Recognitions and Awards

Dr. Pistoia has been the recipient of several professional awards, including five Best Paper Awards (three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at the ACM ISSTA 2007, 2011 and 2014 conferences, respectively, a Best Paper Award at the ACM IUI 2017 conference, and an Honorable Mention at the IEEE VL/HCC 2017 Symposium).

In April 2019, Dr. Pistoia received two IBM Corporate Awards for his work in Quantum Computing. The IBM Corporate Award is the highest technical recognition inside IBM. At the time he received those two awards, he was the only employee to ever receive two IBM Corporate Awards in the same year in the history of IBM. In the course of his career at IBM, he has also received an IBM Research Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award (3 papers selected our of 130), four IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, and four IBM Research Division Awards.  As a college student, he received a European Community Erasmus Fellowship Award.

In September 2007, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, the National Committee of the Italian Presidents of Faculties of Sciences and Technologies, and Confindustria, Italy's leading organization representing all the Italian manufacturing and service companies, presented Pistoia as one of the 70 most successful Italian mathematicians who graduated from an Italian university between the years 1980 and 2000.  His biography was published in the book Matematici al Lavoro.

In March 2023, Dr. Pistoia was one of the 12 technologists included in the HPCwire People to Watch 2023, a 23-year-old program that "recognizes HPC professionals who play leading roles in driving innovation within their particular fields, making significant contributions to society as a whole. Over the course of the program, HPCwire has recognized nearly 200 HPC luminaries who have gone on to achieve extraordinary things."

In May 2023, Dr. Pistoia received the Instinet Positive Change: Visionary Markets Choice Award.

In June 2024, Dr. Pistoia was featured as one of the most successful Italian industry leaders in the section "Beautiful Minds" of leading  Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

In 2025, the Quantum Computing Applied Research program built by Pistoia at JPMorganChase was recognized as the most advanced among all the financial institutions worldwide by both The Quantum Insider and Evident, which ranked Pistoia as the No. 1 "Quantum VIP" in the financial industry, and defined him as a "visionary" for "assembling banking’s largest quantum team" working on actual industry use cases.