Professor Yizhou Zhang has been awarded the 2026 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Junior Prize. The award recognizes a junior researcher who has demonstrated exceptional promise in programming languages research through impactful early-career contributions.
“Congratulations to Yizhou on being this year’s Dahl-Nygaard Prize winner in the junior researcher category,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “This recognition from his peers reflects the originality, depth and increasing impact of his research on programming languages.”
Established in 2004 by the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO), the prize honours Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, whose design of the programming languages Simula I and Simula 67 laid the foundation for object-oriented programming. Alongside the Junior Prize, AITO awards a Senior Prize for outstanding career contributions.
The award will be presented at ECOOP, Europe’s longest-standing annual programming languages conference. This year’s event takes place in Brussels, Belgium, from June 29 to July 3.
Professor Yizhou Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research home base is programming languages, extending into formal verification and AI. His recent research interests span language design, compilers, machine-assisted proofs, neuro-symbolic AI, and probabilistic computing.
AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize citation
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.