News: Faculty

For more than 40 years, mathematicians and computer scientists have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: If many overlapping requirements all need to be balanced at once, how evenly can it be done?

For many graduate students, a capstone project marks the culmination of months of learning. For one team of students in the University of Chicago’s MS in Applied Data Science (MS-ADS) program, it became something even more: peer-reviewed published research in Cancers.

This year’s Golded Goose Award honorees turned coffee stains, holiday lights, and a noisy ultrasound experiment into breakthroughs in physics, disaster response, and cancer treatment.

Finding reveals how starlight drives surprising chemistry, offers new way to study alien atmospheres.
 

An effort led by University of Chicago researchers has provided the sharpest and clearest ever map of mass in the universe.

US researchers have developed a method to convert plant waste into high-quality graphite. This breakthrough offers a potential domestic source for a critical battery component. The new process involves slow cooling of biochar, creating larger graphite crystals. This sustainable alternative could reduce reliance on imported graphite for electronics. Further development is needed to scale up production and lower costs for commercial use.

Award by Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation honors high-risk, multi-field leap across quantum, biology, and chemistry.

Half a century ago, scientists at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute helped invent a new way to study the universe: by treating the Big Bang itself as a laboratory to explore nature at energy scales unreachable on earth. This fall, nine of the researchers who carry that legacy forward will share what those fifty years have uncovered — from the invisible matter holding galaxies together to the gravitational ripples of colliding black holes.

The series of free public talks by UChicago scientists, “The Compton Lectures: 50 Years of Discovery,” run every Saturday from Oct. 3 through Dec. 5 at 11 a.m. in the Kersten Physics Teaching Center.
 

In its hunt for dark matter, the XENONnT experiment has detected the rare, feeble glow of neutrinos smacking into electrons.

Breakthrough from a team led by Jacob Covey, associate professor in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Department of Physics, turns helium-3’s low mass into a quantum resource.

Study led by UChicago researchers uses bending by gravity of the oldest light in the universe to map the intervening structure.

Argonne scientists are hitting the road, bringing AI out of the lab and into libraries, museums and community centers. No jargon. Just great science.

UChicago chemists invent faster, cheaper technique to turn isoxazoles into pyrroles, a building block for medicines.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign-led NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (NSF HQAN) for a second phase with $37.5 million in funding over five years. One of the original three NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes, NSF HQAN is the nexus of quantum information science and technology research in the Midwest.

The American Chemical Society honor recognizes Gagliardi's pioneering work and its application to catalyst design, carbon capture, and the global energy transition.