News

Computer Science Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes explores what’s possible with technologies that sit on the body: wearable devices that influence a user’s motion and perception. His vision of human-computer integration creates new interactive devices that “borrow” parts of the user’s body for input and output to expand potential and accessibility. With a new NSF CAREER grant, Lopes will embark upon the next phase of that mission, inventing and testing technologies that interface with smell, touch, temperature, and other senses.

Rebecca Maxcy, director of the UChicago Financial Education Initiative, tells the NYT courses need to go beyond writing a check or filing taxes, to discuss financial systems and how personal values and attitudes about money influence behavior.

Four Physical Sciences Division students have been awarded 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships: Jazmine Jefferson in astronomy, Antares Chen in computer science, Lauren Weiss in physics, and Melissa Adrian in statistics. Honorable mentions were awarded to Patrick Kelly in chemistry and George Iskander in physics. Each fellowship provides three years of support during a five-year fellowship period. For each of the three years of support, NSF provides a $34,000 stipend and $12,000 cost of education allowance to the University.

Postdoctoral fellow Darryl Seligman and student, Megan Mansfield, of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, published an April Fools paper on arXiv that uses a Python algoritm to detect "emotional trends in the repertoire of Taylor Swift" and are receiving national attention, including mentions in Business Insider and The New York Post.

Professors Mark Rivers and Stephen Sutton of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences have been awarded the 2021 APSUO Arthur H. Compton Award. The two scientists co-directed the design, construction, and operation of the GeoSoilEnviroCARS (GSECARS) Sector 13 at the Advanced Photon Source, which provides users with high-pressure diffraction and spectroscopy, x-ray microprobe, x-ray absorption spectroscopy, and microtomography research techniques.

Prof. Rebecca Willett, Departments of Computer Science and Statistics, selected as a SIAM 2021 Fellow. She was recognized for her contributions to mathematical foundations of machine learning, large-scale data science, and computational imaging.

Incoming postdoctoral researcher in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, Ellen Price, Harvard'21, has been selected for the Heising-Simons Foundation 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The fellowship provides $375,000 in support for her research focused on protoplanetary disks—the birthplaces of planets.
 

This month, PSD community members have been featured for their work to confirm the third-nearest star with a planet, prove that bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, and recreate how magnetic fields grow in clusters of galaxies. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from March 2021.

Midway3 takes off, fueling computational discovery of all stripes at UChicago. The new campus high-performance computing cluster, optimized for deep learning, goes into production this month—providing both power and the latest approaches for enabling discovery and innovation.

Pioneering educator and longtime UChicago faculty member, Max S. Bell, AM’58, AMT’59, was the co-author of the definitive math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics. He and his wife and research partner, Jean, used the royalties to help establish what would become UChicago STEM Ed. He died Mar. 6, at age 90.

Why Oumuamua, the interstellar visitor, looks eerily familiar. Deptartment of Geophysical Sciences postdoctoral fellow, Darryl Seligman, comments for the New York Times.

Prof. Neil Shubin, a pioneering University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and bestselling author, has been selected to give this year’s Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture.

Fermilab user and University of Chicago physics student Ihar Lobach explains how his team used Fermilab’s IOTA electron storage ring to glean insights that can be difficult to obtain on an electron beam and how this proof of principle could benefit the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade at Argonne National Laboratory.

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.