News: Faculty Awards

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

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 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...."

Crain's Chicago Business article discusses UChicago's SAND Lab's inclusion in the 2023 Chicago Innovation Awards.

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.

APS Ramsey Prize winner David DeMille describes his groundbreaking ACME experiment and how it puts the Standard Model to the test.

Congratulations to Mathematics Professor Luis Silvestre, who was named a 2024 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS)! Forty mathematical scientists from around the world have been named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2024, the program's twelfth year. AMS members designated as Fellows of the AMS have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics. 

Researchers from the Department of Computer Science have created a side-channel attack that identifies how easily hackers could guess a user's passwords or credit card numbers by listening to the audio of a SmartTV. The work has been recognized by Samsung, and the group is now featured in the Samsung Hall of Fame for Smart TV, Audio, and Displays.

In an interview with APS News, Kolb urges physicists to combat scientific illiteracy and discusses the Big Bang, parallel universes, and the need for public outreach.

The Norman F. Ramsey Prize recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the two fields of Norman Ramsey: atomic, molecular, and optical physics; and precision tests of fundamental laws and symmetries. DeMille, along with Gerald Gabrielse (Northwestern), and John M. Doyle (Harvard), earned the prize “for pioneering work in molecular physics, cooling, and spectroscopy that has profoundly advanced the search for the electric dipole moment of the electron, and for placing stringent constraints on modifications to the Standard Model in a tabletop experiment.”

Crain's Chicago Business reports on Prof. Rina Foygel Barber being awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.