Professor Ilias Diakonikolas wins 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship
Professor Ilias Diakonikolas of the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Computer Sciences has been named a Guggenheim Fellow by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The board appointed the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, including 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Diakonikolas, who came to UW-Madison in 2019, is the Sheldon B. Lubar Professor of Computer Sciences and a member of the theory of computing group, machine learning@uw-madison, and the Institute for Foundations of Data Science. He earned his PhD in computer science from Columbia University and previously held faculty positions at the University of Southern California and the University of Edinburgh.
Diakonikolas works on the algorithmic foundations of machine learning and statistics. His research seeks to understand when complex learning tasks can be carried out efficiently, reliably, and with provable guarantees. A central theme of his work is the interplay between statistical accuracy, computational efficiency, and robustness: what can be learned from high-dimensional, noisy, or corrupted data, and what fundamental computational barriers stand in the way.
“Ilias is the type of researcher who doesn’t merely contribute to a field, but rather repeatedly breaks new ground and shapes the broad direction of research,” says Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences Director and Professor of Computer Sciences. “This is why it is no surprise to me that he has received the high honor of being named a Guggenheim Fellow. It is a wonderful moment to both celebrate Ilias’s achievements and look forward to his next steps. AI is clearly shaping the future of people and society; deep work by Ilias is shaping our understanding of AI.”
Diakonikolas’s contributions span several areas of modern learning theory. He is especially known for foundational work in high-dimensional robust statistics, and his research has also advanced our algorithmic understanding of learning latent-variable models and neural networks. In particular, he has developed efficient algorithms for learning mixture models and other latent-variable models, studied the efficient learnability of structured nonlinear models, and helped clarify information–computation tradeoffs that separate what is statistically possible from what can be achieved efficiently.
“I am very honored to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship,” said Diakonikolas. “My research is driven by basic questions about what can be learned efficiently from complex, high-dimensional, and imperfect data, and this fellowship will provide valuable support for pursuing those questions.”
His work has been recognized with the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Marie Curie Fellowship, a Google Faculty Research Award, best paper awards at NeurIPS and COLT, and the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award.
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Diakonikolas’s colleague, Professor Stephen Wright, noted that besides its high prestige, the Guggenheim Fellowship was notable for its broad scope. “Guggenheims are awarded to high achievers across all areas of sciences, humanities, and arts, both inside and outside academia,” he said. “It is a high honor for Ilias to be recognized in such an eclectic group.”
About the Guggenheim Foundation:
Created and initially funded in 1925 by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. The Fellowship is application-based and open to U.S. and Canadian citizens or permanent residents.