2000
Chaviva Hošek becomes CIFAR's president & CEO
Prior to Hošek's appointment, she served as the director of policy and research in the Prime Minister's Office; the minister of housing for the Province of Ontario; president and executive member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women; and a professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. Under her leadership, CIFAR expands its investigation of early childhood development while mobilizing new knowledge for greater societal impact.
"Under Chaviva's leadership over the last 11 years, the Institute has developed as Canada's premier centre for advanced research, linking top Canadian researchers to each other and to the world's best."
David Dodge, CIFAR Board of Directors, former Governor of the Bank of Canada
2002
CIFAR turns 20:
The Next Big Questions
As part of its 20-year anniversary celebration, CIFAR launches the Young Explorers Prize, given to the top 20 scientists under 40 in Canada. Victoria M. Kaspi, now the director of the Gravity & the Extreme Universe program, was among its recipients.
The award is a testament to CIFAR’s focus on the next generation of researchers for years to come, including the launch of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program in 2016.
Read the of REACH to find out more.
2004
CIFAR's talent leads Globe and Mail's Starting from Zero series on child development
Canadian national paper the Globe and Mail publishes a series on early child development, Starting from Zero, heavily featuring CIFAR researchers in the Experience-Based Brain and Biological Development (now renamed Child & Brain Development). Read more in the Globe and Mail.
2005
CIFAR researcher Avner Greif introduces novel ‘Game Theory’ application
Avner Greif, who was a fellow in the Institutions, Organizations & Growth program, introduces game theory into the study of economic history, and shows how to explain the emergence of institutions and their decline as a result of strategic interactions between economic and political factors. His book, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade becomes required reading in the field.
2007
Roger Myerson awarded Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
Roger B. Myerson, former advisor for the program Institutions, Organizations & Growth, shares the prize with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric S. Maskin "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." A major breakthrough in the modern economic analysis of institutions and markets, it has had lasting influence in the design of economic policies around the world.
2008
CIFAR researchers help find two-million-year-old life under ice
Researchers in CIFAR’s Earth System Evolution program help discover life in a lake that has been trapped under a glacier for nearly two million years. This discovery hints at the possibility of life in other inhospitable environments, such as Mars or Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.
Photo: Mars as seen by the ESA Rosetta spacecraft in 2007 (credit: BY-SA IGO 3.0)
2008
CIFAR launches Junior Fellow Academy
Continuing CIFAR's commitment to fostering the next generation of innovative thinkers, the Junior Fellow Academy, which ran until 2015, offered early-career researchers the unique opportunity to participate in CIFAR's global research network and be mentored by some of the world's best researchers. This program paved the way for the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program which launched in 2016.
"It helped me to develop my thinking around novel and important points of intersection between my own work and research pursued by other researchers which, I am sure, I would not have otherwise recognized."
Dr. Arjumand Siddiqi, Professor and Division Head of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity (CIFAR Junior Fellow, Successful Societies, 2008-2009, and Associate Fellow, Successful Societies, 2010-2012)
“CI(F)AR’s 20th anniversary is something that all Canadians should celebrate. Our country is home to a unique organization that is respected by the world’s greatest thinkers. There is no better way to mark this occasion than by recognizing the work and the promise of our country’s best young researchers.”
Thomas E. Kierans, CIFAR Chairman (2009)
2008
Legacy: CIFAR receives its first endowment gift
Philanthropist Beryl Ivey names CIFAR as a beneficiary of her estate. In life, Ivey was known for her curiosity and pursuit of excellence. Through her legacy gift, Ivey remains invested in addressing the most important questions facing science and humanity.
2009
AI world standard: CIFAR-10 dataset
The CIFAR-10 dataset is a collection of photographs that can be used to train machine learning and computer vision algorithms. CIFAR-10 and later CIFAR-100 became a world standard dataset and one of the most widely used datasets for machine learning research, containing 60,000 colour images.
