We apply discoveries in nanoscience towards applications relevant to our health, environment, security, and connectedness. In our work and our team we unite chemistry, physics, and engineering within six experimental laboratories at the University of Toronto. Our currently active research projects are:

1. Sense life at the molecular level
Nucleic acids such as DNA code life. Semiconductors process, store, and convey information. We are uniting nucleic acids with semiconductors to advance the early detection of disease. Our goal is to enable future diagnosticians to see disease - and its molecular origins - safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

2. Harvest light’s power with high efficiency and low cost
Each day the sun bombards us with ten thousand times more energy than we consume. If we could cover 0.1% of the Earth's surface with solar cells, and each cell was 10% energy efficient, we could satisfy our energy needs completely using this clean source of energy alone.

3. Take away the night using sensitive, low-cost imaging systems
Today's cameras see only in the light of day, or with the aid of special illumination. Is this a fundamental limit, or only a blip in time: in the future, with the right technology, could each of us see in the dark?

4. Generate infrared light for high-speed networking
Quantum dots act as artificial atoms: the strength and spatial extent of quantum confinement of excitons to the dot determines the set of energies and, consequently, available optical transitions.

Ted Sargent holds the rank of Professor and Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology at the University of Toronto. In 2004-6 he was also Visiting Professor of Nanotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2003 Ted Sargent was named "one of the world's top young innovators" by MIT's Technology Review. In 2002 he was honoured by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research as one of Canada's top twenty researchers under age forty. In 2002 he won the Outstanding Engineer Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of Canada "...For groundbreaking research in applying new phenomena and materials from nanotechnology towards transforming fibre-optic communications systems into agile optical networks." He was awarded a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto in 2000: "Ted Sargent has created a new type of laser that unites many sophisticated optical devices onto a single, integrated photonic chip. His research links the emerging concept of the photonic circuit with the exploding field of fibre optic networks. Ted Sargent's doctoral research on the lateral current injection laser won him the 1999 NSERC Silver Medal. He received the B.Sc.Eng. (Engineering Physics) from Queen's University in 1995 and the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Photonics) from the University of Toronto in 1998.