Andy Pavlo, assistant professor of computer science, has received the 2014 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award, which recognizes the best dissertation in the field of databases for the previous year.

Pavlo earned his Ph.D. in computer science last year at Brown University. His thesis, “On Scalable Transaction Execution in Partitioned Main Memory Database Management Systems,” was based on H-Store, an experimental, distributed main memory database management system.

H-Store was the first of a new class of database systems, known as NewSQL, that support highly-concurrent workloads without giving up the transactional guarantees of traditional, relational systems. The system was later commercialized as VoltDB in 2009.

The award was presented June 26 at the ACM Special Interest Group on the Management of Data Conference in Snowbird, Utah. He shared this year’s prize with Aditya Parameswaran of Stanford University.