News

Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science Fred Chong comments on a new programming language called Twist that can help scientists discover which qubits in their machines become entangled when working on a problem, and then take specific actions, like only accepting data from an unentangled qubit.

More than a dozen Black scientists made key contributions to the Manhattan Project but their stories have often been overlooked. One of them was Moddie Taylor, SM’39, PhD’43, who worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory—the arm of the Manhattan Project based at UChicago—and went on to lead Howard University chemistry.

Exoplanet researcher and astronomy and astrophysics student, Emily Gilbert, comments on the identification of Proxima d, another planet around Proxima Centauri, the sun’s closest neighbor.

NASA has selected University of Chicago associate professor of geophysical sciences, Edwin Kite, to join the Mars Curiosity rover mission as a participating scientist. Kite, along with fourth-year Ph.D. student Sasha Warren, hopes to expand the rover science team’s understanding of climate history on Mars.

Colin Aitken was born and brought up in San Jose, California. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he was at MIT where he studied math and performed in the Shakespeare Ensemble. He has been a graduate student at UChicago for five years in the Department of Mathematics, though he sometimes hangs out in the Department of Economics. His field of study is algebraic topology.

Neubauer Professor of Computer Science Ben Zhao comments on misrepresentation and fraud in modern hiring.

Newly announced Sloan Fellow Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes, Department of Computer Science, was interviewed about his human computer integration research by FOX32 Chicago.

Amgen Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Benoit Roux is leading the effort to build a supercomputing cluster to explore structure and dynamics of biological systems.

Three Physical Sciences Division early-career scholars have been selected for Sloan Research Fellowships: Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes in the Department of Computer Science, Asst. Prof. Chao Gao in the Department of Statistics, and Asst. Prof. Mark Levin in the Department of Chemistry.
 

A statue of KICP postdoctoral fellow Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil will be featured in The Smithsonian’s Women’s History Month presentation of “#IfThenSheCan - The Exhibit,” a collection of 120 statues of women in STEM that will be on display in the Smithsonian gardens March 5–27. 

University Communications invites all members of the UChicago community to submit images from their scientific research for a “Science as Art” contest. The deadline to enter is March 15.

An interview with Prof. Jiwoong Park, Department of Chemistry, who talks about his group’s newly engineered crystalline material that is an excellent transmitter of heat in the x-y plane but a thermal insulator in the z plane.

Prof. Cheng Chin’s lab has been able to create a new kind of quantum object at will in the laboratory: “domain walls.” At extremely low temperatures, groups of atoms can segregate into domains, and a “wall” forms at the junction where they met.

A team led by Prof. David Awschalom of physics has achieved two major breakthroughs to overcome common “coherence” challenges for quantum systems: They were able to read out their qubit on demand, and then keep the quantum state intact for over five seconds—a new record for this class of devices. Additionally, the researchers’ qubits are made from an easy-to-use material called silicon carbide, which is widely found in lightbulbs, electric vehicles, and high-voltage electronics.

A new technique in the field of 2D materials led by Dept. of Chemistry and PME Prof. Jiwoong Park cuts fragile sheets of nanomaterials and uses a robotic hand to stack them in layers that can demonstrate targeted interactions. The automation can be customized and optimized.