News: Faculty

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.

Liew Family Professor Giulia Galli recieved the ISSNAF Lifetime Achievement Award which acknowledges outstanding individuals of Italian origin who, thanks to their pioneering spirit and lifetime commitment, have honored their country of origin and given a significant contribution to research, leadership, and mentorship in any field.

Researchers including chemist Wenbin Lin use nanoparticles to deliver a bacterially derived compound that targets the STING pathway to suppress tumor growth and metastasis by disrupting blood vessels and stimulating immune response.

Assoc. Prof. Pedro Lopes, Dept. of Computer Science, and his team have developed a hardware prototype to keep users enveloped in a virtual experience. The small box attached to a VR headset detects distractions like winds or a sudden ray of sunshine hitting one's skin.

Chemist Bozhi Tian’s latest experiment mimics the structure of soil to create materials that can interact with their environment, with promise for electronics, medicine, and biofuel technology.

Assoc. Prof. John Anderson of chemistry has discovered a material that can be made like plastic, but conducts electricity more like metal. The breakthrough could point to a new class of materials for electronics, devices.

Prof. Abigail Vieregg, Depts. of Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been awarded $1.25M from the Moore Foundation for instrumentation development to advance the detection of the highest energy neutrinos in ice sheets and build a more complete picture of the dynamic high-energy universe.
 

Prof. Marcela Carena, Dept. of Physics, and of Fermi National Laboratory has been selected by The Department of Energy as one of two national laboratory scientists to be named DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellows. 

This month PSD researchers were featured for their efforts to test an unhackable internet, develop metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to transform cancer treatments, and design and build the next generation telescope called CMB-S4.

A group with UChicago and the Field Museum tested an instrument made by Thermo Fisher Scientific on a piece of a Martian meteorite and were able to accurately and easily date the rock using strontium isotopes.

A new University of Chicago initiative, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures, will train the next generation of scientists combining research in both AI and science fields, including physics, astronomy and biology.

With a $9.2 million grant from IARPA, Andrew A. Chien will lead a team of UChicago CS researchers building the UpDown System, a new approach that could speed up graph analytics a hundredfold.

Students Ting-Han Lin and Spencer Ng together with Asst. Prof. Sarah Sebo, Dept. of Computer Science, presented research inspired by interactive amusement park animatronics and escape rooms to test people’s preferences for human versus robot game guides.