University of Toronto launches $100 million scholarship program targeting PhD talent

TORONTO – The University of Toronto is launching a new $100 million scholarship program to attract PhD talent from around the world including those leaving the United States, said president Melanie A. Woodin on Monday.

Woodin said the school is appealing to scholars who are looking for the best place to conduct research and those choosing to leave the U.S. because it’s not providing an environment to ask certain questions including on topics like climate change and gender.

“The attacks on higher education in general and the loss of funding to many institutions is certainly a push factor for many individuals,” she said.

“It also means that certain top talent that might have otherwise thought about going to the U.S. is now reconsidering it and looking for other academic institutions where they can make their next discoveries.”

Woodin said the situation in the U.S. creates “an exceptional opportunity” for Canadian institutions to focus on attracting talent.

The university said the Presidents’ Impact Scholarship Program will provide $80,000 funding per year for 50 scholars for a total of $320,000 of funding over four years.

The school said the program is the largest of its kind in Canada and is comparable to scholarship funds in other world-leading research universities in the United States and United Kingdom.

“It is the most lucrative PhD funding package in Canada and it ranks amongst the highest in the world, above Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford,” Woodin said.

“When you want the best in the world, first of all, you need to be competitive and recognize that many individuals may not currently be in school. They might be already out, have done their undergraduate or master’s training or another program, might be out working in the field.”

Woodin said the university wants to have the PhD students engage in an interdisciplinary approach to solve the biggest problems facing the world and produce future leaders.

“The world right now is facing many complex challenges, whether they be climate change, the role of AI for humanity, the list goes on,” she said.

“In order for us to address these complex challenges facing Canada and the world, we need to be producing leaders who have a real interdisciplinary perspective in how they tackle these challenges.”

She said the program will be run by the school of graduate studies and there will be activities that bring the cohort together around working on the complex problems to solve.

“You can think about academic conferences. We’ll also be providing them with a lot of networking opportunities to maximize, as a collective group, their public impact, external to the academy,” she said.

“There are big professionalism activities for them to help them engage again in that knowledge mobilization for both social and economic impact.”

The university said a Canadian family foundation with a long history of supporting the university and high education in the country provided a $50 million endowed gift for the program and the university matched its annual payout to create the $100 million fund.

The school said a total of 12 or 13 new scholarship recipients will receive four years of funding each year starting in September 2027.

The program will have a total of 50 scholars by the beginning of its fourth year and that number of recipients will be maintained in perpetuity.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 5, 2026.