He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 and the IEEE Visualization Career Award in 2012.

He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, which led to clickable highlighted web-links, the ubiquitous touchscreen keyboards on mobile devices, dynamic query sliders for data exploration, and a patent for photo tagging. His work on information visualization led to the widely used treemaps (treemap history, treemap art project), novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records with EventFlow.