Global recognition for AI breakthroughs

Explore awards and achievements earned by Vector researchers in 2024-25.

2024 – 2025

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Members:

Kelsey Allen

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

  • The Power List: AI from Maclean’s 2024 Power List
  • 2024 PRISM Prize
  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award renewal
  • ICReDD Award, Hokkaido University Institute for Chemical Design
  • Spiers Memorial Award, Royal Society of Chemistry

Shai Ben-David

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award renewal

Mike Brudno

  • MScAC Faculty Mentor award, ARIA conference

Wenhu Chen

  • CIFAR AI Catalyst Award

Jeff Clune

  • Killam Accelerator Research Fellowship                                             
  • Best Paper Award, ICML, 2024                                                                
  • NeurIPS workshop best paper award, Open-World Agents Workshop, NeurIPS 2024                         

David Duvenaud

  • Inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair, SRI

Murat Erdogdu

  • Ontario Early Researcher Award 
  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award renewal
  • CIFAR Catalyst Grant Award 

Sanja Fidler

  • The 50 Most Influential Torontonians of 2024 by Toronto Life
  • 2025 Changemakers by The Globe and Mail
  • DIFIX3D nominated for Best Paper Award, CVPR, 2025

Roger Grosse

  • Best Paper Award, ICML, 2024 
  • Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society, SRI
  • AI2050 Early Career Fellow, Schmidt Sciences 

Geoffrey Hinton

  • Nobel Prize in Physics, 2024 
  • The 50 Most Influential Torontonians of 2024 by Toronto Life
  • VinFuture Grand Prize
  • Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering

Gautam Kamath

  • Best Paper Award, ICML, 2024
  • Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2024 
  • Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security, Early Researcher Award, 2025

Xiaoxiao Li

  • Responsible Artificial Intelligence, Canada Research Chair (Tier 2)
  • Best Paper Award, FL@FM Workshop, ACM Web Conference, 2024 

Sheila McIlraith

  • The Canadian AI Association Lifetime Achievement Award, 2024 
  • D2L Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning, 2025 

Yalda Mohsenzadeh

  • Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security, Early Researcher Award, 2025

Parvin Mousavi

  • Canada Research Chair Tier 1                                                       
  • IJCARS-MICCAI Special Issue Best Paper Award, 2024 
  • Best Paper Award, IPCAI, shortlisted with PhD student Laura Connolly, 2024 
  • Best Paper of MICCAI, Young Investigator Award, to PhD student Paul Wilson, 2024 

Nicolas Papernot

  • Inria International Chair Award
  • ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Early-Career Researcher Award, 2024

Gennady Pekhimenko

  • ASPLOS Artifact Evaluation Award, 2025 

Toniann Pitassi

  • SAT Test of Time Award

Geoff Pleiss

  • CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant

Colin Raffel

  • TMLR Outstanding Certification Finalist, 2024 
  • ICBS Frontiers of Science Award in Theoretical Computer and Information Sciences, 2024

Daniel Roy

  • Best Paper Award, ICML, 2024 

Frank Rudzicz

  • Killam Memorial Chair, Dalhousie University

Evan Shelhamer

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award

Freda Shi

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award

Vered Shwartz

  • CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant Award

Raquel Urtasun

  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 2024 

Bo Wang

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award renewal 

Victor Zhong

  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair Award

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates: 

Benjamin Alarie

  • Donner Prize shortlist, 2024

Michael Brown

  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025 

Timothy Chan

  • MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Research Papers Competition, First place, 2024 

Elliot Creager

  • CIFAR Catalyst Grant Award 

Mark Daley

  • The Power List: AI from Maclean’s Power List, 2024 
  • I150, Constellation Research’s AI150

Federico Gaiti

  • Terry Fox New Investigator Awardee, 2025 

Igor Gilitschenski

  • Best Paper Award Finalist, CVPR, 2024 

Ihab Ilyas

  • C.C. Gotlieb Computer Award, 2024 
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 2024

Alec Jacobson

  • ACM SIGGRAPH Test of Time Award, 2024 

Nachiket Kapre

  • Best Paper Award, FPT, 2024 

Amir-Hossein Karimi

  • 2025 CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant Co-PI

Jonathan Kelly

  • Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Robotics

Kate Larson

  • Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, 2025 

Jimmy Lin

  • Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024 

David Lindell

  • Google Research Scholar Award, 2024 
  • Ontario Early Researcher Award, 2025 

Muhammad Mamdani

  • Solventum Health Care Innovation Team Award from the Canadian College of Health Lead – Unity Health, 2024 
  • 35th Anniversary Medal, Canada’s Drug Agency

Kuldeep Meel

  • Best Paper Award, ICLP, 2024 
  • Distinguished Paper Award, CAV, 2024 

Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari

  • Google Research Scholar Award, 2024 

Nisarg Shah

  • Computers and Thought Award, IJCAI International Joint Conferences on AI Organization, 2024 

Bhavin Shastri

  • Sloan Research Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Florian Shkurti

  • AI2050 Fellowship, Schmidt Sciences

Linbo Wang

  • Canada Research Chair in Causal Machine Learning

2023 – 2024

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Members: 

