Sam Westrick, a post-doctoral researcher in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department, received the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (ACM SIGPLAN).

Westrick's thesis, "Efficient and Scalable Parallel Functional Programming Through Disentanglement," identifies a memory property called disentanglement and develops automatic memory management techniques to exploit it for improved efficiency and scalability.

The John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award is presented annually to the author of an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of programming languages. The award recognizes the contributions to computer science that Reynolds, a renowned CMU computer science professor, made during his life and encourages researchers to replicate the clarity and rigor that Reynolds embodied. It also provides a reminder of Reynolds's legacy and the difference a person can make in the field of programming language research.