ACM SIGMICRO: Dissertation Award

Eligibility

Eligible dissertations must have been successfully defended and deposited in the previous calendar year. Each nominated dissertation must be on a topic relevant to computer microarchitecture. The determination of whether a thesis is within scope for the award will be made by the SIGMICRO Dissertation Award Committee.

A dissertation can be nominated for both the SIGMICRO Dissertation Award and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. However, a dissertation that has received the SIGARCH Dissertation Award is ineligible for nomination.

Application Requirements

Nominations should be made in the form of an email addressed to the Chair of the Dissertation Award Committee (Pradip Bose; pbose@us.ibm.com) with the subject 2024 SIGMICRO Dissertation Award Nomination. Self nominations are not allowed. The following materials are required for the nomination:

English language copy of the thesis.
A statement from the nominator, limited to two pages, addressing why the nominee's dissertation should receive this award. This should address the significance of the dissertation, and not simply repeat information in the thesis abstract.
Three letters of support, limited to two pages each. Supporting letters should be included from experts in the field who can provide additional insights or evidence of the dissertation's impact. The nominator/advisor may not write a letter of support. The letter should also contain the qualification of the endorser and his/her role with respect to the nominee. If a letter writer is supporting more than one nomination, they may be asked to rank those nominations.
A list of publications contributing to thesis.
Suggested citation if the candidate is selected. This should be a concise statement (maximum of 25 words) describing the key technical contribution for which the candidate merits this award. Note that the final wording for awardees will be at the discretion of the Dissertation Award Committee.

The nominator is responsible for ensuring that all nomination materials reach the Dissertation Award Committee Chair, by email, by the submission deadline.

Past Recipients

Year	Recipient	More Info
2025	Mohammad Bakhshalipour	For Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture.
2025	Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı	For Enabling Efficient and Scalable DRAM Read Disturbance Mitigation via New Experimental Insights into Modern DRAM Chips.
2024	Poulami Das	For developing software and architecture techniques to increase the throughput and reliability of emerging quantum computers.
2024	Saeed Rashidi	For developing the ASTRA-sim simulation framework for identifying and addressing communication challenges in next generation distributed AI systems at scale.
2024	Nicolai Alexander Oswald (Honorable Mention)	Enabling faster, more robust design of cache coherence protocols for more systems through protocol design automation.
2023	Kazem Taram	This dissertation deepens our understanding of how microarchitectural optimizations can leak information and proposes secure yet high-performance architectures that preserve those optimizations, easing the inherent security-performance tension.