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From Booth to Google: An alum learns to lead AI innovation

Hal Conick — 05/29/2026 - 12:04pm

Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.

In 2006, Satyajeet Salgar, MBA’07, was sitting in an advanced marketing class at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when he pitched his group on a case study: a new video platform called YouTube.

Smartphones were growing in popularity, and the internet was nearly ubiquitous.

“This platform is going to be big,” Salgar thought. But his group balked.

“The sentiment in the class was, ‘We don’t think this thing will make it to next year,’” Salgar said.

After he graduated, he got a job with Google—working on partnerships at YouTube, one of its newest acquisitions.

“I always found that hilarious,” Salgar said.

Nearly two decades later, Salgar serves as director of product management and user experience (UX) at Google AI. In this role, Salgar leads the company’s efforts to use AI to build the next generation of products for Android, Chrome, Google Cloud, Search and more. It was a path that emerged from his graduate studies at Booth, where he learned to break a problem into its basic principles before looking for a solution.

“I might be a better software engineer for it,” Salgar said. “Even without writing code for two years, I felt like I developed the habit of rethinking everything from the start, then building it back up.”

The path toward innovation

Growing up in Tanzania, Nigeria and India, Salgar saw how innovative technology was changing the way people lived their lives and spent their time.

By high school, he knew computing would be central to his path in life. This led him to pursue a bachelor’s in computer engineering at India’s Pune Institute of Computer Technology, then a master’s in computer science at Stanford University.

As a graduate student, Salgar worked part-time at a medical startup; after graduating, he joined a data storage security startup. These experiences taught him how technology needs to work with sales, marketing and finance to find success.

This understanding deepened when Salgar earned his MBA at Booth, which he calls a truly “transformational experience.” Salgar enjoyed being part of a student body with diverse skillsets and experiences. His classmates all had unique goals, ambitions and talents, and he loved being in their orbit and learning from them.

Salgar worked as editor-in-chief of the Booth student newspaper, Chicago Business, and kept a pulse on what was happening around campus. He was fascinated by classes with professors Austan D. Goolsbee, Sanjay K. Dhar and Raghuram G. Rajan, all world-class experts in their fields.

“I feel very lucky for my time in Chicago because there was this grounding in data and facts,” Salgar said. “The school was also very intentional about helping students be better at both strategy and marketing, so it was a good time for me to be there.”

That groundwork has become essential for Salgar’s career at Google. His broad skillset has allowed him to move from partnerships at YouTube to a wide range of roles across Google. He’s worked on ads, payments, games and Google Search, among other parts of the company.

Search, especially, was important to Salgar.

“It’s an incredible product because of the impact you have on the world,” he said. “You get to deeply understand people, because you can see what they’re looking for and understand their needs.”

New access to intelligence

In his current role at Google AI, Salgar draws on his nearly two decades of experience across the company to guide AI innovation.

AI, he believes, will affect how everyone works and interacts with the world. He said it could extend intelligence much as YouTube lowered hurdles to broadcasting and Search flattened access to information.

Salgar is part of the AI Innovation and Research team, managing designers, researchers and product managers, among other employees. His goal is to improve Google’s core AI models to help make people’s lives better.

He believes there’s still a gap between the potential of AI and how it’s used today. To close it means letting users find new ways to interact with the product, while his team innovates to push technology further.

“Right now, I’m very focused on improving our platforms and ecosystem,” he said. “How will Chrome evolve? How will the Android operating system evolve? We have glasses that we’ve announced—how do those get better with AI? How do people live better lives as a result?”

Marketing plays a role too, Salgar said. To effectively communicate its value, Google must deeply understand its customers and how they use its products. Marketing is an art and a science, he said. His team can be simultaneously creative and data-informed when promoting and improving a product.

Salgar gives back to Booth by engaging with students through the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing, where he sits on the steering committee, and more recently with the Center for Applied AI (CAAI), where he’s on the advisory council.

When he meets with students, he sees that expansions to the school’s programming have helped prepare them well for the intertwined world of business and technology.

This includes events at CAAI and others such as the Kilts Center’s Marketing and Management Forum, which allows students to connect with high-profile alumni in small-group discussions. Salgar has participated in this and other events through both centers.

“The impact of the school, and the Kilts Center in particular, is remarkable,” Salgar said. “I feel very connected to the center and the folks over there and energized by meeting with students.”

One thing that hasn’t changed since Salgar was at Booth is the emphasis on students first understanding themselves and their own interests. Students must not only develop their skills but also learn what makes them feel curious and expand their understanding of how the world works.

Even with all the coming innovation, Salgar said students shouldn’t forget soft skills. There will always be new technology, but learning how to manage and work with people can set a technologically proficient professional apart.

“I often tell students that the class I used the most in my first six months of working at Google was Organizational Behavior,” Salgar said. “What incentives do people have? How do I bring people around to my ideas? Those skills were as important as anything else.”

Austan D. Goolsbee is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics. Sanjay K. Dhar is the James M. Kilts, Jr. Professor of Marketing. Raghuram G. Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.

—This story was originally published on the Chicago Booth website.

David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, extends support of the Rubenstein Scholars Program with $15 million gift

05/27/2026 - 11:24am

Chair of the Board of Trustees David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, has extended his support of the University of Chicago Law School’s Rubenstein Scholars Program with a new $15 million gift.

The Rubenstein Scholars Program is one of the most distinguished scholarship initiatives in legal education, and Rubenstein’s latest contribution ensures the continued recruitment and support of exceptional students through highly competitive, full-tuition plus stipend scholarships.

Established in 2010 with a $10 million gift, this latest donation brings the cumulative total of Rubenstein’s contributions to the scholarship program to $76 million. The program has benefited more than 220 students to date.

“We are incredibly grateful to David for his ongoing support in creating and sustaining what has become the most prestigious scholarship program in legal education,” said Adam Chilton, dean and Howard G. Krane Professor of Law. “This kind of sustained investment strengthens the Law School in lasting ways. It allows us to bring together exceptional students whose energy and ideas enrich our academic community and contribute meaningfully to the profession, and it’s my hope that David’s gift inspires other donors to support this important mission.”

The scholarships enable recipients to pursue a wide range of career paths. Rubenstein Scholars have gone on to careers in government and public service, clerkships at the highest levels of the federal judiciary, and leading roles in private practice and beyond.

“Being selected as a Rubenstein Scholar was truly life-changing for me,” said Nena Benavides, JD’22, who will clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the October 2026-27 term. “In addition to providing incredibly generous financial support, the program fosters a community of thoughtful and inspiring people. My career trajectory was deeply influenced by the invaluable guidance and unwavering support of the mentors and friends that I gained through the program.”

Benavides is the 15th Rubenstein Scholar to have been selected to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk. In total, more than 62 percent of all alumni in the program have served in at least one federal judicial clerkship.

Lior Strahilevitz, the Sidley Austin Professor of Law and faculty director of the Rubenstein Scholarship program since its inception, said the program has been “an enormous success” at bringing in some of “the world’s most talented law students.”

Ann K. Perry, associate dean for admissions and financial aid, described the program as “truly transformative” for its recipients while “opening doors of opportunity” that served both them and the Law School as a whole.

In establishing the program, Rubenstein sought to provide future students with the same opportunities that shaped his own path.

“Through full tuition scholarships we can attract exceptional students who are more likely to consider public service because they do not have to worry about loan repayment,” Rubenstein said. “The financial support I received from Chicago Law fostered my ability to later serve in government, and I am humbled by the opportunity to pay that debt of gratitude forward.”

Rubenstein is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a global investment firm. He is a major philanthropic leader and partner of the University and has served since 2022 as chair of the UChicago Board of Trustees, working closely with President Paul Alivisatos to help steward the University’s vision and long-term priorities.

His past gifts include funding for the David Rubenstein Forum, which opened in 2021. In March, he committed $50 million to support the modernization of Ida Noyes Hall.

—This article was originally published on the Law School website.

Daniel Kind awarded 2026 Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence

Colin Terrill — 05/27/2026 - 11:00am

Fourth-year Daniel Kind has been awarded the University of Chicago’s Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence for his advocacy to address the homelessness epidemic.

Kind hails from Orlando, Fla. and helped found the Orlando Secure Housing Project (OSHOP) in honor of a childhood friend who died while dealing with housing insecurity. The organization works to offer mutual aid and raise awareness while lobbying for policy changes and funding for homelessness services.

“The public image of homelessness tends to focus on the most visible cases, but the majority of people experiencing it are not chronically or permanently unhoused,” he said. “What OSHOP tries to do is shift that conversation toward understanding what precarious housing actually looks like for our neighbors, and what it takes to address it on both a charitable and policy level.”

The Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence is the highest honor bestowed upon a UChicago undergraduate, in recognition of the same qualities of its namesake: unwavering hope, ambition for others and an abiding courage of conviction.

“Daniel’s ambition for others is clear in his sustained and significant record of elevating the public good,” said Melina Hale, dean of the College. “Through service and leadership, his efforts have been recognized both at the University of Chicago and beyond. We are proud to present him with this well-deserved honor.”

Kind, who also serves as an volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT), becomes the fifth College student to receive the award.

“What makes this award meaningful to me is that it isn’t just about academic achievement,” he said. “It recognizes people who have genuinely invested themselves in the work of helping others, and at a place like UChicago, that combination is definitely something I want to be associated with.”

To Kind, the homelessness problem that OSHOP is trying to address is just the tip of the iceberg, compounded by the many downstream effects of not having a secure place to stay each night.

“Housing insecurity compounds in ways most people don’t see,” said Kind. “Patients without stable housing have measurably worse medical outcomes after the same procedure as someone with secure housing. Even on identical résumés, the applicant with a fixed address is more likely to advance in a hiring process than the one listing a shelter address. The instability becomes self-reinforcing.”

On campus, Kind worked as a research assistant at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and helped present research centered around climate change’s impact on housing affordability at the Kreisman Symposium for Housing Law and Policy. He was even “elected pope” in the spring of 2025 during Prof. Ada Palmer’s popular reenactment course on the Italian Renaissance. He said the experience changed his perspective on the world.

“One of the things Pope class drove home for me is that, by almost any measurable standard, we are living in the period of human history with the least suffering,” he remarked. “But that’s an argument for doing more, not less. Progress like that isn’t self-sustaining but exists because brave people keep pushing the system to be better and it continues only if we carry on their legacy.”

Kind will be working to solve this problem with his degree in Law, Letters and Society paired with another in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU). As a founding member of the UChicago speech team, he would love to use his argumentative skills while attending law school after graduation with the goal of focusing on public interest.

“I’m drawn to the kind of work organizations like the ACLU or NAACP do at the appellate level, where the goal is to move policy through carefully constructed cases,” Kind said. “If we’re serious about zoning reform in this country, we need litigation that surfaces the structural causes of the housing crisis. The law seems to me like one of the few tools that can force that conversation.”

One thing that Kind has learned is that there are those just like him trying to make a difference everywhere he looks, including at UChicago.

“Whether I’m raising money for mutual aid in Orlando or watching students donate to a GoFundMe for a local Lyft driver, I keep being reminded how many people are quietly doing this work with little expectation of recognition,” he said. “It’s the Mr. Rogers line I come back to; ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

More information about the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence and past recipients can be found here. The nomination process for the 2027 honoree will begin in Autumn Quarter of the 2026-27 academic year.

—This article was originally published on the UChicago College website.

UChicago dedicates data science and AI building in honor of alumni supporters

05/26/2026 - 10:48am

The University of Chicago’s first building devoted entirely to data science and artificial intelligence now bears the names of two alumni who met as students, married on campus and went on to support the University for decades.

The Lorraine and Yuji Suzuki Center, home of the UChicago Data Science Institute, was dedicated May 19. It honors the late Lorraine Suzuki, PhD’73, a scholar and educator who helped steer what is now the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, and her husband, Yuji Suzuki, SM’70, who led a global packaging network while serving nearly 20 years on the UChicago Physical Sciences Division Council.

“Through this dedication, we honor Yuji and Lorraine Suzuki, who united statistical thinking with positive community impact,” said President Paul Alivisatos in his remarks at the naming ceremony. “We place their mark indelibly on this campus, and on every scholar who will work within these walls.”

Across borders and boundaries

After marrying at UChicago’s Bond Chapel, the couple’s professional lives crossed continents, with home bases in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Tokyo, Japan.

Yuji, who earned his master’s in statistics, took a position with Tri-Wall, a company that manufactured transport packaging. There, he led the company’s expansion through a partnership with one of the largest paper companies in Japan. The company continued to expand over the next 30 years across China, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Yuji now serves as founder and chairman emeritus of the Tri-Wall Group, a network of companies in over 35 countries that provides innovative and cost-effective packaging solutions.

After completing her Ph.D. at what was then known as the School of Social Service Administration, Lorraine became an associate professor in the University of Michigan School of Social Work. While working there, she earned a master’s degree in management from Stanford University. She later joined Yuji in Tokyo, taking a position with the Asian Division of the University of Maryland University College (now called the University of Maryland Global Campus), where she taught a new graduate program designed to serve U.S. military servicemembers, civilians and their families overseas.

She was later named associate dean of the Asian Division of Programs and, eventually, the vice president and interim director of the Asian Division, where she significantly expanded the institution’s regional research program.

In addition to serving on visiting and steering committees for UChicago, the couple also established the Lorraine R. and Yuji Suzuki endowed Scholarship at Crown and the Yuji and Lorraine Suzuki Postdoctoral Research Fund in the Physical Sciences Division.

“My wife said, ‘once you get to where you want to be, what do you do? You can do something more than retiring,’” said Yuji in his remarks at the dedication ceremony.

How humans and machines think together

Through his service on the Physical Sciences Division Council, Yuji remained connected to and curious about the University’s pioneering research in data science and AI. He supported the development of the Data Science Institute, which was formed to seed research at the interdisciplinary frontiers of the field, develop partnerships with industry, government and social impact organizations, and support data science and AI education.

The new center bearing the couple’s names marks the University’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of these fields and shaping how humans and machines think together.

“When Yuji made the gift, it wasn’t just about the building but about what matters: the foundations of inquiry, the social impacts of knowledge and the preparation of students to enter a complicated and ever-changing world,” said Data Science Institute faculty codirector Dan Nicolae in his remarks.

