News

2022

New technique to determine age will open new era of planetary science, researchers say

October 26, 2022

meteorite close up

A group with UChicago and the Field Museum tested an instrument made by Thermo Fisher Scientific on a piece of a Martian meteorite and were able to accurately and easily date the rock using strontium isotopes.


New Schmidt Futures fellowship at UChicago to foster next generation of AI-driven scientists

October 26, 2022

Prof. Rebecca Willett (center) will serve as the faculty lead of the new fellowship program. Profs. David Freedman (left) and Joshua Frieman will serve as faculty co-leads.

A new University of Chicago initiative, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures, will train the next generation of scientists combining research in both AI and science fields, including physics, astronomy and biology.


New UpDown Project uses “intelligent data movement” to accelerate graph analytics

October 25, 2022

A figure from computer science research on speeding up graphing analytics

With a $9.2 million grant from IARPA, Andrew A. Chien will lead a team of UChicago CS researchers building the UpDown System, a new approach that could speed up graph analytics a hundredfold.


UChicago research tests whether robots or humans are better game partners

October 25, 2022

Participants played with either (a) a robot game guide or (b) a human game guide in a series of games and puzzles.

Students Ting-Han Lin and Spencer Ng together with Asst. Prof. Sarah Sebo, Dept. of Computer Science, presented research inspired by interactive amusement park animatronics and escape rooms to test people’s preferences for human versus robot game guides.


Student uses NASA data to reveal new details on planets in other solar systems

October 24, 2022

The Kepler telescope

A study by undergraduate student Jared Siegel, UChicago ’22, will be published by The Astrophysical Journal and sets upper limits on the masses of 50 exoplanets. He conducted his research with Asst. Prof. Leslie Rogers, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics.


Rock scooped off speeding asteroid suggests it was once comet that lost its tail

October 24, 2022

an illustration depicting the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 as it touched down on the asteroid.

An analysis of rock scooped directly from the surface of an asteroid by a Japanese spacecraft suggests Ryugu originally formed alongside the ice giants Neptune and Uranus and spent time circling the sun as a comet before making its way to the asteroid belt near Earth.


Asst. Prof. Leslie Rogers on award-winning team for Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe

October 20, 2022

Leslie Rogers

Assistant Professor Leslie Rogers, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, is part of an interdisciplinary team that has been awarded a Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Award to pursue innovative research on how volatile reservoirs within planets inform life outside the Solar System.


Three UChicago scientists named 2022 fellows of American Physical Society Scholars

October 19, 2022

David Mazziotti, Jiwoong Park, and David Schuster

Profs. David Mazziotti, Jiwoong Park, and David Schuster have been named 2022 fellows of the American Physical Society Scholars and recognized for contributions to atomically-thin materials, electron structure methods, and quantum networks.


Watch President Obama surprise students at Chicago Quantum Exchange event

October 19, 2022

Barack Obama greets a man in a South Side Science Festival shirt

Former President Barack Obama sent a jolt of electricity through Chicago Quantum Exchange in Hyde Park. Students from Kenwood Academy were on a field trip to learn about the future of communication when Obama suddenly appeared during a career panel. Watch FOX32 News coverage.


The next stage of cosmic microwave background research

October 19, 2022

Collage of Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the foreground with snowy scene of South Pole in the background

With CMB-S4, scientists including UChicago cosmologists John Carlstrom and Jeff McMahon hope to connect a sandy desert with a polar desert—and revolutionize our understanding of the early universe.


PSD Spotlight: Arnab Bose

October 19, 2022

Arnab Bose

Meet Arnab Bose, a clinical associate professor and the online program director of the Master’s of Science in Applied Data Science program at the University of Chicago. Read about his experiences at ITT in India, reflections on his academic and industry successes, and visions for the UChicago Applied Data Science graduate program.
 


PSD Spotlight: Shawn Manner

October 18, 2022

Shawn Manner

PSD’s October spotlight is Shawn Manner, administrative assistant to Professor John Carlstrom of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Shawn is from Michigan City, Indiana, and has been with the University of Chicago since February 2022.


Asst. Prof. Weixin Tang, Dept. of Chemistry, named a 2022 Packard Fellow

October 18, 2022

Weixin Tang

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Weixin Tang, Dept. of Chemistry, was named a 2022 Packard Fellow. The award will support her research to develop a mammalian biology-compatible, adaptation-ready directed evolution strategy to isolate biomolecules for therapeutic discovery.


Meet astronomy and astrophysics student, Dhayaa Anbajagane

October 17, 2022

Dhayaa Anbajagane

Dhayaa Anbajagane was raised in the coastal city of Madras in India. He earned a bachelor’s in physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has spent two years as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics where he uses observations made by large telescopes to study the initial state of the Universe and its subsequent evolution into what we see on the sky today. 
 


Her work helped her boss win the Nobel Prize. Now the spotlight is on her

October 17, 2022

Donna Elbert

UChicago research assistant, Donna DeEtte Elbert, was a “computer” for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and shared authorship with the Nobel laureate on 18 papers. Her pivotal finding about planetary magnetic fields existed for years as a footnote in his work—until recently.