News

UChicago-backed startup hub Third Coast Foundry marks grand opening in San Francisco

06/26/2026 - 11:49am

The University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation celebrated the official launch of the new San Francisco-based Third Coast Foundry innovation hub on June 23 with a ribbon cutting and Midwest Deep Tech Demo Day.

The events brought together founders, investors, sponsors and leaders from the eight partner universities behind the hub to celebrate the launch and showcase deep tech innovation emerging from the Midwest.

The ribbon cutting included leadership from each of the eight partner universities behind the facility, as well as San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie.

“Universities bring incredible energy,” said Lurie. “They bring new ideas and new people into our city. They strengthen the culture of innovation that has defined San Francisco for generations, and that is exactly what we want more of here in downtown San Francisco.”

“Third Coast Foundry is about creating new opportunities for university-backed founders and researchers from the Midwest to build relationships with investors and partners in the Bay Area,” said Samir Mayekar, managing director of the Polsky Center. “Our universities have deep research expertise, talented founders, and strong startup ecosystems. This shared San Francisco presence gives them another pathway to connect and grow.”

Later that evening, the Midwest Deep Tech Demo Day brought 40 startups in front of Bay Area investors at the INSEAD San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation. The event drew more than 200 attendees, including founders, partners, sponsors and investors that collectively manage more than $110 billion in capital.

The startups that presented are backed by the Midwest universities that are part of Third Coast Foundry, including the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Washington University in St. Louis. Their technologies ranged across advanced materials and manufacturing, cleantech and energy, semiconductors, robotics and spacetech, quantum, healthtech and medtech, AI and more, and included ventures founded by students, alumni, faculty and researchers.

“Tonight is the culmination of a shared effort to connect startups from the Midwest with the investors, customers, and networks that can help them scale,” said Mayekar to open the event.

Victoria “Vic” Woo of the INSEAD San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation welcomed attendees and emphasized the Midwest’s strength as a region known for building durable, high-growth companies.

“The Midwest is one of the most important regions in the U.S.,” Woo said. “It is filled with builders, entrepreneurs and operators who build things that last and scale—and that’s exactly what we need today.”

UChicago President Paul Alivisatos spoke to the investors in the room, saying the event reflected a rare level of cooperation across major research institutions.

“It’s not every day that eight universities come together like this,” he said. “We’ve come together with a deep spirit of cooperation because we know we can bring to the Bay Area a level of founder that you will be excited about.”

He also shared words of encouragement.

“To all the founders here, we’re so excited about what you’re here to pitch,” Alivisatos said. “I’ve been there myself. Sometimes you may need to give a few pitches, but we’re all behind you.”

Both events were part of a busy launch week of activities, giving a preview of what the new San Francisco hub is designed to make possible—connections between Midwest founders and the investors and partners needed to accelerate their growth.

“Third Coast Foundry was created to make these connections more consistent, more intentional, and more impactful,” said Mayekar. “These events show the strength of what our universities can do together—and the caliber of founders emerging from the Midwest.”

Learn more about the startups that presented. For more information about how to get involved in the next Midwest Deep Tech Demo Day, contact Amelia Salter.

—This article originally appeared on the Polsky Center website.

Distinctive brand names pay off for wine producers, study finds

Eric Berkman — 06/24/2026 - 10:25am

Thousands of wines in France’s Bordeaux region carry similar-sounding names, many adopted long before modern trademark law took effect.

That crowded field gave University of Chicago Law School Prof. Jonathan Masur a rare chance to test a long-held assumption that having a unique brand name provides value to an enterprise. That’s why trademark law exists and why companies spend so much money and expend so much effort protecting their brands.

However, there’s historically been very little empirical evidence to prove the underlying assumption, since intellectual property laws have been so successful at preventing the proliferation of brands with similar names. Because brand owners tend to take aggressive legal measures to protect their mark from a competitor seeking to poach it, there are few markets with a critical mass of similar-sounding brands.

This has made it difficult to study the impact of similar- and dissimilar-sounding brand names and generate a better understanding of the benefits that brand distinctiveness actually provides.

Until now, that is. In a paper published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Masur and his coauthors Christopher Buccafusco of Duke University and Ryan Whalen from the University of Hong Kong turned Bordeaux's tangle of overlapping names into a natural experiment—and found that having a name that stands out in the crowd indeed allows a wine producer to charge higher prices.

Their findings also indicate that this holds true for cheap, mid-price and highly expensive wines alike.

“This shows that there is real value to a brand in maintaining a linguistically dissimilar trademark,” said Masur, the John P. Wilson Professor of Law and a wine enthusiast. “It also implies that when we think about whether a trademark is dissimilar or not for purposes of trademark law, we should think not only about whether it’s similar to the nearest competitor, but how it compares to multiple other linguistically similar products.”

A fundamental question in trademark law

The paper stemmed from a prior research project in which Masur and his coauthors examined linguistic similarities among the names of wines in different regions. In comparing Bordeaux wines to other regions, they found that the names of Bordeaux wines overlapped linguistically to a much greater extent than did wine names from other areas.

For instance, more than 100 different wine-producing chateaux (wine estates) in the Bordeaux region use the word “croix” (cross) in their name, including three named “Châteaux la Croix,” two named “Château de La Croix,” and one named “Château Lacroix.” In fact, only about a quarter of producers have names that don’t include words found in the names of other producers. In some cases, these names date back hundreds of years and cannot be challenged under current trademark law.

Wondering what kind of effect this had on the marketplace, the authors sought to obtain data on wine prices and wine ratings and examine how linguistic similarity among wine names might impact their prices.

“This is a fundamental question in trademark law, and in marketing, because the point of trademarks is to allow customers to distinguish between different products,” Masur said. “So, what happens if products have very similar names and consumers can’t distinguish between them?”

A statistical test on the Bordeaux wine market

While they had the data on wine names, the authors faced the bigger challenge of obtaining data on wine prices and scores. Fortunately, WineSearcher.com, a search engine for wine purchasers, proved to be a valuable resource.

WineSearcher provided a dataset of Bordeaux wines that included the wine name, the producer’s name, the vintage, the initial sale price and the average rating by a professional critic on a 100-point scale. Pulling from this data, the authors generated a computational measure of linguistic similarity, based on the number of consecutive characters any given wine shared with the 10 other wines that had the most similar names.

Because the price of a wine depends substantially on its perceived quality—the scores it receives from critics—the authors sought to determine the effect of name distinctiveness on price while controlling for a wine’s quality.

In other words, among wines that possessed a given rating from critics, the question was whether wines with more distinctive names would command higher, lower, or equivalent prices to wines with more common names.

“Access to the data on prices, critic ratings and name similarities was critical in allowing us to perform this statistical test,” Masur noted.

Their results indicated that brand name distinctiveness among Bordeaux wines was indeed associated with a price premium: Wines with more distinct names commanded higher prices, even after controlling for the wines’ quality. Interestingly, this effect was true for both lower-rated (and cheaper) wines and higher-rated (and more expensive) wines, and everything in between.

While the authors’ empirical methods didn’t allow them to establish causation, the results provided at least suggestive evidence of a marketing advantage for wines with distinctive names.

“We didn’t expect that the positive relationship between distinctiveness and price would be consistent across the entire spectrum of quality,” Masur said. “We thought it was possible that lower-priced wines might benefit from having similar names to more highly-rated wines. But that turned out not to be the case. That finding was particularly surprising and particularly interesting.”

Legal implications

Masur and his coauthors suggested in their paper that these results have important implications for trademark law and policy. In particular, their evidence supported the idea that trademark congestion is harmful because brands with similarly named competitors tend to face a pricing penalty.

While trademark law already seeks to address this by making it harder for companies to register marks in “crowded fields” of linguistically similar brands, the authors said trademark law could go further by making it more difficult and expensive to register descriptive and suggestive marks that are more likely to have similarities to existing ones.

Additionally, the results suggested that courts should rethink the type of evidence used to prove infringement.

“We hope [the paper] causes people to think more comprehensively about linguistic congestion in an entire market,” Masur said.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago Law website

Peter B. Littlewood, condensed matter physicist and internationally recognized leader, 1955–2026

Maureen Searcy — 06/23/2026 - 10:09am

Peter B. Littlewood, a distinguished condensed matter physicist and internationally recognized leader of research institutions, died June 15. Littlewood, the chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago and the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor in Physics and the James Franck Institute, was 71.

Littlewood’s research shed new light on the quantum behavior of superconductors, superfluids, semiconductors, and other collective phenomena; he also made contributions to optics, biophysics, and neuroscience.

But while he was a theoretical physicist by trade, Littlewood was highly interested in translating scientific discoveries into the real world and worked to do so—first at the famed Bell Laboratories, later as head of the Cavendish Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, and through multiple collaborations across disciplines throughout his career.

“Peter was a visionary scientist citizen, always looking to advance ambitious work,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “I got to know him first when he was director of Argonne as he championed the study of the brain and neurosciences with the advanced imaging and computational tools of the lab. In the years since, he relentlessly challenged us to look further, doing so with humor and high expectation.”

“Peter’s scientific depth was matched only by his extraordinary generosity and vibrant wit,” said longtime colleague Young-Kee Kim, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. “Known internationally for his transformative work on collective phenomena in condensed matter physics, his approach to science was deeply collaborative, always seeking to connect complex physics to real-world advancements. Over the years, his unwavering support—of me personally, as well as his profound commitment to our department, our students, and the community—left an unshakeable foundation.”

“Physics is what physicists do”

Born in 1955, Littlewood described growing up on a small farm near Shoreham in southeast England as an only child: “I spent most of my young life plowing, and it gives you a lot of time to think,” he said, and somewhere along the way he decided he wanted to become a scientist—and to go to Cambridge to do it. “I don't know why I even thought that because none of my family had ever been to university, but it turns out that if you just want to do things, sometimes they happen,” he said.

He earned a BA in natural sciences (physics) from the University of Cambridge in 1976. Littlewood spent a year at MIT as a Kennedy Scholar before returning to Cambridge to complete his PhD in physics in 1980, under the supervision of Volker Heine. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he joined their technical staff and became head of their theoretical physics research group in 1992.

Littlewood described Bell Labs as a formative institution for science—an industrial lab that was conducting fundamental research. There he applied his physics knowledge toward theoretical engineering, working on projects including holographic data storage, the theory of optical fiber capacity, and the development of acousto-optic switches.

He returned to the University of Cambridge in 1997 as the director of the Theory of Condensed Matter group and later became head of the Cavendish Laboratory and Department of Physics.

Littlewood’s research included superconductivity and superfluids, strongly correlated electronic materials, collective dynamics of glasses, density waves in solids, and applications of materials for energy and sustainability.

With his growing interest in energy research, Littlewood moved to the Chicago area, joining Argonne National Laboratory in 2011 as Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering and the University of Chicago as a part-time faculty member. He was a key contributor to the Institute for Molecular Engineering (now the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering), which was established that year in partnership with Argonne to address some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Littlewood went on to serve as Argonne’s Director from 2014 to 2016. During this time, he helped lead landmark projects in fields such as energy storage and high-performance computing. He also guided a multi-year lab modernization plan, bringing state-of-the-art research facilities to the Argonne campus. In addition, Littlewood strengthened collaboration between Argonne and UChicago, and he was instrumental in advancing the region’s innovation ecosystem.

“Peter was a brilliant scientist whose impact extended far beyond his research and leadership,” Argonne Laboratory Director Paul Kearns said. “He was deeply respected, admired, and beloved by colleagues across Argonne and the broader scientific community. I was fortunate to work closely with him and will always remember his curiosity, warmth, and commitment to helping others succeed. His legacy lives on in the laboratory he helped shape and in the many people he inspired.”

In 2017, Littlewood returned to UChicago as a full-time faculty member. In recent years, his research activities included the dynamics of non-equilibrium and driven systems, particularly those that exhibit transitions between different types of synchronization. This included quantum systems, such as lasers and light-matter condensates, as well as classical active matter such as flocks, and artificial neuronal systems.

“Peter was striking in the breadth of his knowledge and enthusiasm for all areas of physics, as well as its extensions to diverse areas of science and technology. His expertise was in condensed matter physics, the physics of collective phenomena—what are the emergent properties of systems with large numbers of components that underlie diverse behaviors—from magnetism to neural computation,” said colleague and collaborator Margaret Gardel, the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in Physics, Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, and PME, and director of the James Franck Institute and the Center for Living Systems.

“His style is one I attribute to the ‘Bell Labs’ model, where finding connections between disparate systems can lead to disruptive advances in understanding. For Peter, this meant working on problems in strongly driven quantum systems and neuronal signaling,” Gardel added. “His enthusiasm for finding these connections was infectious.”

Also a fellow of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and a member of the Center for Living Systems and the Neuroscience Institute, Littlewood defied categorization of his field. He believed that “physics is what physicists do.”

A uniting force

Littlewood had a reputation for inspiring people to collaborate in powerful and productive ways: “Peter was a very generous soul with a gift for bringing people, especially younger researchers, together to work on interdisciplinary projects,” said colleague and collaborator Vincenzo Vitelli, Professor in Physics and the James Franck Institute, and Scientific Director of the CNRS-UC International Research Center. “I cherish the work we did together on nonreciprocal systems as the most precious moment of my career, both scientifically and personally. In typical Peter style, it brings together ideas from quantum mechanics and neuroscience.”

“Peter was a hero in my field when I was a graduate student; when I joined the Physics faculty at UChicago, I was still a little intimidated by him. His warmth and dry humor melted that, and we became close colleagues and friends,” said Stephanie Palmer, Professor in Physics, Organismal Biology and Anatomy, and the Neuroscience Institute. “From number theory to native plants, he took delight in life in all its forms. It was an honor to hood his most recent PhD graduate on June 6, Cheyne Weis, and share the photos with him, with just the right ‘Peter-esque’ mix of bemusement and joy.”

