January 6, 2026
Thirty-two members of the University of Chicago faculty, including five from the Physical Sciences Division, have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships, effective January 1.
Andrew Campbell
Andrew Campbell has been named the Louis Block Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the College.
Campbell is the principal investigator and director of SEES, an NSF-funded organization to manage and support user facilities advancing Earth and environmental science research at U.S. synchrotron beamlines. His research lies in the physical and chemical properties of materials under high pressure and high temperature conditions comparable to those in the mantle and core of our planet, to better understand the constitution, structure, and evolution of Earth’s interior. He is also known for cosmochemical investigations of the materials that make up the building blocks of the terrestrial planets, analyzing meteorites and other materials to understand the physical and chemical processing of material in the early solar system.
Campbell previously served as chair of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, and as deputy dean for infrastructure in the Physical Sciences Division. He currently serves as senior advisor to the provost for academic space allocation and capital projects.
Cheng Chin
Cheng Chin has been named the Horace B. Horton Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the James Franck Institute, and the College.
Chin’s research explores the quantum world based on atoms and molecules at the lowest temperatures scientists can achieve—nearly a billionth of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero—to generate insights into novel quantum phenomena in nature.
Recent works include laser cooling, Bose-Einstein condensation of atoms and molecules, strongly interacting Fermi gas, Feshbach and Efimov states, quantum information science, novel quantum states and quantum dynamics, thermophoretic levitation, and quantum simulation of condensed matter, nuclear, high-energy, and cosmological systems.
Chin is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an Academician of Academic Sinica, and was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher. His awards include the I.I. Rabi Prize, the BEC Prize, an NSF CAREER award, a Packard Fellowship, a Humboldt Fellowship, and a Sloan Fellowship.
Kevin Corlette
Kevin Corlette has been named the George and Elizabeth Yovovich Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the College.
Corlette’s research lies in differential and algebraic geometry and has touched on areas such as non-Abelian Hodge theory, rigidity of lattices in Lie groups, and representations of fundamental groups of Kähler manifolds. He is the director of the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation; previously, he served as chair of the Mathematics Department and as director of the Master’s Program in Financial Mathematics.
A member of the UChicago faculty since 1987, he was a recipient of an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award. Corlette was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Margaret Gardel
Margaret Gardel has been named the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Physics and Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the College.
Gardel is director of the James Franck Institute and the Center for Living Systems, a National Sciences Foundation Physics Frontier Center. She is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and a member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.
Her research investigates how living matter emerges from collections of molecules to control physiology of cells and tissues. Her laboratory applies this understanding to design and build new types of active and adaptive soft materials and engineer the shape and dynamics of cells and tissue.
Gardel’s awards include the Tel Aviv University International Prize in Biophysics, as well as the Packard Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and NIH Pioneer Award. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Peter Littlewood
Peter Littlewood has been named the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute, the Neuroscience Institute, and the College.
Littlewood is a condensed matter physicist whose areas of interest include superconductivity and superfluids, strongly correlated electronic materials, collective dynamics of glasses, density waves in solids, neuroscience, and applications of materials for energy and sustainability.
Littlewood currently serves as chair of the Physics Department. Previously, he served as head of the theoretical physics research group at Bell Laboratories, as head of the Theory of Condensed Matter group at the University of Cambridge, head of the Cavendish Laboratory and Department of Physics in Cambridge, as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, and as founding executive chair of the Faraday Institution. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adapted from an article originally published on UChicago News.