The Machtey Award is given at the annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) to the author or authors of the best student paper or papers. A paper is considered a student paper if all authors are full-time students when the paper is submitted. The Program Committee decides the winner.
The award is named after Michael Machtey, who was a researcher in the computer science research community in the 1970s. The similar award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) is called the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award.