The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize

In 2004, AITO established an annual prize in the name of the Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard to honor their pioneering work on object-orientation. See the new statutes of the prize for the award process approved on October 2021.

The prizes are named after Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, whose pioneering conceptual and technical work in the sixties shaped that view of programming and modeling which is now known as object-orientation.

One prize is awarded to a junior researcher (who has obtained the PhD degree at most 7 years before the award year, excluding any parental leave), and one prize to a senior researcher. The senior researcher should have made a significant long-term contribution to the field in research or engineering. The junior researcher should have made a promising contribution to the field through a paper, a thesis, or a prototype implementation.

Call for Dahl Nygaard Award Nominations 2026, deadline 30 November 2025

Nomination of candidates for next year's prize are now open. Please fill in the Google form for your nomination of deserving candidates for the Dahl-Nygaard prizes 2025 (for details see the statutes for the prizes).

Recipients of the Prizes

2025, Bergen
Mira Mezini (senior prize), and Amir Shaikhha (junior prize)

2024, Vienna
Rachid Guerraoui (senior prize), and Alvin Cheung (junior prize)

2023, Seattle
Sophia Drosspoulou (senior prize), and Heather Miller (junior prize)

2022, Berlin
Dan Ingalls (senior prize), and Magnus Madsen (junior prize)

2021, Aarhus
Kim Bruce (senior prize), and Karim Ali (junior prize)

2020, Berlin

Jan Vitek (senior prize), and Jonathan Bell (junior prize)

2019, London

Laurie Hendren (senior prize), and Ilya Sergey (junior prize)

2018, Amsterdam

Lars Bak (senior prize), and Guoqing Harry Xu (junior prize)

2017, Barcelona

Gilad Bracha (senior prize), and Ross Tate (junior prize)

2016, Rome

James Noble (senior prize), and Emina Torlak (junior prize)

2015, Prague

Bjarne Stroustrup (senior prize), and Alexander J. Summers (junior prize)

2014, Uppsala

William Cook (senior prize), Robert France (senior prize), and Tudor Gîrba (junior prize)

2013, Montpellier

Oscar Nierstrasz (senior prize) and Matthew Parkinson (junior prize)

2012, Beijing

Gregor Kiczales (senior prize) and Tobias Wrigstad (junior prize)

2011, Lancaster

Craig Chambers (senior prize) and Atsushi Igarashi (junior prize)

2010, Maribor

Doug Lea (senior prize) and Erik Ernst (junior prize)

2009, Genoa

David Ungar (senior prize)

2008, Paphos

Akinori Yonezawa (senior prize) and Wolfgang De Meuter (junior prize)

2007, Berlin

Luca Cardelli (senior prize) and Jonathan Aldrich (junior prize)

2006, Nantes

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and (posthumously) John Vlissides

2005, Glasgow

Bertrand Meyer (senior prize) and Gail Murphy (junior prize)