News: Students

The PSD Fellowship Challenge to support incoming graduate students in 2020-2021 surpassed its goal to raise a total of $3.75 million. Thank you to all our supporters!

A Physics student in the McMahon lab, Grace Chesmore, led the optical measurements of new metamaterial tiles to improve the sensitivity of large telescopes at SimonsObservatory. This discovery may yield insights into how the universe began.

New self-assembly method creates bioelectronics out of microscopic structures. Scientists in Prof. Bozhi Tian’s lab use a “bottom-up” approach to yield highly customizable bioelectronics.

There were 39 news articles featuring Physical Sciences Division research and accomplishments in December and January. Scientists created the first computational model of the entire virus responsible for COVID-19, pioneered measurements of electricity in cells, and charted the evolution of U.S. energy consumption. Several valued members of PSD were memorialized, including a Nobel lareaute and a graduate student. See highlights below and read the full list.

Prof. Gladders's undergrads discover bright lensed galaxy in the early universe

Yiran Fan, FinMath SM ‘15 and Ph.D. student ‘beloved by all who knew him,’ 1990–2021

Margo MacDonald was born and raised in Granville, Ohio. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and double majored in physics and biophysics. This is her third year pursuing a PhD in the Graduate Program in Biophysical Sciences. We interviewed her via email about her experiences at UChicago.
 
 

Jack Steinberger, Nobel-winning physicist and UChicago alum, 1921-2020. Steinberger, SB’42, PhD’49, was most famous for his co-discovery of a new type of ghostlike particle called the muon neutrino—a breakthrough that earned him, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988.

Chunxiao Song, PhD'13, co-founded a biotech startup that was recently acquired by Exact Sciences for $410 million. The startup company sequences genetic and epigenetic data to detect early-stage cancer.

The Physical Sciences Division of the University of Chicago has selected 20 PhD students in the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, Statistics, and Astronomy & Astrophysics as the 2020–21 Radix Trading Fellows.

UChicago campus full voter engagement helps boost Hyde Park-Kenwood voter turn-out to 88.19 percent. Precinct 27, which covers campus, exceeded 100 percent voter turn-out

CS student, Tyler Skluzacek, invented a vibrating smartwatch to stop nightmares affecting combat veterans. Now it has been given FDA approval as a therapeutic device

Zachary Myers was born in Michigan and grew up outside of Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Mathematics in May. He began his studies at UChicago this Autumn Quarter as a master’s student in the Financial Mathematics program. 

This Autumn Quarter an alternate reality game created by an interdisciplinary group of UChicago researchers gathered 70 teams of students—and helped keep them safe. Culminating in an Oct. 30 livestream, the ECHO game brought together students and other members of the UChicago community through weeks of collaborative play

New ‘Expand Your Perspective’ podcast features PSD grad students studying space and the universe: ranging from exoplanets to galaxies to black holes. With Nora Bailey (Astronomy & Astrophysics), Gourav Khullar (Astronomy & Astrophysics), and Gautam Satishchandran (Physics)