Ben Mildenhall and Pratul Srinivasan are the recipients of the 2025 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Association for Computing Machinery announced May 27, citing "contributions to radiance field representations, 3D scene capture and rendering, and pioneering neural implicit representations and 3D generative AI." The Hopper Award goes to the outstanding young computer professional of the year for a single major technical contribution made at age 35 or younger, and carries a $35,000 prize funded by Microsoft.
The single contribution in question is, of course, NeRF. Mildenhall and Srinivasan were two of the first authors of the 2020 paper that introduced Neural Radiance Fields, and ACM's citation describes the shift in the terms this field has lived through since with differentiable neural scene representations replacing decades of reliance on explicit geometry, unprecedented realism in novel view synthesis, and the broader neural fields framework that has since spread into medical imaging, astronomy, and computational physics.
The citation also credits the pair's work as underpinning deployed systems in immersive mapping, 3D commerce, and large scale scene visualization, and, by bridging neural rendering and generative modeling, driving the emergence of 3D aware AI systems.
Both researchers have stayed at the center of the field since. Srinivasan is a research scientist at Google DeepMind, where his post NeRF work with the same orbit of collaborators produced Mip-NeRF, Zip-NeRF, NeRF-Casting, and many influential radiance field works.
Mildenhall left Google to co-found World Labs, the spatial intelligence company building large 3D generative world models. Mildenhall also boasts an incredible research portfolio, sharing many credits with Srinivasan.
The Hopper is their second shared honor in under a year. The pair received the SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award in 2025, making the case that the graphics and computing communities have independently arrived at the same verdict on where NeRF ranks.
The Hopper Award's past recipients include Donald Knuth, and recent years have honored work in learning theory, privacy, and data center networking; the last time it touched visual computing was Jeffrey Heer's visualization languages in 2016, and rendering research has never been closer to its center. Mildenhall and Srinivasan were announced alongside Erdal Arikan, who receives the Kanellakis Award for polar codes, and Kevin Leyton-Brown, who receives the Allen Newell Award. The awards will be presented at ACM's banquet in San Francisco on June 13.