In addition to his research and leadership positions, Littlewood served on advisory boards of several institutes, including the Simons Foundation, the Flatiron Institute, the Paul Scherer Institute, the Carnegie Institute for Science, the Max Planck Institutes at Halle and Hamburg, the London Centre for Nanotechnology, and the U.K.’s Faraday Institution, of which he was a founding executive chair. He became a visiting professor at University of St Andrews in 2022.

Littlewood wrote or co-authored over 270 publications and held seven patents. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the World Academy of Sciences.

In October of 2025, Littlewood was awarded the Institute of Physics Gold Medal - Richard Glazebrook Medal and Prize in recognition for his exceptional leadership throughout his career.

“To lead and build research organizations is a privilege,” said Littlewood. “It’s a special joy to create institutional and societal impact.”

In addition to his scholarly accomplishments, Littlewood was a skilled pianist. He was passionate about classical music and spent much of his free time attending concerts and opera, as well as enjoying Chicago’s theater and art. He was also a keen traveler and loved attending conferences abroad and taking road trips.

Littlewood is survived by his wife Elizabeth and his children Chris and Sophie.

—Adapted from an article published by the Physical Sciences Division. Additional remembrances can be found from the Simons Foundation and Argonne National Laboratory.

Powerful seismic waves from Japan’s 2011 earthquake struck Earth’s core and bounced back up, moving island eastward

Louise Lerner — 06/18/2026 - 10:00pm

In 2011, Japan reeled from the effects of a devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake.

But unnoticed in the chaos resulting from the quake, its major aftershocks and the tsunami it caused, something strange happened. About 16 minutes after the earthquake, but before the aftershocks hit, Japan’s GPS stations registered an eastward lurch—across the entire country—but unconnected to any specific quake or aftershock.

A new analysis of data from the quake, led by University of Chicago geophysicist Sunyoung Park, suggests an extraordinary answer: The waves from the earthquake traveled downwards to the Earth’s core and then back up, displacing the tectonic plates further. This permanently moved the entire island of Japan eastward by up to six millimeters.

Seismologists knew that large waves from earthquakes can travel through the Earth and even reverberate off the core. But this is the first time the phenomenon has been identified to have caused tectonic plates to slip near the Earth’s surface.

“It’s striking because this is both an unprecedented length and area for a seismic event, and it is a previously unrecognized source of seismic hazard,” said Park.

The study is published in Science on June 18.

Traveling to the core and back

The 2011 earthquake, localized off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan, ranks among the strongest ever recorded; the combination of quake and tsunami killed 20,000 people.

It was also one of the most thoroughly documented. Because Japan has a long history of earthquakes, the country has thousands of monitoring stations. Scientists immediately began poring over the data recorded to try to understand what happened, and hundreds of papers were published.

But years later, a strange wiggle in the data was still bothering Park, an assistant professor in the UChicago Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

After the quake itself, but before the major aftershocks, GPS had stations picked up a sudden shift eastward. This shift didn’t correlate with any of the aftershocks registered at the surface. But, strangely, it was registered at precisely the same time by stations across Japan.

“Most of the time, we would see an offset like this when there's actual earthquake happening. But here there was no known aftershock at this time, so we were quite curious,” Park said.

With collaborators Hiroo Kanamori of Caltech and Luis Rivera of the University of Strasbourg, Park began to rule out possible causes.

An undersea landslide didn’t fit the data—too localized. Same problem for a slow slide at one of the faults.

Instead, the team came to believe it was due to a wave of energy from the quake that had radiated downwards through the planet, struck the Earth’s outer core—which is a liquid metal alloy—and reverberated back up to the crust. There, it triggered another slip along two major plate boundaries around Japan.

The journey down and back up, about 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) round-trip, took about 15 minutes.

Broadest seismic event on record

Even as we get better at understanding and predicting hurricanes or tornadoes, earthquakes have remained difficult to study. They occur infrequently—especially large quakes—and take place over a very large area. And of course, most of the action takes place deep below ground, or worse, under the ocean, where few measurements are possible.

Scientists, including Park, are coming up with new and innovative ways to study seismology. But the recent finding adds a wrinkle to our understanding of large quakes and tectonic plate movement.

Taking place over an area stretching about 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers), the newly identified event is the broadest seismic event ever recorded. It released about the same amount of energy as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake.

It is also the first on record to involve multiple major tectonic plate boundaries; it took place at both the intersection of the Pacific and Okhotsk plates, and the other between the Philippine Sea and Eurasian plates.

It wasn’t immediately noticed, the authors said, because seismic sensors are designed to look for the shorter, high-frequency signals that accompany more typical quakes felt on the surface.

“There was also a ton of noise going on in the aftermath of the 9.0 quake,” Park explained.

But by comparing both GPS and seismic data from stations across the country, they were able to tease out the signal.

Park thinks it’s likely that vigorous shaking from the original quake weakened the plate boundaries, which then made it easier for the later-arriving wave from the core to re-activate the area around the main quake, as well as trigger new movement along plate boundaries further away.

“This indicates that large earthquakes can influence the fault even after the main shaking is over,” Park said.

Overall, the scientists said, it’s clear we still have much more to understand about large quakes and tectonic plate behavior.

“This is adding an entirely new angle of seismic hazard we didn’t know about before,” Park said.

Citation: “ScS-triggered slip on megathrust interfaces after the 2011 MW 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake.” Park, Kanamori, and Rivera, Science, June 18, 2026.

Funding: Sloan Research Fellowship, University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology.

Nutrient in breast milk helps boosts immune system development in mice

Matt Wood — 06/18/2026 - 12:23pm

Trans-vaccenic acid (TVA), the most abundant trans fatty acid found in human breast milk, helps boost immune system development and has long-lasting effects on immune system health in mice, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Chicago.

The study, published in Science, showed that nursing female mice fed a diet enriched with trans-vaccenic acid (TVA) passed the nutrient to their pups, leading to increased production of immune cells during early development. Genetic analyses also showed that TVA exposure during breastfeeding reprogrammed immune cells to improve responses to pathogens. Mice that were nursed on TVA-enriched milk responded faster to infections with viruses or common bacteria, even into adulthood.

“It’s common knowledge that breastfeeding is important for neonatal immune development and overall health, but breast milk is so complex that it seems almost impossible that one single molecule would be sufficient to change a baby’s immune development,” said Jing Chen, the Janet Davison Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine at UChicago and one of the senior authors of the new study. “So it was very surprising to see that during this crucial stage of development, one nutrient derived from the mother’s diet and delivered through breastfeeding has such a tremendous effect.”

Long-term immune imprinting

Trans-vaccenic acid is a long-chain fatty acid found in meat and dairy products from grazing animals such as cows and sheep. The human and mouse body cannot produce TVA on its own, so it must be obtained through diet. In a 2023 study, Chen and his colleagues found that it improves the ability of CD8+ T cells to infiltrate tumors and kill cancer cells in adult mice. Because TVA is also abundant in human breast milk, the researchers wanted to understand how it might influence immune development early in life.

In a series of mouse experiments, the team fed nursing mothers a diet enriched with TVA. The nutrient was passed on to their pups through breast milk, where it promoted the development of a broader and more effective immune cell population, particularly CD4+ T cells that are important for adaptive immunity.

Working with Chuan He, the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry and a senior author of the study, the researchers also conducted genetic analyses that revealed how increased TVA helped reprogram CD4+ T cells in the mice in a way that shifted their natural immune responses to favor fighting off microbes and other pathogens, instead of responding to antigens. Later experiments showed that when mice raised on TVA-enriched breast milk were exposed to the flu virus or Salmonella, they responded more quickly and had better survival rates than controls.

Interestingly, this advantage appeared only when mice were exposed to TVA during breastfeeding. Pups that were exposed to TVA via the mothers’ diet during pregnancy but were then nursed by a foster mother who was not on a TVA-rich diet did not have these improved responses to infection.

“We saw that only postnatal exposure to TVA through breastfeeding is important to train the neonatal T cells, and this can have long-lasting imprinting effects,” Chen said. “Even in adulthood, when we challenged the mice with influenza, the ones that were exposed to higher TVA levels during breastfeeding responded better when battling the infection.”

Chen also partnered with Erika Claud, the Stephen Family Professor of Pediatrics and director of the UChicago Center for the Science of Early Trajectories, who studies the biology of early-life development on long-term health and wellbeing. Claud’s work with the SET Center complements Chen’s longstanding interest in the impact of nutrition on immune system development and health outcomes. The research team worked with the Metabolomics Platform at the UChicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, led by Hardik Shah, to analyze TVA levels in breast milk and blood samples from human nursing mothers and infants from a biorepository maintained by the SET Center.

They found that higher TVA levels in breast milk were closely linked to higher TVA levels in infants’ blood. In preterm infants, levels of circulating TVA correlated with similar shifts in immune responses to those the researchers saw in mice. Higher TVA levels in human breast milk were also associated with reduced risk of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a chronic inflammatory lung disease that affects premature infants with underdeveloped lungs and increased susceptibility to respiratory infection.

‘A question that has huge health impact’

Chen said working with partners like He, with his extensive experience with RNA sequencing and epigenetic analysis, and Claud, with her expertise on early infant development, was crucial to the success of this study. “This was truly ‘team science.’ It definitely reflects the great collaborative environment here at UChicago,” he said. “That's our strong suit, with three different departments working together to address a question that has huge health impact.”

With multiple studies now showing the immune benefits of TVA, particularly in the early-life period, Chen said he hopes there will be more research on the possibilities for supplementing diets with TVA during pregnancy and breastfeeding or adding it to infant formula. The team wants to investigate other fatty acids and nutrients found in breast milk to understand their benefits as well.

“There are close to 40 fatty acids in total in breast milk, along with hundreds of other components,” Chen said. “So, I think it's safe for us to say that we believe there could be additional fatty acids and nutrients that can do something similar.”

The study, “Maternal trans-vaccenic acid shapes neonatal T cell development and early-life immune imprinting,” was published June 18, 2026 in Science. It was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Ludwig Center at UChicago, the Sigal Fellowship in Immuno-oncology, and the Harborview Foundation Gift Fund.

Additional authors include Hao Fan, Zhong Zheng, Kaitlyn Oliphant, Jiacheng Li, Cheng Wei Ju, Brandon Trandai, Jiayi Tu, Freya Q. Zhang, Rukang Zhang, Zhicheng Xie, Chunzhao Yin, Chufan Cai, Megan S. Kennedy, Tess McNeely, Candace Cham, Robert B. Hamanaka, Gökhan M. Mutlu and Eugene B. Chang from UChicago; Ryan Mack and Jiwang Zhang from Loyola University Chicago; Lei Dong from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; Rui Su from the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope; Camilia R. Martin from Weill Cornell Medicine; Brian T. Layden from the University of Illinois Chicago; and Hongbo Chi from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

—This story was originally published on the University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division.

Nadya Mason appointed as UChicago’s vice president for research

06/17/2026 - 04:30pm

Distinguished physicist Nadya Mason, dean of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, has been named UChicago’s vice president for research, President Paul Alivisatos announced. Her appointment is effective July 1.

In this role, Mason will serve as UChicago’s chief research officer, leading the University’s research partnership activity and the full range of critical support functions that enable faculty scholarship across campus and beyond.

The Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering, Mason has served as dean of UChicago PME since joining the University in October 2023. The following fall, she was concurrently appointed to the role of interim vice president for science, innovation and partnerships. Her new appointment broadens the scope and impact of her previous interim role to benefit the University’s broader research mission.

“In her time as dean and interim vice president, Nadya has already helped advance major research partnerships and create new opportunities for faculty,” Alivisatos said. “Our scholarly community deserves a chief research officer whose vision matches their ambitions, and I am confident that Nadya will bring her expertise and dedication to bear toward elevating the whole of our research enterprise in the years to come.”

As dean, Mason led UChicago PME through a period of substantial growth and change. She oversaw a landmark partnership with IonQ, which included major investments in quantum infrastructure on campus, and the establishment of the IonQ Center for Engineering and Science.

The new building will principally house UChicago PME, including expanded space for the school’s materials, immunoengineering and quantum research.

During her tenure, she also secured a $21 million gift to establish a new field pioneered by the visionary Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine, and shepherded the development of 20,000 square feet of new laboratory space for UChicago PME faculty at the Hyde Park Labs complex, which also houses state-of-the-art space for the University’s Biological Sciences Division.

In her role as interim vice president, Mason deepened connectivity across the University’s research enterprise and strengthened external partnerships. That work will grow in her new role, which includes leadership of Science Strategy, Corporate Engagement, and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. It also will include research support in the Office of Research, including University Research Administration, Lab Safety, Research Integrity, the Research Computing Center and Research Development Support.

“Research is how universities transform ideas into knowledge and knowledge into impact, and stepping into this role means I have the honor of supporting that mission across the entire University,” Mason said. “Serving as dean of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has been a great privilege, and I look forward to partnering with scholars across campus to continue to build upon UChicago’s eminent research enterprise.”

Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker expect to name an interim dean of UChicago PME in the coming weeks, and will share more information about a formal search process that will launch in the fall.

Why do some Americans support tariffs, even when it costs them?

Sarah Kuta — 06/16/2026 - 10:15am

Tariffs tend to increase prices for consumers and provoke retaliation from trading partners.

Yet such protectionist taxes remain popular enough with some U.S. voters that the administration of President Donald Trump won office on a platform that prominently featured tariffs.

The desire for exclusivity may help explain why, according to economists Alex Imas and Heather Sarsons of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Working with the London School of Economics’ Kristóf Madarász, they found some Americans support protectionism, despite its costs to them, because they value limiting foreign consumers’ access to U.S. products.

