News: Faculty

Computer Science Asst. Prof. Pedro Lopes explores what’s possible with technologies that sit on the body: wearable devices that influence a user’s motion and perception. His vision of human-computer integration creates new interactive devices that “borrow” parts of the user’s body for input and output to expand potential and accessibility. With a new NSF CAREER grant, Lopes will embark upon the next phase of that mission, inventing and testing technologies that interface with smell, touch, temperature, and other senses.

Rebecca Maxcy, director of the UChicago Financial Education Initiative, tells the NYT courses need to go beyond writing a check or filing taxes, to discuss financial systems and how personal values and attitudes about money influence behavior.

Professors Mark Rivers and Stephen Sutton of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences have been awarded the 2021 APSUO Arthur H. Compton Award. The two scientists co-directed the design, construction, and operation of the GeoSoilEnviroCARS (GSECARS) Sector 13 at the Advanced Photon Source, which provides users with high-pressure diffraction and spectroscopy, x-ray microprobe, x-ray absorption spectroscopy, and microtomography research techniques.

Prof. Rebecca Willett, Departments of Computer Science and Statistics, selected as a SIAM 2021 Fellow. She was recognized for her contributions to mathematical foundations of machine learning, large-scale data science, and computational imaging.

This month, PSD community members have been featured for their work to confirm the third-nearest star with a planet, prove that bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, and recreate how magnetic fields grow in clusters of galaxies. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from March 2021.

Pioneering educator and longtime UChicago faculty member, Max S. Bell, AM’58, AMT’59, was the co-author of the definitive math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics. He and his wife and research partner, Jean, used the royalties to help establish what would become UChicago STEM Ed. He died Mar. 6, at age 90.

Prof. Neil Shubin, a pioneering University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and bestselling author, has been selected to give this year’s Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture.

New studies by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and UChicago Professor of Chemistry LuPing Yu shed light on organic frameworks for advanced solar cells and detectors.

Assistant Professor Chao Gao receives 2021 IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award for "groundbreaking contributions to robust statistics, including establishing connections with generative adversarial networks, network analysis, and high-dimensional statistical inference.” 

Assistant Professor of the Geophysical Sciences Edwin Kite has co-authored a paper finding there might be many planets with water-rich atmospheres. His study finds way that hot, rocky planets in other systems could form and keep atmospheres.

An international collaboration co-led by UChicago managed to recreate—for the first time in the laboratory—the growth of magnetic fields at extreme conditions similar to those in the hot plasma that fills clusters of galaxies. Using powerful lasers, the pioneering experiments capture how physical process called turbulent dynamo grows these fields.

Professor of Chemistry Yamuna Krishnan founded start up Esya Labs with funding from UChicago Polsky. The pioneering effort develops tools for the early, precise, and cost-effective detection of neurodegenerative diseases to support drug discovery and personalized medicine efforts.

This article from UChicago News explains the solar wind, or the complex swirls and eddies of particles that travel about a million miles per hour as they pass Earth. Famous UChicago astrophysicist Eugene Parker first hypothesized solar wind and now current research by Profs. Olinto and Rosner carry this work forward.

Bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, UChicago study authored by Professor Greg Engel finds. Photosynthetic bacteria adapt to environment by using quantum mechanics to steer energy.

The Brown Science Foundation today announced physicists David Hsieh of Caltech and William Irvine of the University of Chicago as recipients of the inaugural Brown Investigator Award. The award, which recognizes curiosity-driven basic research in chemistry and physics, supports the investigators’ research with $2 million over five years to their respective universities. Hsieh and Irvine were nominated by their institutions and chosen from a candidate pool of mid-career scientists at 10 top-rated research universities.