News: Faculty Awards

Congratulations to the PSD faculty members who have received NSF CAREER Awards. According to the NSF, the prestigious CAREER award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
 

UChicago’s Alex Kale receives the Early CAREER Award for advancing ethical and practical standards in data visualization, empowering creators and audiences to better interpret what charts reveal and what they conceal.

Frank Calegari, professor and associate chair of the Department of Mathematics, and Young-Kee Kim, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.

Congratulations to the PSD community members who have been recognized with 2026 Frontiers of Science Awards. Michael Levin, Professor in Physics and the JFI, and Physics alum Carolyn Zhang, PhD'23, are recognized for the field of condensed matter physics. Yoav Afik, a postdoctoral scholar in the EFI who works on the ATLAS experiment, is recognized for research in particle physics phenomenology.

This year, eight PSD instructors and students have been honored for excellence in teaching the next generation of physical and mathematical scientists.

Congrats to Nick Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science, who has won a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

How an RNA pioneer’s discovery of reversible methylation launched a new era in the chemical and biological sciences.

Congratulations to Rebecca Willett, the 2026 recipient of the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize!

Marking the centenary of the Schrödinger equation, the 2026 award honors Gagliardi’s transformative work in climate solutions and multireference quantum theory.

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.

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.

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.