News: Faculty

Prof. David Archer comments on the planet’s ample stores of subsea methane hydrates as new research suggests a major destabilization of seafloor methane off the coast of Africa around 125,000 years ago.

NASA has awarded $4.3 million for the final phase of construction and flight of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon (EUSO-SPB2) experiment led by Prof. Angela Olinto, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Sending a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above Earth will enable a search for tiny, ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles and neutrinos.

Dieter M. Gruen, Physics PhD’51, is a 99-year-old scientist who fled Nazi Germany, worked on the atomic bomb, and continues to push the bounds of alternative energy technology. 

In a discussion at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, Nobel laureate John Mather, senior project scientist of JWST, and astronomer Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, a previous chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope’s board of directors, talked about the past, present and future of JWST with Columbia University theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin, director of sciences at Pioneer Works.

In a new study, astrophysicists Prof. Daniel Holz and Jose María Ezquiaga, a NASA Einstein and KICP Fellow, laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes to measure how fast our universe is expanding.

Prof. Peter Littlewood, Dept. of Physics, and his collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory used supercomputing power to image the neuronal architecture of the octopus in an attempt to reverse-engineer its brain and understand how it functions.

Prof. Noboru Nakamura, Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences, comments on a new report that uses hyperlocal data and climate projections to show that cities as far north as Chicago could have many more days of extreme heat each year.

Research led by Prof. Philipp Heck, the Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics at Chicago’s Field Museum, and geophysical sciences graduate student, Xin Yang, explains strange particle ejection behavior seen in 2019 on the Bennu asteroid.

New funding from NSF will grow the IDEAL consortium of more than 60 regional researchers in computer science, statistics, mathematics and electrical engineering. Main research topics of interest include the foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society, including emerging issues of reliability, fairness, privacy and interpretability.

Prof. David Mazziotti, Dept. of Chemistry, led the creation of a method to efficiently calculate quantum phase transitions. This new shortcut for quantum simulations could unlock new doors for technology similar to ones that led to MRI machines and the transistors in modern computers and phones.

Prof. Amie Wilkinson, Dept. of Mathematics, advises her uncle, The New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson, on best practices for learning math.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to use supercomputing simulations to reveal weaknesses in HIV-1 defense, share the scientific community's enthusiasm for the first full-color images of James Webb Space Telescope, and to invent a ‘quantum flute’ that can make particles of light move together.

With their latest results, the XENON collaboration broke their own record for the most sensitive direct detection dark matter experiment ever conducted. 

A study led by Prof. Gregory Voth, Dept. of Chemistry, ran the first realistic simulations of how the HIV capsid stabilizes and forms. "The vulnerabilities in the armor of the HIV-1 virus capsid were revealed by the simulations and analyses we did," said Voth. The realistic model could result in better understanding of the infection process and improved treatments.

A team of scientists led by physics professor Giulia Galli have utilized a new framework for understanding the electronic properties of amorphous carbon. Their findings let scientists better predict how the material conducts electricity and absorbs light.