News

Five new members elected to UChicago’s Board of Trustees

08/26/2026 - 10:00am

The University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees has elected five new members: Wei Cai, AM’95, MBA’95; David Foley; Stephanie Rada Zocco, AB’88; Imran Siddiqui, AB’96, AM’96; and Konstantin Sokolov, MBA’05. They began their five-year terms in May 2026.

“We are pleased to welcome Wei, David, Stephanie, Imran and Konstantin to the Board,” said David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, chair of the Board of Trustees. “Their distinguished leadership and commitment will help guide the University through this pivotal moment as it embarks on the Chicago Minds campaign.”

“This is a remarkable group of individuals,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “I am grateful for their dedication to the University and look forward to all that we, along with their colleagues on the Board, will accomplish together.”

Wei Cai recently retired as a partner and global vice chairman of investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, where he also served as co-head of China and co-head of China investment banking.

Prior to Goldman Sachs, Cai served as vice chairman of Asia Investment Banking and co-head of China at UBS, and as managing director and head of Asia General Industrials at Morgan Stanley. He was previously a managing director at FountainVest Partners, a China-based private equity fund.

Cai is a member of the Campaign Cabinet and has been an active member of the Chicago Booth Council since 2019 and the Harris School Council since 2024. He also served on the Harris Council from 2014 to 2023.

He received an LLB from Fudan University in 1988, an AM in public policy from the Harris School in 1995 and an MBA from Chicago Booth in 1995.

David Foley is a senior managing director and global head of Blackstone Energy Transition Partners, responsible for overseeing Blackstone’s private equity investment activities in the energy sector on a global basis.

Since joining Blackstone in 1995, Foley has built the energy practice and played an integral role in each of the firm’s energy-related private equity investments. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors for several Blackstone-owned companies, including Accel International, Advanced Cooling Technologies, Kinetik, Sediver, Viridon and Western LNG. Prior to Blackstone, Foley worked at AEA Investors and as a management consultant at Monitor Deloitte.

Foley, alongside his wife Vicki, has chaired the College Parents Council since 2021. He also serves as chair of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate & Sustainable Growth Advisory Council and chair of the Columbia University Medical Center Ophthalmology Board of Advisors.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Northwestern University in 1989 and his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1995. Foley is the parent of a UChicago alum and current student.

Stephanie Rada Zocco is the co-founder and co-president of The Rada Zocco Foundation, a philanthropic foundation dedicated to advancing education, scientific research, culture, the arts and nature conservation.

Her professional expertise is in international trade issues, with a particular focus on intellectual property rights and trade in services. She was the founder and president of the Geneva Business Roundtable, a business advisory group on global trade.

Additionally, she has previously worked with the World Trade Organization, the European Union (Parliament and Commission), and the Executive Office of the President of the United States. She also serves on the board of the Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation and is a founding family member of HeritagePlus Advisory in Geneva, Switzerland.

For over three decades, Rada Zocco has been a committed alumni leader in the UChicago community. She currently serves on the College Advisory Council and the Chicago Booth Global Leaders Group. She is a former president of the University of Chicago Alumni Board of Governors.

She received her bachelor’s degree from UChicago in 1988 and a master’s degree from the University of Virginia.

Imran Siddiqui is the chief executive officer of Talcott Financial Group, an international life insurance provider, and a director on the Talcott Financial Group board.

Since Siddiqui joined Talcott, the company has grown its assets under management to over $135 billion. Under his leadership, Talcott has reinsured over $65 billion of liabilities from leading life insurance and annuity providers in the United States and Japan and the company launched a new retail business focused on the U.S. retirement market in 2026. He was previously a senior partner at Apollo Global Management and held senior positions at Oak Hill Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs.

Siddiqui has served on both the College Advisory Council and the Law School Advisory Council.

He received two degrees from the University of Chicago: a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in international relations, both in 1996; and a JD from Harvard Law School in 2002. Siddiqui is the parent of two current UChicago College students.

Konstantin Sokolov is the founder and chairman of the board of IJS Investments, a Chicago-based private equity firm focused on critical infrastructure, technology and financial services.

He is the founding chairman of the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund, a U.S. nonprofit organization mobilizing capital across the South Caucasus and Central Asia. He also serves on the boards of the Munich Security Conference Foundation and the American Friends of the Munich Security Conference.

Throughout his career, Sokolov has advised governments and major companies, led public listings on major stock exchanges, and overseen restructuring projects for central banks and sovereign wealth funds. He is the chairman of the Northern Pillar Energy Consortium and Pelagos Data Centres.

Sokolov is a member of the Council on Chicago Booth and the Chicago Booth and Polsky Center Private Equity Council. He received his master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from St. Petersburg State University in 1997 and an executive MBA from Chicago Booth in 2005.

Quantum Leap Challenge Institute renewed for $37.5 million as NSF invests in quantum sensing for biology

08/25/2026 - 10:15am

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced Aug. 25 that it has renewed the Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering with a $37.5 million, five-year investment to advance quantum sensing technologies that can reveal biological processes difficult or impossible to observe with conventional tools.

The Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering (or NSF QuBBE) was first established in 2021. Led by the University of Chicago in partnership with Chicago State University, the University of Illinois Chicago, Harvard University and other collaborators, the institute brings together quantum scientists, engineers, chemists, biologists, and physicians.

The renewal will move NSF QuBBE into its next phase: advancing quantum sensing from proof-of-principle measurements toward robust tools for investigating biological systems. It will also continue to develop a ‘quantum workforce,’ creating pathways into quantum science and technology.

At UChicago, the effort spans the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Physical Sciences Division, Biological Sciences Division and UChicago Medicine.

“Quantum sensing has reached a point where it can begin to address real biological questions,” said Greg Engel, director of NSF QuBBE, chair of the Department of Chemistry, and professor at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “The next challenge is to make these tools reliable, adaptable, and useful in the complex environments where biology actually happens. This renewal allows us to take that step.”

From quantum experiments to biological tools

Quantum sensors use properties of quantum systems to make extraordinarily precise measurements. In biology, they could provide new ways to observe molecular and nanoscopic cellular processes that are difficult to access using conventional techniques.

