PSD Academic Accolades and Honors

Astronomy & Astrophysics

• John Carlstrom has been selected for the 2024 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics, 1/11/24

Chemistry

• Scott Snyder received ’23–’24 Marian and Stuart Rice Research Award, 2/23/24
• Assistant Professor Anna Wuttig has received a NSF CAREER Award, which provides funding to pursue the "development of self-healing electrocatalysts via a tunable non-covalent design" over the next five years, 1/8/24
• Benoît Roux is the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Kenneth S. Cole award, 1/5/24
• Chuan He awarded the 24-25 Tina's Wish Award for new ways to "clinically evaluate asymptomatic adnexal masses," 1/4/24 

Computer Science

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Haifeng Xu has been named one of the AI2050 Early Career Fellows by Schmidt Sciences, 3/4/24
• Assistant Professor Yanjing Li Awarded NSF CAREER Grant for Innovative Computer Architecture and Deep Learning Research, 2/26/24
• Nick Feamster's NetMicroscope, a startup that monitors and corrects network performance, recently was awarded $200,000 from the George Shultz Innovation Fund, 1/23/24
• Three computer science professors have received named professorships: Henry Hoffmann has been named Liew Family Chair and Bo Li and Ce Zhang have been named the first Neubauer Associate Professors of Data Science, 1/3/24

Geophysical Sciences

• Sunyoung Park earned a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields, 2/20/24
• Assistant Professor Clara Blättler has received a NSF CAREER Award, which provides funding over the next five years to “improve understanding of Earth’s evolution following the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere approximately 2.3 billion years ago,” 2/7/24

Statistics

• Yuehaw Khoo earned a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields, 2/20/24
• Yuehaw Khoo has won an NSF CAREER award, 2/15/24
• Rebecca Willett awarded the SIAG DATA Career prize, 2/10/24
• Stephen Stigler has been awarded the 2023 Neumann Prize for his book Casanova's Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2022, 1/17/24

Data Science Institute

• Aloni Cohen awarded Outstanding Paper by the Association for Algorithmic Learning Theory for “Private PAC Learning May be Harder than Online Learning,” 2/29/24

Astronomy & Astrophysics

• Daniel Holz was named a Highly Cited Researcher in Web of Science's 2023 report, 11/15/23
• John Carlstrom’s CMB-S4 project has been awarded $3.7 million by the NSF for the first year of a grant that may provide up to $21.4 million to design a set of next-generation telescopes, 10/26/23
• Edward "Rocky" W. Kolb received the American Physical Society’s 2024 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, 10/24/23 
• Marcela Carena (Physics), Wendy Freedman, and Angela Olinto were named Notable Women in STEM by Crain's Chicago Business, 9/6/23

Chemistry

• Mark Levin won the 2023 Dream Chemistry Award, 12/5/23 
• Wenbin Lin was elected to the European Academy of Sciences as a foreign member, 12/5/23
• Anna Wuttig received an NSF CAREER grant, 11/28/23
• Highly Cited Researchers in Web of Science's 2023 report, 11/15/23
  • Qing Dai 
  • Chuan He 
  • Wenbin Lin
  • Jiwoong Park
• Bryan Dickinson was awarded $350,000 in seed funding from the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust’s Catalyst Award program for a project called “Development of targeted translational activating oligos to treat SYNGAP1 deficiency-related neurological disorders,” 10/26/23. Dickinson was one of two UChicago nominees (the maximum number allowed), and both won.
• Ka Yee Lee was named a 2023 Biophysical Society Fellow, 10/10/2023. This honor is given to only seven scientists "who have demonstrated sustained excellence in science and have contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics."  Ka Yee was honored for her impactful work on the structure and stability of lipid membranes and their interactions with proteins.
• Steven Sibener received the Ira Remsen Award given by the Maryland section of ACS, 10/9/23
• Dmitri Talapin and John Anderson awarded $1.8M by NSF for M-STAR (MXene Synthesis, Tunability and Reactivity) Center of Chemical Innovation program as a Phase 1 Research Center, 9/27/23
• Chuan He selected as first laureate for Science Breakthrough award by Falling Walls, in Life Sciences, 9/13/2023
• ACS awards, 9/7/23
  • Viresh Rawal received the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry
  • Guangbin Dong received the Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator 
  • Mark Levin received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award

