News: Faculty

2023

Meet new senior member: David W. Miller

October 23, 2023

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


Meet new senior member: Jamie Law-Smith

October 3, 2023

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


Michael Gladders will receive a Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching

May 25, 2023

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.


“Answering big questions at the South Pole”, PSD News

May 22, 2023

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 has been elected to the Royal Society, PSD News

May 10, 2023

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.


“NSF awards $52M to upgrade Simons Observatory in Chile to explore origins of universe”, UChicago News

May 9, 2023

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


First results from DAMIC-M chosen as PRL Editors’ Suggestion

May 3, 2023

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

February 9, 2023

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.


Erik Shirokoff, astronomer who built instruments to map the universe, 1979-2023

February 3, 2023

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.


A coherent story of the Universe from galaxy and CMB surveys

January 31, 2023

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, 2023 APS President, Takes the Helm”, APS News

January 30, 2023

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.


2022

“Discovering the highest energy particles from the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet”, PSD spotlight

October 27, 2022

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


Congratulations to Abigail Vieregg

October 27, 2022

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


KICP Senior Member Marcela Carena has been named a DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow

October 26, 2022

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 has been appointed the David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics

August 1, 2022

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.