Pittsburgh, PA — The Carnegie Mellon Database Group is pleased to announce that CS alumnus Prof. Huanchen Zhang (now faculty at Tsinghua University) has won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. This honor is conferred for the best dissertation in the field of databases for the previous year. Huanchen’s thesis, entitled “Memory-Efficient Search Trees for Database Management Systems”, develops new methods for reducing the memory overhead of search trees. Huanchen’s thesis advisers were CMU CS faculty members David Andersen and Andy Pavlo.

As part of his dissertation work at CMU, Huanchen received the 2018 SIGMOD Best Paper Award for his SuRF: Practical Range Query Filtering with Fast Succinct Tries paper. This work has also been featured in the Communications of the ACM.

Huanchen is the second CMU Ph.D. student to win the SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award in the last three years; the previous CMU winner was Joy Arulraj in 2019. Since the award’s inception in 2006, CMU students and faculty have won the SIGMOD best dissertation award in databases four times:

• 2012 – Ryan Johnson (CMU Ph.D.)
• 2014 – Andy Pavlo (CMU Faculty)
• 2019 – Joy Arulraj (CMU Ph.D.)
• 2021 – Huanchen Zhang (CMU Ph.D.)

The awards ceremony is on Thursday June 24 at the 2021 SIGMOD Conference.