Areas of research

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo is amongst the top 100 Physics and Astronomy departments in the world (QS rankings 2020), and is home to a wide range of ground-breaking and award winning research, including the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

We are a key part of Waterloo’s burgeoning physics ecosystem that also includes partnering institutes and centers such as the Institute for Quantum Computing, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology and the Waterloo Center for Astrophysics.

Research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy is in six, often overlapping, research areas.