News: Faculty

A group of scientists, including several with the UChicago and Fermilab, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today, using DES and SPT data.

Philippe Guyot-Sionnest, Departments of Chemistry and Physics, Robert Rosner, Department of Physics, and Norbert F. Scherer, Department of Chemistry have been named in the 2022 class of American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows. The award recognizes their advancing scientific excellence, tackling complex societal challenges, and pushing boundaries that will reap benefits for years to come.

Norman Lebovitz, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Chicago who taught for more than 40 years and worked to unravel the complex behaviors of stars and galaxies, died Dec. 28, 2022. He was 87.

Assoc. Prof. Edwin Kite, Dept. of Geophysical Sciences, is part of a team striving to identify nontraditional abiotic methane sources that could potentially be in play on exoplanets of interest.

Remembering Albert Madansky, Statistics AB’52, SM’55, PhD’58, and longtime UChicago Booth professor who studied subjects ranging from nuclear war to behavioral science and pastrami.

Wisconsin Public Radio Morning Show host Kate Archer Kent interviews computer science professors Rebecca Willet and Ben Zhao about the potential uses and security challenges to AI.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to determine why the Southern Hemisphere is stormier than the Nothern Hemisphere, explain how the HIV virus replicates itself, and gather and analyze data on the funding, location, and research status for more than 230 GMO crop varieties in Africa.

The New York Times interviewed the co-chairs of the national committee on Elementary Particle Physics: Progress and Promise, emeritus Professor Michael Turner, Depts. Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Maria Spiropulu, to discuss the group’s progress, the disappointments of the last 20 years and the challenges ahead.

The 2023 unveiling of the Doomsday Clock at a Jan. 24 event in Washington, D.C. showed  hands of the clock at 90 seconds to midnight. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which includes Profs. Holz and Rosner of PSD, cite ‘unprecedented danger’ amid war in Ukraine, concerns over climate change.

A study by UChicago chemists has uncovered a new key step in the process that HIV uses to replicate itself. “The thought is that if we could stop the capsids from forming, or cause them to malform, we could prevent HIV from being infectious and replicating,” said senior author, Prof. Greg Voth, Dept. of Chemistry.

Prof. Ka Yee C. Lee, Dept. of Chemistry, was named a Fellow of the Biophysical Society in 2023 “for her impactful and creative contributions to our understanding of the structure and stability of lipid membranes and their interactions with proteins.”

Sleep research began at UChicago, when in 1953, Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky identified REM sleep, the stage when most dreaming occurs. Today, UChicago researchers study sleep’s relationship to body weight, disease, learning, and mood.

Neubauer Professor of Computer Science Heather Zheng was elected as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals, for her work in wireless networking and mobile computing.

The Open Spatial Lab (OSL), a collaboration of the Data Science Institute and the Center for Spatial Data Science, is a new hub for the tools and partnerships essential for maximizing the potential of spatial data science.

Kristian Lum has joined the DSI as a research associate professor after time at Twitter, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and in academia examining fairness, accountability and transparency in machine learning and its applications.