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.
| 2026 | Winners: Hangdong Zhao (Advisor: Paraschos Koutris), University of Wisconsin, Advancing Join Algorithms for Real-world Queries Wenqi Jiang (Advisor: Gustavo Alonso) ETH Zurich, Vector-Centric Machine Learning Systems: A Cross-Stack Approach Runner-Ups: Kyle Deeds, (Advisors: Dan Suciu and Magdalena Balazinska), University of Washington, Data-Aware Complexity Analysis and Program Optimization by Fine-grained Reuse and Feature Arnab Phani (Advisor: Matthias Boehm), BIFOLD and TU Berlin, Fine-grained Reuse and Feature Transformations in Machine Learning Systems Manuel Schönberger (Advisors: Wolfgang Mauerer), OTH Regensburg, A Twofold Strategy Towards Mature Quantum Data Management |
| 2025 | Winner: Peng Li (Advisor: Xu Chu, Kexin Rong), Georgia Institute of Technology Cleaning and Learning Over Dirty Tabular Data Honorable Mentions: Xuanhe Zhou (Advisor: Guoliang Li), Tsinghua University Aecio Santos (Advisor: Juliana Freire), New York University Meghdad Kurmanji (Advisor: Peter Triantafillou), University of Warwick
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| 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 Jialin Ding (Advisor: Tim Kraska), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Yisu Remy Wang (Advisor: Dan Suciu), University of Washington
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| 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 (advisor Ion Stoica), University of California, Berkeley
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| 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
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| 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
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| 2020 | Winner: Jose Faleiro (advisor: Daniel Abadi), Yale University Honorable 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 University Honorable 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 Munich Honorable 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, Berkeley Honorable Mention: Immanuel Trummer (advisor: Christoph Koch) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
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| 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
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| 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
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| 2014 | Winners: Aditya Parameswaran (advisor: Hector Garcia-Molina), Stanford University Andy Pavlo (advisors: Stan Zdonik and Michael Stonebraker), Brown University
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| 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
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| 2012 | Winner: Ryan Johnson (advisor: Anastasia Ailamaki), Carnegie Mellon University Honorable Mention: Bogdan Alexe (advisor: Wang-Chiew Tan), University of California – Santa Cruz |
| 2011 | Winner: Stratos Idreos, Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica Honorable Mentions: Todd Green, University of Pennsylvania Karl Schnaitter, University of California – Santa Cruz
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| 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
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| 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
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| 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
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| 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
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| 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 |
