2025 Alumni Achievement Award
Jure Leskovec’s pioneering work in data science, machine learning and network science has shaped the way complex systems are studied and applied across academia, industry and society.
Jure is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he pioneered the field of graph machine learning. The technology has revolutionized the way in which complex data is analyzed and has become a cornerstone in modern artificial intelligence and machine learning.
His innovative approach has drawn interest from computer scientists and researchers across the globe, who have made his Stanford course, Machine Learning with Graphs, one of the most popular machine learning courses on YouTube with more than 2 million views.
Jure is dedicated to open science and fostering collaboration between academia and industry. In September of 2021, he released pyg.org, an online library for machine learning on graphs that has more than 100,000 monthly downloads. His earlier projects include the Stanford Network Analytics Platform, which facilitates research and learning, and the Open Graph Benchmark, which offers diverse, large-scale datasets and tools.
In addition to his academic work, Jure is also a successful entrepreneur. He has founded several companies including Kumo, a startup that applies graph machine learning to enterprise data.
Jure’s work has made an impact on both industry and global policy. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, he published a study of reopening strategies that was used by the U.S., Poland and Japan to shape their country’s policies. Prior to Stanford, he worked as chief scientist at Pinterest, where he built several foundational AI platforms that lead to a significant improvement in key business metrics.
His work has received more than 200,000 citations, has been published in top scientific journals like Nature and Science, and is featured regularly in major press outlets such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Insider. He is the recipient of numerous honors including the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, the Lagrange Prize, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp.
Jure earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and a master’s degree in knowledge discovery and data mining and Ph.D. in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He completed postdoctoral training at Cornell University.