The Misha Mahowald Prize Awards

Neuromorphic engineering is defined as the construction of artificial computing systems which implement key computational principles found in natural nervous systems. Understanding how to build such systems may enable a new generation of intelligent devices, able to interact in real-time in uncertain real-world conditions under severe power constraints, as biological brains do. 

The Misha Mahowald Prize was established in 2016 by iniLabs, an organization based in Switzerland dedicated to the promotion of research and applications of brain-like computation. From 2019 onward the Prize is being managed by iniForum.

2025 Misha Mahowald Prizes

The 2025 Misha Mahowald Prize has been awarded to the OPUS team from UC Santa Barbara led by Kerem Y. Çamsari for their work on Stochastic Neuromorphic Computing with Probabilistic Bits.

The 2025 Mahowald Early Career Award has been equally awarded to: 

Note about award date: From 2025 onwards, the award is dated with the year of the award rather than the year of submission. Awards below were awarded in the year following the jury selections.

Prizes 2023

The MMP jury recognized Carver Mead for his lifetime contribution to neuromorphic engineering.

The MMP jury awarded the 2023 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering to a team led by Brad Aimone from Sandia National Labs.

Prizes 2022

The MMP jury awarded the 2022 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering to a team led by Nitish Thakor at the Johns Hopkins University, for their pioneering work on "Neuromoprhic e-Dermis for Restoring Complex Touch" that brings tactile perception to humans with a prosthetic arm.

The MECA jury awarded the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award to Chang Gao for the project "Accelerating Recurrent Neural Networks with Neuromorphic Principles". The project introduces efficient computing using the neuromorphic principles of spatial and temporal sparsity, leading to an energy-efficient accelerator for edge RNN computing. 

Prize 2021

The 2021 Misha Mahowald Prize was awarded to two teams of researchers who used neuromorphic principles to build devices that help disabled humans improve sensory and motor interaction with the world.  

The Jury found that these two submissions were tied for first place, and recommended that the teams receive separate prize citations, but share the prize money.

Prize 2020

The Prize Jury unanimously awarded the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize to the team led by Prof. Shih-Chii Liu for their pioneering work on ”Hearing with Silicon Cochleas". 

Special Award 2020

The Jury also conferred a Special Posthumous Award on the late Prof. Karlheinz Meier, in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the field of Neuromorphic Engineering. 

Prize 2019

The independent jury awarded the 2019 prize to the group of Prof. Greg Cohen at Western Sydney University and presented in an online ceremony during the 2020 Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions). 

Prize 2018

No Award could be made for 2018.

Prize 2017

The independent jury awarded the 2017 Prize to the group of Prof. Davide Scaramuzza at the University of Zurich, and presented in a ceremony at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich on 19 June 2017. 

Prize 2016

The inaugural 2016 prize was awarded to the IBM TrueNorth Project, led by Dharmendra S. Modha. The prize was presented in a ceremony at IBM Research – Almaden on 11 August 2016.