News: Faculty

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.”

Abigail Vieregg, Professor in the Department of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and the EFI, has been appointed the David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics for a term beginning August 1, 2022 through July 31, 2025.

The appointment of Joshua A. Frieman, Professor, as chair of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, effective July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2025.

Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, receives a Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize for Exceptional Service on June 4.

Josh Frieman elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Prof. Wendy Freedman will address this year’s graduating class on the Main Quad. A renowned cosmologist, Freedman led the team that made a landmark measurement in 2001 of the Hubble constant—the rate at which the universe is expanding.

Prof. Emeritus Dietrich Müller, a renowned experimental physicist at the University of Chicago who spent half a century building instruments to study energetic particles from space called cosmic rays, died Dec. 22 at the age of 85.

University of Chicago physicist Abby Vieregg is leading an international experiment that essentially uses the ice in Antarctica as a giant detector to find extremely energetic particles from outer space. Recently approved by NASA, the $20 million project will build an instrument to fly above the Antarctic in a balloon, launching in December 2024.