SIGMOD 2026 New Researchers Symposium
- Panel: June 1 (Monday) 7PM - 8:30PM. Location: TBD
Abstract
Every year, the SIGMOD Conference features a symposium offering advice on launching a career in data management. These sessions are both informative and engaging, primarily aimed at graduate students, junior faculty, and early-career industry researchers, while consistently attracting a broader audience. This year, we will host a panel and two flash mentoring sessions (see also 2026 SIGMOD Mentorship Program).
Panel
The panel topic this year is “The Strategic Researcher: Choosing Problems That Shape Fields, Not Just Papers.” We have assembled an outstanding panel representing diverse perspectives on how researchers identify impactful problems and navigate the tradeoffs between short-term publication goals and long-term field-building contributions.
The panel will begin with each panelist sharing their experiences and perspectives on what it means to be a strategic researcher—how to identify and pursue problems that have lasting impact, balance ambition with feasibility, and make choices that shape research directions rather than just individual papers. This will be followed by a moderated Q&A session and an open forum for audience questions.
Panel Moderators
Brit Youngmann (Technion) and Sayan Ranu (IIT Delhi).
Panelists
Alexandra Meliou is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to joining UMass, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington. Alexandra received her PhD degree from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received recognitions for research, teaching, and service, including a CACM Research Highlight, an ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, multiple Distinguished Reviewer Awards, and a Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. Her research focuses on data provenance, causality, explanations, data quality, and algorithmic fairness.
Immanuel Trummer is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. His research focuses on making data analysis more efficient and more user-friendly. In particular, he studies novel use cases for LLMs in the database area and ways to scale up processing via LLMs to large data sets. His papers were selected for "Best of VLDB", "Best of SIGMOD", and the CACM research highlight award. He received an NSF CAREER grant and multiple Google Faculty Research Awards.
Vidya Setlur is the Senior Director of Tableau Research, where she leads a team exploring data visualization, multimodal interaction, applied machine learning, and natural language processing. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Graphics from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on how language and semantics can inform meaningful visual depictions of data. Before joining Tableau in 2012, she was a Principal Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center. Since then, she has contributed to various projects on semantics, data exploration systems, and the company’s first natural language feature, Ask Data. Vidya is the co-author of Functional Aesthetics for Data Visualization and is passionate about mentoring women and other underrepresented communities in technology and research.
Fatemeh Nargesian is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester and a graduate of the University of Toronto. Her research centers on data management for AI, with a focus on algorithms and systems for data acquisition. She works on data-efficient AI, including dataset summarization, coreset construction, and slice finding; distribution-aware data integration; and dataset discovery in data lakes. She is also interested in scientific time-series management, aiming to scale higher-order correlation analysis for interactive data exploration in domains such as climate science and neuroscience.
Boris Glavic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he leads the UIC DBGroup. His research spans database systems, including data provenance, data integration, query execution and optimization, and data curation, with an emphasis on building practical systems grounded in strong theoretical foundations.