Formerly the home of the McCormick Theological Seminary, the building was constructed in 2003 and renovated in 2025. The Lorraine and Yuji Suzuki Center now houses two seminar spaces, nine collaborative spaces and huddle rooms, graduate student workspaces, faculty and staff offices, and a wellness room.

“Lorraine and Yuji’s legacy will endure, advancing research and education both within this building and through collaborations across the globe,” said Ka Yee C. Lee, dean of the Physical Sciences Division, in her remarks. “Their support will help drive AI-enabled scientific discovery, foster innovations to strengthen democracy, accelerate and transform climate research, and address other urgent challenges that we face now and in the decades ahead.”

—This article was originally published on the UChicago Physical Sciences Division website.

Stretchable AI patch computes on your body, no server required

Sarah C.P. Williams — 05/26/2026 - 09:50am

A new skin-like computing patch developed at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering can analyze health data using artificial intelligence in an unprecedented way.

Unlike today’s wearable devices, it carries out its AI computations directly on the body, in mere milliseconds, without relying on a wireless connection.

While your current smartwatch may be able to track your heart rate or movements, it doesn’t analyze what it finds. The analysis happens elsewhere, after it shuttles data to an external server. In some situations—detecting ventricular fibrillation in the heart, for instance—that few-seconds lag to communicate with the server is too long.

The new device, designed and tested in collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, was made possible by new manufacturing processes that allow organic electrochemical transistors to be printed onto flexible surfaces.

“The future that we’re trying to realize is to make wearable and implantable devices smarter,” said Sihong Wang, an associate professor of molecular engineering at UChicago and co-senior author of the new study, published in Nature Electronics. “It’s helping people have a personal, instantaneous doctor integrated into their devices.”

Manufacturing stretchy transistors

For years, Wang’s lab has been working to create electronic components that can stretch and bend like human skin, with the goal of creating smart devices that adhere to human tissues. The group previously developed methods for fabricating stretchable transistor arrays and a stretchable OLED display.

In the new work, Wang and his colleagues set out to build a stretchable neuromorphic computing circuit—a large array of transistors that can run analyses of health data. Earlier work had demonstrated that the concept was theoretically possible with a small number of transistors but hadn’t scaled it up to a practical size.

The transistors the team wanted to use, called organic electrochemical transistors, work differently from those inside a standard computer chip. They process information using both electrical current and the movement of ions through a gel-like electrolyte layer.

The electrolytes give each transistor a built-in memory, letting them store numerical values stably over time, much the way a synapse in the brain can be strengthened or weakened to encode a learned pattern.

However, these components presented a manufacturing challenge. The flexible surface layer is sensitive to heat and solvents and so can’t be fabricated using standard chip production techniques. At the same time, the gel electrolyte layer tends to move like a liquid, merging with neighboring devices and causing short circuits.

“What we had to ask was whether we could use or change the properties of these polymers to make them compatible with photolithography—the main patterning method used in the microelectronics industry,” Wang said.

The team solved the challenge by engineering a new type of polymer gel that could be hardened into precise patterns through exposure to ultraviolet light. The result is a fabrication method that can produce 10,000 organic electrochemical transistors per square centimeter.

“As computer scientists, we’re used to thinking of a neural network weight as just a number,” said Zixuan Zhao, a graduate student in the UChicago Department of Computer Science and co-first author of the study. “In hardware, it’s a material—with variability, history and physical limits. The challenge was to hold those constraints in mind and still compute with enough precision to matter.”

Saving lives with speedy computing

To test the new devices, Wang’s team used one of their new stretchable arrays to run a pre-trained algorithm designed to help treat ventricular fibrillation.

This dangerous electrical storm in the heart can be fatal and is most often treated with a one-size-fits-all defibrillator shock that delivers a massive jolt of electricity to the entire heart. Researchers have proposed a more precise treatment: mapping abnormal waves of electricity as they move through the heart and delivering small, precise pulses just ahead of them before they can continue.

However, the obstacle has been time. Wavefronts move through the heart so fast that the entire analysis must be completed within milliseconds—far too quickly for data to be transmitted to an external computer and back.

“This is a situation where it’s not feasible to have remote computing. It just takes too long,” said Wang. “But if you have a computing device that can do the analysis within the body, it could be possible.”

Using real cardiac mapping data from a donor human heart, the team showed the stretchable array could locate wavefront positions with 99.6% accuracy, even while the device was stretched to more than one and a half times its normal length.

In a separate demonstration, a neural network encoded in the array analyzed a combination of vital signs and personal health data—including cholesterol levels, blood sugar, maximum heart rate and ECG readings—to assess a patient’s risk of heart attack, achieving 83.5% accuracy.

Wang sees this computing array as one component of a fully integrated, body-compatible health platform. His lab is now working to pair the computing array with stretchable wireless communication components and improved sensors, moving toward a system that can sense, analyze and respond to health data as a fully integrated whole.

“Instead of sending data away to a remote server, we can begin making sense of it right where life is happening,” said Fangfang Xia, a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and co-senior author of the study.

Citation: “A large-scale stretchable neuromorphic circuit for on-body edge computing,” Li et al, Nature Electronics, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01639-8

Funding: U.S. Office of Naval Research, UChicago Joint Task Force Initiative, National Institutes of Health, Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Leducq Foundation and CZ Biohub.

—This article was originally published on the UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering website.

UChicago men’s tennis team wins NCAA title—its third in five years

05/23/2026 - 10:13am

For the third time in five years, the University of Chicago men’s tennis team are NCAA Division III national champions.

The top-ranked Maroons (23-3) defeated No. 2 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) in a thriller on Friday, 4-3, clinching the title in the final and deciding singles matchup.

With the match tied at 3-3, UChicago fourth-year Emil Grantcharov earned the deciding victory, rallying to win the last two sets against CMS’s Warren Pham, 4-6, 6-1, 6-4. Pham had rallied from down 5-1 in the final set to make it 5-4, but Grantcharov made a huge serve on match point to seal the national championship.

"One of my beliefs is that if you go out, compete as hard as you can and with a good attitude and spirit, good things can happen," said men's head tennis coach Matt Brisotti. "Today was no different than the rest of this season. We played with that determination and confidence."

CMS took an early lead, claiming the point in doubles. In singles play, UChicago third-years Michael Choi, Christian Liew and Ajer Sher all claimed victories, setting up Grantcharov’s deciding win.

The matchup was a rematch of the 2024 national championship, which UChicago won. The Maroons also won the 2022 title.

With the win, UChicago claimed its 11th overall team national championship.

"Winning a national title is the result of hard work, daily consistency and a genuine commitment to one another," said Erienne Roberts, interim director of UChicago Athletics. "This team set a clear goal early and never wavered in its pursuit. I could not be more proud of their discipline and resilience."

University of Chicago launches ambitious campaign, ‘Chicago Minds’

05/22/2026 - 09:30am

The University of Chicago has launched the most ambitious and comprehensive fundraising and global engagement campaign in its history, a multi-year initiative that aims to expand the University’s impact through investments in research and education. A key component of the effort aims to engage with and inspire UChicago’s worldwide community of alumni and friends.

Called “Chicago Minds,” this campaign seeks to leverage UChicago’s uniquely rigorous approach to confront the most pressing challenges of today and the future, from climate to cancer; to explore the potential of emerging technology; and to strengthen economic opportunity and democratic institutions and discourse.

“At the University of Chicago, we are devoted to the cultivation of the human mind that pursues knowledge at the highest level,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “This campaign is designed to honor that enduring commitment and create the conditions in which future generations of Chicago Minds—our faculty, students, staff, researchers, and physicians—can shape the future through discovery, dialogue, and service to society.”

Chicago Minds is inspired by what has distinguished UChicago since its founding in 1890: independent thinkers who are part of a culture that embodies free inquiry and debate, imagination, and persistence. It is an environment where ideas are tested, assumptions are challenged, and discoveries lead to far-reaching impact.

Throughout UChicago’s history, groundbreaking ideas have sprung from myriad fields—as distinct as astronomy, economics, archaeology and genetics—and from across disciplines. Chicago Minds will ensure that in a rapidly changing world, the University empowers the next generation and provides opportunities for them to grow and lead.

"Our common cause is to create the conditions so that Chicago Minds will continue to shape the future,” Alivisatos said in his remarks at the campaign launch event, “and in so doing to fulfill our role in our promise to America that extends across decades and even centuries.”

The campaign reflects years of planning across the University. Organized around broad themes that include advancing world-changing research, fueling faculty excellence, expanding access and opportunity for students, and reimagining the physical campus, Chicago Minds will strengthen the University’s academic enterprise for generations to come. It will support major interdisciplinary initiatives in health and medicine, computing and artificial intelligence, climate and sustainable growth, and thriving cities and institutions. It will also further galvanize UChicago’s global community of alumni and friends to advocate for its mission and values.

Many of these priorities have already inspired significant philanthropic support leading up to the public launch of the campaign:

Faculty excellence — Chicago Minds will promote investment in faculty across disciplines, recognizing that attracting and retaining exceptional scholars is essential to the University’s continued leadership in research and education. A $75 million challenge commitment from Amy Wallman, MBA’75, and UChicago Trustee Richard Wallman, MBA’74, inspired an additional $75 million in philanthropy from alumni and friends to create 30 new endowed professorships across the University.
Student support — The campaign seeks to expand undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, and professional school aid while creating new opportunities for research, experiential learning, and global engagement. It will build on the University’s long-standing commitment to access and affordability, including a new initiative under which, beginning in fall 2027, admitted undergraduate students from families earning less than $250,000 annually, with typical assets, will receive free tuition. Students from families earning less than $125,000 annually, with typical assets, will be able to attend the College free of tuition, housing and meals costs, and other fees.
Mind and machine — The campaign will support faculty, academic programs, and dedicated spaces for research and collaboration on topics related to thinking with machines across all disciplines, as well as foundational work in computing, mathematics, and statistics. UChicago’s distinctive approach to examining the ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies will feature prominently. A $50 million commitment from Trustee Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80, will help accelerate the University’s efforts to become a global leader in computing and artificial intelligence by building a cohort of faculty who will pursue AI’s potential.

Health and medicine — Chicago Minds will support ambitious investments in the biological sciences, clinical care, and translational research, as well as the many intersections with the physical sciences, molecular engineering, and data sciences, helping accelerate discovery while expanding access to exceptional care. Philanthropic support for the new AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion is creating one of the most significant health care projects in the University’s history, while a $21 million gift from philanthropist Thea Berggren has established a new center for quantum engineering and human health.
Climate and energy — The campaign will accelerate the University’s efforts to confront climate change while expanding economic opportunity and improving lives around the world. Centered at the new Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, the initiative brings together economics, policy, science, engineering, and business to pursue evidence-based climate solutions, breakthrough energy technologies, and innovative approaches to sustainable growth. A distinctive initiative of the new institute is a commitment to create a new discipline of climate systems engineering. More than $125 million in philanthropic support has already helped launch the effort, which includes a first-of-its-kind curriculum focused on climate and sustainable growth.
Campus renewal — A $50 million gift from Board Chair David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, will revitalize Ida Noyes Hall as a vibrant new hub for student life and a center for welcoming visitors and alumni. The project launches a broader effort to renew the University’s historic campus for the next hundred years while creating dynamic spaces that foster collaboration, connection, and intellectual exchange.
Freedom of expression — Building on the University’s long-standing leadership in free expression and academic freedom, Chicago Minds will support new programs, research, course offerings, fellowships, and public engagement. A $100 million commitment from an anonymous donor to the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression is helping expand its work on campus and beyond, championing UChicago’s distinctive approach to rigorous debate, open discourse, and the fearless pursuit of truth.

Other generous investments in the lead-up to the campaign are already accelerating work with the potential to expand knowledge, advance scholarship, and drive societal impact across the University.

A $60 million gift from Trustee John M. Liew, AB’89, MBA’94, PhD’95, and Clifford Asness, MBA’91, PhD’94, is helping the University of Chicago Booth School of Business deepen its leadership in finance, economics, and quantitative research.
An $18.4 million gift from the Leinweber Foundation has established a major new institute for theoretical physics at UChicago, strengthening the University’s leadership in fundamental science and expanding opportunities for collaboration across the physical sciences.
Trustee Steven A. Kersten, JD’80, and his wife, Priscilla Kersten, made a $25 million commitment to the Urban Education Institute in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice to advance K–12 education research and improve outcomes for students in urban schools.
A $20 million gift from Trustee Thomas Francis Dunn, AB’81, MBA’86, and Susan Knapp Dunn, AB’82, established the Bike Shop @UChicago at the Harris School of Public Policy, a lab for building algorithms to help design more effective policy.

“This campaign is animated by the extraordinary ambition and momentum of the University of Chicago,” said Rika Mansueto, co-chair of Chicago Minds. “Across disciplines and across the campus, you can see scholars and students pushing boundaries, asking difficult questions, and advancing work that has the potential to shape the future in profound ways.”

Fellow campaign co-chair David M. Rubenstein said Chicago Minds also presents an opportunity to strengthen the University’s global community of alumni and other supporters.

“The University of Chicago has one of the most influential and intellectually engaged alumni communities in the world,” Rubenstein said. “This campaign is about bringing people into that shared sense of purpose and possibility and helping alumni and others see the extraordinary impact this institution can have in the decades ahead.”

Chicago Mindsseeks to increase engagement across UChicago’s global network of more than 200,000 alumni, parents, and other friends in more than 75 countries. By inspiring our community to volunteer, share UChicago research among their networks, and pursue lifelong learning opportunities, the campaign promises to deepen connections across generations of the University community.

“The University of Chicago is worthy of the belief and pride of its global community,” said Armin Afsahi, UChicago’s vice president for advancement. “Chicago Minds is about ensuring that this remarkable institution has the resources to continue generating transformative scholarship, educating extraordinary students, and contributing meaningfully to the world for generations to come. Together, we can build a powerful legacy.”

Learn more at the Chicago Minds website.

UChicago physicists figure out how to reduce formation of ‘viscous fingers’

Maureen Searcy — 05/21/2026 - 11:00am

When they reach the bottom of a soap dispenser, frugal handwashers might try adding water to the bottle to push out the last bit of soap. But usually, the water drills right through the soap and jets out an only slightly sudsy splash.

