He received the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking.

[2][3][4] He is currently Research Director Emeritus for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at VERIMAG laboratory near Grenoble, of which he is the founder.

He founded with Edmund M. Clarke and Amir Pnueli the CAV conference, organized for the first time in Grenoble in 1989.

Sifakis held the INRIA-Schneider endowed industrial chair[6] (2008–2011) and has been a full professor[7] and the Director of the «Rigorous System Design Laboratory » at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of EPFL (2011–2016).

Established initially as a mixed industrial laboratory between CNRS and Verilog SA., VERIMAG has collaborated with Airbus and Schneider Electric to develop methods and tools for the development of safety critical systems, in particular the SCADE synchronous programming environment based on the Lustre Language.