News

Jennifer Bergner, the NASA Hubbell-Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, has been awarded the LAD 2021 Dissertation Prize for the dissertation, “Tracing Organic Complexity During Star and Planet Formation,” which she wrote under Professor Karin Öberg at Harvard University. Bergner is being cited “for the discovery of new, cold pathways to complex molecule formation and for creative, interdisciplinary explorations of the origins of organic molecules during planet formation.” She will give an invited lecture at a meeting of the Laboratory Astrophysics Division.

New studies by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and UChicago Professor of Chemistry LuPing Yu shed light on organic frameworks for advanced solar cells and detectors.

Assistant Professor Chao Gao receives 2021 IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award for "groundbreaking contributions to robust statistics, including establishing connections with generative adversarial networks, network analysis, and high-dimensional statistical inference.” 

Assistant Professor of the Geophysical Sciences Edwin Kite has co-authored a paper finding there might be many planets with water-rich atmospheres. His study finds way that hot, rocky planets in other systems could form and keep atmospheres.

An international collaboration co-led by UChicago managed to recreate—for the first time in the laboratory—the growth of magnetic fields at extreme conditions similar to those in the hot plasma that fills clusters of galaxies. Using powerful lasers, the pioneering experiments capture how physical process called turbulent dynamo grows these fields.

PSD's March spotlight is Qiti Guo, PhD, Senior Scientist with the James Franck Institute. Qiti has been with UChicago for over 28 years, since 1992.

Professor of Chemistry Yamuna Krishnan founded start up Esya Labs with funding from UChicago Polsky. The pioneering effort develops tools for the early, precise, and cost-effective detection of neurodegenerative diseases to support drug discovery and personalized medicine efforts.

This article from UChicago News explains the solar wind, or the complex swirls and eddies of particles that travel about a million miles per hour as they pass Earth. Famous UChicago astrophysicist Eugene Parker first hypothesized solar wind and now current research by Profs. Olinto and Rosner carry this work forward.

Bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, UChicago study authored by Professor Greg Engel finds. Photosynthetic bacteria adapt to environment by using quantum mechanics to steer energy.

Ahmed Bou-Rabee was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and spent the first half of his life in Kuwait and the second in the United States, mostly in California. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he received an undergraduate degree in math and a master’s degree in statistics from Stanford. He has been at UChicago for five years as a doctoral student in the statistics program. Ahmed studies probability and partial differential equations.

The Brown Science Foundation today announced physicists David Hsieh of Caltech and William Irvine of the University of Chicago as recipients of the inaugural Brown Investigator Award. The award, which recognizes curiosity-driven basic research in chemistry and physics, supports the investigators’ research with $2 million over five years to their respective universities. Hsieh and Irvine were nominated by their institutions and chosen from a candidate pool of mid-career scientists at 10 top-rated research universities.
 

The Giant Magellan Telescope announces fabrication of the sixth of seven of the world’s largest monolithic mirrors. This is a major step for the partnership for which UChicago is a founder.

UChicago team that built MAROON-X instrument confirm third-nearest star with a planet—and it’s rocky like Earth.
 

UChicago Global Digest spotlights geophysical scientist Clara Blättler in a faculty profile.

Prof. Stephen Stigler retired after over forty years at the University of Chicago. Over his long career, he has investigated the history of the development of mathematics and statistical methods, in relation to problems in many fields—from astronomy to medicine to social sciences and psychology.