News: Research

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. 

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

Cyndia is wrapping up her PhD in physics at Stanford/SLAC working on CMB instrumentation and analysis with Chao-Lin Kuo and Zeeshan Ahmed.

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.

I’m wrapping up a postdoc at the Center for Particle Cosmology at UPenn, and will join KICP this Fall.

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023

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

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.

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.

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