This happens because when you push a less viscous fluid like water into a more viscous fluid like soap in a confined space, the place where the two fluids meet can be unstable, and the runnier liquid might find a path of least resistance.

If you looked very closely, you might see tiny protuberances form at the place where the fluids touch, in a phenomenon physicists call “viscous fingering.” In certain types of confined spaces, the fingers form a branching pattern.

“The viscous fingering instability is one of the most-studied examples of pattern formation, consistently yielding new insights and variations into the formation of branched structures in the natural world, such as rivers splitting into smaller streams,” said Sidney Nagel, Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Physics.

In a new study published in Science Advances, Nagel’s team discovered that changing the shape of the interface where the fluids touch can delay onset and slow the growth of the branches—promising improved efficiency for industrial and environmental processes.

Shapeshifting

When one fluid meets another in a confined space, the stability of the interface depends on a few factors: how easily the fluids mix, the difference in their viscosity and how fast the fluids are moving. If the interface becomes unstable, it gets wavy and fingers form.

This reduces efficiency in a lot of scenarios. For example, companies use carbon dioxide to push oil out of reservoirs—but if the interface becomes unstable and forms fingers, the gas can shoot straight through the oil to the extraction well. Engineers are then pumping up gas, leaving oil in the ground.

To better understand the problem, Nagel’s team wanted to delve deeper into the fundamental rules that underscore finger formation.

For fluids that don’t readily mix, such as oil and water, surface tension serves as a sort of skin, helping to stabilize the edge between them. On the other hand, for miscible fluids—which can dissolve together into a uniform solution—there is little to no surface tension. This would suggest greater instability, yet sometimes fingers never develop. Why?

For fingers to form, the interface between runny and thick has to be sharp and abrupt; if the fluids are too similar in viscosity, the interface won’t be sharp enough. Fingers can also be avoided if the runnier fluid is injected slowly enough that it has time to seep into the thicker fluid.

But was there a way to affect finger formation without changing those factors?

“We wanted to know if we could physically change the shape of the interface without altering the viscosity ratio, and whether there’s a direct correlation between its shape and the stability,” said Zhaoning Liu, a graduate student in the Nagel lab and first author on the paper.

Smoothing motion

Viscous fingering instability is often studied using an apparatus consisting of two flat, parallel plates separated by an extremely thin gap.

The team filled the gap with a high viscosity solution. Then they injected a low viscosity solution through a small hole in the top plate. As the thinner liquid spread out from the center, pushing the thicker liquid outward, the advancing edge between them formed a blunt curve, with a fairly flat (sharp and abrupt) face. Fingers eventually formed.

Then they repeated the technique, sliding the bottom plate side to side, a process called shearing, varying how fast and how far, to see how the interface changed.

The motion altered the shape where the two liquids met. The interface bulged outward, forming a pointier curve, and the sharp edge smoothed out.

The team found that the farther and the faster they slid the plates, the longer it took for fingers to start forming, and once they did, they grew more slowly—indicating that there is a direct correlation between the interface shape and its stability.

This breakthrough could have ramifications for industrial processes and environmental applications, the scientists said.

“This study demonstrates a new way to control and delay the instability onset,” said Nagel, “which plays a role in so many industrial processes involving fluids, from oil extraction from the earth to carbon sequestration.”

For example, one climate change mitigation effort has been to lock carbon dioxide inside saltwater aquifers, and the ability to control viscous fingering could be the key to trapping more of the greenhouse gas deep underground.

“There is a long road ahead to take this research and apply it to such problems, but this is a start,” Nagel said.

Citation: Zhaoning Liu et al., Effect of translational shear on interfacial structure in the viscous fingering instability. Sci. Adv. 12, eaeb2907 (2026).

Funding: National Science Foundation

—Adapted from an article first published by the Physical Sciences Division.

Medicaid work requirements could cause 1 million missed cancer screenings

Grace Niewijk — 05/20/2026 - 01:30pm

A new study from University of Chicago Medicine projects that upcoming federal Medicaid changes could result in more than 1 million missed cancer screenings within two years of taking effect.

In a research letter published in JAMA Oncology, surgical oncologist Sarah Shubeck and Adrian Diaz, a surgical oncology fellow, used recent data and statistical modeling to project the downstream effects of proposed Medicaid work requirements and more frequent recertification rules outlined in the One Big Beautiful Bill from the administration of President Donald Trump.

Starting in January 2027, new federal rules will require many Medicaid recipients to prove they are working and recertify their eligibility more often. In practice, these new hurdles will make it more difficult for people to remain insured.

“These new requirements introduce administrative barriers that often mean paperwork or technical errors determine whether someone gets screened for cancer,” Shubeck said. “A particularly concerning aspect is that people who are disproportionately likely to lose coverage are exactly the people most likely to benefit from early cancer detection: younger adults and people from vulnerable social groups.”

Shubeck and Diaz estimate that within two years of the new rules taking effect, roughly 7.5 million adult Medicaid enrollees eligible for cancer screening would lose coverage, with the number rising above 10 million under the most drastic scenario modeled.

The researchers analyzed real-world data from across the United States, such as the previous work requirements in Arkansas and pandemic-era changes in Medicaid verification. The results showed that more than 1 million mammograms and screenings for colorectal and lung cancers may be missed nationwide within the first two years of the new restrictions. This could result in over 2,300 undetected cases of breast, colorectal and lung cancer—hundreds of which may be at more advanced and difficult-to-treat stages when finally discovered.

Even without accounting for potential treatment interruptions for already-diagnosed cancer patients, the model projects approximately 155 avoidable deaths from only these three types of cancer within two years of policy implementation.

“Early screening saves lives, and lost coverage means lost opportunities for detection,” Diaz said. “The consequences aren’t just numbers—they represent real families affected by avoidable disease and loss.”

The authors emphasized that the impact will vary widely across states, depending on factors like whether states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, populations of screening-eligible adults, and differences in state safety net programs that help support cancer screening and treatment for people without insurance.

“This analysis highlights how policy changes like Medicaid cuts and restrictions can have profound and preventable negative effects on public health,” Diaz said. “The hope is to inform policymakers and the public about the stakes before these changes take effect.”

—This article was originally published on the Biological Sciences Division website.

Is that song AI-generated? UChicago scientists create browser extension to check

Miranda Redenbaugh — 05/20/2026 - 11:25am

In 2024, a remarkable shift hit the music world: AI-generated songs exploded onto streaming platforms, making up nearly half of all newly uploaded tracks. But as the lines blur between human artistry and algorithmic output, listeners face a new question: How much of the music we truly enjoy is made by people, and how much is the work of machines?

A new cutting-edge browser extension from a team of scientists at the University of Chicago, known as Quicksilver, allows listeners to scan songs for traces of AI.

The project is intended to champion transparency, ethical technology, and support from human creativity in a rapidly evolving digital soundscape, its authors said.

Quicksilver was developed by the UChicago SAND Lab alongside the nonprofit Ethical Technology and Computing for Humanity (ETCH), launched this year by UChicago Neubauer Professors of Computer Science Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng with a mission to ensure technology serves the broader interests of society and creative communities.

It follows Glaze and Nightshade, recent work by Zhao and Zheng that disrupt nonconsensual training on artistic work; these two programs have now been downloaded over 13 million times by creatives in more than 160 countries.

“Given that there is so much AI music out there, and that normal users can’t tell the difference, giving users a tool to identify these AI songs was a very natural solution,” said Stanley Wu, lead developer and UChicago graduate student. “At this scale, I think there needs to be more protections in place so that this wave of “spammy” AI music does not negatively impact human artists.”

A tool built for transparency and privacy

As members of the SAND Lab team measured the prevalence of AI music on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, they discovered that most platforms don’t disclose whether tracks are AI-generated or not.

Their research revealed that close to 50% of weekly releases are now AI, most receiving little engagement—a wave of so-called “AI slop.”

Wu and his colleagues, including Zhao, Zheng, and undergraduates Naryna Azizpour and Viresh Mittal, found the problem only deepened the more they investigated: Even professional musicians performed only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing AI music from human compositions.

With AI music so prolific, often created with no human input and little engagement, questions about artist integrity and impact on real musicians have become urgent, Wu said.

Unlike many detection services, Quicksilver operates locally on your device. Users play music from any streaming platform and Quicksilver listens in, analyzing the audio live.

There are subtle “artifacts” in AI-generated audio that ears simply can’t detect, according to the team. With a tap of the “Analyze” button, the extension scans for these artifacts, particularly those produced via Suno and Udio, two widely used AI music platforms.

No audio is uploaded to external servers, and detection is lightweight and fast.

Musicians’ responses to Quicksilver have been overwhelmingly positive, and the team received supportive feedback from the French streaming platform Deezer, whose research also inspired Quicksilver’s detector.

The team is actively working to keep pace with newer music generation models and evolving deepfake technologies. Their ongoing priority is to ensure that Quicksilver remains accurate and responsive, minimizing false positives as it adapts to new challenges.

A nonprofit for ethical development of new technologies

Quicksilver’s roots reach back to ETCH, a nonprofit spun out from years of SAND Lab research. ETCH includes board members and advisors from across UChicago’s Computer Science, Law, Medical, and Booth School of Business, and is dedicated to investigating and guiding the ethical development of new technologies.

The organization’s philosophy is clear: technology must serve humanity. “Human creative work represents the very best of human expression and communication,” ETCH’s website notes. “Creative forms of human expression should be celebrated, preserved, and protected by technology.”

ETCH’s funds and supports ethical research, partners with technologies and creators, translates complex findings into actionable guidance, and builds resources to help creative communities navigate technological change.

“With trillions of dollars committed to developing, deploying, and monetizing AI systems in nearly all aspects of our lives, it is more important than ever to elevate the human voice, to highlight the value of human creativity and ingenuity even as we explore ethical and principled approaches towards AI,” said Zhao. “The goal of ETCH is to ensure that AI efforts are transparent, accountable, and equitable while elevating human creativity and prioritizing social good over profit.”

Looking forward, the researchers are hopeful that industry stakeholders will embrace tools like Quicksilver to promote greater transparency around AI-generated music and streaming content.

“The continued development of AI is poised to change society in ways few of us can predict,” said Zhao. “We believe that technology should always serve humanity, and it is up to all of us to ensure that AI becomes a benefit for the many, not the few. At ETCH, we are working towards this goal in multiple creative domains while engaging with stakeholders across the ecosystem.”

—Adapted from an article first published by the Department of Computer Science.

Please play this syllabus

Tori Lee — 05/20/2026 - 09:56am

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.

Class begins with a final cutscene.

Projected on a large screen, a student guides a cloaked figure toward a beam of light atop a distant mountain. Trudging through blinding snow, the figure falls to its knees, unable to continue.

Then, a dizzying ascent into the sky. A freewheeling flight through red, torii-like gates. And finally, a blinding white light.

“How did this ‘payoff’ make you feel?” prompted instructor Marshall Cunningham.

Relief. Disappointment. Joy. Sorrow. The class is divided.

In the video game Journey (2012), players walk, slide and fly through dunes on a sandy pilgrimage. Without any dialogue other than a musical chirp, the character visits shrines and communes with other players to uncover the history of a fallen civilization.

The game is one of many on the syllabus of “Gaming the Gods: Video Games and Religion,” a new undergraduate course offered by the University of Chicago Divinity School—part of the campus-wide Year of Games. Using video games as primary texts, students analyze the religious themes and imagery used by developers and designers.

“The way this generation of students consumes media is primarily through video games,” said Cunningham, assistant instructional professor of the Bible and the ancient Near East in the Divinity School. “Let's take the medium seriously as a medium of storytelling—of meaning-making—and apply a critical apparatus to it so these students can be better readers.”

Throughout the course, students played Halo, Cult of the Lamb, Indika, I Am Jesus Christ and more, while discussing ritual, belief systems and depictions of religion.

“I feel like I'm really learning how to closely read different works of media. I've never been able to look at video games with such a critical eye before,” said Rafaela Grieco-Freeman, a third-year student in the College. “If you want to expand a different skill, I think this is a really fascinating class to do it.”

How to read a video game

Cunningham hasn’t played a video game in years. However, that didn’t stop him from teaching a new course entirely devoted to the medium.

“I asked students, what do you do when you're not doing school?” he said. “An overwhelming majority said, I play video games.”

When he proposed “Gaming the Gods,” Cunningham wanted to “meet students where they are.” He sees his lack of gaming experience not as a detriment, but an opportunity. Students are the video game experts—Cunningham brings the critical religious studies lens. Together, a foundation of shared authority grounds their class discussions.

Alongside video games, students read secondary texts such as Homo Ludens by Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga and Games as Agency by University of Utah Prof. C. Thi Nguyen. They also studied classical theory on ritual and think pieces on depictions of modern religions and the Gamergate controversy.

“There’s actually a surprisingly long history of people thinking about the overlap between play and ritual,” Cunningham said.

When students play a game in class, Cunningham likens it to critically reading a text aloud.

For example, together the class pieced together Journey’s mysterious past. Buried ruins and gravestones were evidence of a destroyed “before time.” Murals and character visions showed an advanced society undone by its own technology.

Grieco-Freeman, an art history and economics major, grew up playing video games but got deeper into the hobby during the pandemic playing Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite and the Uncharted franchise with friends. When playing games for class, however, she consciously slowed down her gameplay.

“I looked at a lot of more details than I would've otherwise, even background details that normally somebody would just run past while they're trying to complete the quest,” she said. “I found myself really stopping and thinking.”

The insider/outsider problem

Cunningham also used Journey to illustrate one of the biggest tensions in religious studies: the insider/outsider problem.

Practitioners of a religion, or insiders, believe they do certain rituals because divine commandment prescribes it—eating or fasting at particular times, for example. Non-practitioners, or outsiders, believe rituals reinforce social norms and legitimize power, sometimes called a “functionalist approach” in religious studies.

Students broke into small groups and were tasked with adopting either an insider or outsider perspective to discuss the mysterious belief system.

To insider groups, the main character’s journey implied a belief in reincarnation. The interactions with other players showed the importance of communal experience and taboos around violence.

