News: 2023

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”.

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."

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. 

Exoplanet GJ 1214b is too hot to be habitable, but likely contains water vapor.

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.

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.

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.

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.