News: Research

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.

For World Quantum Day, Prof. David Awschalom comments in Forbes’ brief overview of where quantum computing, communications, and sensing and its industry and investments are going, where quantum is today, and how we got here.

KICP fellow, Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil, was interviewed by Astrobites about her childhood fascination with Albert Einstein and the wisdom gained staking a career as an astrophysicist, emphasizing "you don’t need to choose your career over your identity."

Jasmine Lu, Ziwei Liu, Jas Brooks, and Prof. Asst. Pedro Lopes of the Human Computer Integration Lab are developing a new kind of haptic feedback they've dubbed chemical haptics, applying it to five different virtual reality experiences.

Two astrophysicists who have been selected for the prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program have chosen to join the University of Chicago Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics to conduct their postdoctoral research. Jessica Avva, AB'15, and Hayley Macpherson will seek to answer how the universe works as Einstein Fellows, beginning their programs in Autumn Quarter of 2022.

The Physical Sciences Division has many programs ranked highly in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report top science graduate schools rankings.