News: Awards

Assistant Professor Chao Gao receives 2021 IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award for "groundbreaking contributions to robust statistics, including establishing connections with generative adversarial networks, network analysis, and high-dimensional statistical inference.” 

The Brown Science Foundation today announced physicists David Hsieh of Caltech and William Irvine of the University of Chicago as recipients of the inaugural Brown Investigator Award. The award, which recognizes curiosity-driven basic research in chemistry and physics, supports the investigators’ research with $2 million over five years to their respective universities. Hsieh and Irvine were nominated by their institutions and chosen from a candidate pool of mid-career scientists at 10 top-rated research universities.
 

This month, PSD community members have been featured for their work discovering new metamaterials to improve optics for telescopes, designing patterns in self-propelling liquid crystals, and meauring ceramic chips in meteorites to study the early solar system, and more. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from February 2021.

Prof. Marianna Csörnyei has been named the Association for Women in Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society 2022 Noether Lecturer. The honor acknowledges Csörnyei’s significant contributions to several areas of mathematical analysis, including geometric measure theory, functional analysis and real analysis.

The Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards are given to recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students who present at one of the poster sessions at the meetings of the AAS. Awardees are honored with a Chambliss medal or, in the case of honorable mention, a certificate. Five graduate and undergraduate students from the Astronomy & Astrophysics Department won awards or honorable mentions.

Prof. Josh Frieman has been awarded an American Astronomical Society Fellowship in recognition of his significant theoretical contributions to inflationary cosmology and dark energy theory and his contributions to optical surveys.

Prof. Joshua A. Frieman and Prof. Emeritus Eugene Parker named Fellows of the American Astronomical Society. Prof. Frieman was recognized for his significant theoretical work on inflationary cosmology and dark energy and for pioneering contributions to optical survey science. Prof. Parker was named a Legacy Fellow for pioneering contributions to solar astrophysics.

UChicago CS team led by Prof. Nick Feamster receives $1.2M to map the digital divide in Chicago. Grant from data.org to fund ‘moonshot’ to bring high-speed internet accessible to all

As part of its new Pioneers Program, NASA has chosen four small-scale astrophysics missions for further concept development, including PUEO, a balloon mission led by Assoc. Prof. Abigail Vieregg, that will launch from Antarctica and detect signals from ultra-high energy neutrinos.

There were 39 news articles featuring Physical Sciences Division research and accomplishments in December and January. Scientists created the first computational model of the entire virus responsible for COVID-19, pioneered measurements of electricity in cells, and charted the evolution of U.S. energy consumption. Several valued members of PSD were memorialized, including a Nobel lareaute and a graduate student. See highlights below and read the full list.

NanoPattern Technologies, co-founded by Prof. Dmitri Talapin, and ReAx Biotechnologies, founded by Asst. Prof Raymond Moellering, receive $150,000 each to commercialize research.

Three PSD faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships. Rina Foygel Barber has been named the Louis Block Professor in the Department of Statistics and the College. Dmitri Talapin has been named the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College. Laura Gagliardi has been named the first Richard and Kathy Leventhal Professor of Molecular Engineering and Chemistry.

Four postdocs, Michel Fruchart, Hairong Lyu, Jun Nishida, and Anees Palapuravan, have been named recipients of the 2020-2021 Suzuki Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. Yuji Suzuki, SM’70, a longtime supporter and former Council member of the Physical Sciences Division, established the Yuji and Lorraine Suzuki Postdoctoral Research Fund in 2016 to recognize outstanding postdoctoral researchers. The award provides a salary top-off.

In this unprecedented year of news, fifteen PSD-related stories on the UChicago News site garnered over 4,000 views according to Google analytics. The vital role of the PSD response to the pandemic is represented alongside coverage of the University’s appointment of its first woman provost and breakthroughs in field-defining research. Here, ranked by highest readership, are the top stories covering PSD news and research for 2020.

The Physical Sciences Division of the University of Chicago has selected 20 PhD students in the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, Statistics, and Astronomy & Astrophysics as the 2020–21 Radix Trading Fellows.