Recent PhD graduate Negar Arabzadeh has won the Early Career Researcher Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR).  

Negar won the award in SIGIR’s Community Engagement category, which recognizes outstanding professional service in the information retrieval community. The award ceremony took place at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, held in Melbourne, Australia.

Negar Arabzadeh (on right) at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.

Over the years, Negar has spearheaded several workshops, tutorials, and community events within the IR community. She has played a hand in broadening access to IR community discussions. For example, she organized and moderated the SIGIR Virtual Forum, which benefited researchers who have fewer opportunities to attend in-person conferences. Moreover, she actively mentors junior IR researchers and students and has participated in panels and doctoral symposia.

Notably, she organized a large-scale competition at the 2026 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), creating exciting opportunities for up-and-coming and veteran researchers. This past year, Negar took up several conference leadership and service roles, including the Reproducibility Track Chair and Area Chair for SIGIR, the Workshop Track Chair for the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), and the Publicity Chair for the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) 2026. Overall, she regularly participates in program committee and reviewing service across major IR conferences.

“When I attended my first SIGIR as a first-year PhD student, even just attending a conference and putting myself out there felt a little scary,” says Negar. “I remember seeing people being recognized by the community and thinking, ‘There’s no way that could ever be me.’  So now, receiving the SIGIR Early Career Researcher Award for Community Engagement honestly feels a little unbelievable.”

“SIGIR has been such an important part of my journey as a researcher, and over the years, community engagement, mentorship, and creating opportunities for others have become a big part of how I think about my role in research. Being recognized for that by a community that has given me so much is especially meaningful.”

Negar also presented several research papers at the conference, from AI-based query reformulation to retrieval agents.

This year has been one of recognition for Negar. In May, she won third place in the 2026 Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize for her dissertation on efficient and accurate information retrieval and access systems. She also received a Best Paper Award at ECIR  2026 for ReFormeR, a novel tool for query reformulation.

The SIGIR award represents something close to her heart: lifelong community support and mentorship.

“One thing I would tell PhD students, especially those early in their journey, is to make an effort to connect with people,” says Negar. “I know it can be hard at first to go to conferences, introduce yourself, and put yourself out there. I definitely felt that way too. But trust me, it becomes much easier very quickly, and those connections can become one of the most rewarding parts of your research journey.”