July 1, 2026
Thirteen members of the University of Chicago faculty, including three from the Physical Sciences Division, have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships, effective July 1.
Frederic Chong
Frederic Chong has been named the Seymour Goodman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College.
Chong’s research focuses on the design of software and hardware architectures for practical quantum computing. He was the lead principal investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing from 2018-2024. Chong was a member of the National Quantum Advisory Committee from 2020-25, which advised the president on the National Quantum Initiative Program. In 2020, he co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software company, which was acquired by Infleqtion (formerly ColdQuanta) in 2022. In addition to his faculty position, Chong currently serves as chief scientist for quantum software at Infleqtion.
Prior to joining UChicago, Chong was a faculty member and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, from 1997-2005. He was also a professor of computer science, director of computer engineering and director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2005-2015.
He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 17 best paper awards, and both UChicago’s Quantrell Undergraduate Teaching Award and its Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.
Henry Frisch
Henry Frisch has been named the Herman C. Bernick Family Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute and the College.
Frisch’s early work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, with Nobel laureate Jim Cronin, resulted in successful searches for point-like substructure of the proton, later shown to be quarks, and for muons from short-lived heavy particles, later shown to contain the charm quark.
Frisch was one of the founding members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab Collaboration, where he concentrated on the trigger electronics and rapid analysis. He was co-editor of the design report, drafted the collaboration bylaws, and co-invented the “Godparent Review” process for detector sub-systems. He led the first precise measurements of the Z and W boson masses, and then searched for events that are highly suppressed in the standard model.
Later, Frisch focused on developing instrumentation for experiments that could be done on the UChicago campus. He and his students set direct limits on the flux of cosmic monopoles, and developed systems for precise time measurements for use in large-area applications in particle and nuclear physics and medical imaging; the work has resulted in 14 patents.
Frisch has served on the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Atomic Energy Commission, as divisional councilor of the American Physical Society, as an editor of Physical Review Letters and on the organizing committees of more than 30 conferences. At UChicago, he has served on the Committee of the College Council, as spokesman for the Committee of the Council of the Faculty Senate, and on the Presidential Search Committee of 2005.
He authored a 2025 textbook titled Honors Classical Mechanics: From Special Relativity to Newtonian Physics and has received UChicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Provost’s Teaching Award.
Jiwoong Park
Jiwoong Park has been named the James Franck Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College.
Park’s research focuses on the science and technology of precisely engineered nanomaterials. Among his laboratory’s main goals are building atomically thin integrated circuitry and exploring novel electrical, optical, thermal and quantum properties of two-dimensional nanomaterials. These may lead to the development of advanced devices such as highly efficient solar cells, ultrasensitive bolometric detectors, novel valleytronic devices and molecule-based transistors.
Park’s awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the David Turnbull Lectureship. He was named Scientist of the Year by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served as chair of the Department of Chemistry for the past three years.
Adapted from an article originally published on UChicago News.