During its first phase, NSF QuBBE supported advances across quantum sensing and biology, including genetically encodable qubits, nanodiamond sensors capable of detecting cellular activity, advances in high-field nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance, and novel approaches to using entanglement for biosensing.

For example, research led by UChicago Assoc. Prof. Peter Maurer and Liew Family Prof. David Awschalom—both NSF QuBBE co-principal investigators and their collaborators—demonstrated that fluorescent proteins can function as spin qubits, opening the possibility of quantum sensors that can be genetically expressed directly within cells.

The scientific convergence fostered through NSF QuBBE has also helped catalyze new efforts to move quantum sensing toward biomedical applications, including the formation of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine, housed at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in collaboration with UChicago Medicine and the Biological Sciences Division. The Center is advancing the development and adoption of quantum technologies for medicine and training physicians and physician-scientists to work at the intersection of quantum science and healthcare.

"For more than four decades, NSF has been laying the foundational groundwork of research and discovery that is powering today's modern quantum computing, sensing and communication," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "It's time for focused activities to leverage that base of knowledge to drive us even farther forward to the benefit of all Americans. The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are a next step for us in understanding the quantum world we live in."

Four research areas

In the coming years, NSF QuBBE will drive advances in four interconnected research areas: developing novel quantum nanoprobes for biological sensing; exploring entanglement and squeezed sensing; advancing in vivo measurement with quantum sensors; and accelerating the adoption of quantum sensing across biology and medicine.

Researchers will pursue approaches ranging from improving nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to developing protein-based quantum sensors that can operate within biological systems, while investigating how entanglement, advanced imaging, theory, and computation could enable new ways of measuring biological activity.

“The opportunity in this next phase is to integrate the quantum sensor and the biological question from the beginning,” said Allison Squires, deputy director and co-principal investigator of NSF QuBBE and Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “Rather than developing a technology in isolation and then looking for an application, we can design these tools for implementation in the complex biological environments where we ultimately want them to work.”

Building Chicago's quantum workforce

During NSF QuBBE's first phase, the Institute partnered with Chicago State University to establish the Quantum Institute, including Q-Cert, a one-year post-baccalaureate Quantum Science Certification program. In its next phase, NSF QuBBE plans to expand that model, including the launch of a quantum master's program at Chicago State and further integration of undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. training.

The work will complement Chicage State’s new Quantum Education, Science and Technology Center, CQuEST, which is the university’s center for innovation in quantum science and microelectronics, connecting education, research and workforce development as Chicago's quantum ecosystem grows.

“Building the future of quantum science requires us to build pathways for students to see themselves as part of it,” said Valerie Goss, NSF QuBBE co-principal investigator and workforce development lead at Chicago State University. “Through our partnership with NSF QuBBE, we are creating opportunities for students to gain the knowledge, research experience and connections they need to participate in this rapidly developing field.”

NSF QuBBE will also expand its Quantum Academy, led by UIC Professor Minjung Ryu, which engages Chicago-area high school students and teachers in quantum science through hands-on learning, research experiences, and teacher professional development.

Establishing quantum sensing for biology as a field

The renewed Institute will work to make quantum sensing technologies more accessible to researchers in biology and medicine, expanding infrastructure and user capabilities while bringing biologists, physicians, and other potential users directly into the development and testing of new technologies.

“NSF’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes were created to ask ambitious questions that require an interdisciplinary lens,” said Engel, who is also co-director of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine and a professor in the James Franck Institute and Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at UChicago. “NSF QuBBE is built around one of those questions: can quantum measurement change what we are able to see, understand, and ultimately control in biology and medicine? This renewal gives us the opportunity to create an impactful body of work that provides an answer to that important question.”

—This story was originally published on the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering website.

What ancient trade tells us about globalization

Sarah Steimer — 08/24/2026 - 02:15pm

Indian Ocean imports shaped many lives across the ancient world.

In Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade, Jeremy A. Simmons, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, goes beyond the mechanics of long-distance travel or the economics of trade to offer a new perspective on Indian Ocean commerce.

The book refocuses a historical lens on the commodities involved and the resulting patterns of their consumption, and what Simmons ponders as the consequences of objects in motion.

“[Long-distance trade] conjures up the imagination of the Silk Road or ports that are teeming with traders and exotic goods,” Simmons said. “There's this initial attraction to it by both readers and scholars: We become enamored of this, but at the same time, that magic flattens some of the dynamics. We fixate on the lines crossing the Indian Ocean rather than the actual, tangible change that occurs as a result of these connections.”

To look beyond trade routes and connectivity, Simmons explored what he calls the lingering consequence of traded goods in new environments. For example, he points to pepper in the Roman Empire. This, he says, was not just about luxurious consumption, but about a “desire centered around sensuous qualities that not only prompts [pepper’s] importation but transforms the culture at large as a result.”

Much of Simmons’s research on the topic, which began with his dissertation at Columbia University, involved combing both textual and material archives.

Spending time in India, the Mediterranean and the United Kingdom, he dug through Indian Ocean trade items in collections and storehouses to gain a tangible understanding of the objects. Whereas many scholars might find a Roman coin in India and make note of the emperor pictured to ascertain when it was made, Simmons—in his physical examination of the coin—might find it to be a high-quality imitation that was made there, which tells a very different story.

This reading between the lines—or between the materials—informed much of the book. As Simmons explains it, he let the commodities guide his study. For example, spices in the Mediterranean world suggested a sensuous course, in which these objects were smelled and ingested.

“I think a history of the senses enabled me to think about these goods as greater than commodity—they, in fact, were experiential,” Simmons said.

In his study of ancient texts, Simmons found them to be more nuanced than they’re often perceived. He argues ancient testimonies are frequently read at face value, and their work is mined for facts. A literary perspective, however, can uncover more complex insights. Simmons uses Pliny the Elder as an example: It can be easy to assume that the ancient author is dealing in truths, but there are rhetorical flourishes and jokes that suggest his critiques of luxury goods may be his way of wrestling with this new, more global world.

Following that, Simmons references a story in which someone in hiding is literally sniffed out by his executioners because he is wearing perfume—what was then a new luxury commodity in the Roman Empire. Pliny implies this act makes that individual deserving of death.

But rather than read this passage simply as Pliny moralizing against this commodity, Simmons pushes further at what perfume symbolized at the time: its role in dressing the dead in Roman society.

