News: Awards

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Jan. 30 that University of Chicago Prof. Emeritus Eugene Parker has been awarded the 2020 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy.
Awarded every three years, the prestigious Crafoord Prize consists of a gold medal and a sum of six million Swedish krona (about $600,000)—one of the largest prizes in science. 
The Academy, which is also responsible for selecting Nobel Prize winners, cited Parker for his “pioneering and fundamental studies of the solar wind and magnetic fields from stellar to galactic scales.”

For his work developing new methods for the large-scale optimization challenges that underlie many modern computing applications, UChicago CS assistant professor Lorenzo Orecchia received the NSF CAREER award. The CAREER program is one of the most prestigious NSF awards, supporting early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Stuart A. Kurtz has been named the George and Elizabeth Yovovich Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College. Kurtz is a theoretical computer scientist who studies computational logic, type theory, complexity theory and randomness. He also has made research contributions in biological computing, bioinformatics and constructive logic. 

Matthew Stephens has been named the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Human Genetics and the College. Stephens’ research focuses on a wide variety of problems at the interface of statistics and genetics. His lab often tackles problems where novel statistical methods are required, or can learn something new compared with existing approaches. 

Asst. Prof. Raymond Moellering earned a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award for his project "Reactivity-Driven Metabolic Signaling: A Feature not a Flaw in Metabolic Regulation." Moellering's research aims to develop cellular probes, proteomic methods, and cellular models to illuminate the role of methylglyoxal, a reactive metabolite that is hypothesized to link cellular metabolism with cell stress response, inflammation and many diseases like diabetes, cancer and aging. With this award, Moellering hopes to identify proteins that serve as metabolic sensors, which transmit signals resulting in physical changes in cells and organisms.

U.S. News & World Report ranked UChicago fifth among top physics programs. Japan, the U.S. and the U.K. are home to the highest-ranked physics institutions.

At a Dec. 10 ceremony in Sweden, John B. Goodenough will be honored for pioneering breakthroughs that led to the widespread use of the lithium-ion battery—and helping spark the wireless revolution. The descendants of his batteries now power modern smartphones and hold the potential to one day sustainably harvest solar and wind power.

Graduate students Becca Thompson and Ross Edel won two of the five named national awards at the 66th Annual American Vacuum Society (AVS) Meeting for their doctoral research. Becca won the Nellie Yeoh Whetten Award, while Ross won the Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Scholarship, both for their “outstanding achievement in vacuum science and technology.”

Matthew Zajac, graduate student in the Department of Chemistry at UChicago, was runner-up in Nature's Young Scientist Essay Competition. Reproduction, rethought, his essay about the desire for science to develop same-sex reproduction technology, has been published online. 

Prof. Amie Wilkinson has won the 2020 Levi L. Conant Prize for the "best expository paper published in either the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years."

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Profs. Shan Lu and Heather Zheng as Distinguished Members. This designation recognizes members for educational, engineering, and scientific contributions to computing.

Three UChicago CS PhD students and two students from the MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (CAPP) program were named to the 2020 class of Siebel Scholars, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation announced. They are 5 of this year’s cohort of 93 Siebel Scholars, who are chosen from a select group of graduate schools for business, computer science, energy science and bioengineering.

Assoc. Prof. Henry Hoffman of the Department of Computer Science and Assoc. Prof. Abigail Vieregg of the Department of Physics have been awarded the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to scholars who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. 

The awarded grant will help Nord, utilize AI to design an experiment optimized to measure the expansion rate of the universe. Nord will also be working with Asst. Prof. Yuxin Chen. 

Prof. Wendy Freedman discusses the possibility of systematic errors in Hubble constant calculations with Science News.

Prof. Bryan Dickinson is listed as one of Halo Cures Inc. 40 under 40 Chicago scientists, awarded to scientists for their tireless pursuit of cures and treatments that help people live better lives. Dickinson's work specializes in the creation of functional molecules to solve difficult problems in biology and medicine.