Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology

The Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology is awarded once a year by the Inamori Foundation. The Prize is one of three Kyoto Prize categories; the others are the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The first Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology was awarded to Rudolf E. Kálmán, the "creator of modern control and system theory".^[1] The Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in fields which are traditionally not honored with a Nobel Prize.^[2][3]

The Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology
Awarded for	Global achievement in Advanced Technology
Location	Kyoto, Japan
Presented by	Inamori Foundation
First award	1985
Website	kyotoprize.org

Fields

The Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology is awarded on a rotating basis to researchers in the following four fields:

• Electronics
• Biotechnology and Medical Technology
• Materials Science and Engineering
• Information Science

Laureates

Source: Kyoto Prize

Electronics

Year	Laureate		Country
1985		Rudolf Emil Kálmán	Hungary /  United States	1930–2016	Establishment of the Modern Control Theory Based on the State Space Approach[4]
1989		Amos E. Joel, Jr.	United States	1918–2008	Pioneering Contribution to the Electronic Switching Technology for Telecommunications, Especially that Based on the Concept of "Stored Program Control"[5]
1993		Jack St. Clair Kilby	United States	1923–2005	Creation of the Concept of the Monolithic Semiconductor Integrated Circuit and Its Demonstration[6]
1997		Stanley Mazor	United States	born 1941	Development of the World’s First Microprocessor[7][8][9][10]
		Marcian Edward Hoff Jr.	United States	born 1937
		Federico Faggin	Italy	born 1941
		Masatoshi Shima	Japan	born 1943
2001		Morton B. Panish	United States	born 1929	A Pioneering Step in the Development of Optoelectronics through Success in Continuous Operation of Semiconductor Lasers at Room Temperature[11][12][13]
		Izuo Hayashi	Japan	1922–2005
		Zhores Ivanovich Alferov	Russia	1930–2019
2005		George H. Heilmeier	United States	1936–2014	Pioneering contributions to the realization of flat-panel displays using liquid crystals[14]
2009		Isamu Akasaki	Japan	born 1929	Pioneering Work on Gallium Nitride p-n Junctions and Related Contributions to the Development of Blue Light Emitting Devices[15]
2013		Robert H. Dennard	United States	born 1932	Invention of Dynamic Random Access Memory and Proposal of Guidelines for FET Miniaturization[16]
2017		Takashi Mimura [de]	Japan	born 1944	Invention of the High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) and Its Development for the Progress of Information and Communications Technology[17]
2022		Carver Mead	United States	born 1934	Leading Contributions to the Establishment of the Guiding Principles for VLSI Systems Design.[18]

Biotechnology and medical technology

Year	Laureate		Country
1986		Nicole Marthe Le Douarin	France	born 1930	Outstanding Contribution to Embryology through the Development of the Technology for Making Chicken/Quail Chimeras[19]
1990		Sydney Brenner	United Kingdom	1927–2019	Pioneering Contribution to Molecular Biology through Demonstration of Messenger RNA and Establishment of C. Elegans as an Experimental System for Developmental Biology[20]
1994		Paul Christian Lauterbur	United States	1929–2007	Proposal of the Basic Principles and Outstanding Contribution to the Development of MRI that Confers a Great Benefit on Clinical Medicine[21]
1998		Kurt Wüthrich	Switzerland	born 1938	Outstanding Contribution to Biology through the Expansion of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy to the Structure Analyses of Biological Macromolecules in Water Solution, an Environment Similar to That in the Living Cell[22]
2002		Leroy Edward Hood	United States	born 1938	Contributions to life sciences through the automation of protein and DNA sequencing and synthesis[23]
2006		Leonard Herzenberg	United States	1931–2013	Outstanding contribution to life sciences with the development of a flow cytometer that uses fluorescent-labeled monoclonal antibodies[24]
2010		Shinya Yamanaka	Japan	born 1962	Development of Technology for Generating Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) Cells[25]
2014		Robert S. Langer	United States	born 1948	Creation of Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery System Technologies[26]
2018		Karl Deisseroth	United States	born 1971	Discovery of Optogenetics and Development of Causal Systems Neuroscience[27]
2023		Ryuzo Yanagimachi	United States	born 1928	Contributions to the Elucidation of Fertilization Mechanisms and the Establishment of Microinsemination Technology[28]

Materials science and engineering

Year	Laureate		Country
1987		Morris Cohen	United States	1911–2005	Fundamental Contribution to Development of New Materials Based on Creation of Broad and Basic Insights into the Metal Phase Transformation and Structure-Property Relationship[29]
1991		Michael Szwarc	United States	1909–2000	Pioneering Contribution to Research and Development of Polymeric Materials by Discovering "Living Polymerization"[30]
1995		George William Gray	United Kingdom	1926–2013	Fundamental Contribution to Research and Development of Liquid Crystal Materials by Establishing the Practical Molecular Design Methods[31]
1999		W. David Kingery	United States	1926–2000	Fundamental Contribution to Development of the Ceramics Science and Technology Based on the Physicochemical Theory[32]
2003		George McClelland Whitesides	United States	born 1939	Contributions to Nanomaterials Science through the Development of Organic Molecular Self-Assembly Technique[33]
2007		Hiroo Inokuchi [de]	Japan	1927–2014	Pioneering and Fundamental Contributions to Organic Molecular Electronics[34]
2011		John Werner Cahn	United States	1928–2016	Outstanding Contribution to Alloy Materials Engineering by the Establishment of Spinodal Decomposition Theory[35]
2015		Toyoki Kunitake [de]	Japan	born 1936	Pioneering Contributions to the Materials Sciences by Discovering Synthetic Bilayer Membranes and Creating the Field of Chemistry Based on Molecular Self-Assembly[36]
2019		Ching W. Tang	China  United States	born 1947	Pioneering Contributions to the Birth of High-Efficiency Organic Light-Emitting Diodes and Their Applications.[37]
2024		John Pendry	United Kingdom	born 1943	Contribution of the Theoretical Construction of Metamaterials to the Field of Material Science.

Information science

Year	Laureate		Country
1988		John McCarthy	United States	1927–2011	Fundamental Contribution to the Field of Artificial Intelligence and the Invention of LISP, a Programming Language[38]
1992		Maurice Vincent Wilkes	United Kingdom	1913–2010	Building and Designing the First Practical Stored Program Computer and Pioneering Studies of Computer Architecture[39]
1996		Donald Ervin Knuth	United States	born 1938	Outstanding Contribution to Various Fields of the Computer Science Ranging from the Art of Computer Programming to the Development of Epoch-Making Electronic Publishing Tools[40]
2000		Antony Hoare	United Kingdom	born 1934	Pioneering and Fundamental Contributions to the Progress of Software Science[41]
2004		Alan Curtis Kay	United States	born 1940	Creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization[42]
2008		Richard M. Karp	United States	born 1935	Fundamental Contributions to the Development of the Theory of Computational Complexity[43]
2012		Ivan Edward Sutherland	United States	born 1938	Pioneering Achievements in the Development of Computer Graphics and Interactive Interfaces[44]
2016		Takeo Kanade	Japan	born 1945	Pioneering Contributions, both Theoretical and Practical, to Computer Vision and Robotics[45]
2020	No award because of COVID-19 pandemic
2021		Andrew Chi-Chih Yao	China	born 1946	Pioneering Contributions to a New Theory of Computation and Communication and a Fundamental Theory for its Security.[46]

See also

• Kyoto Prize
• Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences
• Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy
• List of Kyoto Prize winners
• List of computer-related awards
• List of computer science awards