To the outsider groups, the game’s ending seemed brutal—a main character sacrificing themselves for the good of the world.

At the end of the discussion, Cunningham left the class with a pivotal question: How do our own beliefs color how we understand someone else’s religion?

“Students are thinking about how these games change their dispositions to the outside world, which is what we're trying to do in religious studies,” Cunningham said, “to make people think more deeply about sources of authority and the beliefs that they have.”

Making game jam

As one of their assignments, students partnered with the Media Arts and Design course “Introduction to Game Design” for a week-long Game Jam. In small groups, the classes worked together to design a card- or dice-based game that incorporated religious themes.

Shaw Carlson’s group designed a four-player game where players must put down cards to form a collaborative hand. Depending on an individual’s ritual card, players can win ritual points while blasphemies take points away. The mix of collective play and individual incentive creates a “complicated web” of strategy.

“In one of the texts we discussed, ritual describes the day-to-day, and it also comes from what the collective thinks and wants,” said Carlson, a third-year economics major. “That's one of the ways we wanted to show how a culture determines what becomes okay as a ritual and what's not okay as a blasphemy.”

For their final assignments, students could choose to continue working on their game or write a critical review of a game not covered in class.

Carlson plans to write a final review on his favorite game series, the indie darling Hollow Knight. In the sprawling platformer, an insectoid knight travels through a bug kingdom infected with a plague.

“There are super heavy religious elements. There’s an entire pantheon—the currency in Hollow Knight: Silksong is rosaries,” said Carlson, who has already clocked 100 hours in the sequel. “It’s so cool to analyze some of my favorite things in this way.”

Glyn Dawson, pioneering lipid biochemist, 1943-2026

Matt Wood — 05/19/2026 - 03:50pm

Glyn Dawson, an expert on lipid biochemistry and longtime professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, died April 14 at the age of 83.

Dawson was known for multiple discoveries about the nervous system and cell membranes, and made contributions to understanding and treating a group of rare inherited neurogenerative disorders found in children.

He pioneered the use of mass spectrometry for analyzing sphingolipids, a type of lipids that provide structure for cell membranes, particularly in the nervous system. His work first identified gangliosides, which regulate cell signaling and adhesion, and he discovered processes involved with lysosomal hydrolase deficient disorders, a group of genetic metabolic disorders caused by deficiencies in enzymes that break down larger molecules.

An avid collaborator and mentor

Born in 1943 in New Mills, England, Dawson was the first in his family to attend university. He received his B.S. degree and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Bristol, in 1964 and 1967 respectively. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh before joining UChicago as assistant professor of pediatrics and biochemistry in 1969.

Dawson studied the role of sphingolipids in cell signaling in the nervous system and advanced our understanding of lipid functions in cell membranes. This led to research on how sphingolipids such as ceramides can enhance cell death programs, how much sphingolipids affect central nervous system-active drugs, and how these pathways are impacted by stress.

Dawson was especially interested in lipid pathology of the Batten disease family, a group of rare, fatal, inherited neurodegenerative disorders that primarily affect children, as well as in the function of enzymes that are mutated in different forms of these disorders. Because of the need to develop enzyme replacement therapies for lysosomal storage diseases, more recently he focused on using quantum dots as agents to deliver proteins to the central nervous system.

Dawson was a noted teacher and mentor who trained 13 Ph.D. students and 17 postdocs, and he was an avid collaborator with many scientific interactions at UChicago and around the world.

A longtime member of the American Society for Neurochemistry, he published over 230 manuscripts and reviews, and his research was continually funded by the National Institutes of Health, Guggenheim Foundation and Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation.

Beyond the laboratory, Dawson was described as a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, and a man of wide-ranging curiosity. A lifelong trainspotter and avid birder who observed over half the world’s species, he traveled the globe with his wife Sylvia, whom he met at a university dance and married in 1966.

He is survived by his wife, Sylvia Dawson (nee Sharland); sons Philip (married to Denise) and Kenneth (married to Veronica); grandchildren Nathan and Eric; and sister Margaret (Joan) Stafford.

The American Society for Neurochemistry is planning a memorial symposium at its next annual meeting.

—Adapted from an article first published by the Biological Sciences Division.

New book traces slavery, family and early capitalism through rural Louisiana

Sarah Steimer — 05/18/2026 - 10:30am

The Felicianas, a rural stretch of Louisiana farmland, sit far from the centers of power that usually anchor United States histories.

In her new book Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History, University of Chicago Assoc. Prof. Rashauna Johnson argues that's exactly why the region matters.

“A close look at the Felicianas shows that experiences of time and space are not universal or objective—they are dynamic sites over which a global assemblage contested the meanings of family, race, colonialism, slavery and freedom,” wrote Johnson, a U.S. historian.

This region of the south, Johnson argues, offers a microcosm of social tensions that have persisted from the colonial era to today. The parishes of East and West Feliciana border the eastern banks of the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge and south of Natchez, Mississippi. This seemingly quiet area historically played an outsized role in the global economy through its intensive cotton industry.

Sweet Home Feliciana tells three stories—of family, region and the world—that highlight histories of contested placemaking. It follows the region’s transitions over time, while also questioning how we define these shifts.

To construct the history, Johnson drew from a range of sources and interpretive techniques. These include official records, personal correspondence and cemeteries as well as oral histories and popular culture references.

Some of these oral histories are from Johnson’s own family. The book presents this compiled narrative in a way that plays with time, allowing for the reader to consider how high-level events and personal stories intermingle.

Sweet Home’s preface is set during Mardi Gras 2016 as a point of entry into thinking about history and family, then moves into the 2020s to explore the current landscape in the region. From there, Johnson’s book shifts to the more distant past—the Seven Years’ War—and continues in a more chronological fashion to about 1900.

“Within each chapter, I'm trying to play with the tensions over whether or not this is a story about progress or development, or a rejection of progress and development as defined by those in power,” she said, explaining that she tries to explore and present each time period “on its own terms.”

“I want to show that doing that still means that we're going to come away with an understanding that each person living in those times had a different experience or relationship to those specific times.”

About 15 years ago, she said, historians of capitalism honed in on the region explored in her book—and others like it—because of its role in the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism, through its cotton production. Within this framework, Johnson focuses on the actual people whose lands were dispossessed and whose labor fueled this kind of development.

“For them, I don't know that they would use a term like development to explain the emergence of cotton that was going all around them,” Johnson said. “For them, this had to have felt like something very different—perhaps we could use a term like regression.”

In her writing, Johnson uses the perspectives of different actors to consider each period through its own lens, rather than take a presentist view. She points to her ancestor Virgil Harrell, whose history Johnson traced with uncovered documents. This paper trail follows his life of being born into slavery in the high antebellum period and witnessing the Civil War as a young man—living near the Battle of Port Hudson—before getting married.

“Focusing on a person's life in that specific way allows us to think about the ways individuals experienced these massive and world-changing events that are now the key points on a U.S. history timeline in the 19th century,” she said. “But for them, they were real experiences that they had to make sense of and figure out how to move through as real people.”

Sweet Home’s epilogue, Johnson said, returns readers to the present, reflecting on the current stakes of historical work. In some ways, she said, the book closes by meditating on what it means to think about Black history and the history of slavery and emancipation in the present.

“The ability to zoom from the individual level to the more abstracted level is so interesting and so powerful,” Johnson said.

—This article was originally published on the Social Sciences Division website.

Paolo Cherchi, distinguished Romance philologist and devoted teacher, 1937-2026

Rivky Mondal — 05/15/2026 - 02:00pm

Paolo Cherchi, a scholar of Romance philology whose work shaped the study of medieval and early modern literature, died April 4 in Chicago, surrounded by family.

He was a few weeks shy of his 89th birthday. A member of the University of Chicago community for nearly four decades, Cherchi was known for his prodigious scholarship and his expansive intellectual generosity.

Cherchi taught Romance philology as well as Italian and Spanish literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures from 1965 until his retirement in 2003. He published more than 600 works on texts ranging from the medieval period to the 18th century, while also engaging modern authors. A true Romanist, his scholarship ranged across Italian, Spanish, Latin, Provençal and Catalan traditions, often tracing how literary motifs traveled across time, language and genre.

Though frequently described as a figure of great erudition, Cherchi himself resisted the label. His colleague Justin Steinberg, William H. Colvin Professor of Italian Literature, recalled that Cherchi saw erudition as a “cold way of looking at what knowledge is.”

Instead, Cherchi believed scholarship began with a problem, something unresolved in a text. His inquiry unfolded from that moment in what Steinberg described as a “golden chain of textual associations” that defined Cherchi’s work.

For Cherchi, the power of the humanities lay in addressing existential questions, rather than using texts to illustrate preexisting ideas. He hoped to instill this same intellectual hunger in others.

“I never left a conversation with him without wanting to read three or four things,” Steinberg recalled.

Cherchi’s learning extended well beyond his own fields.

“He was intellectually extremely strong in his field, but also cultivated a remarkable curiosity for other subjects,” recalled his son, Marcello Cherchi, PhD’97, a neurologist at UChicago Medicine. “He was always interested in what I was doing, no matter how distant it was from his knowledge.”

Marcello also remembered his father’s rigorous work ethic, “which I still try to live up to.”

Cherchi’s books were widely celebrated and reshaped how scholars understand literary borrowing and invention. His studies of courtly love, Renaissance rewriting and onestade, a concept often translated as a form of ethical or social virtue, demonstrated how literary history must engage the complexity of tradition.

As one colleague noted, Cherchi’s work revealed that even canonical masterpieces could only be understood through deep attention to neglected texts, forgotten ideas and the layered evolution of meaning.

“He connected the broken link between modern cultural history and older, enduring forms of knowledge,” said Mauricio Tenorio, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History. “Incredibly generous with his time and erudition in many languages, Paolo taught me both the evolution of Latin into vernaculars and the politics of philology. I will miss his generous help, his wonderful smile.”

A life in scholarship across languages and worlds

Cherchi was born May 10, 1937, in Oschiri, Sardinia. He received his laurea in lettere from the University of Cagliari in 1962 and his Ph.D. in Romance languages from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. He began teaching at UChicago in 1965.

Cherchi served on the editorial board of Modern Philology from 1973 to 1988; following his retirement, the journal published a tribute issue in his honor. In his later career, he also taught at the University of Ferrara in Italy, where he joined the faculty per chiara fama, an honor reserved for scholars of exceptional distinction.

A committed institutional thinker, Cherchi built enduring relationships with scholars and institutions in Italy, including exchanges with the University of Rome La Sapienza, that brought students and faculty into sustained intellectual dialogue. These efforts helped position Chicago as a hub for Romance philology and Italian studies.

A teacher, mentor and ‘walking library’

Students and colleagues alike described him as a “biblioteca ambulante”—a walking library—who keenly shared his knowledge with others.

Elusive problems were Cherchi’s calling, according to his colleague Elissa Weaver, professor emerita of Italian literature, who noted that “he showed students not only how to identify them, but how to pursue them in original research and to publish their findings.”

Among fellow Romanists, he was known for his generosity, his delight in repartee and his encouragement of younger scholars, particularly women entering a male-dominated field. In a tribute published in Modern Philology, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita Rebecca West wrote: “As a very green Italianist, I appreciated his initial belief in me and, as a more mature one, his constant support of my work, and his encouragement to do more.”

For Cherchi, mentorship and teaching were inseparable from scholarship. In his classrooms, especially his renowned Dante seminars, he lectured without notes for hours, drawing connections across Arabic philosophy, medieval science, biblical exegesis and vernacular poetry.

In the Susan and Donald Mazzoni Seminars, which he founded within the Italian doctoral program, Cherchi worked closely with graduate students on original research projects, often helping to transform seminar collaborations into published volumes.

Former student Lynn Westwater, PhD’03, professor of Italian at George Washington University, recalled Saturday mornings with Cherchi in the Regenstein Library rare book room, where he patiently guided students through intricate philological detective work tracing the unattributed reuse and transformation of sources in Renaissance texts. The resulting essays not only helped students secure academic positions but trained them in methods they built on decades later.

“He had more ideas than time,” recalled Meredith K. Ray, PhD’02, who is now Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Instead of keeping them, he gave them to us.”

Outside formal settings, Cherchi cultivated community with equal dedication, whether dropping off students at the Newberry Library, connecting them with scholars in Italy or conducting conversations over meals.

“He had a joke for every situation,” Westwater recalled, remembering a playfulness mixed with profound pride in his students’ accomplishments. In one message to her, Cherchi wrote that it gave him “so much joy” to help students with their research and “so much satisfaction” to see their careers flourish.

Cherchi’s scholarly output remained vibrant through his later years, publishing new work well into his 80s and receiving major honors, including election to the Academy of the Lincei, Italy’s oldest and most prestigious scientific academy in 2016, and an honorary doctorate from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2024.

Cherchi is survived by his wife, Judy Cherchi, his son Marcello and his grandchildren. A memorial service is planned by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures for spring 2027.

—This article was originally published on the Division of the Arts & Humanities website.

UChicago announces 2026 winners of Quantrell and Ph.D. teaching awards

05/14/2026 - 04:00pm

The transformative education offered at the University of Chicago begins in the classroom, with the teachers who inspire, engage and inform their students.

UChicago annually recognizes faculty for their incredible teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students through the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards, believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching; and the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, which honor faculty for their work with graduate students.

Learn more about this year’s recipients below:

Quantrell Awards: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Ryan Coyne, Nick Feamster and Alexander J. Ruthenburg
Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring Awards: Fernando Alvarez, Pradeep Chintagunta, Jeffrey Stackert and Wei Wei

Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Associate Professor in History

It’s important to Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, PhD’05, that students look beyond the here and now.

“One of the things that worries me the most is the dismissal of the past,” said the environmental historian. “If you forget about the past, then it’s easy to be seduced by simplistic accounts of what human nature is.”

In his research, Albritton Jonsson bridges social science and environmental studies, investigating how and why environmental changes have occurred in the past.

At UChicago, he has helped establish the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization as well as the “Energy in World Civilizations” core sequence, with Asst. Prof. Elizabeth Chatterjee, which explores the historical roots of climate change and postulates on futures beyond fossil fuel dependence.

