News: Faculty

A new “quantum flute” experiment by University of Chicago physicists could point the way towards new quantum technology. The holes create different wavelengths, akin to ‘notes’ on a flute, that can be used to encode quantum information.

University of Chicago scientists helped built parts of the calorimeter at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment. Ten years later after the experiment detected the Higgs boson, physicists reflect on what there is still to learn about and from the Higgs particle.

The University of Chicago announced that Robert J. Zimmer will step down from his role as chancellor to focus on his health. A visionary leader in mathematics and higher education, he is the Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the College and former Chairman of Mathematics.

Upgrades to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider could help scientists discover more new particles and gain better understanding of dark matter.

Lee Chang-Li Teng, a theoretical physicist who contributed to and designed many particle-accelerator-based projects around the globe, and University of Chicago alumnus, died June 24.

Prof. Wenbin Lin and researcher Zhe Li co-authored new research identifying a path to drive the direct photosynthesis of methanol.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to understand why Mars dried out, expand and activate the Chicagoland quantum network, and analyze samples from asteroid Ryugu collected by Hayabusa2.

In an interdisciplinary discussion hosted by Chicago Booth Review, UChicago scholars Wilma A. Bainbridge and Alexander Todorov join Prof. Ben Zhao of computer science to discuss biases relating to faces and the implications of facial recognition technology.

Asst. Prof. Yanjing Li of the Dept. of Computer Science will be one of four researchers to receive the 2022 Under-40 Innovators Award from the annual Design Automation Conference in July in San Francisco, an industry event focused on the automation of electronic chips to systems.

Computer Science faculty Bill Fefferman and Chenhao Tan received 
Google Research Scholar Awards for projects in quantum computing and AI text models.

Liew Family Chair of Computer Science Michael Franklin was one of a large group of researchers and open source developers who received the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award for their work on the popular Apache Spark system.

Solar wind is composed of charged particles and the sun’s magnetic field and is continually released from our star. Explore the phenomenon discovered by Professor Emeritus Eugene Parker, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

John Schiffer, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Chicago and former director of the Physics Division at Argonne, died on June 6. Over a career spanning nearly 70 years, Schiffer contributed to research on nuclear structure, crystalline beams, and neutrinoless double beta decay, and he played a key role in the development of a spectrometer concept that is now part of several radioactive ion beam facilities.

Asst. Prof Alex Ji, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is the co-author of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5) map that aims to probe the secrets of stellar streams, or shredded remains of neighbouring small galaxies and star clusters, that are being torn apart by the Milky Way. 

Roland Winston, formerly chair of the UChicago Department of Physics, will be retiring from UC Merced this summer at age 86. Winston is a pioneer of efficiently harnessing solar radiation as an energy source. He was a student and faculty member in PSD from 1952 until 2003.