News: 2021

New analysis by astronomy professor Wendy Freedman finds agreement with standard model in ongoing Hubble tension.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to transform plastics, electronics, and transportation, experiment with materials that can 'remember,' and contribute to the most precise look yet at the universe's evolution.

Scientists and engineers at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory are using biomaterials, advanced polymers, and artificial intelligence to engineer new materials that are fully recyclable and biodegradable from the ground up, without sacrificing the useful qualities of traditional plastics and consumer products. At the same time, these new materials can be engineered with specific properties to incorporate them into a new generation of electronics, better batteries, clean energy systems, and more.
This work has the potential to advance technology across the board, while reducing environmental harms and enabling human society to move forward in a more sustainable manner.

Clay Córdova, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, has been awarded a Simons Foundation grant as part of the Simons Collaboration on Categorical Symmetries. The collaboration, directed by Constantin Teleman of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported under the Simons Collaborations in Mathematics and Physical Sciences program, which aims to "stimulate progress on fundamental scientific questions of major importance in mathematics, theoretical physics and theoretical computer science."

Prof. Diana Franklin discusses her research into how computer science curricula are used in school and the "big gaps" in learning with Education Next.

A new imaging and machine learning technique developed at the University of Chicago allows scientists, including biophysics student Devin Harrison, to watch cells break down glucose, potentially leading to new methods for treating a wide array of diseases, including cancer and COVID-19.

As a theorist with a background in physics, Prof. Brent Doiron models the brain, and the network of neurons that compose it, as a complex system where interactions among individual components produce activity in a group or system that can’t be explained by just looking at the components in isolation.

PSD’s June spotlight is Melissa “Mel” Salvo-Leadingham, financial administrator for the PSD-LBC. Mel has been with the University of Chicago since November, 2019. This year she co-founded the Hispanic Latinx employee resource group called HLX.

Today’s on-the-ground missions exploring Mars are helping Profs. Edwin Kite and colleagues obtain a more direct and complete understanding of the red planet. Prof. Rocky Kolb comments the US and Chinese space programs should collaborate as well as compete.

Professor Laura Gagliardi has been named the winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Faraday Lectureship Prize, celebrating the most exciting chemical science taking place today. She was cited for contributions to the development of multireference quantum chemical approaches to describe catalysis and excited state phenomena. The prize awards £3000 and a medal.

As a special send-off to the 2021 graduates, students of the PSD came together to perform “Novi Scientiam,” a 21-part song composed by Dean Olinto’s husband, Sérgio Assad, and inspired by the “Alma Mater” Convocation theme of University of Chicago. The student musicians featured practiced during remote learning and submitted their recorded parts to be woven together into a film, debuting at the ceremony June 9.
 

Kyle Kawagoe was born and raised in Reedley, California. Before coming to University of Chicago, he was an undergraduate in The College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He has been a graduate student at UChicago for five years in the Department of Physics. His field of study is theoretical hard condensed matter physics and the physics of topological phases of matter. When the COVID-19 lockdowns started in the United States, he pivoted to theoretical biophysics, doing research on epidemiological modeling.

Abigail Poteshman, a graduate student in the Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. “I plan to develop mathematical and computational techniques to improve the accuracy and efficiency of computational simulations of materials from first principles. In particular, I plan to focus on the thermal properties of materials for applications in sustainable energy technologies,” she said.
 

In 1942, the Manhattan Project needed to create a chain reaction—a crucial step toward proving that it would be possible to make an atomic bomb. The scientists achieved this sustained nuclear reaction, the first created by humans, on Dec. 2, 1942, in a squash court under the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.

Nicknamed “Chicago Pile-1,” the world’s first nuclear reactor kicked off the Atomic Age and has a complicated legacy, including the rise of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

Prof. Dan Hooper discusses what happened after the Big Bang, ‘breaking’ the Standard Model of Physics