VinFuture Prize Council

Ha-Van Vu is the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Data Science at Yale University. He is well known for his work in additive and probabilistic combinatorics, random matrix theory, and their applications in computational science. In 2010, he and Terence Tao, in full generality, established the Circular Law.

Known as the non-symmetric analog of Wigner Semicircle Law, this was one of the most famous open questions in the theory of random matrix. Since 2018, he has also served as the scientific director of VinBigdata Institute.

Professor Vu received the Polya Prize from the Society of Applied and Industrial Mathematics and the Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He has been named a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was also a recipient of an NSF Career Award and a Sloan fellowship. Professor Vu is an inaugural fellow of the AMS and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

Born in Hanoi, Professor Vu attended classes for gifted students at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Budapest (Hungary) for his undergraduate studies and in 1994, moved to Yale for his graduate studies, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1998. He did his postdoc at IAS (Princeton) and Microsoft Research (Redmond). Before going to Yale in 2011, he taught at UC San Diego and Rutgers.

Professor Leslie Gabriel Valiant is a British-American computer scientist and computational theorist who is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University.

Professor Valiant is well-known for his work in theoretical computer science. He was awarded the A.M. Turing Award in 2010 for work in machine learning, computational complexity and parallel computation, having been described by the ACM as a heroic figure in theoretical computer science and a role model for his courage and creativity in addressing some of the deepest unsolved problems in science.

Professor Valiant also received the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union in 1986, the Knuth Prize in 1997, and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Award in 2008. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1991, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

Professor Valiant was educated at King’s College, University of Cambridge, followed by Imperial College London, and finally at the University of Warwick, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974. He started teaching at Harvard University in 1982, prior to which he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh.

Michael Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at the Harvard Business School. He is an economist, researcher, author, teacher, strategy advisor, and speaker.

Throughout his career at Harvard Business School, he has brought economic theory and strategy concepts to address many of the most challenging problems facing corporations, economies, and societies, including competition and company strategy, economic development, health care, and most recently, America’s dysfunctional political system. His extensive research is widely recognized in governments, corporations, health care organizations, NGOs, and academic circles around the globe. His research has received numerous awards, and he is the most cited scholar today in economics and business. While Professor Porter is, at the core, a scholar, his work has also achieved remarkable acceptance by practitioners across multiple fields. His principal goal is to influence actual practice in the fields in which he works.

Professor Porter is an unprecedented nine-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. He is also the recipient of twenty-six honorary doctorates as well as national and state honors.

Professor Porter’s initial training was in aerospace engineering at Princeton University. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard’s Department of Economics. His research approach—applying economic theory and management concepts to address complex systemic problems—reflects these multidisciplinary foundations.

Professor Porter is the author of twenty books and more than 130 articles. For further information, please visit the website of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (www.isc.hbs.edu).

Professor Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS was born in Russia in August 1974 and has dual British and Russian citizenship. He is best known for isolating graphene at The University of Manchester in 2004 and is an expert in condensed matter physics, mesoscopic physics, and nanotechnology.

Every year since 2014, Professor Novoselov has been included in the list of the most highly cited researchers in the world. Kostya holds the position of Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is also the part-time Langworthy Professor of Physics and the Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for his achievements with graphene.

He was awarded with numerous prizes, including Nicholas Kurti Prize (2007), International Union of Pure and Applied Science Prize (2008), MIT Technology Review young innovator (2008), Europhysics Prize (2008), Bragg Lecture Prize from the Union of Crystallography (2011), the Kohn Award Lecture (2012), Leverhulme Medal from the Royal Society (2013), Onsager medal (2014), Carbon medal (2016), Dalton medal (2016), and Otto Warburg Prize (2019) among many others. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his PhD studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to The University of Manchester in 2001. Later Professor Novoselov joined the National University of Singapore in 2019.

Professor Novoselov has published more than 400 peer-reviewed research papers.

Professor Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He is a professor and member of Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique, and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with his doctoral student, Donna Strickland, on generating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material.

Professor Mourou has made numerous contributions to the fields of ultrafast lasers, high-speed electronics, and medicine. He has been honored with several notable awards for his breakthrough scientific inventions, including Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA (2009), and Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society (2018). Professor Mourou was the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan in 1990. He was director of the Laboratoire d’optique appliquée at the ENSTA from 2005 to 2009.

Professor Mourou studied physics at the University of Grenoble, and then at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1973. He later moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of Rochester and University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he did his Nobel Prize awarded work.

Professor Daniel Kammen serves as James and Katherine Lau Distinguished Professor of Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

He was appointed the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow by Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton in April 2010. Professor Kammen is currently on leave from the University of California while serving in the Biden Administration as the Senior Advisor for Energy Innovation at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

He is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In the United States, he serves on two National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.

Doctor Xuedong Huang is a leading computer scientist and technology executive in AI and Spoken Language Processing. He is currently a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Technology Officer overseeing Microsoft Azure AI engineering and research, covering Microsoft’s core perceptive and cognitive AI pillars (Speech, Computer Vision, Natural Language, and Decision).

Dr. Huang has co-authored over 170 US patents, two books, and over 100 papers, including a historical speech recognition review with Raj Reddy and James K. Baker for Communications of the ACM reflecting several generations of spoken language R&D. His notable achievements include receiving the Allen Newell research excellence medal in 1992, and IEEE Speech Processing Best Paper in 1993. In 2016, Wired Magazine named him as one of “25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business”.

He was recognized as an IEEE Fellow in 2000, and ACM Fellow in 2017 for his contributions to spoken language processing.

Dr. Huang was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University from 1989 to 1993. He received his Ph.D., MS, and BS from the University of Edinburgh, Tsinghua University, and Hunan University respectively.

