University College News Roundup

University College student Yuehang (Peter) Ma won the Brian Mulroney Award, one of the 2025 Undergraduate Awards of Excellence in Economics. The ceremony at Max Gluskin House recognized the winners of 22 awards with a total value of $35, 979.84 in prize money. Award recipients were celebrated for course work completed during the 2023-24 academic year. Donors Robert Douglas, Louise Harris and Ilana Hosios, and Patricia Higgins attended the celebration to present certificates to recipients.

Endowed with a gift from Gerry Schwartz, the Brian Mulroney award goes to the student who achieves the highest mark in ECO231H1 (Economics of Global Trade) and ECO232H1 (Global Macroeconomics and Policies), HIS264H1 (Critical Issues in Canadian History), or POL214H1 (Canadian Government). It is awarded based on academic merit and financial need.

“I’d like to thank the donors and Professor Robert Owen for his inspiring teaching,” Yuehang said at the ceremony. “I was surprised by the award, and I appreciate it greatly.”

Faculty member Funké Aladejebi was recently awarded the 2024 Journalistic Excellence award in Print by the Canadian Ethnic Media Association. Nominated by Canada's History Magazine, the award was bestowed in recognition of Aladejebi's piece "Shining Lights in Our Community".

Professor Emerita Pia Kleber recently hosted several guests including Nada Ristich, David and Audrey Mirvish, Scott Griffin, Rosemary Sullivan, Brendan Healy and Mervon Mehta in the Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House for a traditional Chinese tea ceremony. 

Meditating on the significance of a thousand-year-old cultural tradition and sensory experience, the ceremony brought together friends of UC in true collegiate fashion and served as a preliminary investigation into what remains uniquely human in the world of AI – a theme that will be explored further at the Who’s afraid of AI? conference scheduled to take place this fall. 

Who’s afraid of AI? will bring together some of the world’s foremost experts in AI paired with artists, humanities scholars and medical leaders to collectively imagine and cultivate a future where AI serves the public good. The two-day conference at U of T will be accompanied by a week-long, city-wide festival of theatre, music, and visual art all generated by AI. 

With more than 1,200 venture capital-backed startups, 17,000 jobs created and $12 billion in funding raised over the past five years – the impact of the University of Toronto’s entrepreneurship community continues to grow. The innovation engine that is one of the top global institutions for research-based startups was on full display during U of T’s annual tri-campus Entrepreneurship Week from March 3 to 7.

Alum Aiden Gomez’s (BSc 2018 UC) startup Cohere was listed as one of the top 10 startups to watch at this year’s Entrepreneurship Week. Cohere provides advanced Large Language Models (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help businesses integrate AI into their applications. The startup was co-founded by Gomez and colleague Nick Frosst – both of whom worked with UC Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Hinton – and former U of T computer science student Ivan Zhang. 
 
In June, Cohere announced that it launched a startup program that will enable companies to leverage its AI models at discounted rates to support early-stage AI innovation. And, in December, the company announced the release of a new LLM designed for enterprise users. Cohere has raised over US$900 million from investors and was last valued at US$5.5 billion, according to Reuters. Most recently, the company partnered with LG CNS.

UC alumnus Ilya Sutskever (BSc 2005 UC) who co-founded OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence Inc. will be recognized with a U of T honorary degree this spring for his global impact as a scholar and his visionary leadership in the transformational field of artificial intelligence. As a U of T student in the machine learning group with Nobel Laureate, University Professor and University College Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, Sutskever co-published a seminal research article that sparked widespread adoption of deep learning techniques.

Professor and Acting Principal Sali Tagliamonte was recently elected as the President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (isLE). Founded in 2008, the aim of isLE is to promote the study of the structure and history of the English language at an international level.

March marked the last University College Endowed Public Lecture of the 2024-25 academic year, where the college welcomed UCLA's Distinguished Professor & Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, as he presented the 2025 F. E. L. Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas.

Professor Subrahmanyam explored different aspects of Euro-Asian intellectual encounters in the seventeenth century – a period during which a number of different European powers competed in the Asian arena. Follow our website events feed for more information on the 2025-26 Endowed Public Lectures!