News: Students

The University of Chicago announced a new partnership with AI Research Commons, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to support and accelerate early-stage artificial intelligence startups emerging from Midwest research institutions.

Second year PhD student Jiayin Zhi finds that time constraints, as well as when AI access is available, shapes human critical thinking.

A tiny star with almost no metals has just been found in the Milky Way, but it’s from somewhere else entirely.

Researchers, including a Physics postdoc and a Physics grad student, found that a novel qubit platform, invented at Argonne, exhibits noise levels thousands of times lower than those of most traditional qubits. The finding positions the platform as a strong contender in the quantum technology field.

UChicago chemists “film” long-range light-matter hybrid particles.

Like many people, Miguel Roca had long struggled to fall asleep. Podcasts helped, sometimes, soft voices narrating history or science, but they were inconsistent. So he began to wonder: what if the story could be tailored, not just to a general audience, but to him? That question led to Stories for Sleepless Nights, an AI-driven system that generates personalized bedtime stories designed to calm the mind.

On trip to Chilean telescope, UChicago undergrad class sheds new light on evolution of earliest stars.

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

A new system from Yun Ho, Romain Nith, and Pedro Lopes combines AI and electrical muscle stimulation to physically guide users through unfamiliar tasks—marking a leap toward general-purpose, context-aware embodied assistance.
 

The Winter 2026 Capstone Showcase for the University of Chicago’s Master’s in Applied Data Science (MS-ADS) program featured 14 student teams presenting projects that applied data science to real-world challenges.

Third-year PhD student Lan Gao studies how social platforms govern a changing online ecosystem.

The University of Chicago Library exhibit "Binding Energy: Books by Chicago Physics Faculty" explores the work of researchers from Enrico Fermi to the only woman on the Pile-1 team.

MS-ADS alum and Head of Enterprise Data Taylor Marx spoke with students about his career at the innovative Midwestern startup.

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

Chicago researchers, teachers, and curriculum leaders partnered to test if robots need fictional personalities to boost students’ social-emotional learning. Their results show that honest, factual robots can effectively supplement classroom instruction—challenging conventions and illuminating a new, ethical path for educational technology. The study was honored with the Best Paper Award at the prestigious 2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.