Pekka Sinervo, FRSC

Pekka Sinervo is Former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, Professor of Physics and Vice-Provost, first-entry programs at the University of Toronto.

Professor Sinervo joined the University of Toronto in 1990 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics. He was quickly promoted to Full Professor in 1995 and became Chair of the department in 1997. From September 2000 to April 2003, Professor Sinervo served as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science with responsibility for graduate education and research during most of this period. Under his leadership, the Faculty of Arts and Science became the first academic unit in Canada to implement a guaranteed level of financial support for graduate students. He has been Dean of the Faculty since May 2003.

Professor Sinervo is an internationally respected and prolific scientist who has written or co-written articles in more than 350 refereed publications. His research area is elementary particle physics, with a particular focus on experimental studies of the fundamental forces and constituents of matter. His expertise in the study of heavy quarks led him to establish and lead a very active Canadian research group studying the highest energy matter-antimatter collisions. This collaboration made headlines around the world in 1995, when an international team, including Professor Sinervo’s Canadian research group, discovered the top quark at Fermilab in Illinois.

While actively maintaining his own research, Professor Sinervo has served the research community through numerous scientific management roles and on various national and international advisory and review committees. He was Chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council’s (NSERC) Subatomic Physics Grant Selection Committee from 1997 to 1998, Chair of the National Research Council’s (NRC) Advisory Committee on the Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF), Canada’s nuclear and particle physics laboratory from 2000 to 2004, and was a member of the NSERC Council on Research Grants as group chair for physics. He is recipient of the prestigious Rutherford medal for Physics (1996), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1999) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2003).

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