News: PSD Spotlights

A new book by Chemistry alumna Sandra Greer, SM’68, PhD’69, brings hard science to the kitchen.

CS alumnus Andrew McNutt talks visualization career, lessons from UChicago, and the road from PhD to tenure track at University of Utah.

Isabella Scott, born in San Francisco and brought up between there and London, earned a BSc in Pure Maths from the University of St Andrews. They are now a 6th-year PhD student in Math, studying mathematical logic, “which sort of studies the ‘mathematics of mathematics’.”

Mohit Verma, who grew up in Toronto, is a fourth-year PhD student in Physics. His research is in experimental atomic physics with the goal of probing new physics beyond the standard model.

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.