Shai Ben-David

  • Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, 2023

Wenhu Chen 

  • Area Chair Award in Question Answering Track 2023, International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Jeff Clune 

  • “One of the people to watch in Canadian AI” by The Logic 
  • Publication of the Decade from the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium
  • Significant Impact Award from SIGEVO

Sanja Fidler 

  • Honourable Mention 2023, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 
  • “The top people in artificial intelligence” by Insider’s AI 100, 2023

David Fleet

  • CS-CAN Lifetime Achievement Award

Roger Grosse

  • CS-CAN Early Career Researcher Award

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

  • Outstanding Research Award, Intel, 2023
  • Fellow of Industry Academy, International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance 
  • Chemical Engineering Medal, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich
  • Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association 

Gillian Hadfield

  • AI2050 Senior Fellow from Schmidt Sciences

Geoffrey Hinton 

  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, 2023
  • AI leader in the 2023 TIME100 AI
  • “The top people in artificial intelligence” by Insider’s AI 100, 2023

Rahul G. Krishnan

  • Amazon Research Award, 2023 

Sheila McIlraith

  • Best Paper Prize, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2023
  • Northrop Frye Award (Team), 2024 

Parvin Mousavi 

  • Best Presentation Award from Information Processing for Computer Assisted Interventions, All Conference, with PhD candidate Paul Wilson 
  • Best Presentation Award from Imaging Network Ontario with PhD candidate Laura Connolly
  • Best Demonstration Award from MICCAI ASMUS with PhD candidate Laura Connolly 

Nicolas Papernot

  • Elected to the 2023 cohort of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists
  • AI2050 Early Career Fellows from Schmidt Sciences

Gennady Pekhimenko

  • Early Research Award Ontario
  • Distinguished Artifact Award, The Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2023

Toniann Pitassi 

  • Test of Time Award, ICML, 2023

Graham Taylor

  • Arthur C. Stern Distinguished Paper Award, 2024

Raquel Urtasun

  • Emerging Technology CEO of the Year as awarded by Business Development at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce
  • AI leader in the 2023 TIME100 AI
  •  “The top people in artificial intelligence” by Insider’s AI 100, 2023
  • Order of Ontario, 2023 

Richard Zemel

  • Test of Time Award, International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates: 

Benjamin Alarie

  • Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence, Legal Studies and Criminology Category, 2024 

Vaughn Betz

  • Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, 2023

Timothy Chan 

  • Pierskalla Best Paper Award, 2023

Fanny Chevalier 

  • Knight in the Order of Academic Palms by the Government of France 

Igor Gilitschenski

  • Sony Focused Research Award

Nachiket Kapre

  • Best Paper Award, Association for Computing Machinery, Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, 2023 

Amir-Hossein Karimi

  • ETH Zürich Medal for outstanding dissertations

Kyros Kultulakos

  • Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023

David Lindell 

  • Connaught New Researcher Award
  • Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023

Laura Rosella

  • Public Health Sciences Award for Excellence

Nisarg Shah

  • Computer and Thoughts Award, Kalai Prize in Game Theory and Computer Science, IJCAI, 2023

Bhavin Shastri 

  • Ontario Early Researcher Award

Florian Shkurti

  • Best Paper Award, Safe Autonomy Workshop, Robotics: Science and Systems,  2023

Nandita Vijaykumar

  • Sony Focused Research Award

2022 – 2023

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Members:

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

  • John C. Polanyi Award, Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC), 2022

Amir-massoud Farahmand

  • Highlighted Area Chair, ICLR, 2022

Anna Goldenberg

  • Woman of Action Award, Israeli Cancer Research Foundation, 2022

Bo Wang

  • Gairdner Early Career Investigator Award, 2022

David Fleet

  • Outstanding Paper Award, NeurIPS, 2022

Gennady Pekhimenko

  • Google Research Scholar, Google, 2022
  • ASPLOS 2023 Distinguished Artifact Award, ACM, 2023
  • VMware Early Career Faculty Award, VMware, 2022

Gillian Hadfield

  • The Bellagio Centre Residency Award, Rockefeller Foundation 2022

Graham Taylor

  • Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning 

Jimmy Ba

  • Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 2022

Leonid Sigal

  • Best Paper Award Finalist, CVPR, 2022

Nicolas Papernot

  • Outstanding Paper Award, ICLR, 2022
  • Early Researcher Award, Ministry of Colleges and Universities, 2022
  • Oral Paper Award, ICLR, 2023

Rahul G. Krishnan

  • Amazon Research Award, Amazon Research, 2023

Sheila McIlraith

  • ICAPS Influential Paper Award, 2022 

Raquel Urtasun

  • Longuet-Higgins prize, CVPR, 2022

Select awards and recognitions earned by Vector Institute Faculty Affiliates: 

Ajay Agrawal 

  • President’s Impact Award at the University of Toronto, 2023

Alec Jacobson

  • Best Paper Award, SIGGRAPH, 2022

Paul David McNicholas

  • Dorothy Killam Fellowship, 2023

Sushant Sachdeva, 

  • FCOS 2022 Best Paper award, 2022
  • Young Alumni Achiever Award, IIT Bombay, 2023 

Bhavin Shastri

SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2022

iCANX Young Scientist Award, iCANX, 2022