News: Awards

Instruments would help us understand beginning, history, makeup of the universe

In an interview with APS News, Kolb discusses the Big Bang, parallel universes, and the need for public outreach.

Dhayaa Anbajagane, University of Chicago, "Inflation w/ lensing"

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”.

Leslie Rogers, Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Chicago, "Investigating the Biological Potential of Moons in the Uranus System"

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.

Aster Taylor (BS, Astrophysics, 2023) is one of 15 Hertz Fellows selected for this honor, which is awarded to doctoral students who have the "extraordinary creativity necessary to tackle problems others can’t solve."

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.

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

In early 2023, the Community Engagement Working Group in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics organized the South Side Science Art Contest, open to children K-12 who attend schools on the South Side of Chicago. Work on this initiative had started in the Autumn Quarter of 2022, following a successful proposal by the group to the PSD's Inclusive Climate Grant, a fund that supports initiatives that increase diversity or positively impact that division’s culture.

Prof. Wendy Freedman, a leading astronomer who has made fundamental measurements of our universe, will deliver the 2023 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture on May 15 at the Rubenstein Forum at the University of Chicago.

Adina Feinstein (Ph.D. 2023) won a NASA Astrophysics Postdoctoral Sagan Fellowship for 2023.