News: Faculty

Physicist Sidney Nagel is part of a new exhibition that brings together faculty and artists to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Gray Center's Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship.

A new research initiative at the University of Chicago called the Data & Democracy Initiative aims to ignite interdisciplinary research on the digital challenges facing democracies around the world.

Prof. Emeritus Eugene N. Parker, a pioneering astrophysicist whose contributions to solar physics were so enormous that NASA named its Parker Solar Probe mission after him, died March 15. He was 94.

The Organic Chemistry textbook from Wiley first came out in 1976 and is used by undergraduates throughout the world. Professor Scott Snyder joined the author team for the 11th edition over a decade ago and has since contributed to both the 12th edition and the 13th edition that was published this month.

Faculty profile of Rana Hanocka, a new assistant professor who joined UChicago CS in the summer of 2021, aims to democratize this technology, building AI capabilities for 3D data that transform aspiration into reality.

Astrophysicist Prof. Emeritus Don Lamb is co-author on a new paper that may solve a decades-long mystery—why is gas in galaxy clusters still hot even after billions of years? Focusing 196 lasers on a target the size of a dime, scientists simulated conditions in a galaxy cluster and found solid evidence that hot and cold spots come from the impact of magnetic fields on the cooling of the hot gas.

The Optical Society of America, now named Optica, selected Prof. Norbert F. Scherer of the Department of Chemistry as the 2022 C.E.K. Mees Medal recipient. He was honored for seminal contributions to optical science, especially nonlinear spectroscopy and microscopy and optical matter experiments.

Jacob Bean, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, is co-leading a team that plans to use James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to look at sub-Neptune planets and better model atmosphere composition and circulation.

Prof. Wendy Freedman, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, will address this year’s graduating class on the Main Quad during the June 4 ceremony. A renowned cosmologist, Freedman led the team that made a landmark measurement in 2001 of the Hubble constant—the rate at which the universe is expanding.

A team of University of Chicago chemists and biologists including Prof. Yamuna Krishnan developed a tiny device made out of DNA intended to locate tumor cells and force them to reveal themselves to patrolling immune cells.

Following the release of the national plan for developing a quantum workforce, educators and leaders in quantum information science came together to discuss the future of quantum education in the US. Computer science professor Diana Franklin was a featured speaker.

A nuclear reactor at an Illinois energy plant is helping University of Chicago scientists learn how to catch and understand the tiny, elusive particles known as neutrinos. Prof. Juan Collar said, “This is the closest that neutrino physicists have been able to get to a commercial reactor core.”

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to read out a qubit on demand and set a record for preserving quantum states for more than five seconds, to revolutionize the field of 2D materials with a technique to cut and stack fragile sheets of nanomaterials, and to demonstrate ultracold atoms can segregate into separate domain states.

Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science Fred Chong comments on a new programming language called Twist that can help scientists discover which qubits in their machines become entangled when working on a problem, and then take specific actions, like only accepting data from an unentangled qubit.

NASA has selected University of Chicago associate professor of geophysical sciences, Edwin Kite, to join the Mars Curiosity rover mission as a participating scientist. Kite, along with fourth-year Ph.D. student Sasha Warren, hopes to expand the rover science team’s understanding of climate history on Mars.