News: Awards

In a year with a record-breaking number of paper submissions, Bo Li was awarded the NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award.

Vera Dragisich, PhD’90, a senior instructional professor in the Department of Chemistry, has served as director of academic programs and graduate studies and associate director of undergraduate studies. Throughout her career, she has launched and championed a wide variety of inclusion initiatives.

Stephen Stigler, Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Statistics, has won the 2023 Neumann Prize for his book Casanova's Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance. The prize is awarded for a book in English (including books in translation) dealing with the history of mathematics, aimed at a non-specialist readership.

Prof. John Carlstrom cited for microwave interferometry and observations of cosmic microwave background.

A Business Journals article lists UChicago undergrads Aarthi Koripelly and Jackson Lee among the Inno Under 25 for their startup Quail.ai, which tied for first place in last year's College New Venture Challenge and participated in the data science accelerator Transform.

Carlstrom, the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics, is celebrated for work investigating the cosmic microwave background for clues about the early universe.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Anna Wuttig has received an NSF CAREER Award, which supports junior faculty in the sciences through the Faculty Early Career Development Program. The highly regarded honor is bestowed annually upon researchers who have demonstrated exceptional promise in their respective fields. For Wuttig, it carries with it a five-year grant to support the project within the Chemical Catalysis Program of the Chemistry Division.

The University of Chicago will present an honorary degree to distinguished scholar Bernd Sturmfels at its Convocation ceremony in June 2024, in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of mathematics.

Charles Mark Lewis, PhD'23 (Physics), is recognized for "the development of techniques expanding the low-energy reach of new particle detector technologies, with applications in neutrino physics, dark matter searches, and the study of charged-lepton flavor violating modes of muon decay."

The three-year, $450,000 grant will fund Rand’s work on formal verification of the ZX-calculus, a graphical system for representing quantum programs.

Mark Levin has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Dream Chemistry Award. Organized by IOCB Prague, a leading institution in the Czech Republic, the award was established to support “young talents in pursuing their scientific dreams.” Levin won for his project, "Skeletal Editing: Enabling Synthesis that Matches Design."

The 2024 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition is awarded to Benson Farb and Dan Margalit for their Princeton Mathematical Series book A Primer on Mapping Class Groups.

According to the citation, “The authors are leading researchers in group theory as well as allied areas of topology and geometry. Their expertise shines through with masterful and clear expositions of the combinatorial, algebraic, geometric and analytic viewpoints that mapping class groups enjoy...."

Emily Wenger, a 2023 PhD graduate from Appleton, Wisconsin, is making a name for herself in a big way. She was just named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2024 for her work on Glaze: a tool that allows artists to shield their work from AI mimicry.

Six UChicago physical and mathematical scientists were named in Web of Science's 2023 report of highly cited researchers. According to Web of Science, researchers on the list have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields and contribute “disproportionately to extending the frontiers of knowledge and gaining for society innovations that make the world healthier, more sustainable and more secure.” 
 

Congratulations to Katrin Heitmann, a Senior Associate for the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, for being inducted as an American Physical Society Fellow!

Heitmann’s research currently focuses on computational cosmology, in particular, on trying to understand the causes for the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and the role of dark matter and dark energy.