News: Research

Citywide, about 80% of households have internet access, but researchers with the University of Chicago’s Internet Equity Initiative led by Prof. Nick Feamster said there is a nearly 40 percentage-point difference between certain neighborhoods.

The UChicago PSD has expanded a program dedicated to addressing energy use reduction throughout all facilities that have chemical fume hoods. The behavior of lowering the sash after the experiment ends, and especially when the lab closes for the night, has proven to be a tipping point on energy usage that has launched a major culture shift in the PSD. 

Chemist Prof. Chuan He has published results that shed light on a previously unknown pathway of genetic regulation, indicating new research directions to understand the fundamental processes of mammalian development—and could suggest avenues of treatments for disease or other biotechnology.

Three faculty members of the Physical Sciences Division and the Executive Vice President for Science, Innovation, National Laboratories, and Global Initiatives, Prof. Juan de Pablo, are among the 120 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. The PSD faculty include Prof. Joshua Frieman of Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chair and Professor Young-Kee Kim of Dept. of Physics, and Prof. Andrei Tokmakoff of Dept. of Chemistry.

Using complex “multiscale” computer simulations modeling viruses, Prof. Greg Voth and his team modeled the properties in the disassembly process that causes the capsid surrounding an HIV virus to rupture as well as how SARS-CoV-2 binds and enters cells. 

A new technique published by University of Chicago chemists and the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. allows scientists to quickly and easily produce new molecules of interest, to accelerate discovery by reducing the time and energy that goes into molecule design process.

Physics professor David Schuster led the University’s lab that helped with the specifications and verification on real hardware for a new system of control and readout electronics, known as Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK. Developed with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, it has proved to drastically improve quantum computer performance while cutting the cost of control equipment.

Yudai Tanaka, Pedro Lopes, and Jun Nishida of the Department of Computer Science are creating ways for virtual reality experiences to become more tactile. In a recent paper, they describe a system which uses electrical stimulation to control head movements of players in a VR environment.

Grace Chesmore, a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Physics, and Celeste Keith, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, will conduct research at Fermi National Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

A $20M NSF CONECT Award will continue to support Globus, a research data management service developed and operated by the University of Chicago, as well as staff with expertise in building open and interoperable distributed research cyberinfrastructure (CI).

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to find axion particles with new detector designs, advocate for paleobiology and evolutionary biology, and lead the S4 collaboration to design the next generation of telescopes detecting the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Eight years later, an explosion far out in space is still revealing secrets about the lives of stars. Vikram Dwarkadas, University of Chicago research professor of astronomy and astrophysics, comments.

A UChicago News “explainer” on University of Chicago meteorologist Ted Fujita and how he devised the Fujita Scale, the internationally accepted standard for measuring tornado severity.

A group of scientists, including those from the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released an innovative new design for an experiment to find dark matter. This particular detector—Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection, or BREAD— will search for one possible form, called an “axion” with different masses.

Professor of Physics Edward Blucher catches up with The Chicago Maroon about his 2021 AAAS funded work on asymmetry and an experiment deep underground in a mine in northern Ontario that is looking at a rare type of nuclear decay.