News: Awards

The Physical Sciences Division has many programs ranked highly in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report top science graduate schools rankings.

With projects spanning an array of industries, data types, and methodological approaches, the Master of Science in Analytics (MScA) program’s autumn 2021 Capstone Showcase featured an impressive field of twenty-one teams, with four distinguished with Best in Show awards.

Physical Sciences Division members, including an alumna, a graduate student, and undergraduates, won the first inaugural 'Science as Art' contest run by University of Chicago Communications. See their winning photos.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science Junchen Jiang received the NSF CAREER Award to study how individual preferences and machine learning can help automatically optimize video quality while also conserving valuable bandwidth. The award, the NSF’s most prestigious for early-career faculty, was one of six awarded to UChicago CS faculty during the 2021-22 cycle.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to catch and study neutrinos at a local nuclear reactor, treat cancer with nanodevices made out of DNA, conduct Great Lakes sampling efforts under winter conditions, and recreate conditions in giant galaxy clusters with lasers.

Prof. Scott Snyder, Department of Chemistry, has been selected for the 2022 Cottrell STAR Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, cited as “an accomplished organic chemist and pedagogical innovator committed to the education of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students beyond his own lab and classroom.”

The Data Science Institute at UChicago is part of a grant of $4.6M in funding delivered by the Mastercard Impact Fund for data.org’s Capacity Accelerator Network (CAN) that will support the creation of a consortium of diverse higher education partners to amplify social impact through data science.

Young-Kee Kim, Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, has been elected as a foreign member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.

Fifth-year physics graduate student, Savannah Gowen, of Prof. Sidney Nagel's lab, won the NSF MRSEC Science Slam with a short film presentation on training gluten in dough.

The Optical Society of America, now named Optica, selected Prof. Norbert F. Scherer of the Department of Chemistry as the 2022 C.E.K. Mees Medal recipient. He was honored for seminal contributions to optical science, especially nonlinear spectroscopy and microscopy and optical matter experiments.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to read out a qubit on demand and set a record for preserving quantum states for more than five seconds, to revolutionize the field of 2D materials with a technique to cut and stack fragile sheets of nanomaterials, and to demonstrate ultracold atoms can segregate into separate domain states.

Newly announced Sloan Fellow Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes, Department of Computer Science, was interviewed about his human computer integration research by FOX32 Chicago.

Amgen Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Benoit Roux is leading the effort to build a supercomputing cluster to explore structure and dynamics of biological systems.

Three Physical Sciences Division early-career scholars have been selected for Sloan Research Fellowships: Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes in the Department of Computer Science, Asst. Prof. Chao Gao in the Department of Statistics, and Asst. Prof. Mark Levin in the Department of Chemistry.
 

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to mitigate the noise problem on quantum computers, to use doppler calculations to make a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting our galactic halo, and to improve control over vacancies in silicon carbide used for quantum devices.