Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
IEEE's Technical Field Awards honor engineering with a long record behind it
IEEE has named its 2027 Technical Field Award winners, and seven of the first 16 listed are IEEE Life Fellows. Most citations credit work already in drives, chips, networks and clinics, so the awards map settled engineering and say little about AI.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Honorees are selected by the IEEE Awards Board for technical achievement, societal impact and leadership in specialized disciplines, then approved by the IEEE Board of Directors.
- Arjan van der Schaft, retired from the University of Groningen's Bernoulli Institute, is cited for robust and geometric approaches to nonlinear control and hybrid systems.
- Mike Lazaridis of Quantum Valley Investments receives a Sony-sponsored award for leadership in mobile communication that reshaped global consumer technology.
- Akshay Kumar Rathore is honored for developing current-fed and multilevel power electronics converters, in an award sponsored by the IEEE Industry Applications Society.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction Randall's list of fields names AI and medical robotics, but the printed citations offer speech recognition, a computer-vision mentoring award and therapeutic ultrasound, so her framing runs ahead of the record.
- constraint Because the criterion is lasting impact, the list is a poor forecast: fields rising now will reach these citations only after their work has been in use for years.
- precedent Seagate's shared award for a hard-drive technology gives industrial teams a precedent to cite: work judged by its impact in products qualifies for IEEE's field honors.
IEEE describes the program as recognition for achievements that "have made a lasting impact on technology, engineering, and society worldwide" [1]. Impact of that sort takes years to register, and the honorees' records show it. Seven of the first 16 engineers listed are IEEE Life Fellows [d2, d3]. Two are listed as retired: van der Schaft and John Robert Brews of the University of Arizona [c6, c10]. Those counts cover 14 awards, ending with Amin Vahdat of Google, whose NEC-sponsored award appears in IEEE Spectrum's text without its citation [d1, c17].
Mary Ellen Randall, IEEE's 2026 president and CEO, said in a news release: "Across microelectronics, artificial intelligence, medical robotics, wireless networks, energy conversion, and technical education, their groundbreaking accomplishments continue to push the boundaries of science and solve critical challenges for the benefit of humanity." [3] Checked against the citations, her list holds up best for microelectronics. Brews is cited for "foundational contributions to the physics and technology underlying MOS devices and circuits" [10]. Janusz Rajski of Siemens Digital Industries Software won for testing digital integrated circuits at the silicon level [15]. Pasquale Daponte of the University of Sannio won for the measurement and standardization of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters [14].
Wireless and energy conversion are also well covered. Zoya Popović is cited for microwave and millimeter-wave circuit designs, including power amplifiers and wireless power systems [7], alongside the Lazaridis and Rathore awards [c11, c13]. Rama Chellappa of Johns Hopkins is cited for graduate education and for mentoring doctoral students in image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition [16]. Her six fields also leave some winners out. Control theory, hard-drive recording and Internet traffic analysis all won, the last through Matthew Roughan of Adelaide University, cited for "foundational contributions to analyzing Internet traffic and network structures" [c6, c5, c12].
AI and medical robotics are harder to locate. Of the 13 citations printed, none uses the words "artificial intelligence" [5]. The nearest is Chin-Hui Lee's, for speech and speaker recognition "including innovations in adaptive learning and discriminative training" [8]. Nicholas Sidiropoulos of the University of Virginia is cited for signal processing methods that identify patterns in multiple dimensions [9]. The only medical citation goes to Kullervo Hynynen of Sunnybrook Research Institute and the University of Toronto, for therapeutic ultrasound, and none of the 13 mentions robotics [c4, d5]. Randall's mention suggests a robotics award sits outside those 14 [c3, d1].
Several citations judge work by what it did after it left the lab. Seagate's is explicit: the team's recording technology is cited for "powering ultra-high-capacity hard disk drives" [5]. Hynynen's names clinical translation as part of the achievement [4]. Roughan's credits his traffic analysis with "enabling better network management and understanding" [12].
Each award carries a named sponsor. Six of the 14 list a company: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories sponsors both Lee's and Sidiropoulos's awards, and Sony, Google, NEC and Tektronix one each [4]. Others are sponsored by IEEE societies, the Brunetti Bequest and the friends and family of Roger W. Brockett [c5, c6, c10]. The thing this doesn't tell you is how many nominations each award drew, so the list shows which work was chosen and not how contested each field was.
I think the evidence supports reading these awards as IEEE's judgment of settled, high-impact work in microelectronics, wireless, power conversion and engineering education. For AI, the record in these citations is a speech recognition award and a mentoring prize in computer vision [c8, c16].
What to watch
- Whether IEEE's full 2027 list includes a medical robotics award, the one field Randall named that none of the 13 printed citations covers.
- The citation for Amin Vahdat of Google, whose NEC-sponsored award is listed without one in the Spectrum text.