News: Students

The Heising-Simons Foundation today announced Michael Zhang, California Institute of Technology, Astronomy Ph.D.’22, as a recipient of the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. He is among eight fellows selected for 2022. Zhang will be joining the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Fall term to study the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system.

The Physical Sciences Division has many programs ranked highly in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report top science graduate schools rankings.

Physical Sciences Division members, including an alumna, a graduate student, and undergraduates, won the first inaugural 'Science as Art' contest run by University of Chicago Communications. See their winning photos.

A new study introduces a breakthrough in making nanocrystals function together electronically. The research led by Prof. Dmitri Talapin, Department of Chemistry, may open the doors to future devices with new abilities.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to catch and study neutrinos at a local nuclear reactor, treat cancer with nanodevices made out of DNA, conduct Great Lakes sampling efforts under winter conditions, and recreate conditions in giant galaxy clusters with lasers.

‘Rubble pile’ asteroids are loose collections of material, which can split apart as they rotate. Science News covered physicist Melody Lim's March 15 presentation at the American Physical Society in Chicago on her experiment to understand the inner workings of such asteroids by levitating plastic beads that form collections, spin and break up.

For Women’s History Month, The Washington Post profiles prominent women in atmospheric science history and includes Bernice Ackerman who received a bachelor's, master's, and PhD from UChicago between 1948 and 1965.

Fifth-year physics graduate student, Savannah Gowen, of Prof. Sidney Nagel's lab, won the NSF MRSEC Science Slam with a short film presentation on training gluten in dough.

Over the past year, fourth-year physics student Buduka Ogonor has participated in both Argonne National Laboratory’s Mini Semester and the DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program in his pursuit of a career in STEM. “I want to focus on the intersection between artificial intelligence and machine learning in physics, because that’s what my project at Argonne centered around,” he said.

Students and researchers in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences participated in the recently launched “Winter Grab,” a first of its kind, week-long collection event for regional researchers studying Great Lakes’ winter conditions.

A nuclear reactor at an Illinois energy plant is helping University of Chicago scientists learn how to catch and understand the tiny, elusive particles known as neutrinos. Prof. Juan Collar said, “This is the closest that neutrino physicists have been able to get to a commercial reactor core.”

Chemist Reatha Clark King, SM’60, PhD’63, invented a coiled tube that allowed fuel to cool instead of exploding, a crucial advance in the space race. She is also the lead author of a 1967 paper on oxygen difluoride—considered as a key component of rocket fuel and has since become a standard ingredient. Following her years in the laboratory, she was a college president, led the General Mills Foundation, and is an emeritus trustee of UChicago.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to read out a qubit on demand and set a record for preserving quantum states for more than five seconds, to revolutionize the field of 2D materials with a technique to cut and stack fragile sheets of nanomaterials, and to demonstrate ultracold atoms can segregate into separate domain states.

More than a dozen Black scientists made key contributions to the Manhattan Project but their stories have often been overlooked. One of them was Moddie Taylor, SM’39, PhD’43, who worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory—the arm of the Manhattan Project based at UChicago—and went on to lead Howard University chemistry.

Exoplanet researcher and astronomy and astrophysics student, Emily Gilbert, comments on the identification of Proxima d, another planet around Proxima Centauri, the sun’s closest neighbor.