At the 2025 IEEE Honors Ceremony, Regina Barzilay, faculty lead AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic was awarded the 2025 IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for her innovative machine learning algorithms that have led to significant advances in medicine. The awards ceremony was part of the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges (VIC) Summit, held from 23 to 24 April 2025, marking the first time the gathering was hosted in Asia. Jim Collins, faculty lead life sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic, also earned honours, receiving the 2025 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology for his pioneering work in the field of synthetic biology, a prize sponsored by IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, .
Kathleen A. Kramer, President and CEO, IEEE:
The IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal is sponsored by IBM.
This year’s medal is given to Regina Barzilay for her innovative machine learning algorithms that have led to significant advances in medicine.
Norishige Morimoto, Vice President, IBM Japan:
Hi, good evening. I am Norishige Morimoto, representing IBM and I’m glad to present the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal.
Video voice over:
Artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of the world, and Regina Barzilay is at the forefront of this transformation.
In clinical AI, her image-based models can detect breast cancer up to five years before traditional diagnosis, doubling the detection rate of current risk assessment tools.
Her mammogram reading system, Marai, has been deployed in hospitals worldwide, and she has also expanded AI-driven, early detection to lung cancer with Sybil, which predicts future risk with remarkable accuracy.
With unparalleled vision, Barzilay’s innovations are changing how we diagnose disease, pushing the limits of artificial intelligence.
The IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal is sponsored by IBM.
Regina Barzilay, faculty lead AI, MIT Jameel Clinic:
It is a huge honour to receive this award named after Frances Allen, the first woman who won the Turing Award.
Many years ago when I started my career in computer science, I could not have imagined where I would end up and what kind of topics I would address, starting from the decipherment of ancient languages and now to developing new drugs.
And I really hope that all these technologies that we are developing are going to have a positive outcome on people’s lives.
That’s what we are trying to do.
And I’m very grateful to IEEE and to IBM for sponsoring this award.