MIT Jameel Clinic’s Muriel Medard and Rosalind Picard recognized in the 2026 IEEE Awards
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have announced their selection of 24 awardees yesterday in the 2026 IEEE Awards, which includes MIT Jameel Clinic Principal Investigators Muriel Medard and Rosalind Picard. Presented on behalf of the IEEE Board of Directors, these medals recognize innovators whose work has shaped modern technology across disciplines including AI, education, and semiconductors.
Muriel Medard was awarded the prestigious 2026 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal “For contributions to coding for reliable communications and networking.” This award recognizes Medard’s impactful contributions to wireless and network communications as well as information theory. This is Medard’s second IEEE medal, with her first being the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Medal in 2022.
Rosalind Picard’s equally distinguished 2026 IEEE Medal For Innovations in Healthcare Technology is “For pioneering contributions to wearable affective computing for health and wellbeing.” The award recognizes Picard as a key figure in establishing the field of affective computing and her contributions to wearable technologies for emotion and health monitoring.
The IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal is eponymously named after an American mathematician, whose work has significantly influenced the fields of computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the invention of the Hamming code, and error-correcting code. The 2026 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal is sponsored by QualComm.
This year’s IEEE Medal For Innovations in Healthcare Technology is sponsored by IEEE Engineering Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), the world’s largest international society of biomedical engineers.
Each year the IEEE Awards Board recommends a select group of recipients to receive IEEE’s most prestigious honors. These are individuals whose exceptional achievements and outstanding contributions have made a lasting impact on technology, society, and the engineering profession.
