Nando de Freitas is a researcher in computer science and machine learning, particularly in the subfields of neural networks, Bayesian inference, Bayesian optimization, and deep learning.^[1] Associated with Zimbabwe, he attended the University of the Witwatersrand and Trinity College, Cambridge. His institutional affiliations include the University of British Columbia, Oxford University, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft AI. His academic and research associations include Andrew Howard Gee, Mahesan Niranjan, Christophe Andrieu, and Arnaud Doucet. His work encompasses LipNet as well as his 2000 thesis titled "Bayesian Methods for Neural Networks" (https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~nando/papers/thesis.pdf).

De Freitas was born in Zimbabwe. He completed his undergraduate studies (1991–1994) and MSc (1994–1996) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and earned a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge (1996–2000).^[2] From 2001, he was a professor at the University of British Columbia, before joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2017. In 2014, he joined Google's DeepMind when the company acquired Oxford spinoff Dark Blue Labs, where he was in charge of the team that worked on creating tools for generating audio and images.^[3,4,5,6] While the Hausa edition reports that he currently works at Google's DeepMind, the English edition states that he joined Microsoft AI as VP of AI in September 2024.^[7,6]

De Freitas has been recognized for his contributions to machine learning through numerous awards. In 2016, he received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning and the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations. He was granted the Google Faculty Research Award in 2014. In 2013, he was awarded either a Distinguished Paper Award or an Honorable Mention Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He received the Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research in 2012. In 2010, he received a Young Researcher Award, identified as the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Young Researcher Award in English Wikipedia and as the Information Technology Association of Canada and Young Researcher Award in Hausa Wikipedia.