News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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. 
 

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.

In this American Institute of Physics oral history, Prof. Wendy Freedman, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, describes her upbringing in Canada, astronomy training in Toronto, research topics, and leadership in NASA telescope projects.

How can super-porous metal organic frameworks (MOFs) advance healthcare? Prof. Wenbin Lin, Dept. of Chemistry, has spent two decades inventing MOFs that can enhance the effect of the radiation in tumor cells without amplifying damage to normal cells.

Read about the kickoff event for the UChicago-Peking University Joint Forum on Addressing the Climate and Energy Challenge, a 5-part virtual forum open to the public.

A profile of the Chicago quantum network project. “What we’re looking at is: Can you transmit info in a secure way that is immune to hacking and protects your personal and privacy?” says Prof. David Awschalom, Dept. of Physics. “We’re getting close.”

Black holes fascinate both the public and scientists—they push the limits of our understanding about matter, space and time. Read more about them in this UChicago News Explainer Series,