News

At the third annual South Side Science Festival, visitors of all ages were able to participate and observe fun and accessible science experiments: from opportunities to control robots and 3D printers to panels on health trends and AI to a paper airplane design contest and explosive liquid nitrogen demonstrations.

On Oct. 30, UChicago will welcome world-leading scholars and leaders from industry and government to discuss climate and energy policy and research—culminating with the official launch of a groundbreaking new climate and energy institute at UChicago.  

In light of the devastating effects of hurricane Milton, scientists are discussing the possibilities and limitations of scientific responses to climate change. UChicago Prof. David Keith, faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, comments on the potential benefits of geoengineering.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their discoveries and contributions to the field of machine learning. In this article, UChicago Prof. Rebecca Willett comments on the importance of these scientists' work for the development of AI and neural networks.

The James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled a new class of cosmic objects. They are colloquially called little red dots, and they indicate something in the early universe that had never been seen. UChicago Prof. Andrey Kravtsov speaks on the significance of this discovery. 

The U.S. Department of Energy has selected the UChicago-URA-led group Forward Discovery Group, LLC to be the new management and operators of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the nation’s leading particle physics and accelerator laboratory.

Chemistry Prof. Gregory Voth was honored by the American Chemical Society with a symposium. Over four days, more than 60 speakers from around the country, made up of researchers, friends, and colleagues, came together to present on a wide range of topics influenced by Prof. Voth’s work. 

The UChicago team led by Dr. Kyle Chard, Dr. Ian Foster, and Dr. Ben Blaiszik plans to create Globus Search, an expansion to Globus that will allow researchers to search, index, access, and manage data across multiple locations, from laptops to supercomputers.

Astronomy and Astrophysics Asst. Prof. Austin Joyce has been selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program. Prof. Joyce will use this opportunity to apply cosmological quantum field theory to understand how the universe evolved and acquired its structure.

In new research paper, co-authored by UChicago Asst. Prof. Andrew Higginbotham, scientists demonstrate that Josephson junctions dissipate energy as photons, directly measuring them using a sensitive bolometer.

In this interview, UChicago Prof. Danny Calegari discusses the role of failure in mathematics and how it propelled his latest essay published in a recent issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Two UChicago faculty members were recognized as 2024 APS Fellows. Prof. Tiffany Shaw was selected for her contributions to atmospheric dynamics and its response to climate change, while Asst. Prof. Alex Drlica-Wagner was honored for his work in observational cosmology, including groundbreaking research in dark matter science.

At the 2024 South Side Science Festival, UChicago researchers bring their work out from behind the scenes for the public to experience. Through demos, the hope is to spark interest in young minds to pursue work in science, technology, engineering, and math.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announced today the 2024 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering, including UChicago assistant professor of physics Zoe Yan. This year’s class features 20 innovative early-career scientists and engineers who will each receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. This year’s class of Fellows is pushing the boundaries of science and innovation in their fields of study, from advances in detecting and treating serious diseases to understanding how species react to changing climates to energy-efficient electronics. 

In July 2024, Meghana Ranganathan joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. Meghana, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, was previously a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working in their Ice + Climate Group led by Dr. Alexander Robel. The focus of her work was uncovering couplings between brittle and ductile behaviors of ice and their implications for ice sheet change. During that time, she spent three months doing fieldwork in Antarctica. We interviewed Meghana about her interests and experiences.