News: 2022

Grace Chesmore, a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Physics, and Celeste Keith, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, will conduct research at Fermi National Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

A $20M NSF CONECT Award will continue to support Globus, a research data management service developed and operated by the University of Chicago, as well as staff with expertise in building open and interoperable distributed research cyberinfrastructure (CI).

Peter Littlewood, Professor of in the Department of Physics, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds appointments in James Franck Institute and the College, is a Fellow of the Institute of Molecular Engineering, and was former director of Argonne National Laboratory.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to find axion particles with new detector designs, advocate for paleobiology and evolutionary biology, and lead the S4 collaboration to design the next generation of telescopes detecting the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Eight years later, an explosion far out in space is still revealing secrets about the lives of stars. Vikram Dwarkadas, University of Chicago research professor of astronomy and astrophysics, comments.

A UChicago News “explainer” on University of Chicago meteorologist Ted Fujita and how he devised the Fujita Scale, the internationally accepted standard for measuring tornado severity.

Elise Hinkle was born and brought up in Sudbury, Massachusetts. This is her second year at UChicago pursuing graduate studies in physics and working with Professor Ed Blucher. She is a member of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) Collaboration.

Prof. Laura Gagliardi of Dept. of Chemistry has been elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, one of the world’s oldest existing learned societies.

A group of scientists, including those from the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released an innovative new design for an experiment to find dark matter. This particular detector—Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection, or BREAD— will search for one possible form, called an “axion” with different masses.

The PSD April Spotlight is Ben Stillwell, research engineer manager for PSD’s Engineering and Technical Support Group (ETSG), which works with clients to plan, design, build, and test apparatus for their groundbreaking research projects. Ben is from Tampa, Florida, and has been working in this role since 2017.
 

Two PSD undergraduate students, Bernadette Miao and Wilson Turner, have received Barry Goldwater Scholarships, awarded annually based on academic merit and undergraduate research in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. 

Seven Physical Sciences Division students have been awarded 2022 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. Each fellowship provides three years of support during a five-year fellowship period. For each of the three years of support, NSF provides a $34,000 stipend and $12,000 cost of education allowance to the University.

Jeff McMahon, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Kevin Huffenberger, Associate Professor of Physics at Florida State University have been named co-spokespeople for CMB-S4, a next-generation experiment investigating the remnant light from the Big Bang.

Professor of Physics Edward Blucher catches up with The Chicago Maroon about his 2021 AAAS funded work on asymmetry and an experiment deep underground in a mine in northern Ontario that is looking at a rare type of nuclear decay.

A UChicago College science communication course co-taught by Prof. Peggy Mason and Sara Serritella covers written, visual and hands-on methods of sharing data with the general public.