News: 2023

Congratulations to Georgios Zacharegkas for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Modeling the non-linear scales in Cosmology via the galaxy-halo connection with applications in DES Y3”.

Congratulations to Clarke Esmerian for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Modeling Dust Production, Growth, and Destruction in Reionization-Era Galaxies”.

Congratulations to graduate student Karia Dibert, who has been awarded a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year.

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.

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, 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.

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

PSD’s April spotlight is Galen Tsongas, Event Administrator for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and KICP. Galen joined the PSD on February 1, 2023, to plan, organize, and execute events within KICP and A&A.

Congratulations to Celeste Keith for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "OBSERVATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF HAWKING RADIATION FROM PRIMORDIAL BLACK HOLES".

Former KICP graduate student  Kaeli Hughes (Ph.D., UChicago, 2022) won the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics for 2023.
"For leading the lowest threshold ultra-high energy astrophysical neutrino search to date, with data from the Askaryan Radio Array, and her efforts toward the development of future radio detectors for ultra-high energy astrophysical and cosmogenic neutrinos."