News: Awards

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.

Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria presented the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy to the late Prof. Eugene Parker's son, Eric Parker, during a ceremony at Lund University in April. Prof. Parker was celebrated for discovering the solar wind.

Three faculty members of the Physical Sciences Division and the Executive Vice President for Science, Innovation, National Laboratories, and Global Initiatives, Prof. Juan de Pablo, are among the 120 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. The PSD faculty include Prof. Joshua Frieman of Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chair and Professor Young-Kee Kim of Dept. of Physics, and Prof. Andrei Tokmakoff of Dept. of Chemistry.

Grace Chesmore, a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Physics, and Celeste Keith, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, will conduct research at Fermi National Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

A $20M NSF CONECT Award will continue to support Globus, a research data management service developed and operated by the University of Chicago, as well as staff with expertise in building open and interoperable distributed research cyberinfrastructure (CI).

Peter Littlewood, Professor of in the Department of Physics, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds appointments in James Franck Institute and the College, is a Fellow of the Institute of Molecular Engineering, and was former director of Argonne National Laboratory.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to find axion particles with new detector designs, advocate for paleobiology and evolutionary biology, and lead the S4 collaboration to design the next generation of telescopes detecting the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Prof. Laura Gagliardi of Dept. of Chemistry has been elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, one of the world’s oldest existing learned societies.