News: Faculty

In an interview with APS News, Kolb discusses the Big Bang, parallel universes, and the need for public outreach.

Associate Professor, Department of Physics
Ph.D., Stanford University, 2011
 

Assistant Professor | PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, UC Santa Cruz, 2021

Prof Michael Gladders will receive a Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University next week. Mike was nominated by the students in his Astronomy Field Course, an innovative course he designed that gets astronomy majors directly engaged in research with the Magellan telescope. This is one of the highest honors for faculty at the University.

Most people seek warmer destinations for travel to escape the tough Chicago winters. Brad Benson, on the other hand, sets his sights on the South Pole nearly every year. On his list of top reasons to visit: the intense cold creating extremely low levels of moisture in the air, dryer even than the highest mountain peaks in the world. 

Wendy Freedman, John and Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics,  has been elected to the Royal Society, a fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. This year, 59 scientists from around the world were elected Fellows or Foreign Members of the Society for their outstanding contributions to science.

Improvements include upgraded receiver, solar panels to power the observatory and data processing pipeline.

Led by PI Privitera, the DAMIC-M experiment published it’s first, world-leading results searching for sub-GeV dark matter via electron scattering in silicon CCDs.

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.

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.

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.

Prof. Abigail Vieregg and her students build instruments to detect the highest energy neutrinos.

Abigail Vieregg received a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative Award for instrumentation development to advance the detection of the highest energy neutrinos.

Dr. Marcela Carena of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory – Honored “for leadership and influential contributions to particle physics, including novel theoretical ideas and strategies for HEP experiments related to the Higgs boson, dark matter and electroweak baryogenesis, and promoting Latin American participation in DOE-hosted experiments.”