News: Faculty

The Chicago Quantum Exchange, a growing hub for the research and development of quantum technology that is based at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, has added to its community two world-leading research institutions at the forefront of quantum information science and engineering: the Weizmann Institute of Science and The Ohio State University.

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jack Szostak will join the Department of Chemistry faculty, effective Sept. 1, 2022. A pioneering scholar of genetics who examines the biochemical origins of life, Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009. He will become the 24th person to hold a University Professorship, and the 11th active faculty member holding that title.

The outing of a top Catholic official using supposedly anonymous data from his cell phone is raising questions about privacy. NBC’s Joshua Johnson asks Ben Zhao, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, to explain the practice of de-anonymization and whether or not you need to be concerned about your data.

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.