The work builds on past research from Imas and Madarász, who find people derive value from consuming or possessing goods that others want but do not have, a motive they call mimetic dominance-seeking. This behavior, they argue, helps explain numerous market anomalies, from restaurants that intentionally limit their seating capacity to fashion brands that price their sneakers in the thousands.

Imas, Madarász and Sarsons wondered if the phenomenon might also be influencing international trade.

“A lot of nationalistic and protectionist policies have this flavor of making things more exclusive,” Imas said. “Particularly in the case of tariffs, it’s the market that becomes more exclusive.”

The researchers conducted two surveys in the U.S. to test their predictions. In both, they began by measuring respondents’ “exclusionary preferences” by asking them to bid on an item in scenarios in which either one, two or three other participants would be barred from purchasing it. Roughly 40% of respondents were classified as having exclusionary preferences based on their willingness to pay more as the degree of exclusion increased.

For the first survey, the researchers randomly assigned 1,500 respondents to one of two groups and asked them to rate their support for a tariff policy. One group evaluated a 15% tariff that would raise prices at home. The other group considered the same tariff but was also told the policy would boost domestic production and would not harm the targeted foreign country, which could find another trading partner.

The researchers randomly used Canada, China or Mexico as the target country. In addition, they asked all respondents to evaluate a stimulus policy that would result in the same price increase as the tariffs.

In the second survey, the researchers asked roughly 200 respondents to evaluate a broader set of exclusionary nationalist trade policies. For example, respondents shared how much they agreed with the statement: “We should buy from foreign countries only those products that we cannot obtain within our own country.”

A noneconomic motive for favoring tariffs

In a survey, respondents with exclusionary preferences—deriving satisfaction when others are excluded from goods or opportunities—were more likely to support a 15% tariff when they believed it would harm foreign consumers.

Respondents with and without exclusionary preferences were similarly supportive of tariffs that did not harm the targeted trading partner. But those with such preferences were about 12 percentage points more likely to support harmful tariffs than others were.

The same people were more likely than others to support tariffs that harmed trading partners than stimulus policies that caused the same price increases. They were also more likely to endorse policies aimed at preserving a consumption gap between the U.S. and China, even when those policies would raise prices for Americans. And they believed the U.S. should come out on top in trade relations.

These patterns held true across foreign trading partners and when accounting for party affiliation and zero-sum thinking, or the belief that one person’s gain must be another person’s loss. This suggests the differences stem from the desire for dominance, rather than animosity toward specific nations, political leanings or cognitive biases.

Taken together, the findings offer a new lens for understanding economic nationalism. Multiple forces shape voters’ preferences, but a preference for exclusion is a significant factor that deserves consideration, said Imas.

Anyone trying to understand the politics of tariffs “needs to think about more than just the utilitarian pleasure or pain people get—if that was the case, support for tariffs would make absolutely no sense,” he added.

“You have to think about social factors and preferences. It’s not just my utility; it’s also how I perceive my place in society and the world.”

—This article was originally published by the Chicago Booth Review.

What to read during summer 2026

06/16/2026 - 09:00am

Looking for your next summer read? Look no further.

UChicago News asked the 2026 winners of the Quantrell Awards and Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring Awards for their recommendations.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

I think these two books are excellent examples of the power of the mind. Human curiosity is forever drawn to two realms: the physical universe and the inner workings of the mind. Both are sources of profound beauty and endless fascination. These books showcase the beautiful products when we use the mind’s power to probe these mysteries and explore the relationship between the mind and the external world.

—Prof. Wei Wei

“Funes the Memorious” from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

My recommendation is a short story, one I have sometimes used in class, “Funes the Memorious” from Jorge Luis Borges’s book Ficciones. The story is about a young farm worker who, after an accident, acquires a perfect memory. Borges shows us the astonishing things Funes can do with this gift, but also its strange uselessness. I will not spoil the story here, except to say that it beautifully illustrates an idea that is central to science in general, and to economics in particular: understanding the world is hindered by including every detail of it. Understanding means learning what to abstract from, what to simplify, and what to leave out.

—Prof. Fernando Alvarez

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

I love academic novels, and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition is better than most. It explores the ambitions and uncertainties of a cancer research lab, where the drive for success in the face of grant shortages yields both elation and suspicion when experiments yield promising results. My favorite part of Intuition is Goodman’s nuanced depiction of humanness among those working mostly behind the scenes of scientific discovery.

—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert

Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder by Bruce Lincoln

Secrets, Lies, and Consequences is a murder mystery whose intrigue rivals that of an Agatha Christie novel. It is also a serious historical work that reflects soberly on the long shadows of the twentieth century’s worst political offenses. The book takes on the troubled past of the famed scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, and his ties to one of the strangest events in the University of Chicago’s history: the assassination of Ioan Culianu in Swift Hall in 1991. Perhaps the only detail more surprising than Lincoln’s theory of the crime is the fact that he taught himself Romanian just so that he could write the book. It’s a captivating read!

—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

This is a book so short you could devour it in the course of a single day. I have read it many times and keep coming back to it as the years go by. Set in the north of England more than a century ago, it tells the story of a Great War veteran who arrives in a small village to restore a medieval mural. Among many things, it is a book about the joys of skilled labor, the healing properties of great art, and the pleasures of unexpected love. The story is brief and simple yet deeply affecting in a manner that is difficult to describe, shot through with emotion and beauty, leavened with dry wit and a sense of the absurd. A Month in the Country is unfashionable in the best possible way; a poor fit for our brash, impatient and mendacious times. I keep copies of it on hand to give away to close friends and loved ones.

—Assoc. Prof. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Want more recs? See recommendations from previous years.

Public school closings in Chicago linked to more gun violence in nearby neighborhoods

Matt Wood — 06/15/2026 - 01:15pm

In 2013, Chicago Public Schools closed 49 elementary schools—the largest mass public school closure in U.S. history at the time.

A new study from researchers at the University of Chicago and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that in addition to limiting access to education, the school closures also led to increases in gun violence.

Using data from the Chicago Police Department, the researchers showed that neighborhoods near a school saw a 9.9 percent increase in shootings in the years following its closure, compared to similar neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, mostly on the city’s South and West sides, also experienced increases in weapons violations and firearm-related assaults and batteries.

While the city and school district said that the closed school buildings would be sold and repurposed as community centers, housing, or business ventures, 26 of the 49 buildings remained vacant as of 2023. Neighborhoods surrounding these long-vacant buildings saw slightly larger increases in shootings, at 10.2 percent.

“We wanted to look at the effects of these closures not just as creating vacant buildings, because schools represent so much more as a community institution across generations,” said Thomas Statchen, a medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and lead author of the study, published in Social Science & Medicine.

“They are public spaces that are used for building community by hosting events after school and providing a gathering place,” Statchen said. “When that is lost, it can impact the way neighborhoods function in ways that, as we saw in this study, could lead to increased rates of firearm violence.”

Evictions, closings disrupt cohesion and resilience

Earlier this year, Statchen published a similar study in JAMA Network Open showing how increases in eviction rates in neighborhoods were associated with more shootings. That study drew from data collected by the Chicago Department of Public Health, showing that evictions disrupted the social cohesion and resilience of communities. Closing a school compounds this effect because of the vital role schools play in anchoring their neighborhoods.

“Closing a school is like evicting an entire community of social networks,” said Elizabeth Tung, Associate Professor of Medicine at UChicago and a co-author of both studies. “You're taking a place that was so meaningful to a group of people, and now they're no longer able to congregate there and build their lives around it.”

Because the Chicago school closings happened at the same time, they provided a unique opportunity to study the before-and-after effects on gun violence in the surrounding communities.

The researchers used Chicago Police Department data from 2010 to 2019 to understand the trends in gun violence leading up to the school closings in 2013. After controlling for differences between neighborhoods where schools were closed and where they were not, researchers estimated how those trends would have continued had the schools remained open, compared with actual crime data in the years following 2013.

The 2013 school closures primarily affected low-income students of color, particularly Black students. Other studies have shown that the education of students displaced from their schools suffered in the short term. The researchers said that the new analysis shows how the decision to close schools impacts students and their communities far beyond access to education.

“When officials decide to close schools, they must ensure a concrete reuse plan is co-developed and co-implemented with residents from the start,” said Mudia Uzzi, Bloomberg Assistant Professor of American Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and senior author of the new study.

“Most school closures happen in neighborhoods that are already under-resourced and long disenfranchised, so losing a school hits them twice as hard. Leaders have a responsibility to turn closed school buildings into spaces that strengthen community well-being, so every neighborhood has a fair chance to thrive,” Uzzi said.

Citation: “The 2013 Mass Public School Closure and Firearm Violence in Chicago: A Quasi-Experimental Difference-in-Differences Analysis,” Statchen et al, Social Science & Medicine, June 3, 2026.

Funding: Bloomberg American Health Initiative, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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

Scientists show how particle interactions control flow of soft materials—like ketchup

Amber Rose — 06/12/2026 - 10:45am

Sitting in a restaurant, you reach for the ketchup bottle, eyeing the basket of fries in front of you. You give the bottle a shake, then a tap. For a moment, nothing happens—the ketchup clings stubbornly to the glass. Then, all at once, it lets go and rushes out, sometimes in a steady stream, sometimes in a messy surge that threatens to flood the basket.

That awkward moment when ketchup stops behaving like a solid and suddenly starts flowing like a liquid is called “yielding.” Scientists see the same kind of behavior in many everyday and advanced materials, from toothpaste, paints and concrete to 3D-printing inks and electrodes used in next-generation batteries.

Yet what actually causes a material to hold its shape one moment and suddenly let go the next has been surprisingly hard to pin down, especially deep inside dense, opaque fluids where particle motion is difficult to see.

In a new study from researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, scientists used powerful X-ray beams and sophisticated computing resources to track “ketchup-like” materials as they yielded and flowed.

They found that tiny differences in how particles attract or repel each other can make a material flow smoothly, flow in uneven bands, or even stop flowing and turn solid again while under stress. The results could help engineers design better consumer products and more reliable manufacturing processes by precisely controlling when and how soft materials begin to flow.

“Yielding is the transition from solid-like behavior to liquid-like behavior,” explained Argonne assistant physicist Hongrui He. “By applying a force or stress, we are able to manipulate the state of matter. There is no perfectly solid or perfectly liquid material — everything is somewhere in between, and yielding is the shift from one to the other. Given enough time, even a mountain can behave like a very slow-moving fluid.”

A particular question

To study this transition, the team created two closely related materials, both made of tiny particles suspended in liquid. In one, the particles were prepared so they mostly repelled each other. In the other, the researchers added a salt solution that subtly altered the particles, so they were weakly attracted and tended to stick together.

At Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, the size, composition and surface charge of the samples were carefully characterized to ensure that any changes in flow behavior came from particle interactions rather than changes in the particles themselves.

When the samples were not under stress, they looked almost identical. The striking differences only appeared when the researchers applied force and watched how each material flowed.

“When the particles repel each other, the material changes shape in a very even way,” He said. “It flows in a predictable way, without forming large weak spots inside.”

The picture changed when the particles were made slightly attractive. In this case, the particles tended to clump together into dense regions, leaving behind pockets of empty space. Under stress, some parts of the material started to move while neighboring parts stayed stuck. The material split into “shear bands”—regions that flowed at different speeds.

“In the attractive system, parts of the material are almost frozen while other parts are flowing,” said Wei Chen, a chemist from Argonne and a CASE scientist at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “That leads to more complex behavior, such as delayed yielding and resolidification, which you do not see in simple fluids.”

Delayed yielding occurs when a material resists flow for a while after a stress is applied and then suddenly begins to move. Resolidification is the opposite: the material flows for some time and then abruptly stops and behaves like a solid again, even though the applied stress has not changed. These effects help determine whether a material spreads smoothly in use or instead suddenly stiffens, leading to problems such as clogs in industrial processes.

To uncover what was happening inside the materials, the researchers combined standard rheology—measurements of how a material flows and changes under stress—with a technique called X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy at beamline 8-ID at the Advanced Photon Source, a powerful accelerator at Argonne.

While rheology measurements revealed how the whole sample responded, the spectroscopy, which uses a very bright X-ray beam, allowed the team to track tiny fluctuations in scattered X-ray signals that revealed how groups of particles move over time.

“The unique aspect of our approach is that we can measure the motion of the small particles and the overall material response at the same time,” Chen said. “That allows us to directly connect microscopic dynamics to macroscopic behavior in real time.”

Even with these tools, experiments alone cannot capture every detail of the particle motion. To fill in the picture, the team used computer simulations to model dense suspensions of many interacting particles under flow, making it possible to track the motion of individual particles. Simulations were performed on Bebop, a high-performance computing cluster at Argonne’s Laboratory Computing Resource Center.

“In experiments, the material is dense and opaque, so you can’t track every single particle,” said Heyi Liang, a research associate at Argonne and postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. “With simulation, you can. We built the simplest model that still captures the most important parts, including delayed yielding and resolidification. We then used it to understand what is happening at the boundaries between flowing and non‑flowing regions.”

The simulations showed that weak junctions between shear bands—areas where particles are less well connected and have more room to move—play a key role. Under small stresses, these junctions hold, and the material creeps slowly. As stress continues, some junctions suddenly fail, allowing bands of particles to slip past each other, producing delayed yielding. As the system continues to evolve, new junctions form and lock the structure again, leading to resolidification.

By tying these microscopic events to measurable quantities from experiments, the team built a consistent picture that matched both.

“Our findings bridge the microscopic and macroscopic worlds of soft matter,” said one of the study’s coauthors, Juan de Pablo, New York University executive vice president for Global Science and Technology and executive dean of the Tandon School of Engineering. “By directly visualizing how particles interact and reorganize as these materials yield, we can now connect nanoscale dynamics to large-scale mechanical behavior. This gives us a framework to design and tune the flow properties of soft materials with unprecedented precision.”

