News: Awards

With a $9.2 million grant from IARPA, Andrew A. Chien will lead a team of UChicago CS researchers building the UpDown System, a new approach that could speed up graph analytics a hundredfold.

Assistant Professor Leslie Rogers, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, is part of an interdisciplinary team that has been awarded a Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Award to pursue innovative research on how volatile reservoirs within planets inform life outside the Solar System.

Profs. David Mazziotti, Jiwoong Park, and David Schuster have been named 2022 fellows of the American Physical Society Scholars and recognized for contributions to atomically-thin materials, electron structure methods, and quantum networks.

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Weixin Tang, Dept. of Chemistry, was named a 2022 Packard Fellow. The award will support her research to develop a mammalian biology-compatible, adaptation-ready directed evolution strategy to isolate biomolecules for therapeutic discovery.

In an award-winning paper, Asst. Prof. Aloni Cohen, Dept. of Computer Science and Data Science, described a new kind of attack called “downcoding” and warns that the most popular data transformations intended to anonymize should not be considered sufficient to protect individuals’ privacy.

For Hispanic Hertiage Month, the group Latinxs and Hispanics in the Mathematical Sciences (Lathisms) spotlighted David Uminsky, the director of the Data Science Institute.

Samantha Usman, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been announced as a winner of the 2022 Out to Innovate Scholarships, in recognition of her LGBTQ+ activism and research contributions to LIGO.

The National Research Foundation of South Korea (NRF) has awarded Prof. David Awschalom on the Dept. of Physics $1 million to co-lead the creation of a South Korea-U.S. joint research center dedicated to quantum error correction.

Prof. Yamuna Krishnan has been awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for High-Risk, High-Reward Research. Her group will embark on an ambitious new direction to map organelles electrochemically.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to explain half-rock, half-water exoplanets around small stars, build a wheel that can crawl along varying terrain, and comment on climate science related to Hurricane Ian.

The University of Chicago earned the #6 spot in U.S. News Best Colleges national university rankings for 2022-2023.

The DOE has awarded Argonne and a team of academic and community leaders, including UChicago, $25 million over five years to advance urban climate science by studying climate change effects at local and regional scales. It will establish a center called the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science or CROCUS.

The Garden Project led by Prof. Ian Foster has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from NSF for researchers from materials science, physics, and chemistry, to create “Model Gardens” that publish and curate AI models, link them with data and computing resources, and make it simple for users.

Ian Foster, a pioneer in cloud and high-performance computing, was named the 2022 recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award, bestowed annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to predict an extreme heat belt coming to the US, understand universe expansion from black hole collisions, and detect carbon dioxide on a faraway planet using the new James Webb Space Telescope.