Broadening perspectives also lies at the heart of his pedagogical practice. Albritton Jonsson makes a point of teaching “to the whole room.” For him, a good class means everyone gets to weigh in—undergraduates and graduate students with a multitude “of viewpoints, of experience, of ideology.”

“There's nothing quite like the adrenaline kick of a good class,” he said.

“Professor Albritton Jonsson works incredibly hard and is one of the only teachers, in my opinion, who has a perfect course sequence at UChicago,” said one student. “Hands down the best teacher I have ever witnessed.”

For him, teaching is sharing “the joy of grappling” with rigorous arguments and intelligent thinkers. He even pressure tests his own arguments in the classroom. For years, he has taught iterations of his forthcoming book Pandora’s Box: The First Fossil Fuel Economy, which traces the rise of fossil fuel use in Britain.

“I can honestly say the undergraduates in the classroom have done an incredible favor in helping me hone and make much sharper my arguments in my books,” he said.

Despite the potential doom and gloom of his field, Albritton Jonsson wants his students to walk away from his courses feeling inspired rather than pacified.

“I don’t want them to give up hope,” he said.

After 20 years of teaching undergraduates, he says receiving a Quantrell award means the world to him. “I consider this the greatest honor of my life.”

Ryan Coyne, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology and in the College

For Ryan Coyne, teaching begins not with delivering knowledge, but with creating the conditions for discovery.

“Above all, I want the course material to come alive for the students,” he said. “I can only create conditions in which the students do this for themselves.”

Coyne, who studies philosophy of religion and critical theory, approaches the classroom as a space of shared inquiry. Rather than emphasizing the accumulation of information, he encourages what he calls “the power of free inquiry”—a capacity students cultivate by asking and pursuing their own questions.

That approach is especially striking in courses built around demanding texts. In his undergraduate course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, students confront one of the most challenging works of 20th-century philosophy. Yet, as one student wrote, Coyne’s lectures were “eloquently put and clearly well prepared,” helping transform the difficulty of parsing the text into “an extremely rewarding process.”

Coyne sees those moments of transformation not as mastery, but as a shift in how students engage one another.

“I find it rewarding when students stop guarding convictions and start asking questions together,” he said. “Seminar discussions flow when students… work hard to see the world from others’ perspectives.”

That work, he notes, requires intellectual flexibility and a willingness to confront one’s own assumptions. It is also what students often remember most, along with Coyne’s engagement beyond the classroom. Coyne is described by students as a professor who takes their ideas seriously, supports their academic ambitions, and connects them with broader intellectual communities.

Coyne’s teaching is closely tied to his research, grounded in careful attention to texts.

“Testing ideas means scrutinizing textual evidence—in teaching, as in research,” he said. “The devil is always in the details.”

For his students, that scrutiny becomes a foundation for creative and independent thought, one that extends well beyond the classroom.

Nick Feamster, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science

Nick Feamster learned a lot of things from his mentors that he took to heart, but one of them was this: to treat his class and classroom as a simulation of the real world.

“I want to try to give you problems to think about, and projects to work on, that are a simulation of what you would see when you leave,” he said. That extends to the way he designs exams, too. “In the real world, when you have a problem to solve, you turn to your friend or colleague and ask for help.”

It also means that when he teaches technical skills in his computer science classes, he considers what students will take away even if they don’t go into the field.

“I put myself into the shoes of someone who won’t be doing this work in a year,” he said. “What do I hope they remember and take with them for the rest of their lives?”

Those things might include: Curiosity about the world. How to solve problems with any resource on hand. And appreciation that there are often no hard and fast answers. He likes to structure his classes around an open-ended question, and to let the students shape the discussion.

His approach has left an enduring impression on those who take his courses.

“Prof. Feamster brings an incredible amount of enthusiasm and care to his teaching, and it shows in the way he actively works with students to shape the course around how we learn best,” wrote a student who nominated him for the award. “His class felt less like a traditional lecture and more like a shared effort.”

Feamster said he was deeply affected by receiving the award.

“This is probably the honor of my life,” he said. “It’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career to see the impact I’ve been able to have on students. It gives my job tremendous meaning.”

Alexander J. Ruthenburg, Associate Professor, Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology

Alex Ruthenburg teaches molecular biology in the year-long Advanced Biology Fundamentals Sequence for first-year students in the College. It’s a grueling crash course in science, often a student’s first experience of what academic life is like at UChicago. The courses attract aspiring scientists and doctors who are used to acing their AP biology classes, but during 14 years of teaching in the program, Ruthenburg has seen how it can be a shock to the system.

“There's a culture of students in the program who are really passionate about biology, but they’re also just starting college,” he said. “So, there's a lot of the early challenges like how to study or how to manage their time. I'm the first part of that experience for them.”

The most important element of that transition, Ruthenburg said, is to shift students from the mentality of simply memorizing textbook terms and concepts. “The idea is to have students become practicing biologists by the end of their first year. So, it's like a warp speed, whiplash training montage to learn how to think like a biologist in all the sub-disciplines.”

The Advanced Biology sequence is a combination of interactive lectures, small groups, and labs to immerse students in these fundamentals. Ruthenburg partners with Michael Glotzer, who teaches cell biology, and Navneet Bhasin, who runs the lab sessions, along with teaching assistants who run discussion sections. The goal is to not only shift students’ manner of thinking, but also to give them what Ruthenburg calls “the skills to teach themselves.”

Invariably, the students rise to the challenge. Ruthenburg said his own enthusiasm for teaching is a natural result.

“It is a feed-forward cycle, because my course reviews say things like I'm super passionate and enthusiastic about the subject matter, or ‘how could you not get excited about biology from this?’ But I think it's actually me feeding off their energy to get all of us to that same place.”

Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring

Fernando Alvarez, the Charles F. Gray Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College

According to Fernando Alvarez, most students enter Ph.D. programs with a common misconception. There is a pervasive myth, he says, that one day the clouds will clear and a shining path up a mountain will appear. At its peak—the perfect research question.

“That's really not at all how research works,” said the macroeconomist. “You're basically in these clouds all the time.”

For the past 30 years, Alvarez has guided UChicago students through the mists, advising them to stay grounded and flexible. He believes that by first reading others’ work deeply, one can then begin the “very incremental, marginal work” of improving upon it.

“Start with something,” he said. “Take it seriously.”

Inspired by his childhood in Argentina—an era of hyperinflation and severe economic downturn—Alvarez made the long journey north to the University of Minnesota to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. While there, his mentor, the equally mysterious and brilliant Nobel laureate Edward Prescott, treated his students more like colleagues.

Though he characterizes his mentorship style as less enigmatic genius and more “detail-oriented and curious,” Alvarez has continued the tradition of developing close relationships with his students.

At UChicago, Alvarez is known for his hyper-clear lectures and walking students carefully through complex problems and ideas.

“He has a rare ability to make difficult material feel natural and intuitive,” said a current student.

“Students leave not only having learned the material, but also having learned how to reason like economists,” said another.

Frequently described as humble and generous, Alvarez keeps his office as well as his home open for students, ready to support them in whatever way they need. Over his career, Alvarez has advised more than 50 doctoral theses; many of his students are now prominent economists in their own right.

This past September, dozens of them returned to campus for a celebratory conference entitled “Fernando Alvarez at 60: Celebrating his Contributions to Economics and his Friendship.” For two days, speakers recognized Alvarez’s brilliance as an economist.

But with the same frequency came stories of supportive mentorship that “demonstrated humility, attention and genuine care,” said one co-organizer, a former student and current assistant professor at Yale University.

“To be Fernando’s student is, quite simply, a privilege of a lifetime.”

Pradeep Chintagunta, the Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at Chicago Booth

Pradeep Chintagunta’s teaching centers on one key goal: helping his graduate students develop their unique talents.

“My role is to recognize the variety of skills of different students and direct them in ways that are tailor-made for them,” he said. “I want to make sure that the student is able to discover themselves in the most effective way.”

For him, this means being available to help his mentees whenever and however they need. Current and former students appreciate his completely “open-door” policy, where students may drop in unannounced.

“What I most appreciate is that [he] will physically step away from his computer, sit at his table, and give us his complete attention, even during these impromptu drop-ins,” one student said.

While Chintagunta knows that these spontaneous conversations are important, he believes conversations between students themselves are often the most impactful part of the learning process.

“Students develop through collaborative conversation, each trying to get the best out of each other,” he said, adding their thoughts and contributions “are not just for themselves but for their peers as well.”

He’s also found these conversations aren’t just productive for students, but for him as well.

“Having great students in the class brings out the best in me as a teacher,” he said.

Chintagunta’s ultimate goal for his students is to help them become “producers” rather than “consumers” of research material. He says the key requirement for this transition is developing a framework for how to analyze a problem for themselves.

Playing a role in this development and seeing former students succeed in their fields has been one of the most meaningful aspects of Chintagunta’s career.

His investment has not gone unnoticed, with former students saying that his mentorship has been “instrumental” in their success. Critically, the mentorship and support he offers extend beyond the classroom, with many highlighting his “unwavering care” for his students’ overall well-being.

“He puts the student first, and does everything in his power, whether it is research help, funding or life advice, to make sure his advisee succeeds,” a former student said.

Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible in the Divinity School and in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and in the College

Jeffrey Stackert approaches teaching with a principle that might seem counterintuitive: rigor is a form of care.

“A way of being generous is to be exacting,” he says. “We’re going to push you really, really hard. And we’re going to support you as best we can.”

That philosophy shapes both his classroom and his advising. Stackert works closely with students, often one-on-one, guiding them through the technical demands of philology, argumentation, and interpretation. The result, students say, is a style of mentorship that is as challenging as it is transformative.

As one student shared: “He offered critical yet supportive feedback on [my work]…his guidance and critical questions have shaped me as a scholar.”

Stackert has helped build the Divinity School’s Hebrew Bible program into a leading center for the field, with a distinctive emphasis on languages, method, and early engagement with primary texts. At the core of that approach is a deceptively simple goal: teaching students how to recognize excellence.

“The first thing students need to learn is where to set their expectations,” he explains. “What does it mean to work at a high level?”

That standard is reinforced through detailed, sustained feedback. As one former student recalls, Stackert’s comments do more than evaluate; they teach. He “demonstrates which arguments are successful and which are not,” offering tools to refine ideas and strengthen evidence-based claims.

For Stackert, the work does not end with the dissertation. He views doctoral education as preparation for a career and remains closely involved as students enter the job market and beyond. “We’re training them for a career, not just a dissertation,” he says.

That long-term investment extends well beyond graduation and often evolves into collaboration, as former students become colleagues, an outcome that reflects both his meticulous training style and the durability of his mentorship.

“I feel very responsible to help these students in any way that I can,” Stackert says.

Wei Wei, Professor of Neurobiology

When Wei Wei was training as a neuroscientist, she thought the best part of getting a faculty position would be the long-term freedom to pursue her research interests.

“I was looking forward to starting my lab at UChicago, because I thought the best part of the job is to be in an environment where I can have academic freedom to make discoveries,” she said. “And then I realized that what's even better is not making discoveries alone, but instead, having a team of talented graduate students to work on problems together.”

Wei, whose research focuses on how neural circuits in the retina process visual inputs, tries to cultivate a collaborative and engaging environment in her lab where students brainstorm and troubleshoot projects together. This culture of mutual support in turn builds enthusiasm and makes the science stronger.

“Every student brings new ideas to the lab, and that allows my group's research to take a trajectory that is really shaped by the students,” she said. That active participation and positive feedback loop makes her job as both a scientist and a mentor easier.

“This is really a shared honor. The reason I’m receiving this award is because I’ve had the privilege to get to know such an exceptional group of students. I had so much pleasure working with them. The award is just as much theirs as mine.”

—With contributions by Tori Lee, Louise Lerner, Erin Scott, Julian Veenstra-VanderWeele and Matt Wood.

UChicago will offer free tuition for families with incomes below $250,000, greatly expanding undergraduate aid

05/13/2026 - 01:00pm

Reinforcing the University of Chicago’s commitment to providing an education that is transformative and affordable, UChicago is launching an initiative that will guarantee free tuition starting in Autumn Quarter 2027 for undergraduate students from families that have annual income less than $250,000, with typical assets. The College will also provide free housing and meals and other fees for students from families with income less than $125,000, with typical assets.

The announcement is an affirmation of the University’s core belief that costs should not prevent a student from joining UChicago’s community of extraordinary scholars.

Since its founding in 1890, UChicago has been defined by distinctive principles, including a commitment to free expression and rigorous inquiry, the power of education to improve lives, and the importance of bringing together students with a cross-section of life perspectives. Defined by the influential Core curriculum, a UChicago education teaches students how to think, not what to think. The breadth of the student experience at UChicago includes wide-ranging study abroad programs, hundreds of recognized student organizations, research opportunities with world-class faculty, and a campus culture that fosters fearless questioning and discussion across differences. UChicago is continuing to build on these strengths and expand opportunities and financial support for middle-income families, first-generation students, families in rural communities, and those committed to public service, preparing all students to become leaders, thinkers, and innovators in the fields of their choice.

UChicago is a national leader in preparing College students for success after graduation, showing the deep value of a UChicago education. The College connects undergraduates with more than 5,000 paid internships annually—far more than most peers—and 99% of students complete a substantive internship or research experience during their time in the College. Among Class of 2025 students, 98% received offers for employment, graduate school, and other post-college opportunities.

“The University of Chicago is proud to sponsor a learning environment characterized by intellectual curiosity, ambition, and rigor, to shape the next generation of great thinkers whose ideas will benefit the American people and the broader world,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “By deepening our commitment to affordability, we are helping to ensure that the brightest minds can join us.”

Enhancing predictability, clarity of aid

In addition to expanding the aid available to middle-income families, the new initiative is designed to improve the predictability of financial support and reduce complexity for families navigating their options.

“At a time when many families are uncertain about what the cost of college means for them, we created this initiative to radically expand and simplify our support for students,” said James G. Nondorf, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Advancement and Dean of College Admissions and Financial Aid. “This initiative will increase predictability and allow students and their families to focus on what’s important: their love of learning, and preparation for meaningful and rewarding lives after graduation.”

