# Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology

The Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology is awarded once a year by the Inamori Foundation. The Prize is one of three Kyoto Prize categories; the others are the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The first Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology was awarded to Rudolf E. Kálmán, the "creator of modern control and system theory". The Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in fields which are traditionally not honored with a Nobel Prize.

## Fields

The Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology is awarded on a rotating basis to researchers in the following four fields:
* Electronics
* Biotechnology and Medical Technology
* Materials Science and Engineering
* Information Science

## Laureates

Source: Kyoto Prize

### Electronics

| Year | Laureate | Country | Country | |
| 1985 | Rudolf Emil Kálmán | Hungary / United States | 1930–2016 | Establishment of the Modern Control Theory Based on the State Space Approach |
| 1989 | Amos E. Joel, Jr. | United States | 1918–2008 | Pioneering Contribution to the Electronic Switching Technology for Telecommunications, Especially that Based on the Concept of "Stored Program Control" |
| 1993 | Jack St. Clair Kilby | United States | 1923–2005 | Creation of the Concept of the Monolithic Semiconductor Integrated Circuit and Its Demonstration |
| 1997 | Stanley Mazor | United States | born 1941 | Development of the World’s First Microprocessor |
| 1997 | Marcian Edward Hoff Jr. | United States | born 1937 | Development of the World’s First Microprocessor |
| 1997 | Federico Faggin | Italy | born 1941 | Development of the World’s First Microprocessor |
| 1997 | Masatoshi Shima | Japan | born 1943 | Development of the World’s First Microprocessor |
| 2001 | Morton B. Panish | United States | born 1929 | A Pioneering Step in the Development of Optoelectronics through Success in Continuous Operation of Semiconductor Lasers at Room Temperature |
| 2001 | Izuo Hayashi | Japan | 1922–2005 | A Pioneering Step in the Development of Optoelectronics through Success in Continuous Operation of Semiconductor Lasers at Room Temperature |
| 2001 | Zhores Ivanovich Alferov | Russia | 1930–2019 | A Pioneering Step in the Development of Optoelectronics through Success in Continuous Operation of Semiconductor Lasers at Room Temperature |
| 2005 | George H. Heilmeier | United States | 1936–2014 | Pioneering contributions to the realization of flat-panel displays using liquid crystals |
| 2009 | Isamu Akasaki | Japan | born 1929 | Pioneering Work on Gallium Nitride p-n Junctions and Related Contributions to the Development of Blue Light Emitting Devices |
| 2013 | Robert H. Dennard | United States | born 1932 | Invention of Dynamic Random Access Memory and Proposal of Guidelines for FET Miniaturization |
| 2017 | Takashi Mimura [de] | Japan | born 1944 | Invention of the High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) and Its Development for the Progress of Information and Communications Technology |
| 2022 | Carver Mead | United States | born 1934 | Leading Contributions to the Establishment of the Guiding Principles for VLSI Systems Design. |

### Biotechnology and medical technology

| Year | Laureate | Country | Country | |
| 1986 | Nicole Marthe Le Douarin | France | born 1930 | Outstanding Contribution to Embryology through the Development of the Technology for Making Chicken/Quail Chimeras |
| 1990 | Sydney Brenner | United Kingdom | 1927–2019 | Pioneering Contribution to Molecular Biology through Demonstration of Messenger RNA and Establishment of C. Elegans as an Experimental System for Developmental Biology |
| 1994 | Paul Christian Lauterbur | United States | 1929–2007 | Proposal of the Basic Principles and Outstanding Contribution to the Development of MRI that Confers a Great Benefit on Clinical Medicine |
| 1998 | Kurt Wüthrich | Switzerland | born 1938 | Outstanding Contribution to Biology through the Expansion of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy to the Structure Analyses of Biological Macromolecules in Water Solution, an Environment Similar to That in the Living Cell |
| 2002 | Leroy Edward Hood | United States | born 1938 | Contributions to life sciences through the automation of protein and DNA sequencing and synthesis |
| 2006 | Leonard Herzenberg | United States | 1931–2013 | Outstanding contribution to life sciences with the development of a flow cytometer that uses fluorescent-labeled monoclonal antibodies |
| 2010 | Shinya Yamanaka | Japan | born 1962 | Development of Technology for Generating Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) Cells |
| 2014 | Robert S. Langer | United States | born 1948 | Creation of Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery System Technologies |
| 2018 | Karl Deisseroth | United States | born 1971 | Discovery of Optogenetics and Development of Causal Systems Neuroscience |
| 2023 | Ryuzo Yanagimachi | United States | born 1928 | Contributions to the Elucidation of Fertilization Mechanisms and the Establishment of Microinsemination Technology |

