Computer Scientist Anastasiia Koloskova has been named the 2026 EPFL Laureate of the prestigious Lopez-Loreta prize. She is awarded €1 million to further her research in democratizing artificial intelligence.EPFL PhD graduate Prof. Koloskova has been awarded the prize for her project “Democratizing AI: Optimization Methods for Private and Resource-Constrained Environments”, to be carried out at the University of Zurich. The project aims to enable the collaborative training of powerful machine learning models without sharing sensitive data.“Much of society's most valuable data—patient records, financial transactions, environmental observations—is too sensitive or too dispersed to be pooled centrally, limiting the use of modern AI approaches that have transformed other domains,” Koloskova explains. This project will integrate three requirements that are usually studied in isolation: data privacy, scaling for numerous participants and performance optimisation. Koloskova outlines the advantages of her approach: “By developing algorithms suited to resource-constrained, privacy-sensitive settings, it will enable hospitals, universities, and smaller institutions to benefit from advanced AI without centralizing sensitive data or relying on hyperscale infrastructure. Ultimately, the project aims to make AI more trustworthy, sustainable, and broadly accessible.”This project builds on Prof. Koloskova’s PhD research at EPFL, carried out in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. For this research she was awarded the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) PhD Award and the EPFL Thesis Distinction Award. Following graduation from EPFL in February 2024 she conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University before being appointed as Assistant Professor of AI and Optimization at the University of Zurich in August 2025.Prof. Koloskova highlights the impact this prize will have on her future career: “As I start building my own group at the University of Zurich, this prize gives me the necessary resources to expand it — recruiting talented early-career students and researchers — and the freedom to pursue an ambitious, long-term research agenda.”The Lopez-Loreta prize is awarded annually to four recent master or PhD graduates from EPFL, ETH Zurich, École Polytechnique in Palaiseau and ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse to finance outstanding projects over five years. The prize is funded by the Jean-Jacques and Felicia Lopez-Loreta Foundation for academic excellence.