News

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023

Ph.D. in Astronomy from Observatório Nacional, Brazil, 2019

PSD’s April spotlight is Galen Tsongas, Event Administrator for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and KICP. Galen joined the PSD on February 1, 2023, to plan, organize, and execute events within KICP and A&A.

Congratulations to Celeste Keith for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "OBSERVATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF HAWKING RADIATION FROM PRIMORDIAL BLACK HOLES".

Former KICP graduate student  Kaeli Hughes (Ph.D., UChicago, 2022) won the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics for 2023.
"For leading the lowest threshold ultra-high energy astrophysical neutrino search to date, with data from the Askaryan Radio Array, and her efforts toward the development of future radio detectors for ultra-high energy astrophysical and cosmogenic neutrinos."
 

Ph.D., Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2019

In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, Taylor Hoyt –who received his Ph.D from UChicago in 2022 and is currently a researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division – presents a new approach to calibrating the measurement of the universe’s present day expansion rate.

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.”