### Materials science and engineering

| Year | Laureate | Country | Country | |
| 1987 | Morris Cohen | United States | 1911–2005 | Fundamental Contribution to Development of New Materials Based on Creation of Broad and Basic Insights into the Metal Phase Transformation and Structure-Property Relationship |
| 1991 | Michael Szwarc | United States | 1909–2000 | Pioneering Contribution to Research and Development of Polymeric Materials by Discovering "Living Polymerization" |
| 1995 | George William Gray | United Kingdom | 1926–2013 | Fundamental Contribution to Research and Development of Liquid Crystal Materials by Establishing the Practical Molecular Design Methods |
| 1999 | W. David Kingery | United States | 1926–2000 | Fundamental Contribution to Development of the Ceramics Science and Technology Based on the Physicochemical Theory |
| 2003 | George McClelland Whitesides | United States | born 1939 | Contributions to Nanomaterials Science through the Development of Organic Molecular Self-Assembly Technique |
| 2007 | Hiroo Inokuchi [de] | Japan | 1927–2014 | Pioneering and Fundamental Contributions to Organic Molecular Electronics |
| 2011 | John Werner Cahn | United States | 1928–2016 | Outstanding Contribution to Alloy Materials Engineering by the Establishment of Spinodal Decomposition Theory |
| 2015 | Toyoki Kunitake [de] | Japan | born 1936 | Pioneering Contributions to the Materials Sciences by Discovering Synthetic Bilayer Membranes and Creating the Field of Chemistry Based on Molecular Self-Assembly |
| 2019 | Ching W. Tang | China  United States | born 1947 | Pioneering Contributions to the Birth of High-Efficiency Organic Light-Emitting Diodes and Their Applications. |
| 2024 | John Pendry | United Kingdom | born 1943 | Contribution of the Theoretical Construction of Metamaterials to the Field of Material Science. |

### Information science

| Year | Laureate | Laureate | Country | Country | |
| 1988 | | John McCarthy | United States | 1927–2011 | Fundamental Contribution to the Field of Artificial Intelligence and the Invention of LISP, a Programming Language |
| 1992 | | Maurice Vincent Wilkes | United Kingdom | 1913–2010 | Building and Designing the First Practical Stored Program Computer and Pioneering Studies of Computer Architecture |
| 1996 | | Donald Ervin Knuth | United States | born 1938 | Outstanding Contribution to Various Fields of the Computer Science Ranging from the Art of Computer Programming to the Development of Epoch-Making Electronic Publishing Tools |
| 2000 | | Antony Hoare | United Kingdom | born 1934 | Pioneering and Fundamental Contributions to the Progress of Software Science |
| 2004 | | Alan Curtis Kay | United States | born 1940 | Creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization |
| 2008 | | Richard M. Karp | United States | born 1935 | Fundamental Contributions to the Development of the Theory of Computational Complexity |
| 2012 | | Ivan Edward Sutherland | United States | born 1938 | Pioneering Achievements in the Development of Computer Graphics and Interactive Interfaces |
| 2016 | | Takeo Kanade | Japan | born 1945 | Pioneering Contributions, both Theoretical and Practical, to Computer Vision and Robotics |
| 2020 | No award because of COVID-19 pandemic | No award because of COVID-19 pandemic | No award because of COVID-19 pandemic | No award because of COVID-19 pandemic | No award because of COVID-19 pandemic |
| 2021 | | Andrew Chi-Chih Yao | China | born 1946 | Pioneering Contributions to a New Theory of Computation and Communication and a Fundamental Theory for its Security. |