“This trope, as you start following it, occurs everywhere,” Simmons said. “It's a pretty common satirical quip that people make. ‘Oh, he smells like a couple of funerals.’”

Sea of Treasures asks scholars and readers to reconsider the ways we’ve long approached the history of this trade route and its impacts. Simmons urges readers to think of the Indian Ocean on its own terms and not just for what it does for the Roman empire.

“By not engaging only with traditional source material for Roman history, but also looking at the Sanskrit material, the Indic inscriptions and the archeology in the subcontinent, too, [I was] trying to bring different parts of this interconnected world into a more balanced dialog,” he said. “This was an important takeaway for me: You have to look at it from multiple perspectives.”

Along this same vein, he notes that much of the ancient historical record is written by an elite population: People who have the privilege to make arguments about society at large, and who might also have more anxieties about it. Meanwhile, there are those at the margins who are also affected—but whose voices aren’t as readily found.

So while it may appear that a book on ancient luxury items only deals with a small, select segment of the population, these commodities and small-scale practices actually reverberate into a wider socio-cultural world.

As he worked on the book, Simmons said that he saw echoes of this ancient world in modern life. Then, as now, a more globalized economy can spark fears of the new, as well as deeper questions of identity. There’s a larger human story that’s told in Sea of Treasures, he says, one that speaks to the joys and woes of an interconnected world.

“Everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone wants to feel attractive,” Simmons said. “Everyone wants to have an allure or charisma that these sensuous, new, almost numinous commodities can cater to. ‘Luxury’ collapses all this.”

—This article originally appeared on the Social Sciences Division website.

Researchers clear hurdle toward ‘EKG for a single cell’

Paul Dailing — 08/21/2026 - 10:15am

Inserting a diamond-based quantum sensor into a living cell can obtain previously unseen levels of detail about how life works and how diseases form.

“Think of it as an EKG for a single cell, a way to capture everything happening inside at once, in real time,” said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Aaron Esser-Kahn. “We routinely monitor vital signs in people—heart rate, breathing, temperature—but until now, there simply hasn’t been an equivalent way to take a cell’s vitals.”

An interdisciplinary research team from UChicago PME and the University of Iowa, originally aimed at making diamond-based quantum biosensors less toxic, less inflammatory and overall easier on cells, unexpectedly revealed new insights that overturned a major assumption limiting the sensors' effectiveness.

“We found a missing piece of the puzzle,” said Uri Zvi, PhD’25, first author of the paper published in Advanced Materials.

When inserted into living cells, diamond-based biosensors experience energy level shifts called “zero-field splitting” (ZFS), which reduce the sensors’ effectiveness. It had always been assumed that these shifts were the diamond reacting to the cell’s temperature.

“ZFS of qubits in diamond is known to be impacted by temperature. So when people observed ZFS shifts they assumed that these were caused by local temperature changes, i.e., caused by cellular activities,” said UChicago PME Assoc. Prof. Peter Maurer, co-corresponding author of the new work along with Esser-Kahn and University of Iowa Asst. Prof. Denis Candido.

Instead, they discovered the diamond’s surface was causing the shifts. This greater understanding can be harnessed to get even more detailed readings of cells, Maurer said, adding the new paper made two major advancements.

“First, it resolves a longstanding discussion around the origin of observed shifts in qubit resonances in diamond nanoparticles,” he said. “Second, we showed that the observed qubit resonance shifts can be connected to cellular processes and could be an interesting proxy for probing cellular activity."

Following the clues

A previous interdisciplinary breakthrough both led to this mystery and gave the team the tools to crack it.

Last year, Zvi, immunoengineer Esser-Kahn, quantum engineer Maurer and theoretical physicist Candido collaborated on a new shell-encased biosensor inspired by the technology used in quantum dot LED television sets.

They found that coating a sensor in silica, intended only to make the diamond easier on the cell, also created a vastly more stable sensor. Their subsequent investigation found two things that Zvi said led directly to this new work.

First, the coating was dispersing electrons from the diamond’s center, inadvertently closing traps that had been causing spin noise. That was the reason for the increased performance, Zvi said. Second, this electron loss was flipping the charge of just the inside of the diamond from negative to positive.

“The moment we saw that, we started thinking, ‘Hey, this is a stark change,’” Zvi said.

This opened the possibility that electric field effects were more impactful than previously thought, causing them to revise their theory. But the coated sensor also gave them the ability to test this experimentally. They could control for surface effects.

The cell’s temperature would be the same whether the sensor was coated or not, so if temperature were causing the ZFS shifts, both sensors would see them. Instead, they found the silica coating was suppressing the ZFS shifts. The surface was to blame.

But there was a surprise in store for the team.

‘Unexplained and puzzling’

Even though their technique suppressed the ZFS shifts, the team was measuring massive, sudden temperature change within the cell—up to 5 degrees Celsius over 30 minutes.

“I am far from an expert in biology, but a sudden cellular temperature variation of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius is very unexpected," Candido joked. “As a theorist, I always love it when experimentalists have unexplained and puzzling data, so it was very exciting!”

While the current research indicates that temperature was not responsible for the observed ZFS shifts, that conclusion stands in stark contrast to much of the previous literature. Earlier studies had interpreted similar shifts as evidence of intracellular temperature changes of 1 to 10 degrees, Zvi said.

This caused Zvi and Candido to go back to the theoretical drawing board. Not only did they find the true culprit behind the ZFS shifts, they also found an important way to distinguish between the variations of temperature and the electric field signal.

Future researchers can harness this to make more accurate temperature readings of cells and better biosensors to understand life itself.

“You can think about being able to follow whether a T cell is becoming a regulatory T cell or a killer T cell, whether a cell becomes a cancer cell or just a healthy cell,” Zvi said. “There is an entire new world to explore, and entirely new ways to explore it.”

Citation: "Probing Cellular Activity Via Charge-Sensitive Quantum Nanoprobes," Zvi et al, Advanced Materials, February 4, 2026.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago PME website.

Why humor can look a lot like deception

Chandler A. Calderon — 08/19/2026 - 12:15pm

Pinocchio is bullshitting.

