News: Research

Former Motorola CEO Chris Galvin invests in and joins the board of ColdQuanta, which acquired Prof. Fred Chong’s UChicago-born quantum startup Super.tech.

Researchers including chemist Wenbin Lin use nanoparticles to deliver a bacterially derived compound that targets the STING pathway to suppress tumor growth and metastasis by disrupting blood vessels and stimulating immune response.

Assoc. Prof. Pedro Lopes, Dept. of Computer Science, and his team have developed a hardware prototype to keep users enveloped in a virtual experience. The small box attached to a VR headset detects distractions like winds or a sudden ray of sunshine hitting one's skin.

Chemist Bozhi Tian’s latest experiment mimics the structure of soil to create materials that can interact with their environment, with promise for electronics, medicine, and biofuel technology.

Assoc. Prof. John Anderson of chemistry has discovered a material that can be made like plastic, but conducts electricity more like metal. The breakthrough could point to a new class of materials for electronics, devices.

Prof. Abigail Vieregg, Depts. of Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been awarded $1.25M from the Moore Foundation for instrumentation development to advance the detection of the highest energy neutrinos in ice sheets and build a more complete picture of the dynamic high-energy universe.
 

This month PSD researchers were featured for their efforts to test an unhackable internet, develop metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to transform cancer treatments, and design and build the next generation telescope called CMB-S4.

A group with UChicago and the Field Museum tested an instrument made by Thermo Fisher Scientific on a piece of a Martian meteorite and were able to accurately and easily date the rock using strontium isotopes.

A new University of Chicago initiative, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures, will train the next generation of scientists combining research in both AI and science fields, including physics, astronomy and biology.

With a $9.2 million grant from IARPA, Andrew A. Chien will lead a team of UChicago CS researchers building the UpDown System, a new approach that could speed up graph analytics a hundredfold.

Students Ting-Han Lin and Spencer Ng together with Asst. Prof. Sarah Sebo, Dept. of Computer Science, presented research inspired by interactive amusement park animatronics and escape rooms to test people’s preferences for human versus robot game guides.

A study by undergraduate student Jared Siegel, UChicago ’22, will be published by The Astrophysical Journal and sets upper limits on the masses of 50 exoplanets. He conducted his research with Asst. Prof. Leslie Rogers, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

An analysis of rock scooped directly from the surface of an asteroid by a Japanese spacecraft suggests Ryugu originally formed alongside the ice giants Neptune and Uranus and spent time circling the sun as a comet before making its way to the asteroid belt near Earth.

Assistant Professor Leslie Rogers, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the College, is part of an interdisciplinary team that has been awarded a Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe Award to pursue innovative research on how volatile reservoirs within planets inform life outside the Solar System.

Former President Barack Obama sent a jolt of electricity through Chicago Quantum Exchange in Hyde Park. Students from Kenwood Academy were on a field trip to learn about the future of communication when Obama suddenly appeared during a career panel. Watch FOX32 News coverage.