Other contributors to this work include Miaoqi Chu, Zhang Jiang and Suresh Narayanan from Argonne, and Prof. Matthew Tirrell from Argonne and the University of Chicago.

Citation: “Bridging microscopic dynamics and rheology in the yielding of charged colloidal suspensions.” He et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Oct. 17, 2025.

Funding: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences.

—Adapted from an article originally posted on the Argonne National Laboratory website.

Celebrate Juneteenth 2026 at UChicago in the community

06/10/2026 - 02:41pm

On June 19, 1865, “General Order No. 3” was read in Galveston, Texas, bringing news of freedom to enslaved people more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Now a federal holiday, Juneteenth marks the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The following events, supported by the University of Chicago 2026 Juneteenth Celebration funding program, recognize the holiday and offer a chance for meaningful reflection and community engagement.

Saturday, June 13

Knit and crochet with the Committed Knitters
11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Arts Lawn, 337 E. Garfield Blvd.

Spend the day with the Committed Knitters for a fun-filled knit fest that celebrates freedom, creativity and collective care—one stitch at a time. Free and open to seasoned stitchers or the crafting-curious. Complimentary snacks and drinks, special giveaways, free yarn and needles provided for all participants.

Friday, June 19

Celebrate at the DuSable Black History Museum
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
DuSable Museum and Education Center, 740 E. 56th Place

Join The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center for its annual Juneteenth celebration, the Museum’s largest community event of the year. Enjoy a day filled with live music, wellness activities, educational and cultural programming, family-friendly experiences, and shopping with local vendors.

Saturday, June 20

University of Chicago Service Center & Woodlawn Botanical Nature Center Community Gardening
Noon-6 p.m.
Woodlawn Botanical Nature Center, 63rd Street between Stony Island and Harper — the community garden space behind Hyde Park Academy High School

This multi-generational celebration includes a network of community gardeners, conservationists, public artists, and youth development practitioners for neighborhood and community engagement. This event includes gardening, arts and crafts, and performances by local artists. Anyone interested in attending or volunteering can contact Nick Currie (ncurrie@uchicago.edu).

Monday, June 22

Uncovering Legacies: Juneteenth and the Historical Impact of Slavery on Science and Society
Noon-1 p.m. (reception to follow)
Billings Auditorium, P-117, Mitchell Hospital, 5815 S. Maryland Ave.

The Office of Culture, Belonging and Community Care at UChicago Medicine is hosting a Juneteenth event centered on the intersection of history, science, and racial justice, featuring Spencer Annor-Ampofo, a distinguished researcher and journalist. Annor-Ampofo will present his research on the historical legacy of slavery in scientific practices. This event also includes a panel discussion and community engagement activities.

Thursday, June 25

Reimagining Space, Memory, and Liberation: A Juneteenth Program with Amanda Williams
Noon-1 p.m.
Gordon Center for Integrative Science, 3rd floor Atrium, 929 E. 57th St.

Join the UChicago Department of Radiology’s Diversity & Inclusion Council at a Juneteenth event featuring artist Amanda Williams, a Chicago-based visual artist, architect, MacArthur Fellow, and UChicago Laboratory Schools alumna. The event will consist of a keynote lecture, moderated discussion, and community dialogue centered on how histories of slavery, segregation, and systemic disinvestment continue to shape urban landscapes—particularly in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods.

Saturday, June 27

Liberating Love: A Juneteenth Celebration of Black Sexual Health
11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
The Village, 1525 E. 55th St., Suite 310

Hosted by the Center of HIV Elimination, this free, community-centered event will feature educational workshops and a body positivity movement session.

Monday, June 29

Chapbook Creation with the Logan Correctional Center
6-9 p.m.
Walls Turned Sideways, 2717 W. Madison St.

Join the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture for a Juneteenth celebration and distribution of writings from women at Logan Prison titled Untold Truths.

Sunday, July 12 to Sunday, August 2

Digital Storytelling Initiative: Film Screen & Discussion Series
1-4 p.m. every Sunday
Logan Center for the Arts, Rooms 201 and 901, 915 E 60th St.

Join the Digital Storytelling Institute at the Logan Center for the Arts, for a four-session Screening and Discussion series that supports and encourages open dialogue about Black independent filmmaking. Each session includes a free film screening and a discussion about the film in the context of viewers’ experiences, beliefs and tastes.

Saturday, July 25

Community Mural Project
1-4 p.m.
Logan Center for the Arts, Gidwitz Lobby, 915 E. 60th St.

Join the Logan Center for the Arts Community Mural Program for its opening event to celebrate the Community Mural Project. This event is the culmination of a four-part workshop where participants experience the power of painting a community mural together. Murals are a form of public art that cannot be separated from the communities in which they’re placed. They bring people together and showcase what makes communities unique, which is why this Community Mural Program is perfectly positioned to highlight and celebrate the expansive and diverse legacy of Juneteenth.

James M. Redfield, renowned scholar of the ancient Greek world, 1935-2026

Sarah Steimer — 06/09/2026 - 03:18pm

James M. Redfield, a University of Chicago scholar renowned for his groundbreaking research on the ancient Greek world and revered for shaping generations of students, died May 28 at the age of 91.

The Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages and Literatures, in the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College, Redfield, AM’54, PhD’61, was a member of the UChicago faculty for over five decades. His scholarship analyzed the works of classical thinkers such as Homer and Plato through an anthropological lens, and his teaching, which focused on Greek language, literature and social theory, was recognized with two Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

“It is hard to overstate Jamie’s influence on the Committee on Social Thought and vice versa,” said Prof. Gabriel Lear, chair of the Committee on Social Thought. “His scholarship was a shining example of its ethos, combining anthropological, literary, and philosophical approaches to the classical Greek world with enormous erudition and sensitivity.”

Redfield’s most influential book, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (1984), which placed an anthropological perspective on the role of Hector in the Iliad, had an enormous impact on the field of classics, shifting the way people thought about the structure and sense of the epic poem.

The night before he died, Redfield’s son handed him an unmarked text of Plato’s Republic. Redfield opened it to where he had left off several weeks before, reading and translating it to his son and the hospice nurse, offering options for alternate translations.

“Redfield was a profoundly original, incisive, and intuitive anthropologist who worked above all on the ancient Greeks, especially their philosophical and literary texts and their religion,” said Glenn W. Most, a visiting professor on the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and previously professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

“His uniquely personal approach, untrammeled by doctrinaire theories and energized by his fascination with trying to understand both what it was that people—including himself—thought they were doing and what it was that they were really doing, had a profound impact on everyone who read his writings or who experienced him in the classroom.”

‘A beautiful writer’

Redfield was born in Chicago in 1935, spending his early years living at ethnographic field sites in Yucatan, Guatemala and China with his father and mother, anthropologists Robert Redfield and Margaret Park Redfield.

He credited a trip to Florence, Italy, at the age of 13 with sparking his interest in Italy, Greece and the ancient world. He graduated from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools in 1950, and Redfield received his undergraduate degree from UChicago in 1954 before studying at New College, Oxford, from 1956 to 1958. He received his Ph.D. from UChicago in 1961 and joined the faculty in 1960 at age 25. He was awarded tenure concurrently with becoming the Master of the New Collegiate Division in 1968.

He wasn’t the first in his family to teach at UChicago: His father taught anthropology and ethnolinguistics, and served as dean of the Division of the Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946. His maternal grandfather, Robert E. Park, taught sociology at UChicago from 1914 to 1933 and played a key role in the Chicago School of Sociology.

During his career, Redfield wrote and spoke extensively on Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Greek society. He authored three books: Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (1984); The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy (2003); and Plato’s Seventh Letter (2026), which was published this past March. Two of his early lectures are memorialized in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, included in their Chicago Lectures collection.

“He was beholden to no school, but he was open to all manner of influences and conversations,” says Laura M. Slatkin, a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Gallatin Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University. “He combined anthropological sensitivity with this real philological and linguistic brilliance, and very profound interpretive subtlety. And he was a beautiful writer.”

A naturally eloquent teacher

In a 2015 issue of CORE Magazine, Redfield said: “Teaching is not an art, exactly, it’s not a skill. It’s a relationship.” In the classroom, he is remembered for encouraging his students with challenging questions, helping them develop their own line of thought.

Before his retirement in 2016, Redfield held the unique distinction of being a two-time winner of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, first in 1965 and again in 1987.

“There was no student who was so ill-informed or so confused that Redfield could not find what was valuable, even if entirely inchoate, in his desire to learn,” Most recalled.

His lectures were also highly regarded—and sometimes deftly designed in the moment. Chris Faraone, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, recalled an instance when Redfield forgot it was his turn to teach their shared course one day, but was able to immediately bring the lesson to life.

“He walks back and forth in front of the blackboard three times, and then he starts this amazing lecture on death and funerary rituals with an anecdote about his mother's funeral,” Faraone said. “It was just amazing. I wish I had a tape recorder.”

Slatkin said she was riveted by the first lecture she saw Redfield give, and he eventually convinced her to come to UChicago to teach. She said Redfield was naturally eloquent and articulate—and always original, “never secondhand.”

Faraone said many student dissertations were likely inspired by a question or comment from Redfield.

Bruce M. King met Redfield as an undergraduate, and the late professor became King’s academic advisor. The two maintained their connection long after, which included a trip to Greece and Turkey where they explored ancient sites. In 2019, King co-edited Thinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honor of James M. Redfield, a collection of essays exploring themes that Redfield studied throughout his career: Homer, Plato, Philostratus, and beyond.

“Jamie always made it clear that he wasn't looking for acolytes or for people who are going to think like Jamie thought,” said King, now at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. “He was interested in people who could think their own way through, and he was there to help you with it and suggest and read. I found that liberating. It could be challenging, but eventually you found your way—and it was genuinely your way. I think that's pretty rare.”

Redfield was disinterested in his students regurgitating his work and was rarely—if ever—repetitious, his friends and colleagues say, choosing instead to engage with his studies anew to develop original perspectives.

But with his intellectual intensity also came a sense of humor. One notable example is a 1997 essay he wrote, which appeared in The Point in 2023, in which he addresses the ideas of celebrity and the shadow self by way of his envy of the other James Redfield, author of the best-selling Celestine Prophecy.

In addition to his scholarship, Redfield was also part of Hyde Park’s Last Stage, an independent storefront theater company founded in the 1950s by Court Theatre and other UChicago associates. The Last Stage produced Redfield’s adaptations and original translations of Aristophanes' The Clouds and The Frogs. He took Shakespeare acting classes and performed in three productions with Hyde Park Community Players, including playing the lead role of Robert in David Auburn’s Proof. He was known for his cooking and a love for his dogs.

Redfield is survived by three children: Emily Gilliam, James Adam Redfield and Claire K. Redfield. His oldest son, Robert Redfield, passed away in 2020. Redfield is also survived by three grandchildren: Isaac Redfield, Amy Cordelia Redfield Ochs and Levi Redfield Ochs.

How ‘turning away’ from suffering makes us deeply human

Tori Lee — 06/09/2026 - 12:40pm

While looking through a medieval manuscript of the Book of Genesis, Benjamin A. Saltzman encountered a curious illustration. Adam and Eve, freshly fallen from grace, held their hands in front of their eyes rather than the more obvious bits.

Why are they covering their faces? He wondered.

He found the gesture tricky to pin down. A classic interpretation was shame at their newly realized nudity. But Saltzman also saw sorrow, grief and even a literal blindness to God.

Suddenly, Saltzman began to see the gesture everywhere—in art, in film, in harrowing images of war and death on social media. But what he didn’t see was indifference.

“What happens when we block off our senses, when we touch our face and become hyperaware of our own bodies, is we’re able to focus,” said the associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. “This gesture allows us to turn inward, process and reflect in really powerful ways.”

In Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, Saltzman traces averted gazes through dozens of works of art and literature, centering iconic scenes including St. Augustine’s Confessions and the Crucifixion of Christ, while invoking thinkers ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt, artists from Salvador Dalí to Langston Hughes.

“Often when we encounter this gesture in a work of art, it's made by people who are deeply engaged in the pain of the surrounding world,” Saltzman said. “It made me realize that, actually, when we feel the urge to turn away, that's not only a very human urge, but it's actually something we should pay attention to.”

In this edited Q&A, Saltzman discusses what covering our faces has meant throughout history and why, in an era when looking away is seen as a moral failure, turning away might be more important than ever.

In the book, you talk about “gestures of aversion.” Could you define what that means?

The book is very much about a group of related gestures that all involve some form of blocking one's vision, such as covering one's eyes or lowering one's head.

But there's so much variety within that category.

When you cover your face, are you covering your eyes so that you're not seen, or are you covering your eyes so that you do not see? Is it a masking or a shielding? There's a kind of blurriness between those two things that, especially when encountering it in a work of visual art, makes it hard to tell.

To me, that was the exciting part of the project.

So, you’re drawn to these gestures because they’re ambiguous. How do you analyze their meanings across artworks that span different historical periods and cultural contexts?

That's something that I try to be highly attentive to.

For example, when writing about Marc Chagall’s paintings of Christ’s crucifixion, I was prompted by a colleague to think about the specifically Jewish meaning of the gesture. When Chagall paints figures covering their eyes, they almost always use their right hand. That's significant because that's the hand that Jews use to cover their face when they're saying the Shema, the prayer that is said, in certain practices of Judaism, twice a day and in the moments prior to a loved one's death or passing. That word literally means to listen and the gesture helps you clear your senses so that you can pay attention to God. Had I not been attentive to that meaning, then I would have been missing out on that specific context.