Computer Science

• Assistant Professor Robert Rand received an Air Force Young Investigator Grant, 12/19/23
• Ce Zhang’s startup Together (a startup creating open source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure) announced that it closed a $102.5 million Series A funding round, 11/29/23
• SAND Lab won a 2023 Chicago Innovation Award, 11/16/23
• Department Chair Hank Hoffmann and Neubauer Professor Nick Feamster (along with students and an alum) were inducted into the Samsung Hall of Fame for identifying vulnerability in SmartTVs, 10/30/23
• Rick Stevens testified in Congress about a major report he co-authored called AI for Science, Energy, and Security, 9/7/23
• USENIX Security Symposium awards, 9/5/23
  • Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng’s Glaze Project was chosen for both the Internet Defense Prize and a Distinguished Paper Award for its ability to protect artist’s work from being replicated
  • A paper by Blase Ur’s SUPERgroup received the Distinguished Paper Award for research on the vulnerability of the university’s passwords to attacks leveraging password reuse

Geophysical Sciences

• NSF has awarded UChicago a $35 million contract to operate a new facility specializing in the application of a cyclic particle accelerator called Synchrotron for Earth and Environmental Science, with Andy Campbell as PI, 9/1/23
• Tiffany Shaw has been awarded $573,328 from NOAA for a 3-year project to study whether climate change observations are consistent with climate change predictions from the past 40 years, 9/1/23

Mathematics

• Benson Farb was awarded the 2024 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (AMS), 11/28/23
• Luis Silvestre was named a 2024 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), 11/1/23

Physics

• Young-Kee Kim is the 2024 APS President, 1/1/24
• David DeMille has received a grant for small-scale physics research projects from the Moore Foundation along with the Simons Foundation, Sloan Foundation, and Templeton Foundation, 12/11/23
• David DeMille received the American Physical Society’s 2024 Norman F. Ramsey Prize in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, and in Precision Tests of Fundamental Laws and Symmetries, 10/24/23
• Bonnie Fleming was one of 80 projects in high energy physics that received a total of $137 million in funding from the Department of Energy, 10/19/23
• See Notable Women in STEM Award in Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Margaret Gardel and Arvind Murugan awarded $15.5M by NSF to establish Center of Living Systems, 9/12/23
• See National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology award in Statistics

Statistics

• Rina Foygel Barber was named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, 10/04/23
• Rebecca Willett (Stats/CS/DSI), Margaret Gardel (Physics), Stephanie Palmer (Physics), and Mary Silber (Stats) receive $50 million to establish the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology jointly with NU, 9/14/23
  • Rebecca Willett named Deputy Director of new NSF National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, 9/14/23

Biophysical Sciences

• Tao Pan was named a Highly Cited Researcher in Web of Science's 2023 report, 11/15/23

Data Science Institute

• Data Science Institute awarded $520k by 11th Hour Project to continue funding ongoing community-based data science projects, 10/23
• The Internet Equity Initiative’s Chicagoland Broadband Equity and Inclusion Summit was featured as an event on Politico’s Illinois Playbook, 9/27/23
• The Data Science Institute, in partnership with Truman Community College, awarded $1M from NSF for educational training program
• David Uminsky presented on “Training the Impact Data Scientists of Tomorrow” at the Impact Data Science Summit in New York, 9/22/23
• See National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology award in Statistics
• The DSI’s Open Spatial Lab was awarded $1.7 million by the US Forest Service as a collaborating partner with Groundwork Bridgeport, part of the Groundwork USA network of community trusts, to innovate new data collection, monitoring, and assessment tools for a major tree planting initiative in urban Bridgeport, CT, 9/21/23
• The DSI’s Open Spatial Lab was awarded $250k by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation- Urban Institute for work using local data to address structural racism, 9/1/23

KICP

• Katrin Heitmann was named a 2023 Fellow of the American Physical Society, 11/14/23