Wang Qichen Honoured with 2026 ACM SIGMOD Outstanding Reviewer Award

NTU College of Computing and Data Science Assistant Professor Wang Qichen has received the 2026 ACM SIGMOD Outstanding Reviewer Award.

“Receiving this award is very encouraging to me,” said Wang. “Database is a welcoming research community, and I have benefited greatly from being part of it, both scientifically and professionally. I'm glad the community has recognised my reviewing efforts.”

The ACM SIGMOD Conference is one of the premier international conferences in database management and data systems. It brings together leading researchers and practitioners from around the world to present advances in data management, query processing and optimisation, database systems, and emerging data-intensive applications. Wang has served as an external reviewer for SIGMOD for more than eight years, with 2026 as his first year serving as a Program Committee member for SIGMOD.

In 2026, SIGMOD 2026 accepted 349 papers out of 1,049 submissions; all submissions were reviewed by experts in the field, such as Wang, on a voluntary basis. Careful review of submitted papers is important not only to maintain a high standard of quality for the conference, but also to help authors understand how to improve their work.

Wang was one of four reviewers who received this award, out of more than 300 reviewers. This award recognises reviewers who made exceptional contributions to the peer-review process, with recipients distinguished by the quality, rigour, and constructiveness of their reviews and by recognition from multiple associate editors.

Wang’s reviewing philosophy demonstrates his commitment to providing the thorough, insightful, and useful reviews for which he received the award.

“When reviewing a paper, I usually try to go beyond simply reading the manuscript and giving a score,” Wang said. “When necessary, I participate actively in discussions with the authors, check technical details, and sometimes examine the code or reproduce parts of the experiments.”

Rather than viewing paper reviewing as an extra task in addition to the work of being a professor and researcher, Wang sees his service as a reviewer as a crucial part of being part of the research community.

“As an author, I have benefited greatly from careful and detailed reviews of my own work,” Wang said. “I still remember one submission for which the review comments were detailed, reasonable, and insightful, and they helped us substantially improve the work. Experiences like this made me want to give something back to the community and provide the same kind of useful feedback to other researchers.”

The act of reviewing also improves the researcher’s own work, Wang said.

“I see reviewing and research as closely connected. Reviewing gives me an opportunity to understand new ideas in the field at an early stage, but it also encourages me to examine research claims carefully and from different perspectives.”