News: 2026

Congratulations to Chuan He, the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, who has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Congratulations to Frank Calegari, Professor and Associate Chair of Mathematics, who has been named a 2026 Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

Congratulations to Peter McCullagh, the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Statistics, who has been awarded the Guy Medal in Gold from the Royal Statistical Society.

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Anna Wuttig's work in sustainable electrocatalysis earns national recognition.

UChicago chemists “film” long-range light-matter hybrid particles.

An AI-powered suit created by UChicago researchers combines a wearable electrode suit, smart glasses with a built-in camera, a motion-tracking layer, and a multimodal AI model capable of processing both vision and language, the same class of technology as GPT-4.1. The suit physically moves a user's muscles in real time, adapting to whatever task is in front of them, with no pre-programmed routine required.

At the 2026 King Faisal Prize ceremony, Prof. Carlos Kenig was recognized for his transformative work on nonlinear partial differential equations, described as a stubborn, beautiful aspect of mathematics that govern everything from the crash of ocean waves to the clarity of a medical scan. Where others saw complexity, he found structure that reshaped the very landscape of modern mathematical analysis.

Science and art are often held up as opposites — the logical and analytical versus the creative and emotional, the domain of the left brain hemisphere versus the right, the yang versus the yin. But UChicago notes that the disciplines are, in fact, intertwined — and not just in an abstract philosophical sense.

UChicago researchers launch civic chatbot to educate and challenge voters on political views, ballot measures and more
 

UChicago Chemistry celebrates World Quantum Day and how the department transformed quantum science from a descriptive tool into a predictive power
 

UC Berkeley professor and pioneer in gold catalysis and supramolecular chemistry visits UChicago to present a three-part seminar series on the future of chemical synthesis.

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Data Science Institute announced a new partnership with AI Research Commons (ARC), Microsoft, and NVIDIA to identify and support high-potential, early-stage artificial intelligence startups emerging from Third Coast Foundry universities.
 

Profs. Yu Deng and Tomer Schlank have received 2026 Clay Research Awards from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Tomer Schlank is recognized (with collaborators) for groundbreaking work on Ravenel’s Telescope Conjecture, and Yu Deng is recognized (with Zaher Hani) for major advances on the derivation of the Boltzmann equation from particle systems.
 

The UChicago Alumni Association and Alumni Board honor Marc Kamionkowski, PhD’91, with the Professional Achievement Award. Kamionkowski is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2011. He is a theoretical physicist who has worked on a broad range of topics in theoretical astrophysics, cosmology and particle theory. 

Superconductors allow electricity to flow without resistance, meaning no energy is lost as heat.