News

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.

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.