News: Faculty

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.

Hsiao-Wen Chen, KICP senior member and Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics , has been named 2022 American Astronomical Society Fellows. The AAS Fellows program was established in 2019 to recognize AAS members for their contributions toward the Society's mission of enhancing and sharing humanity's scientific understanding of the universe.  

Jeff McMahon and his team have developed new techniques for working with curved lenses instead of flat silicon wafers for CMB telescope lenses.

For Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago, solving these questions involves radically rethinking what we think we know about the universe’s very early history.
Interviewed by Richard Webb, Executive Editor, New Scientist at the Royal Institution, London in Feb 2020.

Citation: "Joshua Frieman (Fermilab / University of Chicago): For significant theoretical work on inflationary cosmology and dark energy and for pioneering contributions to optical survey science."

PUEO is a balloon mission designed to launch from Antarctica that will detect signals from ultra-high energy neutrinos, particles that contain valuable clues about the highest energy astrophysical processes, including the creation of black holes and neutron star mergers. Neutrinos travel across the universe undisturbed, carrying information about events billions of light years away. PUEO would be the most sensitive survey of cosmic ultra-high energy neutrinos ever conducted. The principal investigator is Abigail Vieregg of the University of Chicago.

Congratulations to Sam Passaglia for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "The Black Hole Window on Cosmic Inflation". Sam has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

Congratulations to Philip Mansfield for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Why Do Dark Matter Halos Die Together? An Intergalactic Murder Mystery". Philip has received a position of a KIPAC fellow at Stanford University.

XENON1T data could be either evidence of new particle physics or unexpected contaminant.

“Finding who you are, what you do best and what you enjoy doing will bring you in the right direction—in research, and more broadly, in life,” says Prof. Paolo Privitera. “For this reason, I do not rush the students to focus on a single big project when they start working with me.”