Mr. Speaker, St. Michael's College School has done it again. The Basilian fathers can be proud.
Dr. Robert Birgeneau has just been chosen to be the 14th president of the University of Toronto. His appointment has been acclaimed as brilliant by the Ontario Council of Universities.
Dr. Birgeneau is a Toronto native and a citizen of Canada. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in physics from Yale. He was on the faculty of Yale for one year and then at Oxford University for a year through the National Research Council.
Dr. Birgeneau has been the dean of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1991, and while there he brought MIT's physics department to the top. He said yesterday “One of my deepest commitments is to ensure that every qualified student who wants an education from the University of Toronto gets one, regardless of their financial situation”.
We welcome him back to Toronto, to the University of Toronto, and we wish him and his wife Mary the very best.