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SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award

The annual ACM SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award, inaugurated in 2006, recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field. In 2008, SIGMOD, with the unanimous approval of ACM Council, decided to rename the award to honor Dr. Jim Gray.  The SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee determines the recipient(s) of the award. Previous winners of the award are listed below.

2025 Winner: Peng Li  (Advisor: Xu Chu, Kexin Rong), Georgia Institute of Technology
Cleaning and Learning Over Dirty Tabular DataHonorable Mentions:

Xuanhe Zhou (Advisor: Guoliang Li), Tsinghua University
An AI-Native Autonomous Database System

Aecio Santos (Advisor: Juliana Freire), New York University
Efficient Algorithms for Correlated Data Discovery

Meghdad Kurmanji (Advisor: Peter Triantafillou), University of Warwick
Progressing From Static to Dynamic Machine Learning Based Data Systems
2024 Winner: Daniel Kang (Advisor: Peter Bailis, Matei Zaharia), Stanford
Efficient and accurate systems for querying unstructured dataRunner-Ups:

Wei Dong (Advisor: Ke Yi), HKUST
Query Evaluation under Differential Privacy

Jialin Ding (Advisor: Tim Kraska), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Instance-Optimized Database Indexes and Storage Layouts

Yisu Remy Wang (Advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington
Relational Programming
2023 Winner: Supun Nakandala (advisor Arun Kumar), University of California, San DiegoHonorable Mentions:

Benjamin Hilprecht (advisor Carsten Binnig), Technical University of Darmstadt

Zongheng Yang (advisors Ion Stoica), University of California, Berkeley
2022 Winner: Chenggang Wu (advisor Joseph M. Hellerstein), UC BerkeleyHonorable Mentions:

PingCheng Ruan (advisor Beng Chin Ooi), National University of Singapore

Kexin Rong (advisors Peter Bailis and Philip Levis), Stanford University

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2021 Winner: Huanchen Zhang (advisors David Andersen and Andy Pavlo), Carnegie Mellon UniversityHonorable Mentions:

Erfan Zamanian (advisor Tim Kraska), Brown University

Maximilian Schleich (advisor Dan Olteanu), University of Oxford

Natacha Crooks (advisor Lorenzo Alvisi), The University of Texas at Austin

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2020 Winner: Jose Faleiro (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale UniversityHonorable Mention:

Silu Huang (advisor: Aditya Parameswaran) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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2019 Winner: Joy Arulraj (advisor: Andy Pavlo), Carnegie Mellon UniversityHonorable Mention:

Bas Ketsman (advisor: Frank Neven) Hasselt University

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2018 Winner: Viktor Leis (advisors: Thomas Neumann and Alfons Kemper), Technical University of MunichHonorable Mentions:

Luis Galárraga (advisor: Fabian Suchanek) Télécom ParisTech

Yongjoo Park (advisors: Michael Cafarella and Barzan Mozafari) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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2017 Winner: Peter Bailis (advisors: Joseph Hellerstein, Ion Stoica, and Ali Ghodsi), University of California, BerkeleyHonorable Mention:

Immanuel Trummer  (advisor: Christoph Koch) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

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2016 Winner: Paris Koutris (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of WashingtonHonorable Mentions:

Pinar Tozun  (advisor: Anastasia Ailamaki) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Alvin Cheung (advisors: Sam Madden and Armando Solar-Lezama) MIT

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2015 Winner: Alexander Thomson (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale UniversityHonorable Mentions:

Marina Drosou  (advisor: Evaggelia Pitoura), University of Ioannina

Karthik Ramachandra (advisor: S. Sudarshan), IIT Bombay

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2014 Winners: Aditya Parameswaran (advisor: Hector Garcia-Molina), Stanford UniversityAndy Pavlo (advisors: Stan Zdonik and Michael Stonebraker), Brown University[award citation]
2013 Winner: Sudipto Das (advisors: Divy Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi), University of California – Santa BarbaraHonorable Mentions:

Herodotos Herodotou (advisor: Shivnath Babu), Duke University

Wenchao Zhou (advisor: Boon Thau Loo), University of Pennsylvania

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2012 Winner: Ryan Johnson (advisor: Anastasia Ailamaki), Carnegie Mellon UniversityHonorable Mention:

Bogdan Alexe (advisor: Wang-Chiew Tan), University of California – Santa Cruz[award citation]
2011 Winner: Stratos Idreos, Centrum Wiskunde and InformaticaHonorable Mentions:

Todd Green, University of Pennsylvania

Karl Schnaitter, University of California – Santa Cruz
2010 Winner: Christopher Re (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of WashingtonHonorable Mentions:

Soumyadeb Mitra (advisor: Marianne Winslett), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Fabian Suchanek (advisor: Gerhard Weikum), Max Planck Institute for Informatics

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2009 Winner: Daniel Abadi (advisor: Samuel Madden), MITHonorable Mentions:

Bee-Chung Chen (advisor: Raghu Ramakrishnan), University of Wisconsin at Madison

Ashwin Machanavajjhala (advisor: Johannes Gehrke), Cornell University

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2008 Winner: Ariel Fuxman (advisor: Renee J. Miller), University of TorontoHonorable Mentions:

Cong Yu (advisor: H. V. Jagadish), University of Michigan

Nilesh Dalvi (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington
2007 Winner: Boon Thau Loo (advisor: Joseph M. Hellerstein and Ion Stoica), University of California at BerkeleyHonorable Mentions:

Xifeng Yan (advisor: Jiawei Han), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Martin Theobald (advisor: Gerhard Weikum), Saarland University
2006 Winner: Gerome Miklau (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of WashingtonRunners-ups:

Marcelo Arenas (advisor: Leonid Libkin), University of Toronto

Yanlei Diao (advisor: Michael Franklin), University of California at Berkeley