News: Awards

The new Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center will investigate the mechanisms behind sustainably generated hydrogen fuel
 

NASA has awarded $4.3 million for the final phase of construction and flight of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon (EUSO-SPB2) experiment led by Prof. Angela Olinto, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Sending a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above Earth will enable a search for tiny, ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles and neutrinos.

Third-year Audrey Scott is one of 51 undergrads to earn a competitive Brooke Owens Fellowship. Read about her summer research at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO.

New funding from NSF will grow the IDEAL consortium of more than 60 regional researchers in computer science, statistics, mathematics and electrical engineering. Main research topics of interest include the foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society, including emerging issues of reliability, fairness, privacy and interpretability.

A $20M NSF award will establish the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning, a multi-disciplinary effort led by the University of Illinois Chicago in collaboration with the University of Chicago and other area universities. It will focus on the foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to use supercomputing simulations to reveal weaknesses in HIV-1 defense, share the scientific community's enthusiasm for the first full-color images of James Webb Space Telescope, and to invent a ‘quantum flute’ that can make particles of light move together.

Emily Chen, SB’20 Chemistry and a researcher in the lab of Prof. Giulia Galli, has been selected for the inaugural Arley D. Cathey International Graduate Study Fellowships, which provide financial assistance to pursue a rigorous, research-oriented master's degree at an internationally renowned foreign research university.

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UChicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange will begin its second cohort supporting five quantum startups: Icosa Computing, memQ, Quantescence, SCALINQ, and Wave Photonics.

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.