News: PSD Spotlights

Riya Sheth is a Financial Mathematics student and has been at UChicago for six months. She has been deep diving into her coursework, which includes mathematics, computer science, finance, and data analysis. As part of her program, she has also been working with Bodhi Research Group on a project pertaining to tail-risk hedging.

PSD's May spotlight is Meet Megan Utley, PSD's Lab Safety Specialist. 

Emma Stoutenburg is a second-year UChicago GeoSci PhD student, with a bachelor’s in Earth Science and a specialization in Geophysics from Ohio State University. Emma works in the field of mineral physics, where she studies the physical properties of the minerals within the deep interiors of planets.  

PSD’s April spotlight is Galen Tsongas, Event Administrator for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and KICP.

Lauren is a third-year UChicago chemistry PhD student, with a bachelor’s in chemistry from UC Davis. She is a synthetic inorganic chemist and works primarily with a carbon and sulfur-based scaffold that she links between transition metals. We interviewed her about her experiences at UChicago. 

PSD's February spotlight is Sean Hernandez, Assistant Director of PSD Graphics. Sean has been with UChicago for fifteen years.

Mark A. Olson was raised in Buffalo, New York, and San Luis Obispo, California. After studying mathematics and computer science at UC Berkeley, he joined the PhD program in Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM). He is currently researching Liouville quantum gravity, a topic in theoretic probability, with Assoc. Prof. Ewain Gwynne.

The PSD January Spotlight is Justin Jureller, Chemistry PhD’06, Technical Director of the Materials Preparation & Measurement Laboratory in the James Franck Institute and Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

Mandy Chen was born and raised in Guizhou Province, Southwest China. Before coming to UChicago she was studying at the University of Hong Kong, where she got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and astronomy. This is her fifth year as a PhD student in astronomy and astrophysics. Her research focuses on observations of the diffuse circumgalactic medium—the outermost envelopes of galaxies.

Madison Brady was born in a rural town in Northeastern Ohio, an hour’s drive out of Cleveland. She lived there until she attended Caltech in Pasadena, CA, for undergrad, earning a BS in astrophysics. She is in her third year as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is primarily interested in studying rocky planets around very small nearby stars (M dwarfs), which provide us with key information on the formation, composition, and evolution of planets like Earth.

The PSD November Spotlight is Meredith Davis, media relations manager for the Physical Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She began at UChicago in November 2021.

Phillip Lo grew up near Worcester, MA, and did his undergraduate degree at UChicago (AB’19). Currently a fourth-year student in the Computational and Applied Math PhD program, he is in his eighth year on campus, making him “a UChicago lifer.” In his research, he uses physically-informed machine learning methods to study the magnetic structure of the atmosphere of our sun.

PSD’s October spotlight is Shawn Manner, administrative assistant to Professor John Carlstrom of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Shawn is from Michigan City, Indiana, and has been with the University of Chicago since February 2022.

Dhayaa Anbajagane was raised in the coastal city of Madras in India. He earned a bachelor’s in physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has spent two years as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics where he uses observations made by large telescopes to study the initial state of the Universe and its subsequent evolution into what we see on the sky today. 
 

The PSD September Spotlight is Ian Hoppie, Laboratory Safety Specialist. Ian is responsible for managing and providing technical guidance, training, and inspective/risk analysis of the PSD laboratory safety program. He has been working in this role since July 2021.