News: Students

Two postdocs, Yanzeng Li and Alexander Strang, have been named recipients of the 2022-2023 Suzuki Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. Yuji Suzuki, SM’70, a longtime supporter and former Council member of the Physical Sciences Division, established the Yuji and Lorraine Suzuki Postdoctoral Research Fund in 2016 to recognize outstanding postdoctoral researchers. The award provides a salary top-off.

Elizabeth Kelley, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, was honored with the 2023 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, which recognizes graduate students who show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education and who are committed to academic innovation in the areas of equity, community engagement, and teaching and learning.

A $10m gift to UChicago from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation will establish the Pritzker Plant Biology Center on the University’s Hyde Park campus. It will be led by Prof. Chuan He, Dept. of Chemistry, and will bolster efforts in investigating pathways promoting plant growth and crop yields to combat global problems like food supply, drought, and climate change.

This month PSD reserachers were featured in the news for their efforts to create an 'artificial photosynthesis' system, advance nanoparticle research to fight cancer, and describe cloudy atmospheres on explanets with the James Webb Space telescope.

Madison Brady was born in a rural town in Northeastern Ohio, an hour’s drive out of Cleveland. She lived there until she attended Caltech in Pasadena, CA, for undergrad, earning a BS in astrophysics. She is in her third year as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is primarily interested in studying rocky planets around very small nearby stars (M dwarfs), which provide us with key information on the formation, composition, and evolution of planets like Earth.

University of Chicago computer science Ph.D. student Jas Brooks was interviewed by The Advocate for Pride in STEM Day, Nov. 18, for being a successful LGBTQ+ person in STEM.

The Highly Cited Researchers™ list from Clarivate™ identifies scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant influence through publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Ten PSD members made the 2022 list.

What if your ‘90’s Tamagotchi pet wasn’t digital? What if your devices were really alive, at least a little bit, and you had to care for them in order for them to work? These are the questions grad student Jasmine Lu and Assoc. Prof. Pedro Lopes of UChicago Computer Science set out to answer with their Slime Mold Smart Watch.

Pranav Gokhale, PhD‘20 Computer Science, was among Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40 for 2022. Prof. Fred Chong comments on his success in co-leading their quantum startup, Super.tech. 

Phillip Lo grew up near Worcester, MA, and did his undergraduate degree at UChicago (AB’19). Currently a fourth-year student in the Computational and Applied Math PhD program, he is in his eighth year on campus, making him “a UChicago lifer.” In his research, he uses physically-informed machine learning methods to study the magnetic structure of the atmosphere of our sun.

This month PSD researchers were featured for their efforts to test an unhackable internet, develop metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to transform cancer treatments, and design and build the next generation telescope called CMB-S4.

Students Ting-Han Lin and Spencer Ng together with Asst. Prof. Sarah Sebo, Dept. of Computer Science, presented research inspired by interactive amusement park animatronics and escape rooms to test people’s preferences for human versus robot game guides.

A study by undergraduate student Jared Siegel, UChicago ’22, will be published by The Astrophysical Journal and sets upper limits on the masses of 50 exoplanets. He conducted his research with Asst. Prof. Leslie Rogers, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Dhayaa Anbajagane was raised in the coastal city of Madras in India. He earned a bachelor’s in physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has spent two years as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics where he uses observations made by large telescopes to study the initial state of the Universe and its subsequent evolution into what we see on the sky today. 
 

Samantha Usman, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been announced as a winner of the 2022 Out to Innovate Scholarships, in recognition of her LGBTQ+ activism and research contributions to LIGO.