News: Students

Congratulations to  Fei Xu for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on “Peeking Into the Future of Dark Matter Searches”.

Samantha Usman, graduate student in Astronomy & Astrophysics, has been awarded the inaugural LGBTQ+ Community Engagement Award from UChicago Alumni Pride and the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. This award recognizes exceptional contributions that advance and support the interests of the LGBTQ+ community.

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

Congratulations to Jisheng Zhang for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Thermal and Magnetic History of Rocky Exoplanets”.

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.

Congratulations to Rebecca Diesing for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on “Unraveling Particle Acceleration and the Nonthermal Universe”.

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."

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

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

Diego Garza (Physics, Astrophysics, 2023) and Aster Taylor (Astrophysics, 2023) won the  NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, Taylor Hoyt –who received his Ph.D from UChicago in 2022 and is currently a researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division – presents a new approach to calibrating the measurement of the universe’s present day expansion rate.

Congratulations to Adina Feinstein for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on “Young Stellar and Planetary Systems from the UV to the IR”.

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky.