News: Awards

An interview with Prof. David DeMille, Department of Physics and JFI, recent winner of the Cottrell Plus SEED (Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery) Award for 2021. DeMille discusses the broader questions he is trying to answer with his SEED project, "Developing a New Tabletop-scale Approach to Detect Particles One Million Times More Massive than the Higgs Boson.”

Professor Benoît Roux of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Department of Chemistry, has been elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada. Benoît, who has been at UChicago since 2006 and is Canadian, uses theoretical and computational methods to advance our understanding of the structure, dynamics, and function of biological macromolecular systems at the atomic level.  

Two University of Chicago faculty in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences were among 28 honorees selected for 2021 early career awards by the American Geophysical Union. Associate Professor Malte Jansen, a physical oceanographer, was selected for the 2021 Ocean Sciences Early Career Award for “significant contributions to oceanography.” Assistant Professor Clara Blättler, an isotope geochemist, was selected for the Nanne Weber Early Career Award recognizing “significant contributions to paleoceanography and paleoclimatology.”

Prof. Young-Kee Kim, an eminent experimental physicist at the University of Chicago, has been elected future president of the American Physical Society. She will assume the position in 2024, when she will become the ninth UChicago scientist to do so.

Aaron Elmore, assistant professor at UChicago Computer Science, develops database models that use intermittent query processing (IQP). The approach grafts machine learning prediction to database processing, providing more efficient computation to systems working with bursty data or intermittent monitoring. As a new recipient of the CAREER award, the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty, Elmore will continue designing these innovative systems for data-driven applications.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to bring software that makes quantum computing faster to the market, to speed up development of materials that can harness energy from sunlight, and to pioneer US quantum research and design a new internet protocol that manages different types of quantum information encoding.

The University of Chicago will award two PSD alumnae for their professional achievements in a Nov. 5 ceremony. Katherine Freese, PhD’84, is a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin—where she holds the Jeff and Gail Kodosky Endowed Chair in Physics—and professor of physics at Stockholm University in Sweden. Zhenan Bao, SM’93, PhD’95, is department chair and K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a professor of chemistry and a professor of material science and engineering at Stanford University.

UChicago chemists specializing in mathematical physics, materials chemistry, and physical chemistry are part of a team of scientists who have received $3 million in funding to support three years of quantum information science research. Working with Harvard University and Purdue University, the collaboration will try to build the foundations for using quantum computers to model molecules at the atomic level—yielding not only insights that could lead the way to new chemical discoveries, but potentially laying the groundwork for quantum computing as a whole.

In 2011, a team of MIT researchers including UChicago associate professor Hank Hoffmann (then a graduate student) proposed a “loop perforation” algorithm that gave computers a generalizable option to go off-script and sacrifice accuracy in favor of performance. Though the paper was controversial when originally presented at FSE (The ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering), its tradeoff principles have since become widespread in computer science. To celebrate this forward-thinking research, FSE recently awarded Hoffmann and his co-authors Stelios Sidiroglou, Sasa Misailovic, and Martin Rinard the honorable mention in their annual Test of Time award.

Two UChicago-affiliated researchers came out on top at the IBM Quantum Open Science Challenge — Alexey Galda for the graph state challenge and Pranav Gokhale for the SWAP gate challenge. The first-of-its-kind challenge presented two targets to the research community and offered prize money and experimental time on their quantum computer as rewards. 

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to understand how manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops and increase drought tolerance, explain why planets with oxygenated atmospheres like ours could host alien life, and extol what billionaires mean for the changing arc of aerospace history. And, a Nobel-winning biochemist, Jack Szostak, will join the faculty in 2022.

Incoming President Paul Alivisatos has been named the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College, effective Sept. 1. President Robert J. Zimmer has been named the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the College.

Kate Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Professor Fred Chong and the Chicago Quantum Exchange’s IBM Postdoctoral Trainees Program, received the Kenneth C. Smith Early Career Award in Microelectronics from the IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Multiple-Valued Logic (IEEE TC MVL).

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to transform plastics, electronics, and transportation, experiment with materials that can 'remember,' and contribute to the most precise look yet at the universe's evolution.

Clay Córdova, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, has been awarded a Simons Foundation grant as part of the Simons Collaboration on Categorical Symmetries. The collaboration, directed by Constantin Teleman of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported under the Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and Physical Sciences program, which aims to "stimulate progress on fundamental scientific questions of major importance in mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer science."