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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 Mahowald-Mead Prize (MMP) recognizes an outstanding team or individual achievement in the field of neuromorphic engineering. It was named the Misha Mahowald Prize from 2016 to 2025, and renamed to the Mahowald-Mead Prize from 2026 onwards with the addition of Carver Mead to the prize name.
The Mahowald Early Career Award (MECA) recognizes individual Master's, PhD, and early postdoctoral students in the field of neuromorphic engineering.
The Mahowald-Mead 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.
Prizes 2026
Prizes 2026
The 2026 Mahowald-Mead Prize was awarded to the SpiNNaker Ecosystem with teams led by Christian Mayr (TU Dresden), Steve Furber (University of Manchester), and Hector A Gonzalez (SpiNNcloud Systems) for their work on developing a large-scale neuromorphic computing platform that supports neuromorphic researchers and commercial applications.
The 2025 Mahowald Early Career Award was awarded to Mohamadreza Zolfagharinejad for the project Analogue Speech Recognition Based on Physical Computing, with the jury citation for leveraging the intrinsic physics of analog devices to emulate cochlear mechanics.
Prizes 2025
Prizes 2025
The 2025 Misha Mahowald Prize was 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 was equally awarded to:
Mark M. Iskarous for the work on Invariant neuromorphic representations of tactile stimuli improves robustness of a real-time texture classification, and
Jens Egholm Pedersen for the work on Neuromorphic Intermediate Representation
Note about award date: From 2025 onwards, the award was dated with the year of the award rather than the year of submission. Previous awards were awarded in the year following the jury selections.
Prizes 2023
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
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
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
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
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
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
Prize 2018
No Award could be made for 2018.
Prize 2017
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
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.
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