Princeton Nobel laureate John Hopfield and alumna Fei-Fei Li received 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from King Charles III for “their pioneering contributions to the development of modern machine learning” in a ceremony Nov. 5 at St. James's Palace in London.
Hopfield and Li were among seven AI luminaries awarded the 2025 QEPrize, including Geoffrey Hinton, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics with Hopfield; Yoshua Bengio; Bill Dally; Jensen Huang; and Yann LeCun. Their honors were announced in February.
The annual QEPrize is awarded to engineers “responsible for groundbreaking innovations that have been of global benefit to humanity,” according to the press release for the November ceremony.
King Charles III and Princeton Nobel laureate John Hopfield (right).
Hopfield is Princeton’s Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences, Emeritus, and a professor of molecular biology, emeritus. His Nobel Prize recognizes his “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” He holds associated faculty status in physics and neuroscience. He taught for 16 years as a professor of physics and helped establish the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
King Charles III and Princeton alumna Fei-Fei Li (right).
Li, a member of Princeton’s Class of 1999, was on the Princeton faculty when she conceived of and began building ImageNet, the extraordinary computer vision dataset that led to a paradigm shift in machine learning. She is now the Sequoia Capital Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University and a founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Li is also the author of the book “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI,” which was the 2024 Princeton Pre-read.
Prior to the presentation, this year’s cohort visited No. 10 Downing Street with last year’s QEPrize awardees for a roundtable discussion with Liz Kendall, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology.
Princeton alumna Fei-Fei Li (front row, second from left) and emeritus professor John Hopfield (front row, far right) were honored by King Charles III (back row, second from left) at a recent ceremony for winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
