The International Dennis Gabor Award is awarded by the NOVOFER Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for outstanding scientific achievements with practical applications, with a clear positive attitude towards international cooperation of the researchers. It is named after the Nobel Prize winner Dennis Gabor. The award includes a 130 mm-diameter pure silver medal with a hologram of Dennis Gabor’s portrait, a charter of honor, and a monetary prize. The award is normally awarded simultaneously to a Hungarian and to a non-Hungarian researcher and is not awarded every year but rather every 3 years or longer depending on the level of candidates for the award. The award is an honor to Dennis Gabor and aims at identifying researchers with a likewise successful early career path as Dennis Gabor himself. Because of the high prestige of this award and the broad research area covered, selection of the awardee is extremely competitive, even more so for the non-Hungarian nominees. The award ceremony takes place at the Hungarian Parliament.
A different Dennis Gabor Award is presented each year by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, especially those which further the development of holography and metrology applications.