News: Faculty Awards

Congratulations to Pedro Lopes, who received an Academic Communicators Network Excellence Award for Digital Communications.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced the 2026 Golden Goose Awards, celebrating federally funded basic research that initially seemed trivial but yielded major societal benefits. This year's honorees include discoveries leading to histotripsy, a non-invasive cancer treatment using ultrasound, and the "Black Marble" satellite data, which maps power outages and aids disaster recovery by observing holiday lighting from space. Another award recognizes work on the physics of everyday phenomena like coffee spills, impacting inkjet printing and manufacturing. The awards originated to counter past ridicule of basic science, highlighting how unexpected discoveries, often from obscure beginnings, are crucial for health, safety, and technological advancement, underscoring the importance of sustained federal investment in scientific research.

An assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and the Data Science Institute, Mateo Díaz has been named the inaugural Faraco Family Assistant Professor.

Congratulations to Benoît Roux, who has been selected to receive the 2027 Klaus Schulten and Zaida Luthey-Schulten Award in Computational Biophysics from the Biophysical Society.

Congratulations to Mark Levin, who has been selected to receive the 2026 Kyoto University Lectureship Award in Chemistry.

Vitelli honored for his innovative research reimagining possibilities of unconventional materials.

The UChicago mathematics professor spoke to the Maroon about his work proving one of the decade’s most important results in mathematical physics.

This year’s Golded Goose Award honorees turned coffee stains, holiday lights, and a noisy ultrasound experiment into breakthroughs in physics, disaster response, and cancer treatment.

Award by Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation honors high-risk, multi-field leap across quantum, biology, and chemistry.

The American Chemical Society honor recognizes Gagliardi's pioneering work and its application to catalyst design, carbon capture, and the global energy transition.

Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider sends protons crashing together at extraordinary speeds, allowing scientists to study the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that shape the universe. Those collisions help researchers investigate questions ranging from the behavior of subatomic particles to the possibility of new physics beyond what is currently known.

Laura Gagliardi and Mark Levin acknowledged for their outstanding achievements in chemistry across various fields.

The historic Fields Medal victories of two Peking University alumni have drawn attention to a wider generation of young Chinese scientists and technology entrepreneurs making their mark on the global stage.

Congratulations to Professor Mark Levin, who has received a 2027 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award For Organic Synthesis!

Assistant Professor Daniil Rudenko was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Mathematics for the 2026–27 academic year. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.