Call for Peter Chen Award Nominees

Initiated by Elsevier in 2008 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the journal, Data and Knowledge Engineering, the Peter P. Chen Award honors one person each year for his or her outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling. The winner will receive a plaque and a prize of $5000 composed of: (1) $3,750 sponsored by the Elsevier Publishing Company; (2) $1,250 contributed by the ER Steering Committee, which is primarily meant for supporting the participation of the Awardee to give a keynote speech at the ER Conference.

Formally, these are the criteria for the Award:

• Research: how well the nominee has helped advance the field of conceptual modeling with his/her intellectual contributions.
• Service: participation in the organization of conceptual-modeling-related meetings and conferences and participation in editorial boards of conceptual-modeling-related journals.
• Education: how effectively the nominee has mentored doctoral students in conceptual modeling, produced researchers from their labs, and also helped mentor young people in the field.
• Contribution to practice: the extent to which the nominee has contributed to technology transfer, commercialization, and industrial projects.
• International reputation: the extent to which the nominee's work is visible to and has diffused into the international community.

Previous Peter P. Chen Award laureates are:

• 2025: Ron Weber, University of Queensland, Australia
• 2024: Heinrich Mayr, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
• 2023: Nicola Guarino, National Research Council, Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), Italy
• 2022: Maurizio Lenzerini, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
• 2021: Sudha Ram, University of Arizona, USA
• 2020: Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• 2019: Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada
• 2018: Veda Storey, Georgia State University, USA
• 2017: Yair Wand, University of British Columbia, Canada
• 2016: Oscar Pastor, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
• 2015: Il-Yeol Song, Drexel University, USA
• 2014: Antonio Luz Furtado, Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• 2013: Carlo Batini, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• 2012: Stefano Spaccapietra, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland
• 2011: Tok Wang Ling, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• 2010: John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto, Canada
• 2009: David Embley, BYU, USA
• 2008: Bernhard Thalheim, University of Kiel, Germany

Nominations should be sent by Friday, June 5, 2026 to the ER Steering Committee Chair Giancarlo Guizzardi who will manage the selection process.

Each nomination should be accompanied by a summary statement about the nominee and a justification for the nomination. We highlight that the Peter Chen Award is the highest honour granted by the Conceptual Modeling community. As such, the laureates are individuals with clear, substantive and potentially transformative contributions to the field - ideally contributions that can be captured by statements in the style of other top-honors (e.g., Maryam Mirzakhani - "For her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces” or Barbara Liskov – “For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing).

Based on the criteria for the award and on the case made for the nomination, the selection committee will select the best candidate among the nominees. Selection committee members and the ER Steering Committee chair are not eligible for the award.

The winner will be immediately announced after selection. The award winner will be invited to be a keynote speaker at ER 2026 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.