The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2026

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2026.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Peter Müller.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Yizhou Zhang.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2026 will be given during ECOOP 2026 held in held in Brussels, Belgium, 29 June – 3 July 2026.

Peter Müller (ETH Zürich)

Over many years, Peter Müller has made fundamental and sustained contributions to the practical deductive verification of imperative, object-oriented, and modern systems programs. He is best known for leading the development of Viper, a highly influential intermediate verification language and toolchain that has enabled modular, automated reasoning based on separation logic and related techniques. Through Viper and the tools built on top of it, Peter and his collaborators have brought sound verification to real programming languages including Rust, Go, Python or Java making verification more accessible to software developers while advancing the state of the art in both theory and practice. His work has had broad impact on the programming languages and formal methods communities, and his leadership, mentorship, and long-standing service have further strengthened the field.

Yizhou Zhang (University of Waterloo)

Yizhou Zhang is recognized for a series of original and influential contributions at the intersection of programming languages, mechanized metatheory, and effectful programming. He introduced object-oriented ideas, most notably family polymorphism, into interactive theorem provers, yielding proof languages with a new level of extensibility that scales from mechanized metatheory to full compiler verification. He also pioneered lexical effect handlers, establishing key design principles and implementation techniques that have since shaped subsequent systems. Together with important contributions to the semantics and implementation of probabilistic programming languages, Yizhou's work shows exceptional depth, creativity, and independence, marking him as a rising leader in programming languages research.

The Members of the 2026 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee are:

• Bruno Oliveira (chair)

• Atsushi Igarashi (vice-chair)

• Jonathan Aldrich

• Karim Ali

• Görel Hedin

• Amir Shaikhha

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. As of January 2021, it has 59 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Davide Ancona.