Not wanting to reveal his friend’s location, but also not wanting to trigger the telltale sign that he’s lying, the Shrek the Third character talks in circles to avoid telling an angry Prince Charming where his rival, the ogre Shrek, is.

“Well, uh, I don’t know where he’s not,” the would-be boy begins.

Then he really begins to dazzle: “On the contrary, I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably do or do not know where he should probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he isn’t.”

The linguistic gymnastics continue until one of the Three Little Pigs gets so annoyed that he blurts out what Shrek is up to.

With this scene, projected on three screens at the front of a Harper Memorial Library classroom, Jason Riggle kicked off a lecture for their linguistics course “The Language of Deception and Humor.”

It turns out that humor and deception are two sides of the same coin, Riggle argued in the Autumn Quarter course, and both have a lot to tell us about how we make meaning and interact with others. Students explored how the two modes interact in literature, philosophy, popular culture, developmental science and more.

On one level, “almost all humor involves some kind of deception, involves some kind of trickery, some kind of misdirection,” said Riggle, an associate professor of linguistics who uses they/them pronouns. “So you might say humor is a flavor of deception, but that would be really reductive.”

To start with the obvious, humor is intensely prosocial.

“We delight in messing with each other, in being messed with by other brains,” they said. And when someone gets a joke, it shows shared understanding. “Humor is this sort of magic flash that reveals the insides of other people’s minds.”

Children develop the ability to tell jokes relatively young, Riggle explained in a class on cognitive development. By age 4, most children begin to move from a sense of humor that relies on deviations from expected norms, such as a caregiver making a funny face or using a common item in a silly way, to humor that takes into account shared knowledge and assumptions.

Riggle told students a joke they heard from their young child: “Why do sharks swim in salt water? Because pepper water makes them sneeze!”

It’s a fairly sophisticated joke, Riggle said, one that relies on a couple of analogical leaps. The joke teller must know that the audience thinks of salt and pepper as a pair, that the existence of salt water could imply pepper water exists, and that pepper makes you sneeze. As children gain this awareness of what other people know and how they think, they also learn how to lie.

Deception, too, can be prosocial, Riggle argued in another class session. Hence our wealth of terms for almost-lies. Since calling someone a liar is such a serious social judgment, we are careful to distinguish between kinds of deception that might not convey the same level of betrayal as a lie: white lie, innocent misunderstanding, noble lie, trolling, prank, bluff, ploy, dupe. We might not consider someone who engages in these a liar.

Riggle said some research has even shown that people tend to find those who lie for prosocial reasons—for example, telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings—as more honest rather than less.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

And certainly not in the middle of a linguistics class. But there it was, the famous Monty Python sketch, serving as an example of how a tragic topic becomes fodder for a joke. Humor, like horror, Riggle said, can allow audiences to process fear or anxiety by twisting expectations in an entertaining way.

“It’s a good class to teach, because it gives you all the dopamine, getting to laugh,” Riggle said.

The Shrek the Third scene and the Monty Python sketch were among many short videos students were asked to consider. To tease apart nuances between humor and almost-humor, students analyzed jokes that could easily go sideways.

An example of this involved a contest organized by a restaurant manager in 2001: The server who sold the most beer in a month would win a Toyota.

The winner didn’t receive a car, but rather a “toy Yoda.” It turned out the contest had been announced on April Fools’ Day. Was this funny? Not for the winning waitress, who decided to sue—her case was settled out of court.

The course took a more sober tone in the final weeks of the quarter, diving into ways that humor feeds into persuasion, misinformation and contagious deception.

“Humor is the magic key that opens up people’s defenses and allows you to get at what they really think,” Riggle said, making it a potential tool for manipulation.

But Riggle was not above a little manipulation themself, it turned out. They revealed in one class session filled with comedy clips and memes that research has shown people absorb more from lectures that involve humor than those that don’t, even if slides used in a lecture are out of order.

This suggests that after experiencing humor, the mind is better able to draw connections. Students glanced around, amused that they might have been tricked into learning something.

—This article originally appeared in the Spring/26 University of Chicago Magazine.

Randal C. Picker, renowned legal scholar, 1959-2026

Mark Cohen — 08/18/2026 - 05:15pm

Prof. Randal C. “Randy” Picker, an influential legal scholar and beloved teacher whose ties to the University of Chicago began nearly five decades ago as a College student, died Aug. 15. He was 66.

Picker, AB'80, AM'82, JD’85, was the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1989 and helped shape intellectual and institutional life both there and in the wider University. A leading scholar of antitrust, intellectual property, competition policy and regulated industries, he was a highly popular teacher known for his intellectual curiosity, enthusiasm, humor and willingness to experiment with new ways of engaging students.

“Randy Picker was an influential scholar, a dedicated teacher and one of the Law School’s and University of Chicago’s most devoted institutional citizens,” said Dean Adam Chilton. “Randy personified the best of our values. He was always willing to give his time generously to his students and colleagues, and he was uniquely committed to protecting what makes this University special.”

Chilton also pointed to the extraordinary trust that colleagues across the University placed in Picker’s judgment.

“For decades, Randy was asked to serve on or chair nearly every important committee across our institution, from the faculty senate to dean searches to presidential searches,” Chilton said. “When a high-stakes decision had to be made about the future of the Law School or the University, the only thing that seemingly everyone agreed on was that Randy Picker needed to be in the room.”

Picker’s connection to UChicago stretched back nearly five decades, beginning with his studies of economics at the bachelor's and master's levels before earning his JD with honors. As a student at the Law School, he was an associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif.

After graduation, Picker clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and practiced at Sidley & Austin in Chicago, working on debt restructuring and corporate reorganizations in bankruptcy. He returned to Hyde Park in 1989 to join the Law School faculty and served as associate dean from 1994 to 1996.

Geoffrey R. Stone, JD '71, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, first got to know Picker while Picker was a student at the Law School. As dean, he later hired Picker to join the faculty.

“He was a dedicated and terrific teacher and scholar, and a wonderful colleague,” Stone said.

For decades, their offices were near each other, and Stone recalled regularly talking with Picker about the Law School, his courses, and his many professional and personal pursuits.

“Randy was in so many ways a special person,” Stone said, “and I shall miss him every day.”

