News

Prof. Michael Gladders is the 2022-2023 recipient of the Marian and Stuart Rice Research Award, a U. Chicago Physical Sciences Divisional honor that provides funding for intellectually exciting and innovative research ventures that enables new directions of research.

We welcomed a new staff member last week, Galen Tsongas, who will be our Events Administrator in KICP and A&A! Galen will be coordinating events, workshops, conferences, colloquiua, seminars, and visitors.

Assoc. Prof. Erik Shirokoff, a University of Chicago astronomer who built instruments to understand the earliest ages of the universe, died Jan. 26. He was 43.

Analysis combines Dark Energy Survey, South Pole Telescope data to understand evolution of universe

Combining data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, scientists piece together a coherent story of the Universe from galaxy and CMB surveys. These are some of the most stringent tests of the standard cosmological model using cross-correlations of independent data sets.

Robert Rosner likes big questions.
How could nuclear power help humanity in a warming climate? How can physicists better explain their work to the public? And why are magnetic fields… well, everywhere? “The nerve of them, being so ubiquitous,” he says.

My research is in theoretical astroparticle physics, with the main focus on dark matter searches. In particular, I developed a structure formation model with which dark matter candidates can be tested using various astrophysical observations. Moreover, I explore the astrophysical sky with X-rays, gamma-rays and high-energy neutrinos to search for dark matter signatures.

Mandy Chen was born and raised in Guizhou Province, Southwest China. Before coming to the University of Chicago she was studying at the University of Hong Kong, where she got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and astronomy. This is her fifth year as a PhD student in astronomy and astrophysics. Her research focuses on observations of the diffuse circumgalactic medium—the outermost envelopes of galaxies. She says she “seeks to better understand the dynamical state of this diffuse gas, and its connection to the star-formation/supermassive blackhole activities of galaxies and the cosmic baryon cycle in general.”

Jessica Zebrowski's research centers on understanding cosmic acceleration. She is interested in developing mm-wave instrumentation and data analysis techniques to build pioneering line intensity mapping experiments. These experiments will constrain cosmology by mapping the evolution of large-scale structure over time.

Scientists have new evidence about how cosmic cataclysms forge gold, platinum and other heavy members of the periodic table

I am an experimental cosmologist building technology to probe the structure and origins of the universe.

Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, graduate student, won the 2022 DOE Graduate Instrumentation Research Award (GIRA).

I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Chihway Chang and Prof. Josh Frieman. I am heavily involved in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration, studying large scale structure using weak gravitational lensing. In particular, during my PhD I have been focusing in calibrating the redshift distributions of both the background and foreground galaxy samples used for the weak lensing analysis of the first three years of DES data.

I am interested in astroparticle physics, plasma physics, and multi-messenger astronomy. I study compact sources and transient events, such as neutron stars, or tidal disruption events.

My research lies at the intersection of cosmology and general relativity, most of the time involving simulations. Usually, our cosmological simulations of large-scale structure formation make assumptions about the nature of gravity and space-time. These simulations are extremely important to our understanding of the Universe in regimes we cannot access analytically.