From 1970 until 1984, when he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Deligne was a permanent member of the IHÉS staff. During this time he did much important work, besides the proof of the Weil conjectures: in particular with George Lusztig on the use of étale cohomology to construct representations of finite groups of Lie type, and with Rapoport on the moduli spaces from the 'fine' arithmetic point of view, with application to modular forms. He received a Fields Medal in 1978.
In terms of the completion of some of the underlying Grothendieck program of research, he defined absolute Hodge cycles, as a surrogate for the missing and still largely conjectural theory of motives. This idea allows one to get around the lack of knowledge of the Hodge conjecture, for some applications. He reworked the tannakian category theory in his paper for the Grothendieck Festschrift, employing Beck's theorem – the Tannakian category concept being the categorical expression of the linearity of the theory of motives as the ultimate Weil cohomology. All this is part of the yoga of weights, uniting Hodge theory and the l-adic Galois representations. The Shimura variety theory is related, by the idea that such varieties should parametrize not just good (arithmetically interesting) families of Hodge structures, but actual motives. This theory isn't yet a finished product – and more recent trends have used K-theory approaches.
