News: Faculty

The all-day, all ages event highlighted the importance of STEM education, careers in science and understanding how science impacts daily life. The festival was created to connect South Side community members with science education resources.

Welcome to the new faculty joining the Physical Sciences Division in the '22-23 academic year!

The Garden Project led by Prof. Ian Foster has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from NSF for researchers from materials science, physics, and chemistry, to create “Model Gardens” that publish and curate AI models, link them with data and computing resources, and make it simple for users.

A UChicago Magazine feature on the Internet Equity Initiative that uses existing data to explore the digital divide and develops new ways of measuring internet activity.

Ian Foster, a pioneer in cloud and high-performance computing, was named the 2022 recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award, bestowed annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

WIRED sat down with Prof. Daniel Holz, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, to talk about cosmic versus earthly catastrophes, how to cope with doom, and why this is a uniquely perilous time in human history—but also why all is not lost.

Pioneering neutrino researcher Bonnie Fleming has been named Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory chief research officer and deputy director responsible for leading all areas of science and technology. She has also been appointed part-time professor in the Department of Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. 

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to predict an extreme heat belt coming to the US, understand universe expansion from black hole collisions, and detect carbon dioxide on a faraway planet using the new James Webb Space Telescope.

The new Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center will investigate the mechanisms behind sustainably generated hydrogen fuel
 

James Webb Space Telescope has allowed a team co-led by Prof. Jacob Bean to capture definitive evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet about 700 light-years away from Earth, the first indisputable evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.

Prof. David Archer comments on the planet’s ample stores of subsea methane hydrates as new research suggests a major destabilization of seafloor methane off the coast of Africa around 125,000 years ago.

NASA has awarded $4.3 million for the final phase of construction and flight of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon (EUSO-SPB2) experiment led by Prof. Angela Olinto, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Sending a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above Earth will enable a search for tiny, ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles and neutrinos.

Dieter M. Gruen, Physics PhD’51, is a 99-year-old scientist who fled Nazi Germany, worked on the atomic bomb, and continues to push the bounds of alternative energy technology. 

In a discussion at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, Nobel laureate John Mather, senior project scientist of JWST, and astronomer Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, a previous chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope’s board of directors, talked about the past, present and future of JWST with Columbia University theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin, director of sciences at Pioneer Works.

In a new study, astrophysicists Prof. Daniel Holz and Jose María Ezquiaga, a NASA Einstein and KICP Fellow, laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes to measure how fast our universe is expanding.