Providing comprehensive support

The announcement builds on UChicago’s commitment to meet the full financial need of those admitted, with loan-free financial aid. The University provides undergraduate students with more than $225 million in annual financial aid—a figure that has doubled since 2011 and will further increase with this initiative. The average financial aid package for undergraduate students at UChicago is more than $75,000.

Since 2007, a set of initiatives have helped support UChicago students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, including support for a wide range of American families, enabling students to benefit from UChicago’s distinctive educational environment and pursue rewarding careers. In addition, every first-generation student in the College receives a First Phoenix Scholarship, a paid internship, and ongoing mentorship and peer networking.

UChicago has become known for peer-leading outreach to rural students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including serving as headquarters of the national STARS College Network (Small Town and Rural Students). UChicago also has shown national leadership in expanding support for veterans, and is ranked the top college for veterans.

—Learn more about affordability and outcomes at UChicago at this website.

UChicago alumni earn Pulitzer Prizes for international, local and national reporting

Tori Lee — 05/12/2026 - 10:00am

University of Chicago alumni Dake Kang, AB’16, Caroline Kubzansky, AB’21, and Raphael Satter, AB’05, have won 2026 Pulitzer Prizes for international, local and national reporting, respectively. The prizes were announced May 4.

Kang, a journalist with The Associated Press in Beijing, was part of the global team awarded an international reporting prize for their “astonishing global investigation” into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance—created largely by American companies—used by the Chinese government.

In his reporting, Kang helped uncover that the U.S. government allowed, and even helped, Silicon Valley tech companies sell advanced tech to China, where it has been honed into a vast, powerful surveillance network used to stifle dissent, monitor citizens and target political refugees.

“It’s a real honor, but more importantly, I hope this helps draw more attention to our reporting and the stories of the people we spoke to,” Kang said. “I will never forget what we had witnessed in Xinjiang and elsewhere. In this chaotic age of distraction we are living through, I am grateful that the importance of the issues we documented are being acknowledged.”

A history and math major at UChicago, Kang wrote his award-winning thesis on Beijing’s first subway. He is an Institute of Politics alum and 2023 Pritzker Fellow, where he led seminars on China’s response to COVID-19 (coverage that was named a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting).

“[At UChicago] I met friends and mentors who transformed the way I saw the world and gave me the courage to choose a career that was true to myself,” he said. “For that, I am deeply grateful.”

Kubzansky, as a member of the Chicago Tribune staff, was awarded a Local Reporting Prize for “powerful coverage” of “the Trump administration’s militarized immigration sweep of the city.”

In September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security dispatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Chicago in a months-long targeted immigration raid. Dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” federal agents detained over 1,500 people, deported hundreds and fatally shot one man across the Chicagoland area. The presence of federal agents sparked a swell of resistance by Chicagoans in the form of protests and community action.

In the Tribune's months-long coverage, Kubzansky contributed reporting on the ICE shooting of an activist in Brighton Park and a capstone piece documenting the 64-day period of the blitz.

“The Pulitzer announcement brought me back to that period where that daily urgency, and sharing that experience with my colleagues, was the defining feature of my life,” Kubzansky said. “It reminded me of what it felt like to stand on a city street and watch tear gas clouds clear as people up and down the sidewalk washed their eyes out and helped others near them get back on their feet.”

At the Tribune, Kubzansky covers criminal justice with a focus on violence and its root causes. While at UChicago, the philosophy and English major was a student journalist for the Chicago Maroon from her first week on campus until graduation, serving as the managing editor from 2020-21.

Kubzansky says her time at UChicago gave her “ideas about power, state authority, the meaning of politics and love,” that she thought about during the blitz, but also foundational tenets she uses every day as a reporter.

“Ask for help if you need it—most problems are less intimidating when discussed with someone you trust. Be rigorous in your examination. Ask the intimidating questions,” she said. “Consider the history of the thing before you and ask: How does this fit into what came before it, or stand it on its head?”

Satter, an investigative reporter at Reuters, was part of the winning team that received the National Reporting Prize for “documenting how the president used the U.S. government and the influence of his supporters to expand executive power and exact vengeance on his foes.”

As part of the winning series, Satter contributed reporting on the “purge” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The story outlined the government-backed retaliatory campaign that led to the firings, suspensions and investigations of more than 600 people across the U.S. who made comments on the right-wing influencer’s death.

At Reuters, Satter covers cybersecurity, surveillance and disinformation. He has written extensively on state-sponsored espionage and Russian hacking operations. While at UChicago, Satter also wrote for the Maroon and graduated with a degree in political science.

Kang, Kubzansky and Satter join a distinguished list of UChicago scholars and alumni who have won Pulitzer Prizes. Recent honorees include investigative journalist Trina Reynolds-Tyler, MPP’20; author Brent Staples, AM’76, PhD’82; playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07; and poet Tyehimba Jess, AB’91.

New UChicago digital research tool opens paths connecting cultures and continents

05/11/2026 - 05:13pm

A new website beta launching today is transforming creation, stewardship and delivery of digital collections and data at the University of Chicago.

Built by the UChicago Library and the Division of the Arts and Humanities, UChicagoNode is designed to give researchers and the public a single hub to discover a wide range of digital collections through a unified, open-access platform.

At launch, UChicagoNode offers more than 4,000 digital files from five collections: the Mapping Chicagoland Collection; the Guerrilla Television Network; the Modern Bengali Song Collection; the Middle East Photograph Archive; and the Social Scientists Map Chicago Collection.

Over the next several years, UChicagoNode is expected to grow to support petabyte-scale data, including hundreds of thousands of files from more than 200 collections. It now features digitized photos, maps, videos and sheet music, and will soon add manuscripts, lithographs and audio recordings. UChicagoNode will continue to grow as researchers contribute new collections and will provide a long-term home for content created by UChicago faculty for research and teaching.

It will also offer records of collections from across campus, including those from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, and content contributed by UChicago’s project partners.

"What makes UChicagoNode so powerful is how it facilitates exploration across multi-media content in ways that reward both the expert and the newcomer,” said Hoyt Long, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

“Every object is encoded with rich metadata that allows users to quickly navigate their way to specific items in a collection while also seeing how each item is related to the collection as a whole. UChicagoNode brings our digital collections to life in ways that will make it an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, opening up new paths into the archive."

Providing access to information about collections at scale also opens collections as data, making them newly available to quantitative methods of study.

To enable such research, the UChicago team has enriched maps in UChicagoNode with georeferencing data, so that researchers can overlay the historic maps they find in UChicagoNode on OpenStreetMap, a contemporary map of the same location. For example, students and scholars interested in the Great Chicago Fire can type “fire” into UChicagoNode’s single search box and discover maps of the area that was burned during this landmark historic event. They can then view the overlap of that map with a current map of Chicago using the Allmaps viewer embedded within UChicagoNode to see how the burned areas have developed.

Members of the public as well as scholars can make other fascinating discoveries about arts, culture and history using UChicagoNode. A single search for “Chicago politics” points visitors to 55 videos from the Guerrilla TV collection on topics such as activists’ efforts to keep Cook County Hospital open or life in the Cabrini Green housing project.

Schoolteachers and students can also browse 19th-century photos of the Middle East, discovering the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem; the Hagia Sophia; the Pyramids, Sphinx and Temple at Giza; and the White Mosque in Ramla.

“The University of Chicago Library is committed to opening its collections, to ensure persistent access to scholarship and to contribute to a global knowledge environment that is open, accessible and equitable,” said Torsten Reimer, University librarian and dean of the Library. “UChicagoNode now provides a robust and accessible infrastructure for Library collections and Arts and Humanities research outputs at UChicago, ensuring continuous access to a wealth of information.”

Library leaders chose to collaborate with the Forum for Digital Culture to create UChicagoNode by expanding on their successful OCHRE Data Service.

UChicagoNode gives future collection-builders extraordinary flexibility to add and update collections with relevant descriptions and will provide coherent data services for scholars alongside the OCHRE data service, and the online publication service, CORPUS.

“We expect UChicagoNode to be a powerful tool for current and future faculty,” said Rachael Kotarski, associate University librarian for digital strategy and services.

Launch collections in UChicagoNode

The Mapping Chicagoland Collection brings together cartographic works of Chicago from 1812-1940 on topics such as land use, urban planning, transportation, utilities, annexations, wards, industries, topography, cemeteries, world’s fairs and population.

While the print maps are held separately by three cultural institutions—the Newberry Library, the Chicago History Museum and the UChicago Library—thanks to their collaboration, nearly 2,000 Chicago maps are now united digitally in UChicagoNode for the first time, with more to come. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for the Mapping Chicagoland project.

Also newly available to the public online is the Guerrilla Television Network. This collection includes videos made by diverse artists, activists and journalists from roughly 1968-1980 as part of a movement that amplified the voices of women, Black, Indigenous and people of color, immigrants and Appalachian miners. Activist documentaries, portraits of community members, abstract animations, poetic experiments, goofy skits, insightful journalism and observational footage are all featured in these independently produced videos.

Originally, videotapes in this collection were screened in galleries, lofts and at festivals, traded between collectives and media arts organizations, and occasionally broadcast on nascent cable television, local public television stations or pirate TV signals. To make them available today, the tapes were digitized through a project that began in 2021.

“These tapes are all crucial parts of our cultural heritage, stories told by people who never saw their voices reflected in mainstream corporate media,” said Cecilia Smith, the Library’s director of digital scholarship. “This is ‘the people’s television,’ a version of the media that encouraged active participation and that gave voice to the concerns and interests of ordinary citizens.”

Now available to all through UChicagoNode, many of these videos have not been seen in 50 years.

The Modern Bengali Song Collection includes scores, lyrics, letters, periodical articles, recordings and personal papers documenting the history of modern Bengali song. This newly available collection was created through a partnership between the Library and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, supported by the UChicago Center in Delhi. Nearly 2,000 images and documents from the Manna Dey and Sudhin Dasgupta collections are available to the public.

Joining the century-old maps on UChicagoNode are more than 400 photographic prints in the Middle East Photograph Archive taken primarily in the 19th century. Islamic monuments built between the 9th and 15th centuries in and around Cairo feature prominently in these photographs.

Finally, 45 maps from the Social Scientists Map Chicago Collection have been added to UChicagoNode with new georeferencing data. Chicago School of Sociology researchers created maps in the 1920s-1930s that were considered the most wide-ranging cartographic portraits of an urban area ever compiled. A Social Base Map of Chicago, neighborhood maps, land use and land value maps connected with Homer Hoyt, maps from books by Frederic Thrasher on gangs, Walter Reckless on “vice” and Clifford Shaw on crime are included, along with geographer Harold Mayer’s railroad maps and anthropologist Sol Tax’s manuscript cartographic representation of blockbusting in the Hyde Park area.

An expanding future

“We are working on adding more nodes across different disciplines and academic fields, including records from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures,” Reimer said of the hub’s future. “The ambition for UChicagoNode is to create a linked network that preserves and opens the field-defining research of UChicago scholars to the world.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and individual benefactors provided generous support for UChicagoNode.

—A version of this story was originally published by the UChicago Library.

Are randomized controlled trials harming nonprofits?

Susie Allen — 05/11/2026 - 12:01pm

In the 1940s, medical researchers began using randomized controlled trials to assess the efficacy of health interventions. In RCTs, researchers create randomly assigned treatment and control groups, administering the potential remedy to only the first group, and comparing how the participants fared.

This method, with its promise to tease apart cause and effect, had such seductive explanatory power that other fields began to take notice.

One of these was the social policy sector, Profs. Nicole P. Marwell and Jennifer E. Mosley write in their new book, Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector (2025). Advocates of conducting RCTs believed the trials could bring clarity to the messy work of helping people. Does a job training program really result in more participants getting jobs? Identify a control group and a treatment group and find out.

But as Marwell and Mosley, both professors at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, write, this well-intentioned notion has grown so powerful that the RCT came to be seen not as one method of assessment among many but as “the only method that tells you whether or not the program works,” Marwell said —and an important way for organizations to attract funding.

Mismeasuring Impact challenges this status quo, arguing that RCTs aren’t always the best tool for the job and calling for a more expansive approach to the evaluation of nonprofit social programs.

Questioning the role of RCTs in social policy took some courage. “There’s a lot of support for this methodology on this campus and in this city,” Mosley said. “But in the Chicago way, they are supportive of having lively debate on the topic.”

The problems with implementation

When Marwell and Mosley began speaking to nonprofit employees, funders, and even the evaluators who help organizations plan and administer RCTs, they were surprised to discover how many people had developed misgivings about how the procedure was being implemented in practice.

Many of the concerns were methodological.

Evaluators were especially troubled by insufficient sample sizes: Social programs are often expected to have small-scale effects or to address rare issues, such as youth involvement in gun violence. To statistically detect whether these kinds of programs are working, the organizations running them might need to enroll many hundreds of participants in an RCT.

“But most youth programs don’t serve that many youths at one time,” Marwell and Mosley write in Mismeasuring Impact. “There may not even be that many youths in the neighborhood.”

RCTs are also plagued by problems with so-called control group contamination: People assigned to a control group who didn’t get access to an organization’s program may seek help elsewhere. This means the trial isn’t comparing the treatment to nothing; it’s comparing the treatment to a similar program delivered elsewhere.

Costly and time-consuming, RCTs are also placing a significant burden on the nonprofits conducting them. Under normal circumstances, an organization that sees an emerging need or a gap in its current offerings can quickly adjust; nimbleness is a historic strength of the nonprofit sector. But, Marwell and Mosley explain, organizations conducting expensive multiyear RCTs are essentially frozen in amber—they can’t change their programs once the trial is underway.

These implementation problems undercut a core claim made by RCT proponents: that RCTs provide the best evidence that a program either works or doesn’t. If an RCT finds that a program has no effect on outcomes, it could signal that the program is ineffective—but, Marwell says, it could also indicate that “you didn’t implement the RCT according to the very rigorous methodological standards that it requires.”

Beyond the RTC

Marwell and Mosley talked to many in the nonprofit sector who worried that the dominance of RCTs was pushing organizations to offer programs with easily measured outcomes. Yet many social needs don’t fit into the tidy cause-and-effect framework of the RCT. A homeless shelter, for example, provides vital services but may not on its own reduce homelessness.

