Professor Emeritus Prakash Panangaden elected as Fellow of the Royal Society
McGill Professor Emeritus Prakash Panangaden of the School of Computer Science is among the latest appointees to the Royal Society, the U.K.’s national academy of sciences.
Previously appointed Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society include Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin.
Panangaden, who retired from McGill in 2024 after 34 years at the university, pursued a wide range of research, including machine learning theory, probabilistic models, quantum information theory and reinforcement learning. Panangaden is a Core Academic Member of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Insititute.
“McGill is extremely proud that Professor Emeritus Prakash Panangaden has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society,” said Dominique Bérubé, Vice-President, Research and Innovation. “Throughout his distinguished career, he was honoured for both his excellence in teaching and his significant contributions to research in various disciplines, including computer science, mathematics and physics. A highly collaborative researcher, he exemplifies McGill’s global excellence and is truly deserving of this significant honour.”
In 1999 Panangaden was awarded the Leo Yaffe Award by the Faculty of Science of for excellence in teaching and in 2016 he was awarded the President’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He was appointed a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2020. In 2022, he was awarded the LICS Test-of-Time Award for an influential 2002 joint paper written with Josée Desharnais (Université Laval), Vineet Gupta (Google) and Radha Jagadeesan (De Paul University).
In announcing the appointment of more than 90 new Fellows on Tuesday, Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said, “It is with great pleasure that I welcome the latest cohort of outstanding researchers into the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Their achievements represent the very best of scientific endeavour, from basic discovery to research with real-world impact across health, technology and policy. From tackling global health challenges to reimagining what AI can do for humanity, their work is a testament to the power of curiosity-driven research and innovation.
“The strength of the Fellowship lies not only in individual excellence, but in the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences each new member brings. This cohort represents the truly global nature of modern science and the importance of collaboration in driving scientific breakthroughs,” Smith said.