News: Awards

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.

G. Jake Chanenson, María Fernanda Muñoz, Anup Sathya, and Alex Wuqi Zhang were selected to the prestigious program’s Class of 2027.

Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider sends protons crashing together at extraordinary speeds, allowing scientists to study the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that shape the universe. Those collisions help researchers investigate questions ranging from the behavior of subatomic particles to the possibility of new physics beyond what is currently known.

Laura Gagliardi and Mark Levin acknowledged for their outstanding achievements in chemistry across various fields.

After years of recycling and environmental consciousness, a UChicago alum turned to an old toothbrush, an engineering background, and new knowledge from UChicago’s MS in Environmental Science to create LOOP, a startup reimagining how people approach oral care.

Congratulations to Nita Yack, Managing Director in Computer Science!

Out of more than 6,000 participants and 800 qualifying teams representing 150 countries, University of Chicago MS in Applied Data Science students Morgan Klutzke and Binjie Wang earned first place in the Graduate Track (Master’s & PhD) of the 2026 U.S. Artificial Intelligence Institute (USAII) Global Hackathon.