A scholar and teacher of extraordinary range

Picker built an influential and wide-ranging scholarly career spanning private law, law and economics, antitrust and the legal implications of technological change.

Picker’s scholarship evolved considerably over the course of his career. Long before his work on law and technology, he established himself as a leading scholar of private law.

Douglas G. Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law and a former dean of the Law School, pointed in particular to Picker's role in bringing insights from game theory into law and economics.

“Randy Picker was responsible for incorporating the lessons of game theory into the standard account of law and economics, first in the context of secured transactions, then bankruptcy, and finally the law of contract and torts more generally,” said Baird.

Picker, along with Baird and Robert H. Gertner, coauthored the foundational 1994 book Game Theory and the Law, which applied game theory and information economics to legal rules and institutions.

Picker also had a significant influence on the development of the law itself. As a member of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, he played an important role in the 2001 overhaul of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code.

While he served as vice chair of the National Bankruptcy Conference, Congress adopted the organization’s recommended reforms of small-business bankruptcy, which Baird described as the most significant change in Chapter 11 since the Bankruptcy Code was adopted in 1978. Baird also described Picker's paper with Michael McConnell on municipal bankruptcy as “the canonical work in the field.”

Picker's later scholarship increasingly explored technology, competition and the evolution of the computer industry. His forthcoming book The Quest for Next: A Competitive History of the Computer Industry explores how law and antitrust shaped competition, innovation, computers and chips.

The book, a sweeping history of how law has shaped the computing and technology industry, is widely expected to be a field-defining work. When he signed the contract for the book with Princeton University Press last year, Picker proclaimed, “I don't know what it means to be pleased as punch, but I am that and more.”

Prof. M. Todd Henderson, JD’98, recalled frequently bringing Picker provocative court decisions involving American technology companies and trying to persuade him to take a side. Picker invariably resisted.

“He’d pull out his own copy, already full of tabs and scribbles,” Henderson said. “He’d patiently lead me through the details—it was always about the details—showing how the issues were more complex and nuanced than I suspected. He took things seriously but with a joy and curiosity that was absolutely infectious.”

Generations of UChicago Law students knew Picker through his antitrust courses, but his teaching ranged widely, encompassing network industries, technology policy, copyright, secured transactions, bankruptcy and corporate reorganizations. He also taught business law at the Chicago Booth School of Business.

For Picker, teaching was itself a subject for experimentation and discovery.

He incorporated new technologies into the classroom and in 2015 became the first Law School professor to offer a massive open online course, “Internet Giants: The Law and Economics of Media Platforms,” which reached thousands of students around the world. He approached the project with characteristic commitment: spending dozens of hours filming and even taking a filmmaking course as he thought about how best to teach in a new medium.

Picker's influence as a teacher extended well beyond the students in his classroom. Henderson credits Picker with inspiring his own academic career.

“I became an academic because of Randy Picker,” Henderson said. Returning to campus for his fifth reunion, Henderson attended a lecture Picker gave to alumni.

“Watching him take apart a complex issue with characteristic analytical rigor, boyish enthusiasm and intellectual clarity was spellbinding. I knew I had to do this.”

“Over the past decades, I turned to Randy more than anyone else for how to teach, how to write, how to approach a problem, and, more than I'd like to admit, how to be a husband, father and friend,” Henderson said. “He always had time for me, whether it was to talk about ideas or life. He also made my thinking better.”

Former Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Richard A. Posner Distinguished Service Professor of Law in the Wallman Society of Fellows, recalled the important role Picker played in the everyday intellectual life of the Law School.

“Randy was present at the Law School—in workshops, at the faculty lunch table, and every day in his office with the door wide open, inviting conversation,” Miles said. “He was always eager to discuss new legal developments, and he elevated the conversation with his incisive questions, his analytical mind and his good humor. He set a shining example of what it is to be a faculty member: to be present with colleagues for learning.”

Picker brought that same curiosity and willingness to experiment to his life outside the classroom. He took improvisational theater classes at The Second City and later performed and organized an improv group that performed publicly—an experience he saw not simply as a hobby but as another opportunity to be a student, encounter new people and ideas, and challenge himself in unfamiliar ways.

Stone experienced that side of Picker firsthand when Picker invited him to be the special guest at one of his improv shows.

“I was quite daunted, but he made it delightful,” Stone said.

A devoted University citizen

Picker’s impact extended far beyond his scholarship and teaching. Over more than three decades, he became one of the University’s most dedicated institutional citizens, serving in numerous leadership and governance roles across the Law School and University.

“Randy was an extraordinarily generous and influential University citizen in every phase of his work, and his dedication and energy for the institution were seemingly boundless,” said Provost Katherine Baicker. “In addition to his distinguished contributions as a scholar and educator, he served on numerous important faculty committees, where his clear voice and keen insights played a vital role in advancing our shared mission. His all-too-brief service as vice provost for academic affairs, which began this summer, was an opportunity that he relished. I deeply admired his intellectual seriousness and agility, his sharp wit, his adept navigation of complex institutional problems, and his profound commitment to this community. He leaves an indelible mark across the University."

"Randy was an extraordinary member of our community,” said President Paul Alivisatos. "He reveled in our world of ideas and brought imagination and rigor to his work. I so much enjoyed hearing from him about his most recent research on the history of the tech industry through the lens of intellectual property. He was tireless in service. He always asked that we return to principles and that we honor our values when we do the work of supporting our University. He was one of our leading lights. I will miss him greatly."

Among his most significant contributions, Picker chaired the University committee that produced the highly influential 2017 report that became widely known as the “Picker Report.” The report addressed the relationship between disruptive conduct and freedom of expression and remains an important part of the University’s approach to protecting free inquiry and expression while ensuring that members of the community can speak and be heard.

Picker also served as a member of numerous key Law School committees, chairing appointments committees, dean search committees and most recently as a member of the Law School’s AI committee. Across the University, Randy’s institutional service included serving as spokesperson for the Council of the University Senate, serving on the Laboratory Schools board, chairing the Library Board and serving on the faculty advisory committee to the Board of Trustees during the search that led to the appointment of Alivisatos as UChicago president.

Upon assuming the position of vice provost for academic affairs this summer, Picker took on vital responsibilities involving faculty hiring and promotion, the Kalven tradition and faculty governance.