“If we continue down this road [where] RCTs are the only way to prove your legitimacy as a program,” Mosley said, “it does devalue those programs that are never going to be able to be part of an RCT. Is that really a world we want to live in?”

Of course “we do need to make sure our programs are effective,” Mosley says. Fortunately, she and Marwell point out in Mismeasuring Impact, there are many tools beyond RCTs to measure efficacy.

Surveying program participants more regularly can yield essential information about what helps and what doesn’t. “Plan-do-study-act” cycles—quick, small-scale experiments—can also help organizations “iterate and improve on a continuous basis,” Marwell adds.

That’s good for all nonprofits, including ones that will never be able to run RCTs. And what’s good for nonprofits is good for the rest of society, she says: These organizations are “such a critical part of our social safety net and a critical part of the services that help people grow and thrive.”

—A version of this story was originally published by the UChicago Magazine.

UChicago chemists invent new way to swap nitrogen into molecules

Louise Lerner — 05/08/2026 - 09:45am

One of the most common types of medicine is a category called small-molecule drugs. This includes the pills you’re used to taking, such as ibuprofen, but the category covers drugs for everything from eczema to cancer.

However, when researchers want to create a new small-molecule drug to treat disease, the process is long and complex—and it starts with making the compound itself to test it.

A new breakthrough by University of Chicago chemists shows how to easily customize molecules by swapping carbon-oxygen pairs for nitrogen atoms. In some cases, the process can be reduced from 10 steps down to just one or two.

The team hopes the finding, published April 30 in Science, could accelerate drug discovery.

“This is another strong tool in the box for the goal of being able to imagine a molecule and then make it—to assemble a molecule as a wish,” said chemist Zining Zhang, a graduate student at UChicago and first author on the paper.

Structure matters

Creating molecules from scratch is hard. It’s not like reaching into a box of loose Lego bricks. It’s more like starting from a box of already partly assembled Lego builds and cobbling those together into the structure you want—with very strict rules about how and when you can take pieces apart.

The structure you’re making matters a lot. When you’re making a drug, tiny changes—like moving a single nitrogen atom—can have huge implications in the final product. That single atom could make the difference between a drug that latches onto the right proteins in the body and one that fails.

But when researchers want to test out different versions of a molecule, to see which one works best, they have to laboriously figure out how to build each new iteration.

“So the question we try to address is, can we find a quicker way to introduce many different structural variations that contain nitrogen atoms?” said Guangbin Dong, the Weldon G. Brown Professor of Chemistry at UChicago and senior author on the paper.

In this case, the scientists wanted to see whether they could figure out a way to easily swap in nitrogen atoms in place of carbonyl groups, a common feature of small molecules that consists of paired carbon and oxygen atoms.

Previously, the Dong lab found a way to more easily move these carbonyl groups around when making a new drug. But they also wanted to give researchers the ability to move nitrogen where needed.

“The location of the nitrogen is important because it is often the piece that interacts with the active site in your body, so we want to be able to move it easily,” explained Zhang.

The group was able to find a simpler method using an ingredient called NAHA, which grabs the carbonyl and cleaves its bond. Then, through a series of moves like choreographed dancers switching partners, the empty space gets filled with nitrogen.

The process is simple, effective and inexpensive, the scientists said. They also noted the design of the technique allows many different types of attachments, known as functional groups, to be compatible, even those that are normally tricky to successfully integrate.

“This was kind of a dream reaction,” said Zhang, “so it was really gratifying to see it work.”

Dong added the group plans to continue pursuing the direction.

“We’d like to be able to swap carbonyl to all of the possible important atoms,” he said.

The other authors on the paper were visiting undergraduate student Zhehan Liang and graduate student Rong Ye.

Citation: “Scanning nitrogen in sp3-rich scaffolds enabled by carbonyl-to-nitrogen atom swap.” Zhang et al,

Funding: National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Bristol Myers Squibb fellowship.

Four UChicago undergraduates awarded 2026 Goldwater Scholarship

Colin Terrill — 05/07/2026 - 11:48am

University of Chicago third-year students Arthur Costa, Shelley Fernando, Mason McCormack and Vincent Wang have been selected as winners of the 2026 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The four undergraduates are among more than 450 winners selected this year for the award, which aims to help STEM students further their research during the last years of their bachelor’s studies.

The Goldwater Scholarship was created by Congress in 1986 and recognizes undergraduates who intend to pursue research careers in natural science, mathematics and engineering. The prestigious award helps winners cover the cost of tuition, room and board, fees and books up to $7,500.

We spoke with each of the winners about their research and what receiving the honor means to them:

Arthur Costa

Arthur Costa is a chemistry major who wants to know how different scientific disciplines can be combined to solve real-world problems.

“I’ve always been interested in the interface between chemistry and biology,” he said. “Specifically, I’ve been trying to see how we can use chemistry to understand and manipulate biological systems.”

This idea has led him to focus on how we can use this way of thinking to solve problems in the medical field. At UChicago, Costa has worked with doctors, epidemiologists and biologists, and as part of a team in the Genehackers organization to create tools that can be used towards improving global disease detection and treatment.

Tell us about your research.

Most of my work has been in Nobel laureate Prof. Jack Szostak’s lab, which aims to understand how life may have started on Earth in the early days by creating model protocells with materials that could plausibly have been present. The opportunity to work with him has been a tremendous learning experience that has taught me how to think as a scientist.

My research uses small molecules to increase membrane permeability to load nucleotides into protocells and trap them inside. Using this system to load nucleotides increases internal RNA copying yields nearly 10-fold and solves a major problem in origins-of-life research by showing how nucleotides could have entered and accumulated inside those early protocells.

Shelley Fernando

For Shelley Fernando, it all started in the Advanced Biology sequence as a first-year student.

For a final assignment, each student was tasked with choosing a scientific paper and writing a review about it. She decided to write hers on an unpublished preprint covering the mechanisms of DNA-loop extruding proteins and the rest was history.

“I got super excited about these loop extruders and did a deep dive on the subject.”

That curiosity eventually led her to declare a major in biological chemistry and research assistant roles in three different laboratories, all of which study genome architecture and loop extrusion at different levels of abstraction. As she works toward a long-term goal of earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology or biochemistry, Fernando said she hopes for more opportunities to meet scientists and talk about exciting science.

Tell us about your research.

I’m interested in the spatial organization of the genome of the nucleus and the dynamic regulation of the 3D genome architecture. Nearly all the cells in our body have the same genome—genetic information in the cell that is packed in the form of chromatin that can be marked and organized in ways that control which genes are expressed in which cells.

My work at UChicago focuses on the changes in chromatin organization that drive the development of B cells. I hope to use the skills that I am learning here to pursue a PhD project that uses ex vivo microscopy and computational modelling to understand the interplay between loop extrusion and epigenetic state.

Mason McCormack

Space has always pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. The drive to answer these seemingly impossible questions fostered Mason McCormack’s interest in studying distant alien worlds.

“Using cutting-edge technology and pushing the boundaries of what we think we can measure really drew me towards this field,” McCormack, an astrophysics major, said. “The study of space is really a testament to human ingenuity in how much data you can get out of shockingly little information.”

McCormack, the president of the UChicago Space Program, has been an engineering lead of the Polarization modUlated Laser Satellite Experiment (PULSE-A) for the last two years. He also conceived of and secured funding and a NASA grant for the Particle Acquisition from Stratospheric Conditions for Analysis in Laboratory (PASCAL) science balloon experiment and attended international conferences.

McCormack said doing all this at a school without an engineering program was made possible by “the drive and support of my fellow classmates and every professor that has generously given us their time and wisdom.”

Tell us about your research.

My primary research is on exoplanets. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, we are trying to understand what the atmospheres are like on some of the biggest planets we’ve discovered. I run hundreds of atmospheric models based on some planetary and stellar parameters we can observe and a couple of molecules to see if we can deduce the composition of these “hot Jupiters.”

The goal of this research is to find a link between how these planets are formed and their compositions. We know that they couldn’t have been born where they are because they are too close to their stars. The fact that they couldn’t be born where they are currently located opens up the question of how they migrated there from their point of origin. Trying to figure out billions of years of history from a few data points is such a uniquely fascinating problem to be working on.

Vincent Wang

Machine learning is still in its infancy, which is what Vincent Wang finds so fascinating about it. For a technology that has become a household name seemingly overnight, there is much that we still don’t know about it.

“I think a very compelling part of machine learning is that it is a field that has many interesting empirical phenomena that we don’t quite understand,” Wang said.

As a double major in mathematics and computer science, he hopes to use mathematics to better understand why machine learning has improved so much over the past decade in order to make it safer and more rigorous.

Tell us about your research.

I’m broadly interested in finding new ways to understand machine learning theory through mathematics. I’m currently working with Research Asst. Prof. Mahdi Haghifam at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) on understanding the optimization of algorithms that satisfy differential privacy, which is a mathematically rigorous guarantee that an algorithm does not leak the data it trains over. In the past, I’ve worked on other projects in combinatorics, tropical geometry and numerical methods for solving partial differential equations.

UChicago and TTIC really shaped how I think about machine learning by describing the field through a consistent theory. It gave me an appreciation of how deep the field runs today.

Each of this year’s Goldwater Scholars was supported by the Office of National Fellowships in the College Center for Research and Fellowships, which guides candidates through rigorous application processes and interview preparation for nationally competitive awards like Goldwater. The Center’s team helps students identify and articulate how their unique talents and distinctive paths prepare them to realize a better world.

—A version of this story was originally posted by The College.

Edith Rickert: Novelist, Chaucer scholar and WWI code breaker

Shiloh Miller — 05/07/2026 - 10:08am

Assoc. Prof. Emerita Christina von Nolcken liked taking students on “little jaunts,” trips to the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center.

There she would show them the famous eight-volume work The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, by scholars and University of Chicago professors John Manly and Edith Rickert, PhD'1899.

In all her years teaching a course on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, von Nolcken began to realize she knew more about Manly—whose portrait hangs in the English department in Walker Hall—than Rickert, whose face she had never seen.

Von Nolcken went searching in Special Collections for photos but found far more. Rickert, she discovered, was beautiful, well traveled, and well liked, and her writings conveyed a kind of crackling intensity and thoughtfulness.

“This is a really interesting woman,” said von Nolcken, a scholar of Old and Middle English literature.

Her initial curiosity moved her to become Rickert’s biographer, and in 2024 she published The “Lives” and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871–1938): Novelist, Cryptologist, and World-Class Chaucerian.

The book reveals an accomplished scholar and writer who was also partly responsible for one of the most important acts of American code breaking in World War I. Rickert’s scholarly and cryptographic achievements are sometimes not given the same credit as those of her male collaborators, an oversight von Nolcken’s biography seeks to rectify.

Cracking the code

Rickert was born in 1871 and grew up first in the small Ohio town of Canal Dover and later in Chicago.

The first in her family to go to college, Rickert graduated from Vassar in 1891 as valedictorian. She then returned to Chicago to teach high school and pursue a Ph.D. in Middle English at UChicago. Dissertation research called her abroad, and on her 25th birthday she set sail for Europe to explore the British Museum’s collection of medieval romances.

The summer of 1899 took her to Chicago to defend her Ph.D. Among her examiners was John Manly, the “brand-new whiz kid at the University,” as von Nolcken describes him, and the first head of the English department. Right away Rickert “fell desperately in love.” But she nevertheless decided to return to England and establish herself as a writer—publishing five well-received novels, several works of scholarship and many short stories.

In 1909 Rickert returned to America to finance the educations of her three younger sisters. Then, when the United States joined World War I in 1917, she followed Manly to Washington, D.C. to become a code breaker.

Rickert had gained some code breaking experience that same year from her work on the Voynich manuscript, a 15th-century document written in a (still uncracked) cipher, and she had picked up German at Vassar.

Information about Rickert’s code breaking is hard to come by because the 1917 Espionage Act put limits on most outside communication. But it’s clear that she took to the work with diligence and zeal.

After three days of nonstop effort, she and Manly broke the Waberski cipher, found on a paper sewn into the clothes of a German spy intercepted in February 1918 at the U.S.–Mexico border. Known patterns in German spelling, like the fact that the letter c is always followed by h or k, helped them identify patterns. The decrypted message concerned Germany’s attempt to ally with Mexico, reinforcing information in the Zimmermann telegram cracked by the British the year before.

Rickert’s role in breaking the Waberski cipher has been largely overlooked by historians. She is also not widely recognized for her work in the pre-war years revising—and helping write—a series of English grammar and composition textbooks that bear Manly’s name. In fact, after publishing the biography, von Nolcken found a letter in which Rickert says she did all the work on the cipher.

“I can believe her,” said von Nolcken.

Tellers of Tales

After the war, Rickert and Manly embarked on what von Nolcken considers “the most ambitious humanistic project of the early 20th century,” their critical edition of The Canterbury Tales. For this they had to locate and examine every one of the more than 80 extant manuscripts of the tales, in order to reconstruct the version left by Chaucer’s very first scribe.

After purchasing photostats of all the manuscripts, they and their assistants collated them in what became known as the “Chaucer Laboratory” at UChicago. Both Rickert and Manly now taught at the University, where Rickert—like von Nolcken—became a full professor focusing on medieval English literature.

“I had her job, in a sense,” von Nolcken said.

After years of worsening health, Rickert died in 1938, two years before the eight-volume Canterbury Tales was published. While the edition is not used widely today, von Nolcken believes that “no one has edited The Canterbury Tales with more care.”

Von Nolcken’s biography is bookended by excerpts from Rickert’s notes towards an unfinished autobiography, My Book, penciled at the very end of her life.

In her own words: “In this life, just as I am, physically & mentally, I have certain powers & certain opportunities not quite like those of anyone else. So with each of us. It is our business to be used to the utmost. And why, I wonder? Because stagnation means atrophy—going backward—& that is the one crime. The perpetual urge in us toward growth & grasp & power & understanding—that is God.”

—This article was originally published in the University of Chicago Magazine.

What a thousand years of economic history reveals about modern growth

Cristi Kempf — 05/06/2026 - 02:16pm

Scholars have long debated what sparked Europe’s economic surge in the mid-18th century.

That debate took center stage recently at the University of Chicago, where an expert panel from the Harris School of Public Policy and Northwestern University—a group including two Nobel laureates—held a wide-ranging and pointed discussion on history’s lessons for growth.

