News: Awards

The UChicago PME and Chemistry Department professor was presented the prestigious honor at a ceremony in Rome on Thursday.

Dr. Anna Wuttig wins the KYOTO Rising-Star Lectureship Award.

The American Chemical Society and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced the inaugural cohort of the program, which includes Muqing Yu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute.

Statistician Aaron Schein and Chris Wolfram, PhD student in Computer Science, use LLMs to extract information from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries, verifying the LLM’s output with a Bayesian Model that knows the correct positions of the Moon, planets, and stars in the ancient night sky.

The network will link Argonne and University of Chicago laboratories for remote soft-materials research.

Golden Goose Award winner Sid Nagel is featured in a documentary.

Congratulations to Pedro Lopes, who received an Academic Communicators Network Excellence Award for Digital Communications.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced the 2026 Golden Goose Awards, celebrating federally funded basic research that initially seemed trivial but yielded major societal benefits. This year's honorees include discoveries leading to histotripsy, a non-invasive cancer treatment using ultrasound, and the "Black Marble" satellite data, which maps power outages and aids disaster recovery by observing holiday lighting from space. Another award recognizes work on the physics of everyday phenomena like coffee spills, impacting inkjet printing and manufacturing. The awards originated to counter past ridicule of basic science, highlighting how unexpected discoveries, often from obscure beginnings, are crucial for health, safety, and technological advancement, underscoring the importance of sustained federal investment in scientific research.

Vincenzo Vitelli’s work focuses on a new way of thinking of collections of “agents” — such as robots — as a form of material.

An assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and the Data Science Institute, Mateo Díaz has been named the inaugural Faraco Family Assistant Professor.

Congratulations to Benoît Roux, who has been selected to receive the 2027 Klaus Schulten and Zaida Luthey-Schulten Award in Computational Biophysics from the Biophysical Society.

Congratulations to Mark Levin, who has been selected to receive the 2026 Kyoto University Lectureship Award in Chemistry.

Vitelli honored for his innovative research reimagining possibilities of unconventional materials.

This year’s Golded Goose Award honorees turned coffee stains, holiday lights, and a noisy ultrasound experiment into breakthroughs in physics, disaster response, and cancer treatment.

Award by Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation honors high-risk, multi-field leap across quantum, biology, and chemistry.