News: Research

A UChicago Magazine feature on the Internet Equity Initiative that uses existing data to explore the digital divide and develops new ways of measuring internet activity.

Ian Foster, a pioneer in cloud and high-performance computing, was named the 2022 recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award, bestowed annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to predict an extreme heat belt coming to the US, understand universe expansion from black hole collisions, and detect carbon dioxide on a faraway planet using the new James Webb Space Telescope.

The new Catalyst Design for Decarbonization Center will investigate the mechanisms behind sustainably generated hydrogen fuel
 

James Webb Space Telescope has allowed a team co-led by Prof. Jacob Bean to capture definitive evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet about 700 light-years away from Earth, the first indisputable evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.

NASA has awarded $4.3 million for the final phase of construction and flight of the Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon (EUSO-SPB2) experiment led by Prof. Angela Olinto, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Sending a scientific balloon to 110,000 feet above Earth will enable a search for tiny, ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles and neutrinos.

Third-year Audrey Scott is one of 51 undergrads to earn a competitive Brooke Owens Fellowship. Read about her summer research at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO.

Geophysical sciences graduate student, Sasha Warren, writes in Scientific American how wind, ice, and rock may have combined to give our planet its shortest day.

In a new study, astrophysicists Prof. Daniel Holz and Jose María Ezquiaga, a NASA Einstein and KICP Fellow, laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes to measure how fast our universe is expanding.

Prof. Peter Littlewood, Dept. of Physics, and his collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory used supercomputing power to image the neuronal architecture of the octopus in an attempt to reverse-engineer its brain and understand how it functions.

Prof. Noboru Nakamura, Dept. of the Geophysical Sciences, comments on a new report that uses hyperlocal data and climate projections to show that cities as far north as Chicago could have many more days of extreme heat each year.

Research led by Prof. Philipp Heck, the Robert A. Pritzker Curator of Meteoritics at Chicago’s Field Museum, and geophysical sciences graduate student, Xin Yang, explains strange particle ejection behavior seen in 2019 on the Bennu asteroid.

New funding from NSF will grow the IDEAL consortium of more than 60 regional researchers in computer science, statistics, mathematics and electrical engineering. Main research topics of interest include the foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society, including emerging issues of reliability, fairness, privacy and interpretability.

Prof. David Mazziotti, Dept. of Chemistry, led the creation of a method to efficiently calculate quantum phase transitions. This new shortcut for quantum simulations could unlock new doors for technology similar to ones that led to MRI machines and the transistors in modern computers and phones.

The Giant Magellan Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever engineered using the world’s largest mirrors, today announced it has secured a $205 million investment from its international consortium to accelerate construction. This investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for the telescope since its founding and includes leading commitments from the University of Chicago, Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), The University of Texas at Austin, and University of Arizona.