[6] He is the Herschel L. Seder Professor of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the founding director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS).

In 2014, Vidal was elected IEEE Fellow[12] for contributions to subspace clustering and motion segmentation in computer vision.

He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to subspace clustering and motion segmentation in computer vision".

[19] Currently, he is working on understanding the mathematical foundations of deep learning, specifically conditions for global optimality.

[20] In computer vision, Vidal has made many contributions to rigid motion segmentation,[3][21] activity recognition[22] and dynamic textures.