This year’s SIGGRAPH Awards spotlight a pivotal moment for the radiance field research community, with two key recognitions that underscore how central neural rendering and Gaussian splatting have become to the future of graphics.
Two of the original authors of NeRF, Ben Mildenhall and Pratul Srinivasan, were recognized with the 2025 Significant New Researcher Award. Mildenhall, now one of the co-founders of the generative AI company World Labs, was previously at Google. Srinivasan remains at Google, and both have continued to make significant contributions to the radiance field space since their original work.
Also recognized for his major contributions was George Drettakis, who received the 2025 Computer Graphics Achievement Award. Drettakis has made a lasting impact across computer graphics, including as one of the authors of 3D Gaussian Splatting. His research group at Inria has been instrumental in advancing splatting-based scene representations that maintain photorealism while enabling interactive performance.
The accepted papers for this year’s SIGGRAPH have begun to trickle out, and based on some of the upcoming work, we may be seeing even more radiance field researchers recognized in the years to come. Congrats to everyone who was honored for their work! Check out the full set of recipients here.
