The Canadian who invented the Blackberry has a soft spot for physics. Mike Lazaridis, who made a fortune developing the BlackBerry handheld device, is donating another $50 million to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics located in North Waterloo, Ontario.
The new funding is on top of the $100 million in personal funds he put up to found the institute in 2000. The gift will allow Perimeter to continue its current rate of expansion without drawing down its endowment. The problem at Perimeter is not so much a lack of money as a surge in popularity. In its eight years of existence it has attracted funding from the national and provincial governments, recruited 85 resident scientists–including 10 faculty, 10 associate faculty, 39 postdocs, and 26 graduate students–and contributed more than 800 papers to the peer-reviewed literature, according to spokesman John Matlock.
"At Perimeter we don’t do any experiments," Lazaridis said by phone, "What’s happened is that Perimeter has become well-recognized globally, and we have a lot more people desiring to come here and work and collaborate with our staff, so we’ve had to accelerate our expansion plans."
Lazaridis, who was born in Turkey to Greek parents and moved to Canada with his family at the age of five, dropped out of the University of Waterloo just shy of a degree in electrical engineering to launch Research in Motion, maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry device. He said that when he considered how to give back to his society, supporting theoretical physics was a natural choice.
"Obviously this is very, very important, and it’s an area I have a passion for, a natural affinity for," Lazaridis said, "Everything from power generation to transmission over power lines, induction motors, which led to the invention of the radio, which led to the invention of communications."
Story adapted from Symmetry Breaking by Glennda Chui, Fermilab/SLAC