News: Students

The University of Chicago Library continues to look to the sky in an ongoing collaboration with Professor Rich Kron, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, exploring the use of data obtained from historical astronomical glass plates to drive new astronomical discovery.

The Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards are given to recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students who present at one of the poster sessions at the meetings of the AAS. Awardees are honored with a Chambliss medal or, in the case of honorable mention, a certificate. Five graduate and undergraduate students from the Astronomy & Astrophysics Department won awards or honorable mentions.

Experimental cosmologist and Assoc. Prof. McMahon and his students developed a new metamaterials-based antireflection coating for the silicon lenses used in cameras that capture the oldest light in the universe.

Ceramic chips inside meteorites hint at wild days of the early solar system. Using complex equipment in Nicolas Dauphas' Origins Lab, including a one-of-a-kind patented purification system that the team developed, Justin Hu measured the isotopes for eight different elements inside the chips.

Mingyue Wang grew up in Hangzhou, China. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Fordham University. This is her second quarter as a student in the Financial Mathematics master’s program. She is currently taking Portfolio Theory & Risk Management, Numerical Methods of Option Pricing and Hedging, Stochastic Calculus, and Machine Learning in Finance.

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.