But at the same time, the gesture resonates with other meanings. In those paintings by Chagall, for instance, it also might signify grief or sorrow.

So, there’s a push and pull between my responsibility as a scholar to think about all the different contextual pressures, but also, it's exciting to push against those pressures and recognize how the gesture might be freed from them.

Each chapter begins with a list of thinkers and artists, like characters in a play—St. Augustine, Plato, Francisco Goya, Hannah Arendt, Langston Hughes. How did you tackle that kind of breadth and scope?

This is a very UChicago book; I could not have written it anywhere else. So much of it is inspired and informed by conversations I had with colleagues. They would say, “Have you thought about this work of art?” or “Have you read this philosopher on this aspect of the gesture?”

Where do you draw the lines at all? That became the challenge.

The book could have kept going on and on; in fact, I just received a letter in the mail from a reader who wanted to share three more examples with me. My hope is that Turning Away might open up precisely these kinds of responses, where everyone has their own examples that come to mind.

Today, we are constantly bombarded with images of human suffering. Not averting our gaze has become a rallying cry, a moral imperative. What would you say to those who tell us, “Don’t look away?”

To be very, very clear, our collective attention is clearly one of the few guardrails against atrocity, injustice and corruption. In many ways, the most dangerous possibility is a world of indifference where people just don't care anymore.

But what happens when someone who is inclined to care is told: Don't look away?

For one thing, you might begin to justify doom scrolling as an act of paying attention, though it’s so clearly anathema to human flourishing. And then, as you become over-saturated with images of suffering, there is a risk of moral paralysis. We risk becoming unresponsive or apathetic.

There's something quite dystopian and problematic about looking in a state of unflinching indifference. So, I want to push back against that and think more deeply about the problem.

In what way?

The question is, what do you do when you turn away? Do you turn away and forget? Or do you turn away in reflection? Do you prepare to take some kind of action beyond merely looking? In many of those cases, you must turn away first, in order to respond.

We shouldn't necessarily try to resist the urge to turn away but instead recognize that this urge is how we tell ourselves: This is something serious. This is something to which I might need to act in response.

“Don't turn away” is a very powerful message, but it’s one that's easy to ignore because it's so unsustainable. Maybe a better message is: Notice when you're turning away. If you catch yourself looking away, that probably means that it's something you should engage with, however difficult or unbearable.

UChicago appoints Jake Silverman as Director of Athletics and Recreation

06/08/2026 - 02:02pm

Jake Silverman has been appointed Director of Athletics and Recreation at the University of Chicago, following a nationwide search. His appointment is effective July 15. 

Silverman will provide strategic leadership for the Department of Athletics and Recreation at UChicago, which sponsors 20 varsity sports, more than 40 sports clubs and an intramural sports program with thousands of students participating annually.

Currently Assistant Vice President for Athletics and Recreation at Brown University, Silverman oversees all intercollegiate and performance programs, focusing on student-athlete wellness and performance, development, recruiting, and retention. He serves on the Athletics Executive Leadership Team and the Ivy League’s Senior Leadership group. In 2025, Silverman was named to the NCAA Division I Women’s Lacrosse oversight committee. 

Silverman’s tenure at Brown began in 2021, as Deputy Director of Athletics for Administration. Two years later, he was promoted to Deputy Director of Athletics for Intercollegiate Programs and Performance. 

Prior to Brown, Silverman served for 14 years at the University of Pennsylvania, most recently as Associate Athletic Director of Operations.  

“I am honored to serve the University of Chicago community, our scholar-athletes and lead the future of Athletics and Recreation for the Maroons,” Silverman said. “The University of Chicago balances national athletics success and world-class education to provide transformational experiences for student-athletes. It’s this commitment and alignment in values that immediately drew me to this exciting opportunity.”

Silverman received his bachelor’s degree in sport management from Syracuse University and his master’s degree in organizational dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania.

With a ‘boundless love of knowledge,’ UChicago’s Class of 2026 called to boldly face the future

Andrew Haffner — 06/06/2026 - 02:30pm

Nearly four years ago, the newest members of the University of Chicago community marched through Cobb Gate to the sound of bagpipes, processing through a campus completely unknown to most of them.

On June 6, they walked once more through Cobb Gate and gathered again, this time as graduates of the Class of 2026 amid the cheers of UChicago’s 540th Convocation celebration on the Main Quadrangles.

President Paul Alivisatos said the site at the heart of campus was a “fitting” location for the June 6 campus-wide celebration, in which students across the schools and divisions received their degrees on a warm, sunny morning.

“It is a distinct choice to be outside atop the criss-crossing pathways that serve to connect knowledge across all disciplines. Our presence here is a celebration of the boundless love of knowledge that each of you has brought to the cultivation of your mind here in this community,” Alivisatos said.

He told the new graduates that they had taken in the “habits of intellect and culture” at UChicago to form what he called a “truly Chicago mind”—one set apart by curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Alivisatos said this mindset, practiced in classrooms and laboratories but also in dialogue, would serve the students well in the next steps of their careers.

“In all of your pursuits, this is the time for you to step up and step in,” Alivisatos said. “The world will be better for you having cultivated—here, with us—your fine, brilliant, inspiring Chicago mind.”

Drawing from Lincoln’s example

In her address to the Class of 2026, renowned legal scholar Alison L. LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, drew from the life of President Abraham Lincoln to suggest ways of helping steer a democracy whose future no one can yet see.

LaCroix is an expert on the interbellum period, the decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. She opened her address with a story from before Lincoln became the man of history, as a 28-year-old lawyer just beginning his career—not unlike the new UChicago graduates.

She recounted how Lincoln had been invited to address a club in Springfield, Illinois, tied to the era's “lyceum movement”—public gatherings to debate politics, science and the arts. The lyceum, LaCroix said, was "a microcosm of the lively, organic civic culture of 19th-century America, or indeed of the University of Chicago."

In his 1838 speech, Lincoln credited the country’s founders with the “fundamental blessings” of the nation's institutions, then named two threats. The first was mob rule, or the “mobocratic spirit,” which left citizens “tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection.” The second threat was the potential rise of a tyrant, following people’s loss of attachment to government.

Lincoln’s remedy, LaCroix said, was to bind citizens to the republic through a “political religion” of the rule of law. To this, he looked to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, upheld in the courts.

“He did not know what was coming,” she said of Lincoln, who had no inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, “but what he could do was offer his listeners a set of ideas that would embolden them to feel not alienated from civic life, but attached to it.”

Embracing the uncertain

On Friday, the College’s Class Day ceremony launched Convocation weekend with a recognition of undergraduates and their achievements.

The graduating class selected three student speakers—Matteo Caloia, Ana Emilia Davalos and Vincent Li—to speak on behalf of their peers. They each remarked on the distinctive “life of the mind” and search for truth impressed upon College students.

“UChicago taught us that intellect is not something we perform, but something we practice together,” said Caloia. “It taught us that rigor is not something to escape, but something to seek. And it taught us that protecting the version of ourselves that needs to appear certain can cost us the version still capable of growth.”

Featured speaker David Auburn, AB’91, the Tony and Pulitzer award-winning playwright of Proof, reflected on the merits of leaning into that wider uncertainty. He shared his own path into the unknown of an arts career to describe how the students will “experience struggle and exhilaration, paired” in their own futures.

“I hope you will try to embrace this—not just because it is inevitable, but because it is a good thing,” Auburn said. “Because it means that joy, fulfillment and exhilaration are not things you defer to some later point in your life, after you’ve paid your dues and everything has worked out. You can and will have them all along the way.”

The University’s highest undergraduate honor, the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence, was awarded to fourth-year student Daniel Kind for his advocacy to address homelessness. He plans to attend law school to further that work.

Honoring faculty excellence

During the Convocation ceremony, the University recognized several outstanding faculty members and honored two scholars with honorary degrees.

The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring were presented to this year’s eight recipients—continuing a longstanding tradition of celebrating teaching at the heart of the University’s mission.

UChicago also awarded honorary degrees to Louis Kaplow, an economic and legal scholar, and Greg Woolf, a historian and archaeologist of the ancient world.

‘Democracy imbues each of us with honor’

As she closed, LaCroix carried Lincoln’s argument forward in time, to the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter that opened the Civil War.

Its commander, Major Robert Anderson, had refused to surrender, invoking his honor and his obligations to his government. That stand, she said, fulfilled the “political religion” Lincoln had called for more than two decades earlier.

“Anderson is famous because he said ‘no.’ And because he was willing to face the shells that then began falling,”" LaCroix said.

She turned, finally, to the Class of 2026 before her—and, she noted, to her own two daughters graduating among them.

“Democracy imbues each of us with honor, and in exchange, it asks us to put our honor in the service of the American republic,” LaCroix said.

‘No limit to our learning’: Class Day speakers look to future

Colin Terrill — 06/05/2026 - 05:45pm

The University of Chicago’s 2026 Class Day was a celebration of community and accomplishment.

Selected by their peers, College fourth-year students Matteo Caloia, Ana Emilia Davalos and Vincent Li addressed their classmates, as well as friends and family in attendance, during the June 5 event, which kicked off Convocation weekend. The ceremony also included remarks from featured speaker David Auburn, AB’91.

Melina Hale, dean of the College, congratulated the Class of 2026 on their accomplishments—andt what they will go on to achieve.

“You have shown inquisitiveness and dedication in your learning, compassion and advocacy towards one another, and the pursuit of knowledge that is truly inspirational,” she said.

Each of the students' messages were unique but also intertwined—reflecting on the communities and accomplishments of members of the Class of 2026.

Li took his fellow graduates back to 2022 and their first day on campus. Specifically, he recalled the class picture taken on Stagg Field and how each member looked more like a dot than a person.

“Looking back at the past four years,” Li said, “I see a glaring mosaic—each piece a person, each piece a story. You taught me that being seen is worth more than fitting in, that to make a mosaic, you must ruin the picture first. Once you know how, you can do it anywhere.”

Davalos spoke of the awe that she felt about UChicago and her College experience, stemming from the knowledge her fellow graduates gained through their classes as well as “the people who expanded our worlds.”

To her, the University opened up a realm of infinite possibilities.

“Four years have taught me that there is no limit to our learning and that there is no limit to how far knowledge will take us,” Davalos said. “So share this thing that is being a University of Chicago student with those that you encounter as you move on.”

In his address, Caloia looked at the College community in its entirety. Specifically, he pointed out the difference in what it means to be a college graduate and a graduate of UChicago’s College.

“It means knowing that ideas matter enough to be tested, that people matter enough to be heard, and that the life of the mind is not an escape or retreat from the world, but a way of engaging with it more honestly.”

In the keynote address, Tony and Pulitzer award-winning playwright David Auburn, AB’91, recounted his own journey from UChicago as one of success but also uncertainty.

Auburn told students that uncertainty was “a gift” that should be welcomed.

“Unpredictable things will happen to you, things that you cannot fully control. I want to argue today that this is OK. It’s not something to try to avoid. It may be something to actively embrace.”

Auburn originally came to UChicago with the intention of studying political science. He admitted he was “a lousy” political science major and was a lot more interested in the Chicago theater scene. A member of Off-Off Campus, Auburn said the turning point in his College career came one summer when he had to choose whether to go to Scotland and perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with Off-Off, or pursue an internship with the late Illinois Senator Paul Simon.

Off to Scotland he went—embarking on what would become an illustrious career as a playwright.

While he didn’t ascend straight to Broadway—holding jobs writing for an automotive company and VH1 TV’s “Pop-Up Video,” Auburn finally did make it. His 2001 play “Proof” won both the Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Auburn told the Class of 2026: “At multiple points along whatever journey you take after you leave this campus, you will experience struggle and exhilaration.” This paradox, while necessary, is what he said makes life so interesting. “It’s a gift because certainty is boring.”

“I hope you will try to embrace this not just because it is inevitable, but because it is a good thing,” Auburn said. “Because it means that joy and fulfillment and exhilaration are not things you defer to some later point in your life, after you’ve paid your dues and everything has worked out. You can and will have them all along the way.”

Recipients of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards, believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, were also celebrated at the event. They included Profs. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Ryan Coyne, Nick Feamster and Alexander J. Ruthenburg.

Fourth-year Daniel Kind was recognized for his tireless efforts in homelessness reform and advocacy with the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Medal of Excellence while 16 undergraduates received the Howell Murray Alumni Association Award. Maroon Athletics also recognized the on- and off-the-field efforts of student-athletes Emil Grantcharov, won the Amos Alonzo Stagg Medal; and Mary Stuart Kerrigan who was the recipient of the Gertrude Dudley Medal.

Convocation weekend will continue June 6 with the University-wide and divisional diploma ceremonies taking place across campus. Learn more at the Convocation website.

Cancer pathology AI company takes first at 2026 Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge

06/05/2026 - 04:49pm

Judges and investors awarded a total of $2.1 million to 10 finalists at the 30th annual Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge on June 4.

This year’s winner, Slideflow Labs, was awarded the Rattan L. Khosa First Place Prize of $575,000. The competition is hosted by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago.

“We are elated to have won and humbled because there were so many great teams,” said Justin Hoot, head of business development at Slideflow Labs. “It’s remarkable to be among them, let alone be the winner. It’s an experience that we’ll cherish.”

Slideflow Labs was a participant in both the Transform Accelerator and Alchemist Chicago. 

The finalists, selected from 27 teams, represented a diverse group of startups. At Chicago Booth’s Harper Center, they presented their business plans to a judging panel made up of nearly 30 investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders—many of them Booth alumni, who deliberated behind closed doors before announcing the winners.

“For 30 years, the New Venture Challenge has shown what can happen when talented students are both challenged and supported by a strong community,” said Steve Kaplan, the Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director of the Polsky Center and Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Chicago Booth. “This year’s finalists carried that legacy forward with an impressive mix of ambition, discipline and momentum. They reflect the strength of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth and the role the NVC plays in helping students turn promising ideas into businesses.”

