News: Students

A new discovery from the group led by Asst. Prof. Mark Levin, Department of Chemistry, can easily cut nitrogen atoms from molecules. Similar processes currently in use generate a very toxic molecule—but Levin’s group instead adds a key reagent so nitrogen is released as two bonded nitrogens. As a new foundational method, the discovery opens up avenues for constructing molecules.

Chemistry alumnus Kirk Lancaster, SB’18, has been selected as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and will receive full funding to pursue graduate studies at Stanford University. A student of Chinese language and formerly an intern at the State Department’s Office of Chemical and Biological Weapons Affairs, he will pursue advanced study of his intersecting interests of law, technology and international politics.

In a unique year, UChicago students find togetherness—apart. Students across majors joined astro professor Daniel Holz for “Are We Doomed?,” a class that uses readings and guest experts to inform different apocalyptic scenarios: nuclear war, climate change, artificial intelligence, and of course, pandemics and related biological issues.

Edgar Marrufo and Aurora Ireland, graduate students in the Department of Physics, are among 78 outstanding U.S. graduate students who have been selected by The Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program to perform research in national laboratories.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to build a quantum bit that can search for dark matter, use muscle response for digital authentication, design 'nanotraps' to catch and clear coronavirus from tissue, and harness molecules into a single quantum state. 

The PSD remembers organic chemist John C. Martin, PhD’77, who became a billionaire by developing and marketing a daily single-dose pill that transformed HIV into a manageable disease and who popularized another drug that cures hepatitis C. He died on March 30 at age 69.

In a long-awaited breakthrough, Prof. Cheng Chin and graduate students in the Department of Physics have harnessed molecules into a single quantum state —one of the most important goals in quantum physics.

Fernando Bañales Mejia was born and raised in Riverside, California. After graduating from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, in 2017, he attended the University of Chicago for two years as a PSD Pathway scholar in the Master of Science in the Physical Sciences Division (MSPSD) program. He completed the program in 2020, during the pandemic.

The Physical Sciences Division funded creative efforts to impact climate and foster belonging with the Inclusive Climate Grants program administered by the EDI Office. Four winning projects found innovative ways to further the values of equity, diversity, and inclusion on campus during the pandemic.

Four Physical Sciences Division students have been awarded 2021 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships: Jazmine Jefferson in astronomy, Antares Chen in computer science, Lauren Weiss in physics, and Melissa Adrian in statistics. Honorable mentions were awarded to Patrick Kelly in chemistry and George Iskander in physics. Each fellowship provides three years of support during a five-year fellowship period. For each of the three years of support, NSF provides a $34,000 stipend and $12,000 cost of education allowance to the University.

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.

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.

Ahmed Bou-Rabee was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and spent the first half of his life in Kuwait and the second in the United States, mostly in California. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he received an undergraduate degree in math and a master’s degree in statistics from Stanford. He has been at UChicago for five years as a doctoral student in the statistics program. Ahmed studies probability and partial differential equations.

Astrophysicist and University of Chicago graduate student Abigail Lee is the lead author on a new paper that analyzed observations of light from a nearby galaxy to validate the JAGB method for measuring cosmological distances. This novel technique will allow future independent distance measurements that can help answer one of the biggest outstanding questions in cosmology: how fast is the universe expanding?