News: Awards

The IAU received 118 applications for a PhD prize for thesis defended between, defended between 16 December 2023 and 15 December 2024. The Divisions have awarded nine PhD Prizes, and each awardee will be invited to present their work during the Division Days at the IAU XXXIII General Assembly, which will be held in August 2027 in Rome, Italy. The Divisions have also awarded eight honourable mentions.

The Teaching Prize is based on nominations from students who shared compelling evidence of honorees’ outstanding contributions to their education. 

Named for a renowned University of Chicago professor who shaped minds with his sense of duty and dedication to students, the Norman Maclean Faculty Award recognizes those who do the same.

As part of the 2025 Alumni Awards program, Prof. Emeritus Donald G. York, PhD’71, will receive the Norman Maclean Faculty Award honoring his extraordinary contributions to teaching and student life at the University of Chicago.

Eleven members of the UChicago community have been honored with the College’s annual teaching awards. These instructors, graduate and undergraduate students were nominated by the undergraduates they teach and recognize their efforts to get students to look beyond the textbook or classroom and discover new ways of learning. 

The Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science has selected 79 PhD students from 56 universities and 29 states for the prestigious Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program.

SCGSR prepares doctoral candidates for careers of critical importance to the Office of Science’s mission of transforming our understanding of nature and advancing the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. Participants receive world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities, expertise, and resources at DOE's national laboratories.  

A segment filmed by UChicago Creative, featuring Prof. Mike Gladders' and his students' travel to Chile to do research on the Magellan Telescope, has won a gold Telly award. The Telly Awards are awards that recognize excellence in video and television across all screens since 1979. The gold award is the highest honor in the category.

Grad student Joann Jones has been selected as one of the Jump Trading fellows for their 2025 inaugural class. With this fellowship, Jump will fully fund one year of her PhD studies for the 2025-26 academic year.

Professor Wendy Freedman named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2025

The highly competitive NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) recently named 24 new fellows to its 2025 class.  Over 650 applicants vied for the 2025 fellowships. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support at a U.S. institution.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

The American Astronomical Society has awarded the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy to Maya Fishbach (PhD, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2020) 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.

On January 3, 2025, the Biden White House presented 23 individuals and 2 organizations with the National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation.

Michael Zhang has been named a recipient of a 2024-2025 Suzuki Postdoctoral Fellowship Award.

UChicago cosmologist recognized for pioneering work on Hubble constant measurements

The K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award recognizes graduate students who show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education and who are committed to academic innovation in the areas of equity, community engagement, and teaching and learning.