At the University Awards Convocation held on September 26, 2011, Professor Vasant Honavar was presented with the Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award. The award recognizes superior performance by faculty in training graduate students in research and scholarship leading to doctoral degrees at Iowa State University, and mentoring students beyond graduation in pursuit of their careers.
In his 21 years on the faculty of Iowa State University, Dr. Honavar has made foundational contributions in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Knowledge Representation and Inference, and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Dr. Honavar founded and directs the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery. He was instrumental in establishing the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program. He has directed the study of 24 doctoral and 28 master's graduates all of whom have gone on to pursue successful careers in academia or industry.