René Vidal, the director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS) and the Herschel L. Seder Professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s 2021 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award.

This award is given for outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science and engineering or computer technology within the past 15 years. Vidal was recognized “for pioneering contributions to subspace clustering and generalized principal component analysis with applications in computer vision and pattern recognition.”

Vidal’s research focuses on the development of theory and algorithms for the analysis of complex high-dimensional datasets such as images, videos, time series and biomedical data. His lab creates new technologies for a variety of biomedical applications, including detection, classification, and tracking of blood cells in holographic images, classification of embryonic cardio-myocytes in optical images, and assessment of surgical skill in surgical videos.