News: Faculty Awards

Congrats to John Jumper, SM'12, PhD'17, who was awarded a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work creating an AI model called AlphaFold that predicts the structures of proteins. 

Jumper studied with Karl Freed, Henry G. Gale Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and member of the James Franck Institute; and Tobin Sosnick, William B. Graham Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.

Jumper becomes the 100th scholar associated with UChicago to receive a Nobel Prize!

The second edition of TIME100 AI showcases some of the most influential new leaders in AI research and technology. Featured in this year's list is UChicago's Computer Science professor Ben Zhao, the inventor of Nightshade, a program that helps protect artists' work from AI scraping.

UChicago President Paul Alivisatos was honored this week in Norway as one of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience. He shared the award with Prof. Chad Mirkin of Northwestern and Prof. Robert Langer of MIT.

A multidisciplinary eight-member team from UChicago and Northwestern will launch the Cellular Adaptation Lab to study how fundamental cellular behaviors are linked to disease and responses to climate change.

Chemistry Department and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Giulia Galli has been named the 2024-2025 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Awardee. This yearly prize honors exceptional work in theoretical chemistry.

Assistant Professor Sarah Sebo secures CAREER grant to develop robots with advanced social skills for improved collaboration and learning in schools and beyond.

Researchers from UChicago and Northwestern developed a new ultrasensitive DNA-based test that can detect cancer from small fragments of DNA circulating in the blood. Among this team of scientists is John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry Chuan He, a leading expert in the field of epigenomics.

Bryan Dickinson, Margaret Gardel, and Vincenzo Vitelli will study topics related to inflammation and the functions of the immune system.
 

Four Physical Sciences Division faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships. Congratulations, Profs. Archer, Farb, Kim, and Krishnan!

Researchers at UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering and UChicago Physics plan to use a $1.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop an entirely new method of engineering superconductors for quantum computers and other high-tech applications.

The prestigious award recognizes pioneering work in nanoscale materials for medical applications. Alivisatos, University President and the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, is widely known as a pioneer in nanoscience, the study of how materials behave at extremely tiny scales.

Stuart Rowan, the Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise, has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Congratulations to the 2024 recipient of the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize: John Carlstrom!

This year, nine PSD instructors and students have been honored for excellence in teaching the next generation of scientists.

Fred Chong, the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award. Sidney Nagel, the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Physics and the College, has won a Faculty Award for Excellence in PhD Teaching and Mentoring.

Congratulations, Profs. Chong and Nagel!