He taught at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, for 33 years, retiring from teaching in 1997.
During his years as a student at the University of Toronto, Tough's interests included psychology, sociology, philosophy, global issues, alternative futures, journalism, youth and adult education, as well as soccer, skating, dancing, campus publications, and wilderness hiking.
For more than four decades Tough was globally recognized as a pioneering scholar in adult learning, self-directed growth, and personal change.
He received The Malcolm Knowles Memorial Award for significant lifelong contribution to the field of self-directed learning in 2006.
His book When SETI Succeeds was chosen as one of eight works "The Editors Recommend" in the December 2000 issue of Scientific American.
Almost everyone who thinks and writes about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence agrees that the technology of any civilization we detect will be thousands or even millions of years beyond ours.
One year later, at the Boston Museum of Science, he devoted his Wright Lecture on Cosmic Evolution to this topic, specifically to the feasibility of a small smart interstellar probe reaching our planet.
In particular, it could monitor our television broadcasts, our fax and email communications (as some of our human security agencies do already), and of course our World Wide Web and its search engines and directories.
[9] In the early stages of this effort to contact ETI (in whatever form it has reached our solar system), about 20 individuals were listed as an informal advisory panel.
In 2000 Tough began exhibiting symptoms of multiple system atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder initially misdiagnosed as Parkinson's Disease.
Then one day in the summer of 2000, while my wife Cathy and I were hiking in Kluane National Park in the Yukon, I had problems with balance and falling.
For the remainder of his life, Tough continued to make significant intellectual contributions to his three chosen fields of research: adult learning, futures studies, and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
During the last few days of his life, despite having lost the ability to communicate verbally, he was actively involved in the analysis of a still unverified SETI candidate detection.