News: 2025

Graduate student Abigail Lee is featured in a Popular Science article, explaining how to measure the size of the universe 

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.

The DAMIC-M experiment, led by Prof. Paolo Privitera, has released new results on the search for dark matter particles with its prototype detector operating at the Modane Underground Laboratory in France. With an improvement of orders of magnitude in sensitivity with respect to any other detector technology, DAMIC-M new results exclude for the first time that dark matter may be primarily composed of hidden-sector particles with sub-GeV mass. The Chicago group played a  leading role in the detector design, underground installation and commissioning, and data analysis.

MAROON-X instrument finds evidence for planets around famous Barnard’s Star

Research Corporation for Science Advancement will make 21 separate awards of $60,000 in direct costs each to support the research of 20 scientists from colleges, universities, and research institutions in the United States and Canada in the first year of Scialog: Early Science with the LSST, a three-year initiative that aims to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

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.