Hawking Accepts Canadian Research Job

Dr. Stephen Hawking has accepted a position as Distinguished Research Chair at Waterloo, Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, starting in summer of 2009. Hawking will step down from his Cambridge professorship, following a tradition at Cambridge for professors on the year of their sixty-seventh birthday, but will continue research work both at Cambridge's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and on a visiting basis to the Perimeter Institute.

Dr. Stephen Hawking
NASA

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was founded in the summer of 1999, when Mike Lazaridis - founder and CEO of Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry (the cell phone, not the fruit) - decided to help foster physics research in Canada. The Perimeter Institute currently hosts 60 resident researchers, including their current Executive Director, cosmologist Neil Turok (appointed in May 2008).

In the announcement of Hawking's acceptance, Dr. Turok mentions that this is the first of a projected 40 such visiting research chair appointments, representing a new phase for the Perimeter Institute. It is hoped that this will help expand their growing interdisciplinary collaboration, by making the Perimeter Institute one of the research centers for some of the top minds in theoretical physics ... of which, Dr. Hawking most certainly qualifies.

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