News: Students

The Physical Sciences Division community and the Department of Computer Science mourn the loss of Max Solomon Lewis, a rising third-year Computer Science major who is remembered as a campus leader and selfless friend.

Building the wide open future of data science requires bringing new students into the fold today. And at UChicago, for the third consecutive year, the Center for Data an Computing (CDAC) Summer Lab serves as one of those gateways. Welcoming 55 high school, undergraduate, and master’s students to serve as research assistants on projects with more than 39 mentors and adding a new “social impact” track, it’s the largest year yet for the program designed to train and inspire the next generation of interdisciplinary computational and data scientists.

Planets with seasons like ours could host complex alien life, suggests a NASA study co-authored by Megan Barnett, graduate student in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to transform plastics, electronics, and transportation, experiment with materials that can 'remember,' and contribute to the most precise look yet at the universe's evolution.

A new imaging and machine learning technique developed at the University of Chicago allows scientists, including biophysics student Devin Harrison, to watch cells break down glucose, potentially leading to new methods for treating a wide array of diseases, including cancer and COVID-19.

As a special send-off to the 2021 graduates, students of the PSD came together to perform “Novi Scientiam,” a 21-part song composed by Dean Olinto’s husband, Sérgio Assad, and inspired by the “Alma Mater” Convocation theme of University of Chicago. The student musicians featured practiced during remote learning and submitted their recorded parts to be woven together into a film, debuting at the ceremony June 9.
 

Kyle Kawagoe was born and raised in Reedley, California. Before coming to University of Chicago, he was an undergraduate in The College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He has been a graduate student at UChicago for five years in the Department of Physics. His field of study is theoretical hard condensed matter physics and the physics of topological phases of matter. When the COVID-19 lockdowns started in the United States, he pivoted to theoretical biophysics, doing research on epidemiological modeling.

Abigail Poteshman, a graduate student in the Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. “I plan to develop mathematical and computational techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of computational simulations of materials from first principles. In particular, I plan to focus on the thermal properties of materials for applications in sustainable energy technologies,” she said.
 

The Dark Energy Survey, an international collaboration coordinated through the University of Chicago-affiliated Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, surveyed almost one-eighth of the entire sky over six years, cataloguing hundreds of millions of objects. The new results announced May 27 draw on data from the first three years to create the most precise maps yet of the distribution of galaxies in the universe at relatively recent epochs.

A graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, Frank Gao, has been named among the 2020 winners of the Wayne C. Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching, awarded annually to graduate students for outstanding instruction of undergraduates. Additionally, three graduate students have been awarded the Physical Sciences Teaching Prizes for 2020-21: Gourav Khullar of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Sean Lee of the Department of Chemistry, and Victor Zhang of the Department of Physics. Read more about what inspires their teaching.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to theorize non-reciprocal interactions, push the frontiers of human computer interaction, and cut nitrogen atoms from molecules, opening up avenues for constructing molecules.

Forbes 30 Under 30 recognized Leslie Jones-Dove, AB’19, and Devshi Mehrotra, AB’19, who met as computer science majors, for their contributions to social impact. The pair took their capstone project for an “Entrepreneurship in Technology" class and built it out into a public defense software called JusticeText.

The Physical Sciences Division has selected ten graduate students to receive a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year.  

Computer Science participated in CHI 2021, a Human Computer Interaction conference, with an emerging group of UChicago faculty and student researchers representing the many different corners of HCI. This year, ten UChicago papers were accepted to the prestigious conference, with one receiving a Best Paper Award (given to the top 1 percent of submissions) and three others receiving Honorable Mentions (top 5 percent).

An online symposium featured 11 presentations by student teams from UChicago and French universities affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, with questions and discussion from faculty supervisors. Attendees voted to choose the best presentations and awarded two prizes. PSD’s Yi Liu in the Department of Statistics (pictured) and Maria Douaihy of CNRS – U. Montpellier won second place for “Modeling Transcriptional Bursting in Space and Time.” First place was awarded to Marie Greaney of BSD and Maxime Lehman of CNRS – U. Paris-Saclay for “How is Sensory Information Transformed into Appropriate Motor Control?”