[1] He received in 1983 his Ph.D from Brown University under Robert MacPherson with thesis The Intersection Homology D-module on Hypersurfaces with Isolated Singularities.

[5] In 2004, Vilonen, Mark Goresky, Dennis Gaitsgory and Edward Frenkel were awarded a multimillion dollar grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to work on a project aimed at establishing links between the Langlands program and dualities in quantum field theory.

The funds were used to coordinate the work of dozens of mathematicians with the goal of making a concerted effort in a significant area of research.

This five year grant will allow him to address deep longstanding questions about real groups, algebraic objects which describe the basic symmetries occurring in nature.

[11] In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Topological methods in representation theory at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.