The winners of the 2026 New Venture Challenge are:

*After voting was concluded, additional investments were made, so dollar amounts are not indicative of placing.

First place: Slideflow Labs ($575,000)

Slideflow Labs is revolutionizing the way that pathologists determine cancer prognosis and predict recurrence. It has developed cancer pathology AI infrastructure that enables hospitals to discover, develop and run biomarkers in-house, delivering superior insights, accelerating turnaround time, and generating revenue for the hospital rather than for external reference labs.

*Slideflow Labs’ total investment includes the Rattan L. Khosa First Place Prize.

Second place: Nestera ($560,000)

Nestera is a vertically integrated operating system for Hospital-at-Home programs. It automates patient eligibility screening and orchestrates end-to-end home transfer and care logistics, enabling health systems to safely scale home-based acute care. With Nestera, hospitals expand inpatient capacity and improve margins, throughput and patient experience without adding headcount.

*Nestera’s total investment includes the $75,000 second place prize from Venetia Kontogouris, MBA’77.

Third place: Vidnova Therapeutics ($210,000) 

Vidnova Therapeutics is advancing a microbiome therapeutic developed at UChicago striving to treat liver disease patients. Its lead asset is under investigation in a Phase 1b clinical trial and uses defined bacterial strains with known safety and metabolomic profiles to enable precise and scalable microbiome augmentation.

*Included in the prize total, Vidnova Therapeutics also was awarded the Moonshot Prize ($25,000), which is given to a team whose unique technology is catalyzing innovative solutions to global challenges.

Fourth place: BRAIV ($150,000)

BRAIV is a precision psychiatry decision intelligence platform solving trial-and-error prescribing for the 80 million Americans on psychiatric medication and addressing the more than $82 billion U.S. behavioral health crisis.

Fifth place: CareLumi ($135,000)

CareLumi is the first unified infrastructure platform that takes over the administrative burden of healthcare compliance. Its AI Compliance Officer, Carl, orchestrates a multi-agent system that manages the relationship between medical providers, facilities and insurance providers.

Sixth place: Hydrastack ($190,000)

Hydrastack compresses the time it takes to convert slot machine games into online formats using AI-driven code translation, reducing timelines from months to weeks. It begins in regulated casino gaming, building the infrastructure for faster software translation in complex, compliance-driven industries.

Seventh place: Rare Earth Rescue ($205,000)

Rare Earth Rescue is a domestic magnet-to-magnet recycling company supplying rare earth oxide to U.S. permanent magnet manufacturers. By securing feedstock and using proven recycling technologies, it delivers reliable material under long-term contracts, capturing premium pricing while reducing supply-chain risk for EV, wind and defense customers.

*Included in the prize total, Rare Earth Rescue was awarded additional investment ($50,000) through the Polsky Energy Transition Leadership Program. Rare Earth Rescue also won the People’s Choice Award, a $5,000 cash prize voted on by the audience.

Eight place (tie): Inzollo ($25,000),  Unloket ($25,000), eep ($25,000)

Inzollo builds modular, distributor-first tools that manage the full lifecycle of inventory, orders and warehouse operations. Distributors start with the modules they need today and expand over time for an all-in-one tech solution.

Unloket is an A.I. concierge for mid-sized independent hotels with fewer than 150 rooms and short-term rental operators that centralizes guest communication, handles requests and provides local recommendations, helping hotel staff respond faster, reduce workload, and deliver a more personalized and consistent guest experience.

eep is a performance intelligence system that forecasts and protects human performance capacity. By predicting when cognitive overload and burnout risk are rising, eep intervenes early to prevent crashes — helping high-performing individuals sustain consistent, reliable performance without pushing past their limits.

Investments in six of the teams were made in part from the Purcell Ventures Investment Award, which was established following a $2 million gift from Greg Purcell and Francine Purcell in 2022.

Since it began in 1997, the New Venture Challenge has graduated more than 200 companies still in operation today, including nationally known brands such as Grubhub, Braintree/Venmo, Simple Mills and Tovala, that have gone on to raise more than $1.5 billion in funding and achieve more than $11.6 billion in exits.

The Polsky Center also runs additional tracks of the NVC; this year’s winners can be found below:

2026 John Edwardson, ’72, Social New Venture Challenge (SNVC) Winners

2026 College New Venture Challenge (CNVC) Winners

2026 Global New Venture Challenge (GNVC) Winners

—A version of this story was first published by the UChicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

National Cancer Institute awards $66M to renew clinical trial center at UChicago

06/04/2026 - 04:30pm

The University of Chicago has been awarded $66 million in renewal funding from the National Cancer Institute to support the NRG Oncology Statistics and Data Management Center, which provides expertise in biostatistics, data management, and operational support for national clinical trials.

NRG Oncology is a member of the National Cancer Institute's National Clinical Trials Network program, consisting of five network groups that conduct clinical trials across a spectrum of adult and pediatric cancers.

The Statistics and Data Management Center for NRG Oncology currently has over 100 active trials developing therapies for brain, head and neck, gastrointestinal, prostate, bladder, lung, gynecologic, and breast cancers. There are also trials designed to reduce side effects and adverse events, as well as cancer prevention, and cancer care delivery.

In the past, these trials have delivered real improvements to treatment and patient quality of life—in several instances, changing the recommended standard practice across the field.

“The National Clinical Trials Network program is a critical component of our national cancer therapeutic, translational science, and prevention program, producing practice-changing research for all types of cancer,” said James Dignam, Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences, who will again serve as the Principal Investigator and Executive Director of the Statistics and Data Management Center.

The NRG Oncology Statistics and Data Management Center comprises about 90 individuals over four collaborating institutions. It is responsible for trial design in collaboration with investigators; data collection and management; safety and efficacy monitoring; auditing and quality control of data and practices; and trial reporting.

In addition, the center undertakes methodologic research pertinent to clinical trials, leads investigator education in trial conduct, and collaborates on the group’s broader research agenda, including cancer translational science.

“Clinical trials are central to the development of novel and life-saving cancer detection, prevention or treatment strategies,” said Kunle Odunsi, director of the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center and Dean for Oncology in the Biological Sciences Division. “The conduct of NCI-supported trials involves a complex system of designing, reviewing and initiating studies. As such, UChicago is proud to house the SDMC, which makes these clinical trials possible.”

To date, the program has resulted in improvements for multiple types of cancer treatments. For example, trials demonstrated that patients with prostate cancer could halve the number of radiation treatments without loss of effectiveness—a substantial improvement for patient quality of life, and one that has been adopted as a standard of care. Another trial found a particular therapy course substantially improved outcomes for women with advanced or recurring endometrial cancer; it has also been widely adopted.

Leadership in cancer research

UChicago is uniquely positioned to lead this effort. Many members of the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center serve as key leaders and trial investigators across the program, including NRG Oncology; Dignam has extensive experience in multi-center clinical trials spanning over 25 years, including his former position as the Executive Director of the Statistics Center for the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (now a member of NRG Oncology) from 2009–2014.

UChicago collaborators Mei Polley and Ted Karrison are experienced clinical trialists with deep expertise in relevant trial methodology and conduct, as well as the specific disease areas (brain and prostate cancer, respectively) in which they engage for NRG Oncology. Other SDMC members at the UChicago Department of Public Health Sciences include Eric Polley, Associate Professor, and Nika Agrawal, Project Manager/Analyst.

The six-year grant cycle began March 1, 2026. In the previous program cycle, NRG Oncology produced over 300 publications, including more than 40 articles addressing statistical methodology relevant to clinical trials.

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

Two University of Chicago professors elected to British Royal Society

Maureen Searcy — 06/04/2026 - 09:26am

University of Chicago professors Frank Calegari and Young-Kee Kim have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences.

Since its founding in 1660, the Royal Society’s purpose has been to recognize, promote, and support excellence in science and encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

This year, over 90 researchers from around the world in all areas of science, engineering, and medicine were elected Fellows or Foreign Members of the Society for their outstanding contributions to science.

“Our Fellowship is strengthened not only by individual distinction, but by the diversity of perspectives and experiences its members bring,” said Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society. “This incoming cohort highlights the truly international character of contemporary science and underscores the vital role that plays in achieving breakthroughs that benefit us all.”

Frank Calegari is professor and associate chair of the Department of Mathematics. His research focuses on the area of algebraic number theory. He is particularly interested in the Langlands program, a set of mathematical ideas that has been called the "grand unified theory of mathematics.”

In 2021, Calegari and two colleagues discovered a groundbreaking proof of what’s known as the unbounded denominators conjecture. In 2024, he and his collaborators created a new technique to prove certain numbers are irrational—significantly improving upon the previous method, which had been around since the 1970s.

Calegari is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a recipient of an American Institute of Mathematics Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics. He was a plenary speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians and received the 2026 AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize for Number Theory.

Young-Kee Kim is the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. Much of her research seeks to understand the origin of mass for elementary particles—the most fundamental constituents of matter—through the Higgs mechanism, using the world’s highest-energy colliders.

Kim has made seminal contributions to precision measurements of the W boson and top quark masses at Fermilab’s CDF experiment, and subsequently to studies of Higgs boson properties, including its decay modes and self-interactions, at CERN’s ATLAS experiment. Her research is guided by the principle that a comprehensive understanding of the Higgs mechanism requires the synthesis of these complementary measurements.

Kim, who served as co-leader of the CDF experiment in 2004–2006 and President of the American Physical Society in 2024, is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. She is also a fellow of the APS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She received the Ho-Am Prize, the Arthur L. Kelly UChicago Faculty Prize, and the Korean American Pioneer Award.

“Professor Calegari has built mathematical bridges with striking originality, and Professor Kim has made great strides in understanding how fundamental particles acquired mass,” said Ka Yee C. Lee, dean of the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. “We are delighted that the Royal Society has recognized their vital contributions to their fields.”

Class of 2026 looks back on the journeys to Convocation

06/03/2026 - 03:30pm

Each spring, thousands of University of Chicago graduates follow in a single procession across the Main Quadrangles toward Convocation. Yet each student arrived at that moment though uniquely distinct paths.

Looking back on their intellectual journeys at UChicago, several members of the Class of 2026 reflected on how the University shaped them—and where their careers might take them next.

Some developed a space satellite or studied thorny municipal finance issues. Others worked in courtrooms and clinics or chased research questions across continents. Below, these soon-to-be graduates share their stories.

Ingrid Appen, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

As she prepares to receive her bachelor’s in molecular engineering, Ingrid Appen already knows her long-term goal—returning to UChicago PME in a slightly different role.

“I would love to come back to UChicago PME as a professor one day,” she said.

After Convocation, she will be spending one year as a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Taiwan before starting a chemical engineering Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She hopes to study sustainable polymers, the subject of her work as an undergraduate researcher in Prof. Stuart Rowan’s lab, but is open to wherever her UChicago PME education takes her.

“I learned more here than I ever have before, both about engineering and about working hard, getting through failures, and relying on friends and professors,” Appen said. “I am so grateful to this program and highly recommend applying. For first-year molecular engineering majors, my top pieces of advice are: Go to office hours, study with friends and try out research for at least a quarter or two!”

Shaleyah Carter, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

As a first-generation college student, Shaleyah Carter understands the transformative power of education and the importance of creating opportunities for others.

She came to the Crown Family School with a clear sense of purpose: to build a career dedicated to advancing social justice and supporting young people.

Carter is graduating with a master’s degree in social work, social policy and social administration from the Crown Family School and will earn a Professional Educator License in school social work.

A graduate of Howard University, Carter chose social work because it offered an opportunity to serve communities and address the inequities that shape people’s lives. Her commitment to creating a more just and humane society led her to pursue graduate study focused on developing the skills and experience needed to support youth and families.

During her time at the Crown Family School, Carter embraced opportunities to lead, learn and engage with the broader community. She credits organizations such as the Black Student Association and the Leadership Institute with helping shape her experience and providing opportunities to grow as a leader.

Through her involvement across campus, she challenged herself in new ways and gained valuable experience that strengthened both her personal and professional development.

Carter is particularly passionate about disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline and supporting the mental health and well-being of young people. She hopes to create programs that empower youth, amplify their voices and provide the resources they need to thrive.

Her accomplishments include receiving several recognitions, including the Community and Leadership Award, honors for her contributions to Student Government and the Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity Committee, and the Student Organization of the Year Award for her work with the Black Student Association.

Following graduation, Carter plans to pursue a career in school social work, community programming or forensic social work.

Reflecting on her experience at Crown, Carter offers simple advice to future students: “Get involved. You get out of it what you put into it.”

Ayo George, Harris School of Public Policy

When Ayo George graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in political science, he knew he was interested in cities and urban policy, but was still looking for the right way to make a difference.

After working at the Yale University Program on Financial Stability, where he researched financial crises and macroeconomic policy, he began to see how essential finance is to public policy, especially at the local level.

That path eventually led him to municipal finance and then to Prof. Justin Marlowe’s Public Money Pod, which inspired him to apply to Harris.

“I came here to be less afraid of numbers—and I’m happy with the results,” George said.

As he graduates with his master’s degree, George said he found the quantitative foundation he was looking for, building skills to understand finance, regulation and public markets at a time when data and AI are reshaping how policy work is done. He was especially drawn to courses that challenged him to think about regulators not simply as rule-setters, but as actors responding to incentives.

“I think that’s one of the things Harris really excels at,” George said. “It gives you this really strong foundation from which to build.”

During his time at Harris, he worked as a research fellow with the Water Finance Exchange, studying local infrastructure financing and learning how municipalities access grants and revolving loan funds. He later interned with the Metropolitan Planning Council, researching lead service line replacement in Chicago and the Great Lakes region.

