Reza Moridi
Reza Moridi is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He was a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 2007 to 2018, having represented the riding of Richmond Hill. He served as a cabinet minister in the government of Kathleen Wynne. He was the first Iranian Canadian elected to the legislature and appointed as a Cabinet minister in Canada.
Reza was born in 1945 in Urmia, the capital of West Azerbaijan Province in northwest Iran. He grew up in Urmia and graduated from Tehran University with BSc and MSc degrees in Physics. He continued his education in the United Kingdom and obtained MTech and Ph.D. degrees from Brunel University in London. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Odlar Yurdu University, Baku, Azerbaijan. Prior to entering into politics, he was a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Physicist. Reza worked for 17 years at the Radiation Safety Institute of Canada where he was the Vice-President and Chief Scientist. He also worked in the electrical industry as an executive and in academia as a professor and administrator.
Main Contributions
- Scientific honors
- Elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology of the UK
- Presented with the Education and Communication Award by the Canadian Nuclear Society
- Presented with the Fellow Award by the Health Physics Society of the United States
- Public Services
- Launched the single-largest modernization of the Ontario Students Assistance Program (OSAP) by making tuition-free for students from low and middle-income families
- Helped establish York University campus in Markham, e-Campus in Toronto
- Initiated the process of modernizing the university funding formula
- Helped establish the Université de l’Ontario français, the province’s first stand-alone French-language university in Ontario
- Signed MOUs with different countries
