Mike Lazaridis

Mike Lazaridis is known in the global wireless community as a visionary, innovator, and engineer of extraordinary talent. As President and Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), a company Lazaridis founded while a student at the University of Waterloo, he is responsible for product strategy, research and development, product development, and manufacturing.

RIM’s creations have won dozens of industry awards for product excellence, including: the Smithsonian Institution’s Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology, the 1994 Emmy Award for Technical Innovation and the 1999 Technical Achievement Academy Award for DigiSync™.

In recognition of his technical innovations, the University of Waterloo awarded Lazaridis an Honorary Doctor of Engineering in 2000 and McMaster University awarded him an Honorary Degree in Engineering in 2005. In 2002, he shared Canada’s most prestigious innovations prize, The Ernest C. Manning Principal Award, with RIM colleague Gary Mousseau.

Lazaridis supports his community and country through generous philanthropic gifts made possible by his success in business. His most noted commitment, of $100 million, established Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Since its opening in 2001, Perimeter has attracted the rapt attention of the world’s scientific community.