“Water is something that is a marker of development,” George said. “Having a system where you get all your citizens clean water is one of these basic markers of being a developed country, and yet that’s still a challenge that we face in the richest country in the world.”

Outside the classroom, George spent time at the Institute of Politics, attending fellows’ seminars and traveling with classmates to knock doors in Michigan and Wisconsin during the 2024 election. He also built community through intramural sports, especially soccer, and still hopes to see Harris challenge the Law School’s dominance in the graduate Phoenix Cup.

Originally from Cranston, Rhode Island, he was ultimately won over by Chicago. After graduation, he will stay in the city as a senior analyst at S&P Global, where he focuses on utilities, including water and sewer systems, and plans to continue building expertise in public power.

“It really aligns with how I viewed what I wanted to do coming out of undergrad,” George said. “I like the application of municipal finance to something so basic as water.”

Connor Horn, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering

Connor Horn is already in his next role. As co-founder and CEO of K1 Semiconductor, the Ph.D. candidate is bringing a technology developed in Prof. Supratik Guha’s lab to revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing.

“We are using a semiconductor wafer splitting technology to upend the traditional wasteful and restrictive processes for semiconductor device manufacturing,” Horn said.

K1, which Horn co-founded with Guha, fellow UChicago PME Ph.D. students Xella Doi and Sagar Kumar Seth and UChicago Booth School of Business student Joe McDonald, is already turning heads in the startup world. It has received a slate of recognitions, including taking second place at the Polsky New Venture Challenge and joining the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the inaugural cohort of the Alchemist Chicago Accelerator.

Horn and Doi were also named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing & Industry category, two of the seven UChicago PME-affiliated young researchers to be honored in the 2026 list.

Horn said UChicago PME’s interdisciplinary lens and focus on solving the world’s most challenging problems made his time here “rewarding and fun due to the freedom to develop and pursue many new ideas.”

“The scientific directions pursued by UChicago PME researchers are uniquely shaped by a collaborative approach to tackling real-world grand challenges,” Horn said. “My Ph.D. work began as a very pie-in-the-sky idea that did not fit neatly within the silo of a traditional department. With the support of UChicago PME I was able to pursue this unusual project which ultimately led to very exciting results.”

Seth Knights, College

Seth Knights came to UChicago planning to study computer science, but his longtime interest in space began pulling him in another direction.

Near the end of his first year, Knights joined what was then UChicago’s chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, a small group with fewer than 10 active members. The group had been launching model rockets—soon they began discussing the possibility of building a satellite.

Since its formation, Knights has helped transform that small startup organization into the UChicago Space Program. As president, lead engineer and a founding member, he has created something entirely new at the University: the first student-run organization dedicated to developing a space satellite. Now with 130 members across three divisions, the group focuses on rocketry, satellites and scientific instrumentation.

As an engineer but also as a leader and mentor, Knights has inspired fellow students to ask questions, take intellectual risks and work together to create something new.

“To inspire others is to show them that they are more capable of understanding and of creating than they may think, and my goal has always been to create a space where this self-discovery is possible,” said Knights.

“At their best, science and engineering are collective disciplines, ones that require us to respond to, critique and engage with our own and each other’s ideas. Ideas that we must be bold enough to share but humble enough to revise.”

For Knights, the space program’s growth matters. There isn’t a major focused on engineering for space, so he and the team built their own path.

Lessons from his experience with the organization and his wider journey through the College will stay with him after he leaves Hyde Park.

“I think UChicago really challenged me to think and to care deeply—whether it’s in my classes and the reading I'm doing, or the work that I'm doing outside of class with [the space program] or other groups,” he said.

After graduation, Knights will begin a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he plans to continue studying optics.

Kassidy Mahoney, Law School

Kassidy Mahoney always knew she wanted a career that involved helping people. Her lightbulb moment to do that through lawyering came when she read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative—which detailed the author’s work defending the marginalized, the incarcerated and the wrongly condemned.

“I believe each of us has a responsibility to use whatever skills we have to help those most in need in our communities, and I knew that going to law school would give me the skills to be able to do this in the best way possible,” she said.

As a student, Mahoney did not waste any time putting her budding legal skills to use. Starting her 1L year, she sought out pro bono opportunities to help those impacted by civil rights and criminal justice issues. She got involved in organizations such as Life After Justice, the Juvenile Law Center and the National Lawyers Guild, a leftist legal professional organization. She spent time working in the Cook County Public Defender’s Office—where she’ll be working after graduation—and in the Law School’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic.

Mahoney clocked in nearly 900 pro bono service hours in her three years as a student, more than anyone in her graduating class. Her dedication earned her the Law School’s Pro Bono Award of Excellence in May 2026.

“I think it’s easy for students to revert to the safety within our school’s walls and forget that there are real crises occurring outside every day. But we can’t be insulated,” she said. “I couldn’t simply attend my classes and debate the meaning of justice, equality and freedom without feeling as though such conversations call for us to use these lessons outside the classroom.”

Alex Rosencrance, Pritzker School of Medicine

Growing up in the rural Appalachian town of Elkins, West Virginia, Alex Rosencrance, AB’22, knew leaving home for college would be difficult. But he worked multiple jobs throughout high school and as an undergraduate in the College to make it happen.

As chair of the Rural Student Alliance, he sought to increase access to private higher education for students from rural backgrounds.

When it came time to graduate, Rosencrance knew he wanted to stay at UChicago, which had come to feel like home, and he chose to attend the Pritzker School of Medicine. He continued his advocacy for rural communities as chair of the Rural Medical Student Association and JOURNEES, for which he led a service trip to Elkins, exposing classmates to rural health care.

While developing his leadership skills as a member of Pritzker’s admissions and Curriculum Review committees, Rosencrance also forged a deeper bond with the communities surrounding UChicago as someone tasked with caring for them.

“At Pritzker there is a shared sense of responsibility to the South Side that is both inspiring and deeply meaningful,” Rosencrance said. “This shared commitment helped me develop both the skills and perspective needed to care for the underserved.”

Rosencrance specifically sought opportunities to support LGBTQ+ patients, and his research with Assoc. Prof. Julia Rosebush led to a peer-reviewed publication on provider barriers to prescribing pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for adolescents to prevent HIV transmission.

Next, Rosencrance will continue his pediatrics training as a resident physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

“UChicago gave me a framework for how I want to move through the world: boldly, curiously and unapologetically myself,” Rosencrance said. “I was surrounded by people who will change the world in their own unique way, and knowing that pushes me to dream bigger for myself.”

Cazmier Tymoch, Chicago Booth School of Business

When Cazmier Tymoch reflects on his time at Booth, he thinks of his superpower as connection.

An extrovert with an “unusually deep social battery,” Tymoch came to UChicago hoping to grow as a leader, sharpen his business foundation and build a career in consulting. What he found was a community that transformed not only how he thinks, but how he shows up for others.

During his time at Booth, Tymoch served as student body president, leading with a platform rooted in approachability, transparency and community. His proudest accomplishment was launching the inaugural Fall Ball, a new tradition designed to bring the full-time MBA cohort together and celebrate the start of the academic year. But what has fulfilled him most deeply are the relationships he built across the first- and second-year communities: friendships, mentorships and everyday conversations that expanded his worldview.

“UChicago shaped my life through the people,” he reflected. “I was constantly surrounded by classmates, faculty and practitioners who were curious, collaborative and willing to challenge my assumptions. That diversity of thought made me a better thinker, leader and friend.”

Academically, Booth gave Tymoch a stronger foundation for consulting by connecting business theory with real-world application. Personally, it gave him opportunities to lead through ambiguity, receive feedback and practice building trust at scale.

“I leave UChicago more confident in who I am and how I lead,” he said. “This community built me up, and I’ll carry that with me long after Hyde Park.”

Ruby Velez, College

Ruby Velez wants a future focused on helping people.

Originally from Tucson, Arizona, she’s preparing to step into a career shaped by law, public health and international human rights. A participant in the University’s BA/MA program, she will graduate with degrees in both human rights and Law, Letters, and Society alongside a master’s in international relations.

“I think what really changes at this school is your belief of what is possible,” said Velez. “You don’t really realize what you can actually accomplish until you’re given the resources.”

A major influence in her academic journey was the Pozen Center for Human Rights, where she researched corporate accountability and strategic litigation, working with legal practitioners in Colombia and South Africa.

Beyond campus, Velez has been involved with numerous advocacy groups, including the Latino Policy Forum, The People’s Lobby and the Jail Solidarity Network.

Much of her growth was shaped through the UChicago Harm Reduction Project’s Appalseed Fund initiative. Supported by the Stamps Scholars Program, Velez and fellow students traveled to Berea, Kentucky, to support overdose prevention and housing stability initiatives. What began as a focus on Narcan distribution evolved into providing security deposit assistance and short-term financial support for those transitioning out of homelessness.

At the same time, she emphasized that some of her most meaningful intellectual growth came from small spaces on campus.

“I’ve had some of the most world-changing conversations in the Cobb Café basement,” she said.

After graduation, Velez plans to travel to Hong Kong to research alternative treatment approaches for opioid use disorder while continuing work with the Clean Lead Coalition, a policy initiative focused on reducing industrial lead pollution in countries such as Nigeria and Ghana.

As commencement approaches, Velez credits mentors, peers and organizers for shaping her journey. She said her father’s experience navigating undocumented status and financial barriers profoundly influenced her interest in immigration and justice systems.

“It’s not just me graduating,” she said. “It’s a culmination of collective work.”

Anna Zeisel, the Divinity School

Anna Zeisel came to the Divinity School by a path she didn't expect. Already drawn to work as a “death doula,” accompanying people through the final chapter of their lives, she learned that chaplaincy training was open to her as a non-Christian student.

She was enrolled at a seminary when she discovered the Divinity School. Since she was already living in Chicago, the choice felt clear.

“I heard that the University of Chicago has a nice divinity school,” she recalled, with characteristic understatement, “and that's how I ended up here.”

What she found exceeded the description. Zeisel completed her first hospital chaplaincy internship during her time earning her master’s at the Divinity School and emerged from the experience certain of her direction. She has now completed her thesis, “On Longing, Absence, and the Uses of Traditional Prayer in Contemporary Jewish Life,” and will be a clinical pastoral education resident at Rush University Medical Center, working toward board certification next year.

The Divinity School also reshaped how she understands herself. Surrounded by students from a wide range of traditions, many of whom were actively renegotiating their beliefs while in the program, Zeisel found herself identifying more deeply with her own Jewish background than before.

“I feel so lucky to look around and know that I'm going to know the future of religious leadership in this country,” she said. “I trust them, and I think they're amazing people.”

By Andrew Haffner, Paul Dailing, Tonishea Jackson, Colin Terrill, Lily Maxson, MacKenzie Tucker\, Nadia Alfadel Coloma, Tyler Lockman and Erin Keane Scott

“ElectrolyteGPT” can generate new formulations for battery development

Paul Dailing — 06/03/2026 - 02:10pm

Battery electrolytes aren’t just one chemical, but a complex mixture of salts, solvents and additives interacting and reacting with each other.

Artificial intelligence has made great headway in helping select ideal materials to go into that chemical soup. But a team from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering is using AI to generate the entire formulation, balancing the complicated tradeoffs and interactions that go into the electrolytes that make batteries possible.

The research, published in JACS Au, is the next step in the Amanchukwu Lab’s ongoing development of an AI for battery work, which they’ve nicknamed “ElectrolyteGPT.”

“Next-generation battery electrolytes must meet multiple, often conflicting property requirements,” said Jaemin Kim, SM’25, the first author on the study. “With the model’s capability of generating outputs under diverse conditions, ElectrolyteGPT is able to generate novel candidates satisfying the desired properties simultaneously.”

The AI doesn’t just set the ingredients, but the concentrations, mixture ratios and other facets of the blend, hitting targets the researchers set on everything from conductivity to stability to viscosity.

Synthesizing the AI’s recommendations found several novel compositions that performed as well as top-of-the-line electrolytes in lithium metal batteries. It’s an important step toward the long-term goal of finding electrolytes that outperform the current best, said corresponding author Neubauer Family Asst. Prof. Chibueze Amanchukwu.

“We had a number of compositions that performed on par with the state of the art, and so that was exciting for us,” Amanchukwu said. “We can generate compositions that can mimic what some of the best scientists have done, but there’s still lots of work ahead.”

Exploring a vast chemical space

Many estimate the number of potential molecules for battery electrolytes is 10 to the 60th power—more than all the stars in the sky. Exploring each of those molecules for battery components, cancer drugs or other previously undreamed materials is simply beyond the human lifespan.

That’s just the molecules themselves, not the practically infinite possible ways to combine them in different formulations.

“While it’s infeasible to explore the entire near-infinite electrolyte space, generative AI can navigate the ‘unmapped’ areas of chemistry and generate a molecule that has never been synthesized before,” Kim said.

The AI generates theoretical molecules at a rate human researchers could never match, pulling ones it “thinks,” based on training data, would be good for a particular purpose. People then lab-test the materials the AI found, the same they would test a material a researcher suggested.

AI is often used for drug discovery, which set up an early hurdle for Amanchukwu’s team. Most existing GPT models were created to find molecules that make good drugs, not good batteries.

“If you use what is available in the literature, it will generate drug-like molecules. That’s not relevant for us,” Amanchukwu said. “We curated a data set that has electrolyte-relevant compounds so that the GPT model only knows about electrolytes. Then if you say, ‘Generate new solvent molecules,’ it generates compounds that look like they could be electrolytes.”

Next, they had to train the AI to generate only electrolyte materials that hit certain parameters. There’s no point in training an AI to create low-performing batteries, so they set standards for ionic conductivity, oxidative stability, Coulombic efficiency and viscosity.

