In 2007, a donation from Cray was matched through the Graduate Student Endowment Fund (GSEF), resulting in the Cray Inc. Fellowships in Physics.

Since 2007, 56 alumni and 24 current Master’s and Doctoral students in the Department of Physics have received fellowship support as a result of Cray’s generous gift.  These fellowships have truly fulfilled their original objective of “encouraging some of the most promising young physicists from around the world to study at the University of Toronto.”

Our Cray Fellows span all the subdisciplines in the Department: Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Physics, Biological Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, High Energy Physics, and Quantum Optics.   Many Fellows have used, or are using, high performance computing and sophisticated computational methods, algorithms, and resources in their research.  Our Cray Fellow alumni have gone on to a wide variety of careers spanning academia, government, and many facets of industry.

Cray’s Mike Piraino , Senior Vice President, Administration & General Counsel, and Paul Hahn , Analytics and AI Market Manager, joined us for the celebration, which included ‘Three-Minute Thesis’ talks by six 2019-2020 Cray Fellows: Stephanie Hay, Jessie Velay-Vitow, Robert Les, Joey Carter, Huan Yu Meng , and Trevor Towstego .   While on campus, they also visited several labs to learn about research activities underway at U of T Physics.

The Department is grateful for our collaboration with Cray, and we look forward to the continued impact of the Cray Inc. Fellowships.

Thank you to Cray for supporting our graduate students.