News: Faculty Awards

Congratulations to early-career scholars Aloni Cohen (Computer Science and DSI), Anna Wuttig (Chemistry), and Zoe Yan (Physics), recognized for their potential to make substantial contributions to their fields.

Associate Professor Marshini Chetty collaborates with law professors Lior Strahilevitz and Matthew Kugler to demonstrate that dark patterns manipulate users despite explicit instructions to protect privacy, research that was honored with a Future of Privacy Forum’s 2026 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award.

Chemistry professor Bozhi Tian has received the 2026 Marian and Stuart Rice Research Award. The Divisional honor provides $100,000 for intellectually exciting and innovative research ventures that enable new research directions.

Congratulations to Carlos Kenig, who has won a King Faisal Prize for helping to revolutionize the understanding of nonlinear partial differential equations.

Thirty-two members of the University of Chicago faculty, including five from the Physical Sciences Division, have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships, effective Jan. 1.

Congratulations to Michael Rust, who has been selected as a 2025 Innovation Fund Investigator.

In 2025, the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago continued its enduring legacy of scientific discovery, translating innovation into bold impact in service of a better world. We’re thrilled to share a few of our proudest achievements.

The PEERING testbed, created by UChicago Professor Nick Feamster and colleagues, received the Test of Time Award at the 2025 ACM Internet Measurement Conference.

Yu Deng will share the 2026 Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics for his fundamental contributions to the theory of dispersive PDE and, in particular, to a new understanding of wave kinetic equations.

Six University of Chicago Physical Sciences Division scientists were named in Web of Science's 2025 report of highly cited researchers. According to Web of Science, researchers on the list have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields.
 

Pioneering cosmologist honored for landmark measurements of the Hubble Constant.

Congrats to J. Peter May, who received the 2026 AMS Elias M. Stein Mentoring Award for exceptional mentoring. 

Congratulations to Heinrich Jaeger, who has received the American Physical Society's 2026 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize.

Congratulations to Frank Calegari, who is recognized for his work presenting a striking and original proof resolving a conjecture that had stood since 1968, showing that the coefficients of any noncongruence modular form possess unbounded denominators.

Littlewood has received his award for leading international research institutions, including Argonne National Laboratory and the Cavendish Laboratory, and especially as founding executive chair of the Faraday Institution, the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research.