News: Student Awards

Out of more than 6,000 participants and 800 qualifying teams representing 150 countries, University of Chicago MS in Applied Data Science students Morgan Klutzke and Binjie Wang earned first place in the Graduate Track (Master’s & PhD) of the 2026 U.S. Artificial Intelligence Institute (USAII) Global Hackathon.

Congrats to Abigail Lee, PhD’25 in Astronomy and Astrophysics, who has received a 2025 PhD Prize from the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
 

The Physical Sciences Division has selected four graduate students to receive a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year.

CSEi’s first essay contest sparks undergraduate engagement on sunlight reflection methods (SRM), awarding $7,000 in prizes.

PhD Graduate Brennan Schaffner receives ACM SIGCHI special recognition award for his research on dark patterns, subsequent interventions, and influence users. 

This year, eight PSD instructors and students have been honored for excellence in teaching the next generation of physical and mathematical scientists.

Third-years Arthur Costa, Shelley Fernando, Mason McCormack, and Vincent Wang, all of whom study PSD or joint-PSD subjects, earn the prestigious award for their research.

Congratulations to the 18 Physical Sciences Division graduate students have been awarded 2026 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships!

Back-to-back successes cap a championship run for team “pocpocpoc”, consisting of undergraduates Bach Tran, Hung Pham, and Long Nguyen.
 

Fourth-year PhD student Riki Otaki receives the prestigious MongoDB PhD Fellowship for his work making data systems more efficient and scalable.

Recommendations from UChicago award winners, including CS alum Polly Ren, SB’25, College Undergraduate Student Prize in Undergraduate Teaching winner.

In 2025, the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago continued its enduring legacy of scientific discovery, translating innovation into bold impact in service of a better world. We’re thrilled to share a few of our proudest achievements.

Sixth annual workshop celebrates and supports early-career data scientists.

Hilman Hanivan, Sophia Henn, Jonathan Liu, Raghav Mehrotra, and Yudai Tanaka were selected to the prestigious program’s Class of 2026.

UChicago alum John Paparrizos won the SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award for his k-Shape algorithm, advancing time series data analysis across fields like healthcare and finance.