News: 2019

Ellen works as the business administrator in the Flash Center for Computational Science in Astronomy & Astrophysics. She was born in Evanston and raised in Edgewater and Wilmette, IL. She has been a member of the PSD community for six and a half years. 

A new study by UChicago researchers shakes up the picture of Martian salt—and offers new ways to test what Mars’ water would have looked like. Asst. Prof. Edwin Kite’s team analyzed salt deposits and built models to help determine how and why Mars dried out. 

Prof. Daniel Holz discusses the detection of gravitational waves that may have been from a black hole swallowing a neutron star with Science News Magazine. 

 

Prof. Daniel Holz discusses research on black hole pairing and tripling and explains how this research can help scientists measure the eccentricities of black holes' orbits in the near future.  

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day features the 1901 photograph, The Orion Nebula, taken by George Ritchey at Yerkes Observatory. The original glass photographic plate, sensitive to green and blue wavelengths, has been digitized and light-to-dark inverted to produce a positive image. Ritchey's plates from over a hundred years ago preserve astronomical data and can still be used for exploring astrophysical processes. Digitization project: W. Cerny, R. Kron, Y. Liang, J. Lin, M. Martinez, E. Medina, B. Moss, B. Ogonor, M. Ransom, J. Sanchez (Univ. of Chicago)

The Department of Chemistry's Lunch and Learn program helps incoming graduate students acclimate to the University by preparing them for first-year coursework, helping them build a broad foundation of practical skills critical for excellence in graduate school, and more.

Student-driven changes in laboratories at UChicago, including a Shut the Sash program, yield energy and cost savings.

In the year since the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, UChicago's pioneering astrophysicist, Eugene Parker, has been receiving updates on the NASA mission, which has already come closer to the sun than any spacecraft. Parker recently visited with Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, to reflect on the launch.

For the past quarter-century, the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory has helped scientists and engineers make groundbreaking discoveries—providing extremely bright X-rays to investigate everything from dinosaur bones and lunar rocks to materials for new solar panels and new pharmaceutical drugs. Now Argonne, which is operated by the University of Chicago, has been cleared to begin building a massive, $815 million upgrade to its kilometer-long X-ray facility. 

Raymond Moellering’s lab reports a new method to identify and interrogate the biophysical properties of tens of thousands of modified proteins simultaneously in live cells. This method, called “Hotspot Thermal Profiling,” therefore enables efficient selection of functionally important modifications for further study, as well as insight into the network of proteins and biomolecules that are interacting with that particular modification site in cells. 

Assoc. Prof. Henry Hoffman of the Department of Computer Science and Assoc. Prof. Abigail Vieregg of the Department of Physics have been awarded the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to scholars who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. 

Dorian Abbot, Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences, piloted a flipped classroom model in the physical sciences course, Global Warming, wherein students watched short video lectures and read texts outside of class. They then met in small sections with a section leader who guided and coached them through a mixture of quantitative, visual, and discussion exercises so they could apply and practice what they'd learned. This model has been shown to drive student engagement and achievement in STEM classrooms.