News: Faculty

Scientists from the UChicago and Purdue University, including Professor of Chemistry David Mazziotti, collaborated on a new technique to construct a unique “fingerprint” of the noise on a quantum computer as it is seen by a program run on the computer. This approach, they say, shows promise for mitigating the noise problem—as well as suggesting ways that users could actually turn noise to their advantage.

Two PSD faculty members are among the nine UChicago faculty named 2021 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prof. Ed Blucher is a particle physicist and Prof. and Liew Family Chair of Computer Science Mike Franklin is an authority on computation and data science.

The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals, elected UChicago CS Professor Ben Y. Zhao as a fellow in the organization’s 2021 class.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced on Jan. 20 that the hands of the Doomsday Clock—which resides on campus and was started by members of the Manhattan Project—remain at 100 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to apocalypse. The Bulletin cited disinformation, global security threats including ‘nuclear saber rattling,’ lack of actionable climate policies, disruptive technology and insufficient worldwide COVID-19 response.

The work of computer scientists Bill Fefferman and Zachary Remscrim is discussed, as theories change regarding how hard it is to make intermediate measurements to quantify the complexity of quantum algorithms.

An award-winning collaboration between computer scientists and physicists at the University of Chicago broke through one of the key obstacles for large-scale quantum computing by figuring out how to move their control signals “inside the fridge.”

Prof. Emeritus Dietrich Müller, a renowned experimental physicist at the University of Chicago who spent half a century building instruments to study energetic particles from space called cosmic rays, died Dec. 22 at the age of 85.

Aided by sophisticated computational tools, the MICCoM team led by Prof. Giulia Galli reaped a harvest of pivotal discoveries that should pave the way for new quantum devices, like greatly improved control over the formation of vacancies in silicon carbide used for realizing qubits in quantum devices.

Astronomers including Asst. Prof. Alex Ji are one step closer to revealing dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting within our galactic halo. Using doppler calculations, the scientists measured the speeds of stars and their chemical compositions, telling us where they were born.

Professor Cheng Chin of the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the James Franck Institute has received the ’21–’22 Marian and Stuart Rice Research Award, a Divisional honor that provides $100,000 for intellectually exciting and innovative research ventures that enable new research directions. Professor Chin is a pioneer in using ultracold atoms to study the quantum phenomena that underlie the behavior of other particles in the universe.

Professor Hsiao-Wen Chen and Professor Emeritus Richard Kron in the University of Chicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics have been named 2022 American Astronomical Society Fellows.

Asst. Prof. Alex Ji, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, comments on the potential of the massive James Webb Telescope that launched on Christmas day and will be able to peer back 13.5 billion years. The successor to Hubble, it could help answer some of humanity’s biggest questions.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to find extremely energetic particles from outer space with the PUEO Antarctic balloon mission, teach students how to design, build and calibrate their own devices in the creative machines class, and assemble global experts to discuss internet equity and access.

UChicago scientists hope launch of James Webb Space Telescope will help explore previously ‘unanswerable’ questions.

Brent Doiron has been named the first Heinrich Kluver Professor of Neurobiology, Statistics and the College. Doiron uses advanced mathematics to understand how networks of neurons process information about sensory inputs. His research focuses on a combination of nonlinear dynamics and statistical mechanics, with an emphasis on the genesis and transfer of variability in neural circuits. He has developed core theoretical insights that have contributed to both neural coding and network learning. He works closely with experimental neuroscientists who work in the electrosensory, olfactory, somatosensory, auditory and visual systems.