News: Faculty

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.

An analysis of rock scooped directly from the surface of an asteroid by a Japanese spacecraft suggests Ryugu originally formed alongside the ice giants Neptune and Uranus and spent time circling the sun as a comet before making its way to the asteroid belt near Earth.

Assistant Professor Leslie Rogers, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, is part of an interdisciplinary team that has been awarded a Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Award to pursue innovative research on how volatile reservoirs within planets inform life outside the Solar System.

Profs. David Mazziotti, Jiwoong Park, and David Schuster have been named 2022 fellows of the American Physical Society Scholars and recognized for contributions to atomically-thin materials, electron structure methods, and quantum networks.

With CMB-S4, scientists including UChicago cosmologists John Carlstrom and Jeff McMahon hope to connect a sandy desert with a polar desert—and revolutionize our understanding of the early universe.

Meet Arnab Bose, a clinical associate professor and the online program director of the Master’s of Science in Applied Data Science program at the University of Chicago. Read about his experiences at ITT in India, reflections on his academic and industry successes, and visions for the UChicago Applied Data Science graduate program.
 

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Weixin Tang, Dept. of Chemistry, was named a 2022 Packard Fellow. The award will support her research to develop a mammalian biology-compatible, adaptation-ready directed evolution strategy to isolate biomolecules for therapeutic discovery.

In this American Institute of Physics oral history, Prof. Wendy Freedman, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, describes her upbringing in Canada, astronomy training in Toronto, research topics, and leadership in NASA telescope projects.

How can super-porous metal organic frameworks (MOFs) advance healthcare? Prof. Wenbin Lin, Dept. of Chemistry, has spent two decades inventing MOFs that can enhance the effect of the radiation in tumor cells without amplifying damage to normal cells.

A profile of the Chicago quantum network project. “What we’re looking at is: Can you transmit info in a secure way that is immune to hacking and protects your personal and privacy?” says Prof. David Awschalom, Dept. of Physics. “We’re getting close.”

In an award-winning paper, Asst. Prof. Aloni Cohen, Dept. of Computer Science and Data Science, described a new kind of attack called “downcoding” and warns that the most popular data transformations intended to anonymize should not be considered sufficient to protect individuals’ privacy.

For Hispanic Hertiage Month, the group Latinxs and Hispanics in the Mathematical Sciences (Lathisms) spotlighted David Uminsky, the director of the Data Science Institute.

The Washington Post visited Prof. David Awschalom's lab to explore the cutting edge quantum research happening in Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Dept. of Physics at UChicago.