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.
| 2017 | Winners: Peter Bailis (advisors: Joseph Hellerstein, Ion Stoica, and Ali Ghodsi), University of California, Berkeley Honorable Mention: Immanuel Trummer (advisor: Christoph Koch) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne [award citation] |
| 2016 | Winners: Paris Koutris (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington Honorable Mentions: Pinar Tozun (advisor: Anastasia Ailamaki) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Alvin Cheung (advisors: Sam Madden and Armando Solar-Lezama) MIT [award citation] |
| 2015 | Winners: Alexander Thomson (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale University Honorable Mentions: Marina Drosou (advisor: Evaggelia Pitoura), University of Ioannina and Karthik Ramachandra (advisor: S. Sudarshan), IIT Bombay [award citation] |
| 2014 | Winners: Aditya Parameswaran (advisor: Hector Garcia-Molina), Stanford University and Andy 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 Barbara Honorable Mentions: Herodotos Herodotou (advisor: Shivnath Babu), Duke University and Wenchao Zhou (advisor: Boon Thau Loo), University of Pennsylvania [award citation] |
| 2012 | Winner: Ryan Johnson (advisor: Anastasia Ailamaki), Carnegie Mellon University Honorable Mention: Bogdan Alexe (advisor: Wang-Chiew Tan), University of California – Santa Cruz [award citation] |
| 2011 | Winner: Stratos Idreos, Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica Honorable Mentions: Todd Green, University of Pennsylvania; Karl Schnaitter, University of California – Santa Cruz |
| 2010 | Winner: Christopher Re (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington Honorable Mentions: Soumyadeb Mitra (advisor: Marianne Winslett), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Fabian Suchanek (advisor: Gerhard Weikum), Max Planck Institute for Informatics [award citation] |
| 2009 | Winner: Daniel Abadi (advisor: Samuel Madden), MIT Honorable Mentions: Bee-Chung Chen (advisor: Raghu Ramakrishnan), University of Wisconsin at Madison; Ashwin Machanavajjhala (advisor: Johannes Gehrke), Cornell University [award citation] |
| 2008 | Winner: Ariel Fuxman (advisor: Renee J. Miller), University of Toronto Honorable 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 Berkeley Honorable 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 Washington Runners-up: Marcelo Arenas (advisor: Leonid Libkin), University of Toronto; Yanlei Diao (advisor: Michael Franklin), University of California at Berkeley |