University Professor Moshe Y. Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, has been recognized with the IEEE TCCH Outstanding Leadership Award. The honor comes from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Technical Committee on Cyber-Humanities (TCCH).
IEEE Cyber-Humanities calls Vardi “a world-renowned computer scientist whose work has profoundly shaped logic, AI, and the ethical challenges of our digital future.” Vardi gave the opening keynote address at IEEE CyberHumanities 2025 in Florence this week.
The award highlights Vardi’s longstanding leadership and influence at the intersection of computer science and the humanities. It celebrates individuals who demonstrate exceptional vision, dedication, and the ability to foster collaborations across technology, science, business, and humanistic disciplines. It also recognizes those who inspire new research directions and help raise the visibility of this emerging community.
At Rice, Vardi’s research interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite-model theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, and computer-aided verification and reasoning. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After serving as a research scientist at IBM Research and continuing his work at Stanford University, he joined the Rice faculty in 1993.
Vardi has authored or co-authored more than 800 scientific papers. He currently serves as senior editor of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), where he was editor-in-chief for a decade. He also holds honorary titles from ten international universities.
Among his many honors are memberships in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea, and the Royal Society of London. He is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Mathematical Society.