Shortly before his death, while reflecting publicly on the career of his mentor Richard Posner, Picker described a quality he particularly admired: the belief that one could learn ideas from anyone and that each encounter could be a “learning moment.” It was an observation that also captured much about Picker himself, colleagues said.

He is survived by his wife, Gretchen, and their children, Adam, Ben and Emma. Plans are underway for a memorial service at the University.

—This article originally appeared on the Law School website.

From lab to layperson, UChicago students learn to make science land

Benjamin Ransom — 08/18/2026 - 11:30am

While many environmental science majors spend their summers in campus labs, rising third-year Brianna Leech found herself in a NASA research center, building presentations on the spread of invasive tree species across the state of Utah.

It was less a typical research gig than a crash course in building and communicating data on the ground. In a small cohort at a NASA research center, Brianna teamed with three students from wildly different backgrounds and was handed a real client: the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Their task was to track invasive tree species creeping across the state, processing satellite imagery into a wildfire-risk tool that flagged where the department should focus its tree-cutting efforts first.

“There was a feeling of a bit of everything: sending emails, attending meetings, scientific technical skills, and presenting science—with posters, flyers and research papers for NASA staff,” said Leech.

The opportunity came up in office hours at a class for the science communication minor at UChicago. Leech was rattling off her interests to Jordan Bimm—her professor, and the developer of the program’s curricula. They talked about mapping, sustainability, and the writing and public speaking skills sharpened in his classes. Bimm immediately thought of a former student who'd done the program and pointed her toward it.

“It’s something that I would have never thought to do if Jordan wouldn't have helped me put it together in my head,” Leech said.

UChicago’s Science Communication minor had set the whole thing in motion, connecting Leech to Jordan and equipping her to communicate environmental data on the ground. By the time she reached NASA, she could make satellite data translate into something a land manager could actually use in their work.

Learning by making

That hands-on ethos sits at the heart of the science communication minor. Rather than just a final exam, courses often end in a finished product. Students might produce a podcast, report a piece of science journalism, or communicate about exhibits on a museum floor.

“At the end of the quarter you're always producing something, and it's usually something that I could take and show to other people later on,” said Leech.

For example, Leech created a podcast digging into the science behind popular movies. The first episode tackled Interstellar, unpacking how the producers consulted with physicists to explore concepts like black holes, time dilation, and relativity.

“We see so many physics and chemistry concepts in these blockbuster movies, but we don’t really get them fully explained," said Leech. “I really loved making that. I had so much fun.”

Bimm, who not only designs, but teaches many of the program's course offerings, builds that learn-by-doing spirit into the classroom. A prolific science communicator himself, he teaches from his own practice in real time.

“Whatever's happening to me at the moment, I bring the students along with me. When Artemis II was flying around the moon, I was getting inundated with media requests—so I'd show students what a reach-out email from a science journalist looks like, and a recording of me talking to the TV producer,” said Bimm. “So when they're in that position, it won't be the first time they're encountering it.”

Are facts enough?

But the program isn't just about producing things. Behind every podcast episode and museum panel sits a set of theoretical questions that have preoccupied science communication researchers for decades. How do you actually get people to care about science? And is explaining the facts, laying out a rational argument, and citing solid data enough to change anyone's mind?

“A lot of times when people get a science communication course, they're only getting the practical side,” said Bimm. “But even if you just take one class with me, you're still going to get a theoretical foundation in the key frameworks—so students understand the history and the different approaches that are possible.”

That approach resonated with Elijah Tan, a rising third-year studying astrophysics, who took the introductory course as his way into the minor—and now recommends it to fellow students.

One case study from that class stuck with him. After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear fallout drifted onto the hills of Cumbria in northern England. Government scientists, betting the contamination would clear within weeks, didn’t recommend a ban on sheep sales.

They were wrong. The region's peat held onto the radioactive cesium in a way the clay soils they'd studied never had. But rather than own the error, they reversed recommendations abruptly—alienating farmers and corroding their credibility.

A scientist might think: “The evidence changed, so the recommendation changed. So what?” But an explanation that talks past local knowledge, or a story that reverses the instant the data does, can corrode the very credibility it's meant to earn. In other words, these scientists were working from what experts like Bimm call the "deficit model."

“The deficit model is the default model that scientists just assume always works—the idea that just providing facts and information will be enough to convince people to believe what you're saying and have a positive attitude towards science,” said Bimm. “The research for the last 30 years has shown this doesn’t work in practice."

When Tan shared a piece on a new nuclear microreactor, he ran into another similar lesson. Scientists, immersed in their own work, tend to assume everyone else thinks the way they do, and that what fascinates them in the lab will obviously interest a reader too. But that often isn’t true.

“One of my friends in the class, in the nicest way possible, just asked, 'Why should I care?’” said Tan. “And it was a great question, because I just thought it was neat.”

The question forced Tan to rethink the piece. Rather than relying on readers to be compelled by the subject, he showed the stakes—how a reactor small enough to be transported could be flown into a disaster zone, for instance, instead of the logistical nightmare of providing a whole supply chain of diesel. It was a lesson in writing for the reader’s interest rather than his own.

Tan, who dreams of drawing science comics for a living, sees the minor as preparation for whatever shape his career takes—whether in journalism, an astrophysics Ph.D., or institutional work. More than any single skill, he values how it has trained him to think about what an audience actually needs.

The next chapter

The minor is now being offered as a track within the Climate and Sustainable Growth major, led by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. It’s a natural fit, given how central climate is to public debate, and the conversation on how to communicate complex science to the public.

“It's one of the big science problems of our day. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is worried about it, but we still seem to be sliding further and further into it,” said Bimm. “Part of the way out of this isn't just science and technology—it's going to be a new generation of people who are able to effectively and responsibly communicate about it.”

For Leech, who wrote an editorial on the overlap between climate and sports as part of the minor—she came away struck by just how far the subject reaches. Climate science, she realized, “can pretty much be applied everywhere.”

That flexibility is part of the point. Whether the subject is climate, a nuclear microreactor, or invasive trees creeping across Utah, the minor is teaching students to carry science across the gap between the lab and the layperson.

And while the partnership with the Institute is new, Bimm has already seen three years of students come through the minor—and he knows what the payoff looks like.

