News: PSD Spotlights

Annie Xie grew up in Guilford, CT. She’s in her third year at UChicago as a PhD student in Statistics, where she has been working to develop statistical methods for analyzing and identifying patterns in genetics data.

Please welcome the faculty joining the Physical Sciences Division in the ’23–24 academic year.

The 2023 Alice W. Chandler Staff Service Recognition Ceremony was held June 22. Meet some of the staff members who are celebrating this year the longest tenures at the University.

Mitzi Nakatsuka celebrates year 45 at UChicago. She started at the University as a secretary in the Statistics Department, later moved into Web Services, before eventually returning to the department she started in as a web developer.

Sandra Tilmon is a graduate of the MS in Applied Data Science part-time program in the Physical Sciences Division.

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.