News

Since 1994, the Cottrell Scholar program has honored and helped to develop outstanding teacher-scholars who are recognized by their scientific communities for the quality and innovation of their research programs and their potential for academic leadership.

Professors Paolo Privitera (Astronomy & Astrophysics and KICP) and Andrew Cleland (PME) have received a 2025-2027 DARPA award to develop novel qubit-based detectors of low-energy neutrinos.  The UChicago-led consortium supported by the QuSeN (Quantum Sensing of Neutrinos) program includes Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of California San Diego and Fermilab.

UChicago scientists probe the nature of mysterious ‘hidden-sector’ dark matter in DAMIC-M experiment

The Teaching Prize is based on nominations from students who shared compelling evidence of honorees’ outstanding contributions to their education. 

Professor Wendy Freedman named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2025

The DAMIC-M experiment, led by Professor Paolo Privitera, has released new results on the search for dark matter particles with its prototype detector operating at the Modane Underground Laboratory in France. With an improvement of orders of magnitude in sensitivity with respect to any other detector technology, DAMIC-M new results exclude for the first time that dark matter may be primarily composed of hidden-sector particles with sub-GeV mass. The Chicago group played a  leading role in the detector design, underground installation and commissioning, and data analysis.

KICP is collaborating with Adler Planetarium, the SkAI Institute, and the Kavli Center for Ethics in Berkeley on a new Kavli Foundation funded project exploring ethics questions surrounding the use of AI in citizen science efforts, and in basic science research and communication more broadly.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

The American Astronomical Society has awarded the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy to Maya Fishbach for her “major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe.” Fishbach is known for performing the first “dark standard siren” measurement of the Hubble constant with gravitational waves and a galaxy catalog (Fishbach et al. 2019); discovering a gravitational-wave signature of pair-instability supernovae (Fishbach & Holz 2017); proposing the use of black hole spins to distinguish whether black holes grow from previous mergers (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 20177a); and measuring the redshift evolution of the black hole merger rate for the first time (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 2018).
 
The Annie Jump Cannon Award is given every year for outstanding research and promise for future research to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her PhD.

Teniola Ajagbe, a KICP Space Explorers Alum, is headed to Northwestern University as a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major. She was featured on the local news and credits the Space Explorers program with helping her discover what she wants to do with her career.

On January 3, 2025, the Biden White House presented 23 individuals and 2 organizations with the National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation.

UChicago cosmologist recognized for pioneering work on Hubble constant measurements

Analysis of cosmic microwave background reinforces Hubble constant measurement

The APS Fellowship Program was created to recognize members who may have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. They may also have made significant contributions to the teaching of physics or service and participation in the activities of the Society.

SkAI Institute will develop AI tools and accelerate astronomy’s data-driven revolution