News: Faculty

A $10m gift to UChicago from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation will establish the Pritzker Plant Biology Center on the University’s Hyde Park campus. It will be led by Prof. Chuan He, Dept. of Chemistry, and will bolster efforts in investigating pathways promoting plant growth and crop yields to combat global problems like food supply, drought, and climate change.

This month PSD reserachers were featured in the news for their efforts to create an 'artificial photosynthesis' system, advance nanoparticle research to fight cancer, and describe cloudy atmospheres on explanets with the James Webb Space telescope.

The Broadening Participation in Computing program at the University of Chicago provides students from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to get involved with computer science in a way that keeps them continually engaged from high school and beyond.

A group of researchers from the Amyoli Internet Research Lab (AIR Lab) led by Asst. Prof. Marshini Chetty of computer science conducted a study to investigate how certain Netflix features quietly undermine our agency and keep us watching curated content longer.

A new paper from the research group of UChicago CS assistant professor Sanjay Krishnan caps three years of research on how computational geometry can make approximate query processing more efficient.

The Highly Cited Researchers™ list from Clarivate™ identifies scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant influence through publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Ten PSD members made the 2022 list.

A new study from six UChicago chemists shows an innovative new system for artificial photosynthesis that is more productive than previous artificial systems by an order of magnitude and could produce ethanol, methane, or other fuels.

What if your ‘90’s Tamagotchi pet wasn’t digital? What if your devices were really alive, at least a little bit, and you had to care for them in order for them to work? These are the questions grad student Jasmine Lu and Assoc. Prof. Pedro Lopes of UChicago Computer Science set out to answer with their Slime Mold Smart Watch.

UChicago computer scientists will lead a $9.2M grant from ARPA for the UpDown System, to speed up graph analytics. The effort will reinvent computer architecture, dramatically increasing efficiency and scalability for graph computing. Prof. Andrew Chien wil head a team including Henry Hoffmann, Yanjing Li, and Michael Maire.

The fifth annual Chicago Quantum Summit, hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange, will convene academic, government, and industry leaders in quantum information science and engineering on Nov. 14-15. The public can attend on Zoom.

A new study led by Prof. Fausto Cattaneo, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, informs Earth-Moon formation theories. Through analysis of the dynamics of fluids and electrically conducting fluids, the researchers concluded that the Earth must have been magnetized either before the impact of an interplanetary collision or as a result of it. 

UChicago chemist Raymond Moellering is in a group that has created an innovative way to build synthetic molecules that can target these previously “undruggable” transcription factors. The breakthrough holds promise for drugs and treatments as well as tools to better understand cancer biology.

The Summit on AI in Society, organized in October by the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (IFK), featured several UChicago CS speakers alongside social scientists, artists, policy experts, historians, and philosophers.

Assoc. Prof. Diana Franklin, Dept. of Computer Science, was interviewed by the podcast Entangled Things about K-12 education in quantum, suspension of disbelief, and ways to communicate quantum topics to broader audiences.

Former Motorola CEO Chris Galvin invests in and joins the board of ColdQuanta, which acquired Prof. Fred Chong’s UChicago-born quantum startup Super.tech.