre expansion opened in September 2011. Marcela Carena was named the institute’s fourth director in November 2024.

Main research areas

• Cosmology.
• Strong gravity: black holes and gravitational waves.
• Particle physics.
• Quantum gravity, quantum fields and strings.
• Quantum information.

Recent results

Perimeter is a theory institute, so its contributions are ideas rather than instruments, and our sources do not list specific 2026 Perimeter results. Its connection to black hole physics is personal: Stephen Hawking held a visiting Distinguished Research Chair there from 2008. Hawking’s 1974 prediction that black holes radiate and evaporate remains untested directly, but in 2025 gravitational-wave data confirmed another of his results: the loudest merger yet showed that total horizon area does not decrease. Images such as the Event Horizon Telescope’s M87* shadow now test strong gravity directly.

What to watch, 2026-2030

Our sources list no dated Perimeter milestones. The data that strong-gravity theorists depend on keep arriving: the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network starts a six-month intermediate run in November 2026, and LISA is in construction for launch in the mid-2030s.

Why scientists are converging here

For decades, theories of gravity outran the data. That has reversed: gravitational-wave catalogs now hold 390 events, black holes have been imaged, and cosmology faces open questions from the Hubble tension to evolving dark energy. Places that bring theorists together to interpret that flood, as Perimeter does for gravitational waves and dark matter, are in demand.