News: Awards

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.

Two PSD undergraduate students, Bernadette Miao and Wilson Turner, have received Barry Goldwater Scholarships, awarded annually based on academic merit and undergraduate research in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. 

Seven Physical Sciences Division students have been awarded 2022 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. Each fellowship provides three years of support during a five-year fellowship period. For each of the three years of support, NSF provides a $34,000 stipend and $12,000 cost of education allowance to the University.

Professor of Physics Edward Blucher catches up with The Chicago Maroon about his 2021 AAAS funded work on asymmetry and an experiment deep underground in a mine in northern Ontario that is looking at a rare type of nuclear decay.

The 2022 Darwin-Wallace Medal from The Linnean Society of London has been awarded to University of Chicago paleobiologist David Jablonski in honor of his making major advances in evolutionary science.

Prof. Lek-Heng Lim is among the 180 Guggenheim fellows selected in this year’s class from nearly 2,500 applicants. He is recognized for introducing high-level algebra, geometry and topology to applied mathematics. In particular, he works with a type of mathematical object called a tensor and how the concept can be used in computational mathematics and the information sciences.

On March 31, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) announced that Lek-Heng Lim, Professor of the Department of Statistics, Computational and Applied Mathematics Initiative, and the College, is among 26 members to be honored in the 2022 Class of SIAM Fellows.

Two astrophysicists who have been selected for the prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program have chosen to join the University of Chicago Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics to conduct their postdoctoral research. Jessica Avva, AB'15, and Hayley Macpherson will seek to answer how the universe works as Einstein Fellows, beginning their programs in Autumn Quarter of 2022.

The Heising-Simons Foundation today announced Michael Zhang, California Institute of Technology, Astronomy Ph.D.’22, as a recipient of the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. He is among eight fellows selected for 2022. Zhang will be joining the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Fall term to study the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system.

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