News: Students

The American Astronomical Society has awarded the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy to Maya Fishbach for her “major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe.” Fishbach is known for performing the first “dark standard siren” measurement of the Hubble constant with gravitational waves and a galaxy catalog (Fishbach et al. 2019); discovering a gravitational-wave signature of pair-instability supernovae (Fishbach & Holz 2017); proposing the use of black hole spins to distinguish whether black holes grow from previous mergers (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 20177a); and measuring the redshift evolution of the black hole merger rate for the first time (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 2018).
 
The Annie Jump Cannon Award is given every year for outstanding research and promise for future research to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her PhD.

Teniola Ajagbe, a KICP Space Explorers Alum, is headed to Northwestern University as a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major. She was featured on the local news and credits the Space Explorers program with helping her discover what she wants to do with her career.

UChicago-led analysis measures universe expansion rate, finds there may not be a ‘Hubble tension’
We know many things about our universe, but astronomers are still debating exactly how fast it is expanding. In fact, over the past two decades, two major ways to measure this number—known as the “Hubble constant” —have come up with different answers, leading some to wonder if there was something missing from our model of how the universe works.

Congratulations to Elyssa Brooks for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "Developments of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors".

CCAPP is proud to announce Abigail Lee (U. Chicago) and Hanjue Zhu (U. Chicago) as the winners of the 2024 Price Prize in Cosmology and Astrophysics

Ava Polzin, Astronomy and Astrophysics “The Smallest Pieces of the Puzzle: Using Dwarf Galaxies to Understand the Universe”

“We suspected that magnetic fields are acting as the walls of the chimney and that hot gas is traveling up through them, like smoke”, said Scott Mackey of the University of Chicago, who led the study. “Now we’ve discovered an exhaust vent near the top of the chimney.”

Congratulations to Zhuowen (Ben) Zhang for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Forward modeling of cluster systematics for cluster cosmology".

Congratulations to Mandy Chen for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "Toward a Physical Understanding of the Dynamic Circumgalactic Medium"

Gabriel Hoshino, PhD student, was awarded the DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Fellowship to work with Prof. David Miller, Andrew Sonnenschein, and  Stefan Knirck on "Instrumentation for a Terahertz Reflector-Based Search for Axions and Dark Photon”  
 

Congratulations to Jason Poh for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Strong Gravitational Lensing Science in the Era of Large Astronomical Surveys".

Congratulations to Maya Mallaby-Kay for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "Probing the Large Scale Structure of our Universe with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope".

Congratulations to Andrea Bryant for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "HYPOTHETICAL ICY MOON SEISMIC PROFILES FOR COMPARISON TO FUTURE SEISMIC DATA"

Congratulations to the 2023 Blue Apple Prize winner, Amanda Farah!

Congratulations to Wei Quan for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "ANALYSIS OF COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND TEMPERATURE AND E-MODE POLARIZATION ANISOTROPY WITH 2019 AND 2020 DATA FROM THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE".