Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens, and Domagoj Vrgoč are among the seven recipients of the 2026 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation, presented this month at ICALP 2026 at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The award — given jointly by ACM SIGLOG, EATCS, and EACSL — recognizes work published within the last 25 years that has shown outstanding depth, originality, and impact on logic and computation. The 2026 award honors three papers for laying the foundations of logical languages for querying property graphs, foundations that were adopted into the SQL and GQL international standards within a decade.

Libkin, Martens, and Vrgoč were recognized for Querying Graphs with Data (Journal of the ACM, 2016), which the award citation credits with supplying one of the key constructs the emerging standards needed: the ability to query graph topology and data at the same time.

Graph databases now sit at the center of enterprise data infrastructure, reflected in two recent ISO standards: SQL/PGQ, which extends SQL to query property graphs, and GQL, the only query language ISO has standardized since SQL itself. As the citation points out, unlike SQL — whose core rests on first-order logic — SQL/PGQ and GQL developed in close to a theoretical vacuum, and the standards committee looked to the research literature for guidance.

Leonid Libkin represents RelationalAI on the standards committee responsible for the SQL and GQL standards.

Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth) and Domagoj Vrgoč (PUC Chile) are members of our RelationalAI research network.

Congratulations to all seven recipients on this well-deserved recognition.