---
title: "Alan T. Waterman Award"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_T._Waterman_Award"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:11:21.610466+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== List of recipients ==
2024
Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell
"For  pioneering innovations in ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging, particularly coherence-based beamforming, photoacoustic-guided surgery, and deep learning. These innovations cross interdisciplinary boundaries to improve medical image quality in patients, reduce patient deaths during surgery, inspire new surgical designs, and provide more equitable healthcare."
Katrina G. Claw
"For her contributions to pharmacogenomics and for fostering cultural and bioethical research participation within Indigenous communities."
Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio
"For creating robots that adapt and evolve to changing conditions."
2023
Natalie S. King
"For groundbreaking scholarship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education that transcends disciplinary boundaries and directly impacts local and global communities, and for demonstrating exceptional research achievements with tremendous impact on the advancement of Black girls in science, the use of research-practice partnerships to drive K-12 instruction, and the increase of STEM teacher diversity."
Asegun Henry
"For significant contributions in new energy technologies and advanced fundamental understanding of heat transfer addressing a broad range of problems that span from the atomic scale (the physics of heat conduction) to the gigawatt scale (grid-level energy storage)."
William Anderegg
"For outstanding contributions to climate change science, particularly in advancing the understanding of the sensitivity, vulnerability, and resilience of forest ecosystems to change, and to risk analyses of forest-related climate change solutions to achieve sustainability goals."
2022
Jessica Tierney
"For her outstanding advances in the reconstruction of past climate change and furthering the understanding of future climate change."
Daniel B. Larremore
"For his foundational research in computational epidemiology, combining mathematics and computation with real-world data to create powerful new models that provide concrete, innovative, and useful answers to globally important questions in the study of epidemic dynamics, including timely research on vaccination and testing strategies for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic."
Lara Thompson
"For her innovations in rehabilitation engineering and for translating her research on vestibular disorders in primates into engineering-based interventions for individuals with balance, gait and postural impairments. 2021
Nicholas Carnes
"For his looking into how a person’s social background may influence their decision to pursue public service and what factors would increase their opportunities to serve."
2021
Melanie Wood
"For her tackling the mysteries and most complex problems in mathematics by looking into the connection of number theory and random matrices."
2020
Emily Balskus
"For her transformative work that integrates chemistry and microbiology to understand biosynthetic mechanisms and microbial metabolism at the molecular level, with emphasis on enzymatic processes in the human gut microbiome."
2020
John Dabiri
"For his pioneering research in fluid mechanics, with innovative applications in biology, energy, and the environment. His transformative work, especially as applied to biological flow problems, has led to understanding the principles of marine animal locomotion and their application to other biological and environmental problems."
2019
Jennifer Dionne
"For developing techniques and tools to image dynamic physical, chemical and biological processes with extremely high resolution. Her research is enabling new knowledge to help solve global challenges in biomedicine, energy and computing."
2019
Mark Braverman
"For his studies of complexity theory, algorithms and the limits of what's possible computationally."
2018
Kristina Olson
"For her innovative contributions to understanding children's attitudes toward and identification with social groups, early prosocial behavior, the development of notions of fairness, morality, inequality and the emergence of social biases."
2017
Baratunde A. Cola
"For pioneering new engineering methods and materials to control light and heat in electronics at the nanoscale."
2017
John V. Pardon
"For his contributions to geometry and topology, the study of properties of shapes that are unaffected by deformations, such as stretching or twisting and for solving problems that stumped other mathematicians for decades and generating solutions that provide new tools for geometric analysis."
2016
Mircea Dincă
"For pioneering contributions to the synthesis and understanding of molecular porous solids with unusual electronic properties, especially for creative synthetic design leading to microporous materials with high electrical conductivity and redox activity."
2015
Andrea Alù
"For his work in metamaterial theory and design, including insightful contributions to plasmonic cloaking; effective light manipulation at the nano scale; innovative ideas in breaking time reversal symmetry leading to enhanced non-reciprocity from acoustics to microwaves and optics; and for unique contributions to metamaterials."
2014
Feng Zhang
"For development and application of molecular technologies that enable systematic interrogation of intact biological systems through precise genomic manipulation."
2013
Mung Chiang
"Chiang is an electrical engineering professor of Princeton University who uses innovative mathematical analyses to design simpler and more powerful wireless networks. He is the founder of Princeton's EDGE Laboratory, which aims to connect network theory and real-world applications. By developing methods for analyzing the often complex interaction between different layers of wireless networks, his work creates a principled picture of seemingly chaotic interactions and allows for systematic solutions to previously intractable problems."
2012
Scott Aaronson
"By illuminating the fundamental limits on what can be computed in the physical world, and the potential implications of those limits, Scott Aaronson has staked out important new ground in computational theory", said MIT President Susan Hockfield, "I am delighted that the National Science Foundation has recognized his dual abilities, both to articulate key research questions and to offer new methods and ideas for addressing them, with the Alan T. Waterman Award."
2012
Robert Wood
Wood is an associate professor in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He is founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab which leverages expertise in microfabrication for the development of biologically-inspired robots with feature sizes on the micrometer to centimeter scale. 2011
Casey W. Dunn
For his gifted integration of field biology, genomics, and computational science that has led to changing our understanding of the evolutionary tree, integrating morphological and molecular perspectives on diversity, and developing new tools that are revolutionizing biology. 2010
Subhash Khot
Subhash is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at NYU and is recognized already by many other honors and awards. Subhash is a brilliant theoretical computer scientist and is most well known for his Unique Games Conjecture. He has made many unexpected and original contributions to computational complexity and his work draws connections between optimization, computer science, mathematics. 2009
David Charbonneau
For his pioneering research into the discovery and characterization of planets orbiting other stars, which has allowed, for the first time, the study of their surface conditions and atmospheres, and has revolutionized interdisciplinary research related to exoplanets. 2008
Terence Tao
For his surprising and original contributions to many fields of mathematics, including number theory, differential equations, algebra, and harmonic analysis. 2007
Peidong Yang
For outstanding contributions in the creative synthesis of semiconductor nanowires and their heterostructures, and innovations in nanowire-based photonics, energy conversion, and nanofluidic applications. 2006
Emmanuel Candes
For his research in computational mathematics and statistical estimation, with applications to signal compression and image processing. 2005
Dalton Conley
For his contribution to the field of sociology as a research scientist and published author exemplified by his research on how socio-economic status is transmitted across generations. He brings methodological rigor and sophistication to deep social questions.