News: Faculty

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

The University of Chicago announced a new partnership with AI Research Commons, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to support and accelerate early-stage artificial intelligence startups emerging from Midwest research institutions.

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

Research findings show that writing with AI can reduce gender biases in the workplace and that AI disclosure is complex and can impact authorial perception.

In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), a team led by Prof. Laura Gagliardi outlined a new method for excluding water when using covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to build carbon capture materials.

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.

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.
 

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

As robots become more expressive and socially capable, the line between machines and living characters is starting to blur. From Disney’s lifelike Olaf robot to interactive droids inspired by Star Wars, recent developments highlight how far robotics has come in replicating human-like behavior and emotion.