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Walk into Gordon and Patricia Gray’s Toronto-area home and the first thing you’ll notice is the chair.

At a 2006 party to celebrate the couple’s decision to lend their names to a Queen’s University chair in particle astrophysics, Gordon, Comm’50 made a joke. “We’ve paid for a chair,” he said. “Where is it?”

Shortly afterward, Catherine Purcell, the Grays’ development relationship manager, surprised them with a captain’s chair complete with the Queen’s emblem and an engraved plaque.

The Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics – the academic chair, not the one in their foyer – has been in the media spotlight of late, thanks to the first person to occupy it. Dr. Art McDonald, co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, was the Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics from 2006 to 2014.

A retired real estate executive who orchestrated Toronto’s mammoth TD Centre deal and now runs an animal welfare charity that is offering a generous reward to help catch ivory poachers in Africa, Gordon Gray may seem like an unlikely supporter of particle astrophysics research.

But cosmic matters have always been important to Mr. Gray. “When I was young I imagined myself as an astronomer, and I’ve always been interested in the universe,” he says.

Mr. Gray grew up in Copper Cliff, now a suburb of Sudbury, within jogging distance of the Creighton Mine, which now houses the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) where Dr. McDonald conducted much of his research.

It was through his involvement with a fundraising campaign at nearby Laurentian University that Mr. Gray learned of the SNO and the partnership with Queen’s. Before long, he and Patricia, an accomplished sea plane pilot and master gardener, had added particle astrophysics to a long list of diverse interests.

“We thought that if we sponsored a chair, the occupant would be able to devote all of his time to the SNO project,” Mr. Gray says. “To think that we may have had a role in is almost beyond comprehension.”

Watch for the feature article on Patricia and Gordon Gray in the upcoming Queen’s Alumni Review this February.

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