News: Awards

As a sixth year PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Gourav studies the formation and evolution of galaxies in distant galaxy clusters, using data from ground- and space-based telescopes.

John E. Carlstrom, Chair and the Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, is a leading figure in the study of the cosmic microwave background—the light left over from the first few moments of the universe, has been named a 2020 AAAS Fellow.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) has secured $10 million in new funding through two gifts: a $5 million gift from an anonymous alumnus and his wife and a match of $5 million from The Kavli Foundation. The first gift will name the directorship of the Institute in memory of Prof. David N. Schramm, a legendary professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

“Finding who you are, what you do best and what you enjoy doing will bring you in the right direction—in research, and more broadly, in life,” says Prof. Paolo Privitera. “For this reason, I do not rush the students to focus on a single big project when they start working with me.”

Professor Andrew Fabian from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has been awarded the 2020 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, one of the world's most prestigious science prizes. 

Nora’s dissertation research is on the discovery and modeling of Milky Way stellar streams, supervised by Alex Drlica-Wagner.

Congratulations to Karthik Ramanathan on receiving a 2020 Sugarman Award!

Congratulations to Phil Mansfield on receiving the 2020 Sugarman Award!
 

Congratulations to Prof. Paolo Privitera

Phil Mansfield has been appoined as  the James Cronin Graduate Student Fellow.

Citation: "For central contribution to the first measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering."

The Department of Energy has awarded Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Josh Frieman $1 million over three years as part of the inaugural Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellowship program.

UChicago-led proposal receives NSF funding for pioneering sky measurements

The National Science Foundation has awarded $4 million to the University of Chicago to host the development of an ambitious multi-institutional program to map the leftover light from the Big Bang in greater detail than ever before.

Called CMB-S4, the groundbreaking project will allow us to see back in time to the earliest epoch of the universe. Remnant light from this period, called the cosmic microwave background, is still visible in the skies and holds clues to many of the most pressing mysteries about the universe - from its earliest moments to how it evolved to produce the wondrous structure of galaxies, stars and planets that we see today.

"The history of the universe-and the physics that govern its evolution - are encoded in the cosmic microwave background, and rigorous, precise measurements will allows us to unlock this information and will likely lead to new discoveries," said renowned UChicago cosmologist John Carlstrom, principal investigator for this initial phase of the project and co-spokesperson of the CMB-S4 collaboration, who also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. "These are big, big topics in physics, many of which we don't know how to get at any other way."

Congratulations to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration for being awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The citation reads: "For the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes.”  The $3 million prize will be shared equally among the 347 co-authors.

Several UChicago researchers are involved in the EHT collaboration, and the 10 meter South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a critical component of the network of telescopes that make up the EHT.   Chicagoland EHT collaboration members include Brad Benson, John Carlstrom, Tom Crawford, Jason Henning, Ryan Keisler, Erik Leitch, Daniel Michalik, Andrew Nadolski, Steve Padin, and Sasha Rahlin.