Professor Văn-Chí Đặng received his BS in Chemistry (highest honors) from the University of Michigan and was awarded a Ph.D. in Chemistry (high distinction) from Georgetown University.

He received his MD (inducted to Alpha Omega Alpha and Phi Beta Kappa) and internal medicine residency training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He trained in hematology-oncology at UCSF, where he did postdoctoral work on the MYC oncogene. Professor Đặng then returned to Johns Hopkins in 1987 where he established the first mechanistic link between a cancer gene (MYC) and cellular energy metabolism, contributing to the concept that genetic alterations in cancers re-program fuel utilization by tumors and render cancers addicted to certain fuel sources. This conceptual framework contributes to strategies for therapeutic targeting of cancer cell metabolism. His current work extends the role of MYC in cancer metabolism and the role of the circadian clock in metabolism and cancer.

He was Director of the Division of Hematology at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1993-2003) and was appointed Johns Hopkins Family Professor in Oncology Research and Vice Dean for Research at Johns Hopkins. In 2011, he became director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and on July 1, 2017, he assumed the position of Scientific Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, overseeing Ludwig branches located in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Research, an AACR journal.

Professor Pascale Cossart is a pioneering cellular microbiologist who has made significant contributions to our understanding of how bacteria both infect, and survive within, host cells. She uses the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes as a model, with her research paving the way for future therapeutics.

She is currently a Professor and Head of the Unité des Interactions Bactéries Cellules at the Pasteur Institute. She was also a Professor of Biochemistry at the Royal School of Medicine in Vientiane, Laos from 1974 – 1975 before working at Pasteur Institute in Paris from 1988 until the present.

Professor Cossart’s research provides a detailed picture of the factors which make Listeria such an effective infectious agent. She identified different proteins that Listeria uses to enter cells, move, and disseminate in tissues. Through the creation of a transgenic mouse model, she paved the way for in vivo studies. Professor Cossart has also unveiled new regulatory mechanisms in bacteria and is now deciphering how bacteria induce epigenetic changes during infection.

Professor Cossart has received several prestigious awards and recognitions, not only for her research but also for her role as a mentor and promoter of interdisciplinary collaboration. These awards include the Robert Koch Prize for biomedical science in 2007 in Germany, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2008 in Switzerland, the Balzan Prize in 2013 in Italy, the 2014 FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award, and most recently, the FEMS-Lwoff Award in 2019 in the UK. She became the Honorary Doctor of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2020.

Professor Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, as well as Professor in four UC Berkeley departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Mathematics, and Statistics. For 23 years, she was at Microsoft Research where she was Technical Fellow and where she co-founded and led three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. She is the co-author of about 140 scientific papers and the co-inventor of about 30 patents.

Professor Chayes has received numerous awards for both leadership and scientific contributions, including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award, the John von Neumann Lecture Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (the highest honor of SIAM), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.

Professor Chayes is a Fellow of many societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association of Women in Mathematics, and the Fields Institute.

Professor Chayes’ research areas include phase transitions in computer science, structural and dynamical properties of networks including graph algorithms, and applications of machine learning. She is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision-making, and climate change. Professor Chayes is deeply committed to increasing racial and gender diversity in STEM.

Doctor Anandan is a renowned researcher in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence with more than 60 publications and over 14,500 citations in Google Scholar. His career spans over 30 years in academia and industry in the US and India with research areas including visual motion analysis, video surveillance, and 3D scene modeling from images and video.
Dr. Anandan is currently Founder of US-based AI Matters Advisors LLC and Chairman of the Governing Board at Telangana AI Mission (T-AIM).

Between September 2017 and March 2021, he was CEO of Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an independent not-for-profit research institute focused on developing artificial intelligence-based applications for social good. Before Wadhwani Institute, Dr. Anandan was the Founder and Managing Director of Microsoft Research India, and a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He was also Vice President at Adobe Research, responsible for developing Adobe’s research strategy, and leading the Adobe India Research lab.
Dr. Anandan holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, an M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Dr. Anandan has received multiple awards for his work, including Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Alumni Award, IIT Madras; Microsoft Distinguished Scientist; Microsoft Emeritus Researcher; and Hall of Computing, University of Nebraska, 2010.
His papers have won multiple awards including the Helmholtz Prize for long term fundamental contributions to computer vision research.

Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS holds the Cavendish Professorship of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is Director of the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and of the Maxwell Centre. He is also a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and serves as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore. In addition, he is one of the principal investigators in the new Cambridge-based Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) on nanotechnology and co-founder of Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Plastic Logic.

Owning more than 140 patents and having written or co-authored over 1,100 prestigious scientific publications worldwide, Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS is one of the most influential physicists in the world. He also serves as a Council member of many prestigious global Prizes.

He and his group have developed polymer-processing techniques for conjugated polymers and demonstrated non-linear electronic excitations through electrical and optical measurements. He is credited for the first construction of MOSFET (Metal Insulator Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) with polyacetylene as the active semiconductor; the demonstration of novel mechanisms of operation with novel behavior; and the first construction of the efficient, large-area, polymeric semiconductor LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes), based on polyphenylene-vinylene. His research on OLED has been used to develop flat screens, scroll screens, and motion screens for the future with the most well-known application of his research being the OLED TV. His work has also been applied to develop polymer field-effect transistors, light-emitting diodes, photoelectric diodes, optical pump-proof tubes, and direct-printed polymer transistors.

With a world-renowned reputation and numerous achievements in both research and teaching, Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2002. His notable honors and awards include the IEE’s Faraday Medal in 2003, the Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2006, the Institute of Physics Katharine Burr Blodgett Medal, Prize with Dr. David Ffye in 2009, and the Millennium Technology Prize for the development of plastic electronics in 2010. He was knighted for “Services to Physics” in the 2003 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.