News: Faculty

In an annual summer reading list, Assistant Professor Blase Ur and Associate Professor Daniel Fabrycky recommend summer reading, alongside other 2021 teaching award winners.

Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University. The discovery of the exciting and simple modification was co-led by John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Chuan He.
 

UChicago-led South Pole Telescope has helped pinpoint the location of a supermassive black hole in galaxy Centaurus A. Contributing to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the new imagery reveals how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets.

High on Greenland’s ice sheet, particle astrophysicists like Cosmin Deaconu are searching for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe’s most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on the ice surface and dozens of meters below it, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Deaconu, a senior researcher with Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, spoke to Science from Greenland’s Summit Station: “It’s a discovery machine, looking for the first neutrinos at these energies.”

Duality, a first-of-its-kind accelerator for quantum companies, has accepted into its inaugural cohort six startups from across the United States and abroad. The 12-month program will provide training from the University of Chicago, as well as opportunities from Duality’s other founding partners. Read more about the six startups who join with UChicago to unlock the potential of quantum technology.

Scientists at Argonne and UChicago used a new artificial intelligence framework that allows for accelerated, scalable and reproducible detection of gravitational waves. Ian Foster, the UChicago Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science and director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning division, comments on their creation of a method to dramatically reduce data processing time for LIGO detections.

Building the wide open future of data science requires bringing new students into the fold today. And at UChicago, for the third consecutive year, the Center for Data an Computing (CDAC) Summer Lab serves as one of those gateways. Welcoming 55 high school, undergraduate, and master’s students to serve as research assistants on projects with more than 39 mentors and adding a new “social impact” track, it’s the largest year yet for the program designed to train and inspire the next generation of interdisciplinary computational and data scientists.

Incoming President Paul Alivisatos has been named the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College, effective Sept. 1. President Robert J. Zimmer has been named the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the College.

Kate Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Professor Fred Chong and the Chicago Quantum Exchange’s IBM Postdoctoral Trainees Program, received the Kenneth C. Smith Early Career Award in Microelectronics from the IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Multiple-Valued Logic (IEEE TC MVL).

In a recent paper, University of Chicago researchers demonstrate how increased network competition from cell phone data use negatively impacts internet service for everyday Wi-Fi users. 
 

KICP Fellow Yi-Ming Zhong and scientists at UC Riverside have put forward a surprising theory to explain mysterious, supermassive black holes that formed early in the universe; those black holes could have formed with the help of dark matter.

The Hubble constant is one of the most important numbers in cosmology because it tells us how fast the universe is expanding. Read about the debate surrounding it and meet Wendy Freedman and Daniel Holz, the UChicago astronomers leading the way.

New analysis by astronomy professor Wendy Freedman finds agreement with standard model in ongoing Hubble tension.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to transform plastics, electronics, and transportation, experiment with materials that can 'remember,' and contribute to the most precise look yet at the universe's evolution.

Clay Córdova, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, has been awarded a Simons Foundation grant as part of the Simons Collaboration on Categorical Symmetries. The collaboration, directed by Constantin Teleman of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported under the Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and Physical Sciences program, which aims to "stimulate progress on fundamental scientific questions of major importance in mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer science."