"You can see them selecting the tools that I've taught them and implementing them at the right time. That's just so rewarding—not only have they taken this in, but they're now capable, smart, savvy communicators,” said Bimm. “This is exactly what the world needs."

How to better forecast once-in-a-millennium weather events

Maureen Searcy — 08/17/2026 - 10:30am

For all that day-to-day weather predictions have improved, it remains a challenge to forecast events that might happen once in 1,000 years—like the deadliest heat waves.

Traditional supercomputer-based models can forecast these events, but they require a lot of time and energy. Meanwhile, newer forecasting models, based on artificial intelligence, are good at day-to-day forecasts, but often fail to predict outlier events that weren’t represented in their training data.

“AI weather and climate models are one of the great achievements of AI in science, but they’re not magical—they fail on gray swans, the rarest and most extreme events,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, University of Chicago associate professor of geophysical sciences. “Detailed physics-based models can capture extremes, but they require prohibitively large amounts of time and energy.”

An international team of researchers in the United States and France, co-led by members of Hassanzadeh’s Climate Extremes Theory and Data Group, has developed a new hybrid method, published in Physical Review Letters, to solve the problem.

Their solution marries the efficiency of AI tools with the trustworthiness of traditional models to help predict the odds of rare events quickly and accurately, while using far fewer resources.

“The power of this method,” Hassanzadeh said, “is that it combines the strengths of both AI and traditional physics and is particularly effective for extreme events, which are the hardest to simulate and have the greatest societal impact.”

The statistics of rare events

Heat waves are one of the deadliest forms of extreme weather. In 2003, a heat wave led to roughly 70,000 deaths across Europe, and Russia suffered 56,000 deaths in 2010. This past June, nearly half of the United States—roughly 180 million people—experienced dangerous temperatures.

These waves are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, but the nature of outlier events makes them difficult to study and challenging to predict.

Forecasting has long relied on physics-based climate and weather models. They help us see how different conditions, like atmospheric pressure, might affect temperature and other variables over time. These models compute many different potential scenarios, which researchers use to see what is most likely to actually occur.

The trouble is: If you want to know the odds that Chicago will reach 90°F in July—which is not uncommon—you wouldn’t need to run many simulations before one landed on that temperature. But if you want to know the odds that it would reach 105°F, you’ll need to try many more times before you see that extreme. Running that many simulations takes a lot of time and computational power.

Researchers can mitigate the issue by using a statistical technique called rare event sampling (RES), which speeds up the process by scoring conditions so the climate model can focus on only the most promising and ignore the rest. However, rare event sampling doesn’t work well for short-duration events, like week-long heat waves, rather than an entire season that is overall unusually hot.

To address this, the team came up with a new method named AI+RES, which boosts the scoring mechanism by adding AI’s ability to predict which conditions are most likely to lead to shorter, rapidly developing extremes.

“After doing this iteratively, you eventually get to a bunch of simulations that do indeed capture whatever rare extreme event that you’re interested in,” said Alexander Wikner, Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in Hassanzadeh’s group and co–first author on the study. “The more you get, the better you can estimate the probability of that event, and that ultimately gives you a lot more certainty.”

To test the method, the team ran 50,000 simulations using a traditional climate model to predict heat waves over areas of France and the U.S. Midwest. Their new AI+RES method gave nearly identical results using one-hundredth as many simulations.

Because this work was a proof-of-concept, they used a model that didn’t take into account climate change, which adds another level of complexity. The researchers hope to test their method on models running under different climate change scenarios to see how results might shift as the planet warms.

Wikner notes that the method could also help generate rare-event datasets to train even better AI models, which would then speed up their method even further.

Scaling up

According to the scientists, the hybrid method could be applied to other severe weather, including tropical cyclones or extreme precipitation.

“What I like about this framework,” said Hassanzadeh, “is that it’s ready to be scaled. AI models trained on real weather observations are already built and in use, so the next step is to connect a state-of-the-art numerical weather or climate prediction model to one of them through this algorithm.”

This would give decision-makers access to accurate information they need, like the frequency of strong storms and heat waves in the current and future climate, at regional scales—such as specifically over Texas, Florida or California, for instance.

“This is exactly the kind of information federal, state, and local governments need as a first step for climate adaptation and mitigation planning,” added Hassanzadeh. “It’s very exciting that we could be scaling this up into real-world models that directly provide such information to the public and to policymakers.”

Other co-authors on the study include Dorian Abbot, professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago, as well as researchers from École Normale Supérieure in Paris; Réseau de Transport d’Electricité (RTE) in Paris; the World Energy & Meteorology Council in Norwich, UK; and the Courant Institute of New York University.

Citation: “AI-boosted rare event sampling to characterize extreme weather.” Lancelin and Wikner et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. August 5, 2026.

Funding: The Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship, France-Chicago Center FACCTs Award, US National Science Foundation, the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth at UChicago, RTE France, the National Agency for Research and Technology (ANRT) and the Institut des Mathématiques pour la Planète Terre (IMPT).

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

Study gauges efficiency of Affordable Care Act at reducing uninsured rates

08/14/2026 - 11:09pm

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010—known now mostly as the ACA or Obamacare—dramatically expanded publicly supported health insurance coverage across the United States. But how efficiently did those gains translate into fewer people being uninsured?

A new paper by University of Chicago Research Professor Robert Kaestner with Anuj Gangopadhyaya of Loyola University Chicago examines that question by looking not only at whether more people gained coverage, but where that coverage came from.

The ACA’s efficiency, the authors find, depends heavily on who is being covered. For the lowest-income adults, the ACA’s coverage provisions translated almost directly into fewer uninsured people. As income rises, the relationship becomes weaker, and public support is more likely to replace existing employer-sponsored insurance rather than insure someone who previously lacked coverage.

“This research sheds light on a key aspect of the Affordable Care Act, which is the law’s ability to increase access to health insurance,” said Kaestner, an economist at the Harris School of Public Policy.

“While the law did reduce uninsured rates among the lowest-income adults, the research also shows that it shifted a significant number of people who already had health insurance to new plans under the ACA—certainly not the intent of the policymakers, who sought an efficient mechanism for lifting the number of insured people in the United States.”

