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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.

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

Honorable 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 data

Runner-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 Diego

Honorable 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 Berkeley

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

[award citation]
2021 Winner: Huanchen Zhang (advisors David Andersen and Andy Pavlo), Carnegie Mellon University

Honorable 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

[award citation]
2020 Winner: Jose Faleiro (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale University

Honorable Mention:

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

[award citation]
2019 Winner: Joy Arulraj (advisor: Andy Pavlo), Carnegie Mellon University

Honorable Mention:

Bas Ketsman (advisor: Frank Neven) Hasselt University

[award citation]
2018 Winner: Viktor Leis (advisors: Thomas Neumann and Alfons Kemper), Technical University of Munich

Honorable Mentions:

Luis Galárraga (advisor: Fabian Suchanek) Télécom ParisTech

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

[award citation]
2017 Winner: 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 Winner: Paris Koutris (advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

[award citation]
2015 Winner: Alexander Thomson (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale University

Honorable Mentions:

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

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

[award citation]
2014 Winners:

Aditya Parameswaran (advisor: Hector Garcia-Molina), Stanford University

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

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-ups:

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

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