Their groundbreaking research in mathematics and computer science contributes to the development of more efficient and reliable AI and helps bring fundamental research closer to societal applications. With the awards and the accompanying Van Wijngaarden Soirée, CWI aims to highlight the role of fundamental research in shaping the future of AI in the Netherlands and Europe and to stimulate the debate about what that future should look like.
The Van Wijngaarden Soirée – Unlocking Europe’s AI Potential
The five-yearly award was established by CW, and is named after former CWI director Aad van Wijngaarden. The winners receive the prize during a festive soirée on 20 November 2026 in Amsterdam. This year, the ceremonial presentation of the Van Wijngaarden Awards will be combined with a dinner pensant. This Soirée will focus on a two-part question: what do the Netherlands’ leading AI figures need from Europe — and can Europe gain from Dutch AI? The evening will begin with a keynote address by Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy and a leading voice on the future of Europe. He will be followed by Judith Tielen, Minister for Primary and Secondary Education and Equality, who will reflect on the choices facing the Netherlands and how AI changes research, and education. Together with leaders from the worlds of academia, government and business, a panel of experts will then further discuss how AI is transforming scientific research and education.
About the winners
Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb (University of Cambridge) is Professor of Applied Mathematics and a world-leading researcher in mathematical imaging and inverse problems: recovering hidden information from incomplete and noisy measurements. Her work combines partial differential equations, variational methods and optimisation with machine learning, establishing mathematical foundations for image reconstruction and for understanding when learned methods are reliable. Through close interdisciplinary collaborations, she develops mathematics that advances applications from medical imaging and molecular biology to materials science and art conservation. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of SIAM Review. Her honours include the Whitehead Prize (2016), the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017) and the Calderón Prize (2019), and election as a SIAM Fellow (2024) and an ELLIS Fellow (2025).
Mor Harchol-Balter (Carnegie Mellon University) is the Bruce J. Nelson Endowed Chair of Computer Science. She is a world-leading researcher in the field of performance analysis and the design of computer systems. She uses applied mathematics, probability theory and queueing theory to understand how computers and large-scale computing systems can schedule their resources as efficiently as possible, so as to minimize response times, compute resources, and energy usage. For her groundbreaking contributions, she was named a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She has also received a dozen Best Paper or Best Student Paper Awards and serves as the Chair of the Special Interest Group(SIG) ACM SIGMETRICS.
