News: Awards

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to understand why Mars dried out, expand and activate the Chicagoland quantum network, and analyze samples from asteroid Ryugu collected by Hayabusa2.

Asst. Prof. Yanjing Li of the Dept. of Computer Science will be one of four researchers to receive the 2022 Under-40 Innovators Award from the annual Design Automation Conference in July in San Francisco, an industry event focused on the automation of electronic chips to systems.

Computer Science faculty Bill Fefferman and Chenhao Tan received 
Google Research Scholar Awards for projects in quantum computing and AI text models.

Liew Family Chair of Computer Science Michael Franklin was one of a large group of researchers and open source developers who received the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award for their work on the popular Apache Spark system.

Prof. Guangbin Dong has been named a 2022 Blavatnik National Awards Finalist in Chemistry. From the group of 31 finalists, three winners—in life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences & engineering—will be named on June 29. The honorees were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 309 nominees from 150 leading universities and scientific institutions from 38 states across the United States.

The Physical Sciences Division has selected nine graduate students to receive a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year.  

UChicago Chancellor Robert Zimmer was awarded Harvard University’s 2022 Centennial Medal for his superlative leadership of one of the world’s finest universities, and for his principled advocacy for the core mission and values of higher education on the national and global stage.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to capture the first image of the Milky Way's massive black hole, map the digital divide affecting connectivity across the country, and use computer simulations to understand the world's deadliest viruses.

Students in the College, Zihni Baykara and Macallan Maedke, and graduate students, Kaeli Hughes and Rostom Mbarek have been honored by the Enrico Fermi Institute with Nathan Sugarman Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate and Graduate Research. 

The American Astronomical Society has announced that it will present its 2022 George Van Biesbroeck Prize to Donald G. York, the Horace B. Horton Professor Emeritus, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College. The award is presented biannually and honors a living individual for long-term extraordinary or unselfish service to astronomy.

A graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, Ian Bongalonta, has been named a winner of the 2022 Wayne C. Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching, awarded annually to graduate students for outstanding instruction of undergraduates. Additionally, three graduate students have been awarded the Physical Sciences Teaching Prize for 2021-22: Sandrine Legault, Colin Lynch, and Sarah Litwin of the Department of Chemistry.

Ian Bongalonta, an instructor for Honors General Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the Wayne C. Booth Prize. Trevor Hyde, a Dickson Instructor in the Department of Mathematics who recently taught Algebraic Number Theory, has been awarded a Glenn and Claire Swogger Award. 

Professor and Chair of Chemistry Viresh Rawal has earned the E.C. Taylor Senior Award in Heterocyclic Chemistry. The honor is bestowed once every two years to a true leader in the field. Rawal will deliver an award lecture at the Biennial International Society of Chemistry (ISHC) Congress.

Assoc. Prof. David Schmitz was awarded a 2022 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award. Prof. Chuan He and Prof. Wei Biao Wu were awarded the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring.

The 2022 recipients of the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize for Exceptional Service in the Physical Sciences Division are Young-Kee Kim, Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, and Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College.