So far, this is all becoming established practice in the cutting-edge field of AI for materials discovery. The innovation of this new research was inventing a new line notation called the fLine.

Inventing the fLine

Line notations are a way of describing complex chemical structures using language a computer understands. For example, calling sodium chloride “salt” would get the point across to a person but a machine would be confused by all the other possible salts in the world.

In SMILES, one of the most common chemical languages, sodium chloride would be [Na+].[Cl-], a few keystrokes that transmit a massive amount of information.

Based on SMILES, fLine is a new language the team developed that describes not only structure, but also includes notations for solvent ratio, salt concentrations, temperature and the other moving parts that go into a mixture. It could also be adapted to include variables such as current density and capacity if needed as well as other chemical languages beyond SMILES.

This allows an AI to understand the entirety of an electrolyte, not only the chemicals that go into it.

“That is useful for not just electrolytes. It is useful for mixtures in general,” Amanchukwu said. “Now you can actually generate a complete electrolyte formulation with multiple different salts, multiple different solvents at different concentrations and at different mixture ratios.”

Amanchukwu said this is an important step toward the ultimate goal: truly generative electrolyte AI.

“Right now, even with the limited data as well as the limited parameters that we run, we can actually generate compositions that we experiment in. We can verify the AI’s theoretical suggestions in the real world,” he said. “We are interested in seeing if we can make these models bigger and better.”

Citation: "Generative Electrolyte Solvent and Formulation Discovery," Kim et al, JACS Au, April 9, 2026. DOI: 10.1021/jacsau.5c01628

—Adapted from an article first published by Pritzker Molecular Engineering.

Two scholars to receive honorary degrees at UChicago’s 2026 Convocation

06/03/2026 - 12:12pm

Editor's note: It was previously announced that Shankar Balasubramanian of the University of Cambridge would be among this year's recipients. His honorary degree will be conferred at a later date.

The University of Chicago will award honorary degrees to two distinguished scholars on June 6 during its Convocation celebration of the Class of 2026: economic and legal scholar Louis Kaplow and historian and archaeologist Greg Woolf.

Louis Kaplow, the Finn M.W. Caspersen and Household International Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

Kaplow has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of law and economics, taxation and public economics, industrial organization and antitrust law, and welfare economics. His foundational work has employed formal and informal economic reasoning to analyze the effects of legal rules and institutions as well as to provide new conceptual frameworks that revise central legal and economic understandings. His most recent scholarship rethinks optimal income taxation, merger analysis, and competition regulation of dominant firms.

Kaplow is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the National Tax Association and from the American Law and Economics Association.

Greg Woolf, the Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Woolf is regarded as one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of ancient history, whose research greatly impacted our understanding of the Roman world and life within ancient empires. His pioneering work integrated archaeological data into the study of provincial cultures, and it used climate science, evolutionary theory and social anthropology in the history of urbanism. His first book, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998), helped define the field of humanistic scholarship, addressing the history of cultural change in a province of the Roman empire. He is currently researching mobility and migration in the ancient world, and his latest book is entitled The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.

Woolf currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Roman Archaeology and is a former editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. He is a fellow of the British Academy, of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of London, and a member of Academia Europea.

Convocation activities to celebrate UChicago’s Class of 2026

06/02/2026 - 12:20pm

The University of Chicago community and its graduating students will celebrate Convocation this weekend with a series of events across campus honoring the Class of 2026.

The main University-wide ceremony will begin at 9:15 a.m. on Saturday, June 6, with a procession into the Main Quadrangles. During the traditional “calling together” of the UChicago community, President Paul Alivisatos will provide remarks and confer degrees to candidates.

This year’s Convocation faculty speaker is Prof. Alison LaCroix, a renowned scholar of U.S. legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and 18th- and 19th-century legal thought.

On Friday, June 5, the College will celebrate the accomplishments of the Class of 2026 at Class Day. The ceremony will begin at 2 p.m. and will feature addresses from David Auburn, AB’91, a playwright, screenwriter and director who won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his play Proof; as well as graduating College students Matteo Caloia, Ana Emilia Davalos and Vincent Li.

UChicago’s divisions and schools also will hold diploma and hooding ceremonies throughout the weekend. For those unable to attend, the Class Day and Convocation ceremonies will be webcast on the UChicago digital channels.

For more information, and a full schedule of ceremonies across campus, visit the Convocation website. Members of the University community, along with their family and friends, are invited to share photos, memories and congratulatory messages on social media using #UChicago2026.

UChicago to honor distinguished scholars

During the main Convocation ceremony on June 6, the University will recognize faculty members for excellence in teaching and mentorship with presentations of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Awards for Excellence in Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring. UChicago will also award honorary degrees to economic and legal scholar Louis Kaplow, and historian and archaeologist Greg Woolf.

Information for visitors

Please visit the Know Before You Go section of the Convocation website before arriving on campus. This resource contains important information about transportation, parking restrictions, road closures, shuttle service, venue access and other details to help you prepare for the weekend's events.

Guests attending the University-wide Convocation ceremony will enter the Main Quadrangles through one of three designated entrances and will proceed through a security screening process.

To help ensure a positive experience for all attendees, items that may obstruct the view of other guests or disrupt the ceremony are not permitted inside the Main Quadrangles.

Class Day speakers highlight communities built during their time at UChicago

Colin Terrill — 06/02/2026 - 09:45am

The University of Chicago will celebrate the newest graduates of the College one day before the 540th Convocation with its annual Class Day event.

The accomplishments and achievements of the Class of 2026 will be on full display when the event kicks off a celebratory weekend on Friday, June 5, at 2 p.m. on the Main Quadrangles. Matteo Caloia, Ana Emilia Davalos and Vincent Li were selected by their peers to speak on behalf of the graduating class while the keynote address will be delivered by award-winning playwright David Auburn, AB’91.

We talked to the three College Class Day speakers to learn more about them and the message they hope to deliver.

Matteo Caloia

What would incoming first-year Matteo Caloia want to hear before starting his UChicago journey? That is the question the fourth-year version of himself hopes to answer on Class Day.

Hailing from Washington, D.C., Caloia came to the University to play men’s soccer and was rewarded with a historic national championship after just four months in Hyde Park. Memorable as that was, it might be the people he met across campus that most stick with him.

“The quality of the people and the diversity of their interests and passions is incredible,” said Caloia. “The fact that people are so willing to have discussions while at the same time being open to those conversations having an impact on their own perspectives makes it a special place.”

His remarks were inspired by all the different people that he met on the way to Convocation. While on stage, he wants to point out the differences between a college graduate and a graduate of the College.

“Receiving your degree, no matter where it is from, is an incredible accomplishment,” Caloia said. “However, students here are so intellectually curious and they are able to spend four years with some of the smartest classmates and professors refining how and why you think, which is a skill that will last your entire life.”

An economics major, Caloia is also among the first cohort to leave the College with a minor in entrepreneurship—which he has already put to good use as the co-founder of (P)rind, a parmesan-rind-based snack. He is excited to be able to put classes aside and focus on his growing company, but he doesn’t plan on going too far.

“I’m staying in the city and hope to still be involved with the University in some capacity whether that is as a teacher’s assistant at Booth or helping out with the club soccer team,” Caloia said. “I truly do love UChicago, so there is no way I can stray too far from this place.”

Ana Emilia Davalos

Ana Emilia Davalos vividly remembers her first tour of campus. Now she is the one that gets to create those special moments for future students of the College.

“My first time on campus was over four years ago but it feels like it was just yesterday,” she said. “One day I’m listening to the guides share their experiences and the next I’m telling prospective families about how amazing and magical this school is.”

Being a tour guide is just one example of how Davalos has tried to get as much out of her UChicago experience as she can. Over the past four years, she has served as a peer advisor for Career Advancement, the president of the campus consulting club Pareto Solutions and a member of the Model UN. Davalos took on so much out of her desire to get to know her fellow classmates.

When she thinks about the time she has spent at UChicago, her first thought goes to the family she has formed here. The people she became close to helped her through major adversity and she wants to make sure that she is there for them.

“Sometimes I think that the world just waits to introduce you to people who are going to be in your life forever, and UChicago was that place where I got to meet all of them,” she said.

Davalos will focus on that as part of her speech—but also wants to shine a light on how impressive each single person on campus is.

“This is a place where you can look back at the end of a quarter and realize the amount of work you’ve been able to produce or the thoughts you’ve developed or the relationships you built,” she said. “Knowing how impressive the people around you are with achievements that could be very different from yours is something that has always left me with a feeling of wonder and awe.”

Davalos will use that sense of wonder as she travels the globe for the first few months after graduation before diving into the professional world back here in Chicago as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group.

Vincent Li

Vincent Li didn’t know what to expect when he arrived at UChicago. He knew he’d enjoy the intellectual rigor that the College was known for, but he was pleasantly surprised by what he experienced from the get-go.

“I realized early on that when you come to UChicago, you have a community form around you almost instantly,” he said.

Originally from China, Li found this helpful as it allowed him to develop a home away from home. He took that one step further when he became a resident assistant (RA) in his second year, fostering that same kind of environment for students living at Max Palevsky Residential Commons.

“I loved to host study breaks as an RA and always found myself having fun conversations with everyone that lived in Max P,” said Li. “Being able to serve as a mentor for my residents was one of my favorite things to do on campus.”

Serving as an RA also allowed Li to get to know everyone as an individual, not just a number or a nameless dot in a picture. It’s this lesson that he is going to try and convey to the audience come Class Day.

“On our first day on campus, we took a photo where everyone pretty much looks the same,” said Li. “However, we’re all vastly different. Those dots disappeared over our four years here and turned into a mosaic where you have individual pieces that form a beautiful image when put together.”

Li will be staying in Chicago after graduation and will put his economics and laws, letters and society double major to work as a consultant at Econic Partners. Until then, he wants to savor the last few days spent with the community that has helped him call UChicago home.

“We’re all so busy and caught up with work, so I’m going to slow down and enjoy this,” he said. “This is going to be my way of saying thank you to everybody.”

Class Day is planned with input from the graduating class, which also assists in choosing the student speakers on a multi-round submission process. The event will be webcast on the UChicago News site, as well as on the College’s Facebook page.

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

Many planets might be ‘soot factories’, according to new study

Louise Lerner — 06/01/2026 - 11:44am

The astronauts circling Earth on the Artemis mission sent back beautiful clear photos of the continents, clouds and oceans.

But we might be the exception. Many planets in the universe may be hazed in clouds of soot, according to a new study by University of Chicago scientists.

Their analysis explains a curious trend seen by astronomers training telescopes on distant planets beyond our own solar system. Many of these worlds had atmospheres that returned strangely featureless readings.

According to the study, this may be because high temperatures and crushing pressures on these planets combine to make ‘soot factories,’ much like combustion engines here on Earth, which shroud the planets in smog.

“It’s like you have a natural diesel engine in the deep atmosphere of a planet,” said UChicago postdoctoral scholar Jeehyun Yang, first author on the paper.

The study is published May 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A clue from another field

As scientists catalogue the planets in distant star systems, they have found more than a third of them are a distinct type that has no equivalent near us. These planets, which scientists have labeled as “mini-Neptunes,” are a little larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and are shrouded in thick atmospheres.

But that’s the end of what we definitively know about them. Since we cannot see faraway planets directly and must use clever workarounds to learn about them, more mysteries keep popping up as we build on our knowledge.

One such mystery: As the powerful new James Webb Space Telescope has added more and more information about these mini-Neptune planets, a strange but persistent curve in the data appeared. Planets in a particular temperature range seemed to have atmospheres that were very opaque.

No one knew for sure what might be in these atmospheres to cause these readings. But that curve rang a bell in Yang’s mind.

Yang had done his Ph.D. working on combustion engines as a chemical engineer. He had seen thousands of these curves. Jet engines, diesel engines, gasoline engines—they all produced a similar curve as you varied the temperatures at which they were burning.

“When you burn these fuels you get black smoke, and if you look at the particles with advanced microscopes you see these beautiful honeycomb-like structures,” Yang said.

These honeycombs are a class of molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and they result when hydrogen, carbon and oxygen interact at high temperatures. Combined, they make up the soot in truck exhaust or a car’s engine oil filter.

These temperatures didn’t exactly match those of the planets. But Yang and his collaborators knew the atmospheres on these planets are thick and heavy. They realized that deeper down, the pressure and temperatures would be higher—and those temperatures would match the conditions to produce soot.

“The peak exactly matches,” Yang said. “All of the current observations for planets match with our framework.”

The haziness may well be clouds of soot produced from deeper within the planets that floats to the surface.

‘A great case study’

To be clear, these soot-filled atmospheres would make an already distinctly uninhabitable planet even less attractive to humans. These mini-Neptunes orbit so close to their stars that they are swelteringly hot, and the surfaces are probably covered in seas of magma or under such high pressures that they harden like a diamond.

But the finding does intrigue scientists, because the ratio of carbon and oxygen on these planets can likely offer insight into how and where the planets originally formed in their solar systems.

The amounts of soot could serve as a proxy to measure these ratios more precisely—and thereby learn more about planetary formation, including more clues to narrow the search for habitable planets.

“As far as I know, this is the first time anyone has applied chemical engineering to the field of exoplanet study,” Yang said. “I think it’s a great case study that shows why having people from all different backgrounds can help us untangle these mysteries.”

UChicago Prof. Eliza Kempton and then-University of Maryland graduate student Arjun Savel were also co-authors on the paper.

Citation: “Sub-Neptunes as Soot Factories: Deep Atmosphere Hydrocarbon Formation and Quenching as the Origin of Sub-Neptune Aerosol Trends.” Yang, Kempton, and Savel, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, May 18, 2026.

Funding: NASA.