PSD in the News - December 2020 and January 2021

January 22, 2021

Voices

December 

• PSD’s Sunyoung Park and Sarah Sebo join faculty and staff recommending what you should read over winter break

January

• After decades of effort, scientists are finally seeing black holes—or are they? Gravitational theorist Prof. Robert Wald weighs in on the sudden observability of black holes

Research

December

• Web of science recognizes highly cited researchers of 2020

• Geophysical Sciences Prof. Fred Ciesla comments on asteroid dust from Hayabusa2 solving a mystery of planet creation

• Geophysical Sciences Professor Elisabeth Moyer discusses her work on the Research Computing Center's U.S. Energy History Visualization in the Atlantic — an interactive, comprehensive Sankey diagram of energy transitions

  • UChicago News 

• Ten cool research stories you might have missed this year
• UChicago scientists pioneer new method of measuring electricity in cells 

January

• LIGO astrophysicist Jose María Ezquiaga published findings on ripples in space-time that provide clues to missing components of the universe

• UChicago scientists create first computational model of entire virus responsible for COVID-19

  • see also Texas Advanced Computing Center coverage

• This U of C model can help researchers figure out Covid

• Scientists create first computational model of entire virus responsible for COVID-19

• University Of Chicago Astrophysics Students Discover Galaxy Dating Back To Early Universe, CBS-2 Chicago

• Dark Energy Survey releases catalog of nearly 700 million astronomical objects to the public

• Prof. Benson Farb resurrects Hilbert’s 13th Problem and mines web of connections

• Prof. Voth interviewed about the first usable computational model of the entire virus on Fox 32

Education and Community

December

• Four PSD postdocs named Suzuki Fellows

• Three PSD faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

• CS student, Tyler Skluzacek, invented a vibrating smartwatch to stop nightmares affecting combat veterans. Now it has been given FDA approval as a therapeutic device

• UChicago campus full voter engagement helps boost Hyde Park-Kenwood voter turn-out to 88.19%

• Astronomer Andrea Ghez on the responsibility that comes with a Nobel Prize. Honored for black hole discovery, Laboratory Schools alum becomes ‘spokesperson for science’

• Twenty PSD students selected as 2020–21 Radix Trading Fellows

• PSD most read stories 2020. In this unprecedented year of news, fifteen PSD-related stories on the UChicago News site garnered over 4,000 views according to Google analytics

• UChicago alumnus startup Base Genomics acquired by Exact Sciences 

• Jack Steinberger, Nobel-winning physicist and UChicago alum, 1921-2020

• Jack Steinberger, Nobel Winner in Physics, Dies at 99

• Peter O. Vandervoort, astrophysicist and beloved UChicago mentor, 1935-2020

  • ​​​​​Hyde Park Herald

• Meet Biophysical Sciences student, Margo MacDonald

• PSD Spotlights: Joel Matos

January

• The World War II-era Chicago school of meteorology that decoded weather forecasting

• Yiran Fan, FinMath SM‘15 and Ph.D. student ‘beloved by all who knew him,’ 1990-2021

  • Chicago Tribune

• The PSD community mourns the passing of the preeminent statistician Leo Goodman, who spent 36 years in the PSD and greatly innovated social sciences research, 1928—2020

• NanoPattern Technologies, co-founded by Prof. Dmitri Talapin, and ReAx Biotechnologies, founded by Asst. Prof Raymond Moellering, receive $150,000 each to commercialize research

Related News

Awards, Faculty, Research, Students