News: 2024

Congratulations to the nine PSD graduate students who have been awarded 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships! The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

NYT article: Scientists may have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of that mysterious cosmic force. That could be good news for the fate of the universe. Wendy Freedman praises the new survey data as "superb," and Michael Turner says the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news since cosmic acceleration was established.

Josh Frieman will lead around 50 astronomy students south to Carbondale to be in the path of totality for the upcoming solar eclipse.

An accelerator known as a muon collider could revolutionize particle physics—if it can be built. Physicists, like UChicago's Karri Dipetrillo, are advocating for one to be built at Fermilab.

SAND Lab's Nightshade aims to help artists prevent image generators from easily reproducing their work, but the researchers behind it warn more intellectual property safeguards are needed.

UChicago, Fermilab research uses coaxial “dish” antenna to scan for mysterious particles.

Two UChicago postdocs in Astronomy & Astrophysics have been awarded the prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship. Congrats, Rafael Luque and Lily Zhao, for being selected as Sagan Fellows!

UChicago scholars, including Michael Turner, Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics, discuss the significance of the eclipse in science, culture, and religion.

Pouya Mahdi Gholami, a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science, studies adaptive operation and intelligence on energy-limited edge devices.

Ben Zhao, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, pens an article for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development detailing how generative AI systems have made significant inroads into creative industries such as art, music, and creative writing, particularly since 2022.

“All of those major discoveries rested on Leavitt’s discovery,” Wendy Freedman says in a New York Times article about Henrietta Leavitt, whose research revealed that the universe was hundreds of times bigger than astronomers had imagined.

A Chemical & Engineering News article mentions a nearly $2 million grant from the NSF awarded to Prof. Dmitri Talapin to establish the MXenes Synthesis, Tunability, and Reactivity Center for Chemical Innovation.

Researchers from the Chemistry Department in the Physical Sciences Division have developed a computational approach to accurately describe transient states for many chemical reactions.

An interview with Grant Ho, Assistant Professor in Computer Science

In July 2023, Grant Ho joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. Grant, who grew up in South Florida, received a bachelor’s in computer science from Stanford University and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. Before joining UChicago, he was a CSE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sysnet group at UC San Diego and a visiting researcher at Corelight Labs. We interviewed Grant about his interests and experiences.
 

Science.org article describes how a U.S. report lays out an ambitious plan to harness the “RNome” for medicine and more—but funding is uncertain. For a given RNA molecule, researchers will have to document “not only the sequence, but also the type and location of the modification[s],” says UChicago chemist Chuan He.