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.