Hosted by Harris’ Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, the April 14 event featured Steven Durlauf, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor at Harris and the Stone Center’s director; University Professor James Robinson; and Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University’s Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences.

Mokyr won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on the historical origins of sustained economic growth; Robinson won in 2024 for his work linking political and economic institutions with prosperity.

The event offered a rare opportunity to hear three leading academic voices examine the origins of the modern economy and forces shaping its future. The Keller Center's Forum filled quickly, leaving standing room only for the panel moderated by Veronica Guerrieri, the Ronald E. Tarrson Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the UChicago Booth School of Business.

Mokyr described the recent book he co-authored, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000. Stretching over the millennium, the book argues the two arcs diverged near the halfway mark due largely to differences in culture and social structure. These led China to turn inward as Europe became the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

As China emerged from the Middle Ages, Mokyr explained, extended families, or clans, grew stronger, binding people through kinship. In Europe, the opposite happened. Family ties loosened, replaced by what he called “alternative institutions” of guilds, monasteries, universities and autonomous cities.

This focus on shared purpose over common ancestry created space for strangers to collaborate, for ideas to circulate, for institutions to evolve, Mokyr argued.

Europe became an innovative place where people could challenge authority, question tradition and imagine something entirely new. China remained intellectually vibrant as well, but was less inclined toward radical change.

“You see a very active intellectual community in China, but you don’t see radical ideas or people saying, ‘Let’s overthrow everything and start anew,’” said Mokyr.

Durlauf and Robinson followed him to the podium with critiques that sharpened the debate over how lessons from history connect to economic growth. Both discussed the difficulty of drawing clear conclusions across so many years.

“It’s extremely difficult to disentangle a kind of causal relationship over such a long period of time when so many other things are going on,” said Robinson.

He pointed to “other things” not central to Mokyr’s thesis, such as the voyages of European explorers and the 17th century English Civil Wars, during which King Charles I was beheaded, as critical turning points.

The mid-1600s were “a period of tectonic political change,” Robinson said.

“Radical new ideas came on the table as the fixed and daunting structures of the external world—monarchy, lords, church—crumbled.”

“This was a world turned upside down,” he said. “And from that world turned upside down, all sorts of things started happening: economic things, political things, institutional things, cultural things.”

Durlauf framed the discussion around time, contingencies and inequality.

Different forces, he argued, operate on different timescales. Short-term growth may be driven by factors like technology or savings rates, but deeper forces unfold over centuries. And unpredictable “shocks” can reshape trajectories for generations.

“There are shocks to systems that are so persistent that the theory has to do with the shocks, rather than to the mechanisms themselves,” he said.

He added, “growth changes everything.”

“It creates all these possibilities, but it also creates capacities for stratification,” keeping wealth and power stuck in the same hands.

When conversation turned to the present, Guerrieri said that China’s rapid economic rise was not such a surprise. What is surprising, she continued, is the extent to which Europe is lagging.

Europe lacks a true counterpart to California's Silicon Valley, Durlauf noted, raising an open question about whether the advantages that built the modern economy will carry into the next phase.

—This article was originally published on the Harris website.

Deep in the ice, Antarctic detectors pick up incoming cosmic rays from outer space

Louise Lerner — 05/06/2026 - 11:25am

More than 600 feet below the surface of Antarctica, ultrasensitive detectors picked up the tracks of cosmic rays crashing down from outer space.

The Askaryan Radio Array is a group of sensors drilled deep into the ice. For years, the array has been patiently listening for faint radio signals near the South Pole.

In a study published last month, University of Chicago researchers announced that new analysis techniques revealed 13 events where cosmic rays produce particle showers in the ice. This marks the first time that scientists have detected these particle showers through ice, which offers a chance to study never-before-seen aspects of the phenomenon.

“When these particles strike the ice, they produce a burst of radio waves that is a bit like a sonic boom,” said UChicago postdoctoral fellow Philipp Windischhofer, one of the study’s two main authors.

The Askaryan Radio Array was designed to hunt for high-energy neutrinos, an extremely rare cosmic particle. But new data analysis techniques may be revealing it to be an unexpected boon for the wider study of particles from space. Even after the researchers’ landmark findings, more than seven years of data remains to be studied; scientists hope to learn more about elusive cosmic rays—and perhaps finally catch the signal of a neutrino.

“We’re looking forward to analyzing the rest of the data and hopefully, gaining new insights into the highest-energy phenomena in our universe,” Windischhofer said.

The paper is published in Physical Review Letters.

Visitors from outer space

Neutrinos are extremely difficult to catch, as they very rarely interact with matter. But they are a unique window into the wildest phenomena in the universe, like supermassive black holes and exploding stars.

The Askaryan Radio Array, run by an international collaboration of scientists from the U.S., Europe, and Asia led by Prof. Amy Connolly at The Ohio State University, was designed to pick up such very high-energy neutrinos from space. The first prototype was installed in 2011; UChicago scientists Eric Oberla and Cosmin Deaconu developed and built the newest section, deployed in 2018.

However, as scientists initially analyzed the data that came in from this new instrument, located near the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, they didn’t see any signs of neutrinos.

The signals were coming from the wrong direction. Neutrinos were more likely to be picked up as they traveled upward through the two kilometers of solid ice below the station.

Then-graduate student Kaeli Hughes, PhD’22, noted there were a few neutrino-like signals, but they were coming from above the array. She hypothesized that some might be cosmic rays, but no one had yet developed the analytic tools to confirm it.

Over the following eight years, however, science and analytic tools advanced. And a group decided to take another look at the data.

As they combed through, Windischhofer and graduate student Nathaniel Alden were surprised to see clear hits for a different kind of visitor from space: cosmic rays.

The same extreme events—like supernovae—that make neutrinos also produce cosmic rays, which are actually atoms with their outer layers stripped away to leave just a nucleus. When an incoming cosmic ray strikes an atom on Earth, the collision creates a characteristic shower of secondary particles, which the array’s detectors picked up in the ice.

A big difference between cosmic rays and neutrinos is that cosmic rays have a charge. This means their paths get scrambled by magnetic fields on the way to Earth, so scientists can’t trace them back to whatever supernova or black hole might have spawned them.

But each visitor from outer space has something to tell us.

“By studying what elements these cosmic rays are, you can learn about the abundance of elements in the universe and what is accelerating them to such high energies,” explained Alden.

Early findings help to improve hunt for neutrinos

The array also offers a unique perspective on cosmic rays. For one, it looks at higher energy particles than most other cosmic ray experiments. It’s also the only detector that measures how the signals travel through ice.

“This means the Askaryan Radio Array can probe the very dense inner core of the cosmic ray shower, which is very hard to do with other setups,” said Windischhofer.

Finally, the detection marks the first time that a phenomenon known as Askaryan radiation has been observed by itself “in the wild.”

This type of radiation, first predicted in 1962 by Armenian physicist Gurgen Askaryan, occurs when a particle traveling with very high energy smacks into an unsuspecting atom inside ice or similar material on Earth. The collision produces a shower of secondary particles, which travel through the ice at very nearly the speed of light. This effect had been created artificially in the lab, but it had never before been used to actually detect a particle from the cosmos.

As the team members comb through the rest of the array’s data, they expect to find more cosmic rays, but possibly neutrinos as well.

“In that sense, it’s a nice stepping stone because you haven’t seen a neutrino yet, but now you have seen the same signature that you would expect for a neutrino in your detector, and so you’re able to try out ideas that people have had about how to look for both these particles,” said Alden.

“It is not often that a graduate student walks into your office and shows you a plot that says something truly new about nature that you’ve not seen before,” said Prof. Abby Vieregg, David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and senior author on the paper.

“Seeing high energy cosmic rays for the first time through their radio emission in ice is important not just for characterizing cosmic rays in a new way, but also for allowing us a glimpse of what the highest energy neutrino signals could look like some day in the detectors we’ve spent years building,” she said.

Citation: “Observation of in-ice Askaryan radiation from high-energy cosmic rays.” Alden and Windischhofer et al, Physical Review Letters, April 17, 2026.

Funding: National Science Foundation, Taiwan National Science Council, Belgian Fund for Scientific Research, Leverhulme Trust, European Research Council, Belgian American Education Foundation.

A conductor's 50-year crescendo at UChicago

Benjamin Ransom — 05/04/2026 - 04:44pm

Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.

With baton in hand, Barbara Schubert steps up to her podium before the University Symphony Orchestra.

The musicians sit at the ready, eyes on their conductor. Tall and poised, Schubert casts her gaze over the players. Then, as she has for the past 50 years, she lifts her arm—and the music starts, rising and swelling to fill Mandel Hall on the University of Chicago campus.

For Schubert, nothing compares to the rush she feels leading the orchestra.

“People say that being a conductor is like having a fatal disease, in that you get bitten by it and then you can't escape because it’s so compelling,” she said. “The exhilaration that comes from experiencing and being an integral part of a live performance, I think is unmatched.”

This devotion to her craft has driven her through a half-century at the front of the ensemble. In that time, she has pushed generations of musicians—students from all fields of study, plus alumni who never quite wanted to leave—to perform works that would challenge even professional orchestras. In the process, Schubert built a community that, for many, has been a defining piece of their UChicago experience.

This May, nearly 100 alumni who've played for Schubert will return to Mandel Hall to take the stage with her again. The Opus 50 concerts, May 9 and 10, are the Department of Music's tribute to her work at the podium and beyond.

Over the course of the weekend, they’ll present music from Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, sit in on open rehearsals and swap stories from five decades as they reconnect with classmates they haven't seen since college.

For some, the orchestra has become a family tradition. Alumnus violinist Alexandra Hobaugh, now a lawyer, met her husband Michael when they were both students in the orchestra. Years later, their two daughters followed them into the orchestra to play with Schubert as well.

"She's created a space for creativity in our lives and helped souls bloom—whether they knew it at the time or not," Hobaugh said.

Schubert as a maestra in the making

The first piece Schubert ever conducted with the orchestra was Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, a tone poem exploring the death of an artist.

It was 1976. A first-year graduate student at UChicago, she asked the conductor at the time—a medievalist scholar leading the orchestra more out of necessity—if she could guest-conduct. He said yes. One thing led to another, Schubert said, and she was appointed full-time.

“When I started out, I didn't have much experience at all,” she said. “I went to conducting camp at the Monteux School to learn the craft, but most importantly, to learn how to immerse myself in the experience of studying, learning and interpreting the score—and then how to translate that to the musicians.”

Monteux, an acclaimed center in Maine, marked the beginning of a serious training arc. By 1985, she was selected for the prestigious Tanglewood Seminar for Conductors, where she worked with Leonard Bernstein and other major figures. Through the decades after, she continued to hone her skills through workshops and collaborations, later serving as president of the International Conductor's Guild.

Outside of the University, she has led the DuPage Symphony for nearly 40 years and was named Illinois Conductor of the Year in 2003. At UChicago, she has dedicated herself to running the Performance Program, providing support to over a dozen ensembles, and is a senior lecturer in the Music Department.

But across her many collaborations with both academic units and performers, every moment that has come to define the orchestra has had Schubert at its center.

“I'm always really impressed by how Barbara is committed to cooperating and coordinating with other fields,” said David Shepherd, a UChicago alumnus and orchestra bassist since 1989. “Being on a university campus, I think it's so enriching that Barbara helps to integrate us with academic life.”

Though serious in the rehearsal room, she’s also brought a light-hearted approach to her work. She conducted the 1812 Overture by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the University's centennial celebration, with then-President Hanna Holborn Gray pulling the rope to "fire" a papier-mâché cannon on cue.

And in 1981, when Mandel Hall was being renovated and the orchestra was displaced into a gymnasium with bad acoustics, she invented what has since become an institution: the annual Halloween concert, complete with a themed program, a costumed conductor and an elaborate entrance down the center aisle.

Now, families across Hyde Park plan their autumns around it. The first Halloween performance is for children, who often arrive in costumes of their own.

Over the years, Schubert has ridden in on a shark for a Jaws-themed program, dressed as Brünnhilde for Richard Wagner, and conducted Gustav Holst's The Planets as Jane Jetson. She declines to disclose what she's planning for next year. The idea, she said, usually arrives in the summer.

"It will come to me in one big vision," she said.

Pushing musical boundaries

On a given evening, the orchestra’s musicians might rehearse with a bomba ensemble from Puerto Rico, learn a new piano concerto co-commissioned by the orchestra itself, or work through the score to a restored 1925 Sergei Eisenstein silent film for its American premiere.

“It challenges me intellectually and emotionally. I like to bring that tremendous diversity to our audiences, but also to our students,” said Schubert. “They like that big challenge that I put in front of them, and that's what keeps us going.”

Universities without a performance degree—UChicago among them—don't typically program like this. But Schubert has spent 50 years doing it anyway, finding music her players may never have seen before and didn’t know they could play. To get them there, she moves quickly in rehearsals to diagnose what musicians need to fix in the practice room.

"She's very good at adjusting to what the orchestra needs at that particular rehearsal," said violinist Anna-Sofia Hobaugh, daughter of Alexandra and Michael, who graduated from the College last year. "She makes sure that we're hitting the benchmarks we need to that day."

A living legacy

Though Schubert will continue at the helm after the Opus 50 culmination, the weekend’s headline performances carry a poetic echo of her earliest days at UChicago.

While she began her University conducting career with a piece about death, she's now celebrating 50 years at the podium with Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

Eighty minutes long, scored for 100-plus players, including a full chorus and brass section, it culminates in a final movement that moves from despair to transcendence.

“It's an incredibly compelling piece, almost overwhelming in terms of the range of emotions that it expresses and the types of colors that it has,” said Schubert, “so it seemed like a wonderful goal as a culminating event.”

It's a fitting choice for a conductor who has spent five decades insisting that music is not just something you study, but something you do. During the Opus 50 performances, Schubert said she’ll be “concentrating to the maximum on the piece of music at hand.”

“I think it's before and after that I'll be reflecting about the 50 years, but at the moment of conducting, the most important thing is to have my complete focus and the absolute attention to detail that I can muster through every microsecond of the performance,” she said. “After that, I'll probably cry—and celebrate with everybody as well.”

—Reporting contributed by MacKenzie Tucker