News: Research

The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is pleased to announce the launch of DeepTechU, a venture conference showcasing deep tech innovation and 48 investor-ready companies from universities and national labs. The virtual conference will take place April 20-22, 2021, and will feature quick pitches as well as discussions with industry experts and entrepreneurs. Look for exciting PSD start-ups among the line up.

The SAND Lab (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data) at the University of Chicago has created a novel technique for user authentication that takes advantage of an individual’s unique response to stimuli. By providing a variety of gentle electrical stimuli to the muscles of the forearm and measuring the resulting finger movements, users can be robustly and uniquely identified.

The CDAC Discovery Challenge awardees will train data science experts from across the UChicago campus, its national laboratory partners, and government, non-profit, and industry collaborators, to run projects that target transformative impact in medicine, public health, molecular engineering, genomics, and education. 

UChicago and Fermilab physicists, including Assoc. Prof. David Schuster, have built a quantum bit that can search for dark matter. In the team’s new technique, qubits are designed to detect the photons that would be produced when dark matter particles interact with an electromagnetic field.

Professor Yamuna Krishnan and CEO Dhiyva Venkat's startup, Esya Labs, provides novel research assays to accelerate drug discovery efforts. Their effort, made possible in part by funding from UChicago Polsky, is profiled for BusinessWire.com.

An international team of 200 physicists from seven countries found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab. The Muon g-2 results will set the agenda for physics moving forward: to find forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. Cosmologist Gordan Krnjaic and Prof. Marcela Carena, of Fermi and KICP, comment on the importance of the observations.

UChicago and CQE announced Duality, a program to leverage the region’s quantum ecosystem, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33, that will help startups bring their innovations to the marketplace.

David Archer, professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, became a passionate advocate for educating students and the public alike about the oceans, the climate, and the significance of global warming. At least five thousand students have taken his course on climate change over the years, and more than 40,000 more have taken his free online course. 

Prof. Fred Ciesla of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and colleagues at Caltech, the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota laid out a history of carbon in the formation of the solar system. By examining carbon, they found most of Earth likely formed during the solar system’s first million years—much earlier and more precise than the previous estimate of sometime within the first 150 million years.

Postdoctoral fellow Darryl Seligman and student, Megan Mansfield, of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, published an April Fools paper on arXiv that uses a Python algoritm to detect "emotional trends in the repertoire of Taylor Swift" and are receiving national attention, including mentions in Business Insider and The New York Post.

This month, PSD community members have been featured for their work to confirm the third-nearest star with a planet, prove that bacteria know how to exploit quantum mechanics, and recreate how magnetic fields grow in clusters of galaxies. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from March 2021.

Midway3 takes off, fueling computational discovery of all stripes at UChicago. The new campus high-performance computing cluster, optimized for deep learning, goes into production this month—providing both power and the latest approaches for enabling discovery and innovation.

Why Oumuamua, the interstellar visitor, looks eerily familiar. Deptartment of Geophysical Sciences postdoctoral fellow, Darryl Seligman, comments for the New York Times.

Fermilab user and University of Chicago physics student Ihar Lobach explains how his team used Fermilab’s IOTA electron storage ring to glean insights that can be difficult to obtain on an electron beam and how this proof of principle could benefit the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade at Argonne National Laboratory.

Jennifer Bergner, the NASA Hubbell-Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, has been awarded the LAD 2021 Dissertation Prize for the dissertation, “Tracing Organic Complexity During Star and Planet Formation,” which she wrote under Professor Karin Öberg at Harvard University. Bergner is being cited “for the discovery of new, cold pathways to complex molecule formation and for creative, interdisciplinary explorations of the origins of organic molecules during planet formation.” She will give an invited lecture at a meeting of the Laboratory Astrophysics Division.