Using data from the 2008-2024 American Community Survey, the authors study changes in uninsured rates, Medicaid and Marketplace coverage, and employer-sponsored insurance among adults ages 19 to 64. Their analysis focuses on how those relationships varied by income level, across states and over time.

Eligibility for public support is linked to the federal poverty level, an income measure used to determine eligibility for programs and subsidies. These include Medicaid and financial assistance for Marketplace health insurance plans.

The dollar amount changes by household size and is updated annually.

In 2026, for instance, the federal poverty level is $15,960 for an individual and $33,000 for a family of four.

People with incomes up to four times the federal poverty level qualify in all states for premium tax credits that lower monthly premiums for Marketplace plans. People with incomes up to almost 1.4 times the poverty level may qualify for Medicaid, if they live in a state that has expanded it.

People with incomes below the poverty level generally do not qualify for Marketplace savings. For adults in households below 150% of the federal poverty level, or $49,500 for a family of four, nearly all the increase in public coverage via the ACA came from people who had previously been uninsured.

That pattern changed at higher income levels. For adults with incomes between 151 and 400% of the federal poverty level, $132,000 for a family of four, each percentage point increase in public coverage was associated with about a 0.6 percentage point decrease in uninsured rates and about a 0.4 percentage point decrease in employer-sponsored insurance.

The authors describe this shift as “crowd-out”: public coverage did not always newly insure someone, but in some cases replaced coverage that had previously come through an employer.

The paper argues this distinction matters for evaluating the ACA’s efficiency. If public subsidies extend coverage to people who were uninsured, the policy directly reduces the uninsured rate. But if publicly supported coverage replaces employer-sponsored insurance, the number of uninsured people does not fall—instead, the payer simply changes.

The authors find a clear income gradient. Among adults below 150% of the federal poverty level, public coverage gains translated almost directly into fewer uninsured people. But among those with incomes above 250% of the federal poverty level, the tradeoff was closer to 1.5 people receiving publicly supported coverage for every one-person reduction in the uninsured rate.

The paper also finds that crowd-out was larger among groups more likely to have employer-sponsored insurance before the ACA, including parents and married adults. For parents and married adults with incomes between 250 and 500% of the federal poverty level, the authors estimate the ACA supported approximately three people for each newly insured person.

“This finding gets at the central question of policy efficiency,” Kaestner said. “The government was often subsidizing a change in who paid for coverage, rather than newly insuring someone who otherwise would have gone without.”

The study’s broader approach is important, the authors argue, because much of the existing research on the ACA has focused primarily on Medicaid expansion. By contrast, the authors estimate the total effect of the ACA’s major coverage provisions, including both Medicaid expansion and Marketplace coverage.

That broader view changes the interpretation of crowd-out.

Looking only at Medicaid expansion can overstate crowd-out among low-income adults and understate crowd-out among higher-income adults. Among higher-income households, the authors find that much of the estimated shift away from employer-sponsored insurance comes from Marketplace coverage rather than Medicaid expansion.

Some states did not expand Medicaid. The authors argue that analyses focused only on the difference between expansion and non-expansion states miss important parts of the ACA’s overall impact.

The paper shows the ACA affected both expansion and non-expansion states. Medicaid expansion states saw large increases in Medicaid coverage. But non-expansion states also experienced meaningful coverage gains through the Marketplace, along with substantial reductions in uninsured rates compared with pre-ACA levels.

The timing of coverage changes also matters.

The authors identify a weakening relationship after 2021 between increases in public coverage and decreases in uninsured rates, a period that coincided with changes to Medicaid eligibility rules during the COVID-19 pandemic and enhanced Marketplace tax credits under the American Rescue Plan Act. Their results suggest more generous subsidies and eligibility rules may have increased public coverage in ways that did not always produce proportional reductions in the uninsured rate.

If the goal is to reduce the number of uninsured people as efficiently as possible, the authors find that policies targeted at low-income populations are likely to produce larger reductions per public dollar spent. They point specifically to expanding coverage among low-income adults in non-expansion states as a more efficient approach than subsidizing coverage for higher-income groups.

Conversely, the paper suggests that subsidies aimed at households above 250% of the federal poverty level are less efficient at reducing uninsured rates, because a larger share of public coverage gains among those groups appears to come from people moving out of employer-sponsored insurance.

The authors set the efficiency question against a clear gain in enrollment.

“The ACA dramatically expanded publicly supported insurance coverage across all states,” the authors conclude.

—This article originally appeared on the Harris website.

UChicago psychology study points to new potential for treating eating disorders

Sarah Steimer — 08/12/2026 - 02:11pm

Individuals with anorexia nervosa restrict food intake, sometimes to the point of starvation. And yet, a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience finds the cognitive machinery they use to make decisions about what to eat is remarkably similar to that of healthy eaters.

Instead, the difference lies in the brain regions that supply evidence to the decision, the University of Chicago researchers found. Participants without anorexia showed hippocampal activation as they weighed food choices, whereas those with anorexia recruited the striatum too.

The findings suggest that those with anorexia rely on different inputs that lead to restrictive food choices, rather than a maladaptive decision process per se. UChicago Asst. Prof. Akram Bakkour, who was on the research team, explained the significance of the brain regions and said the findings could help target new eating disorder interventions.

“The hippocampus is at the center of this flexible memory system,” Bakkour said. “We think about episodic memory as being very flexible, and it allows us to travel back in time, but we can also think about the future. It’s important for planning. The striatum, on the other hand, really is at the heart of a pretty inflexible memory system. It’s been implicated in habit learning, for example. It helps us learn habits, but also to sustain habits over time.”

To separate valuation from other aspects of decision-making, the research team had participants make food choices and complete a perceptual decision-making task, in which they judged the predominant color in a display of flickering dots.

This allowed the researchers to test whether any differences in the decision process were specific to food or reflected broader alterations in how decisions are made. They combined computational modeling that captures both choices and reaction times simultaneously with fMRI to examine the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of food choice.

Consistent with prior research, patients with anorexia consistently chose low-fat foods and avoided high-fat foods, whereas healthy controls neither preferred nor avoided fatty foods. But once those preference differences were accounted for, the decision-making process itself looked the same across groups. Both groups were faster and more accurate on easier decisions, and the model fit both groups’ behavior equally well, with no differences in key parameters such as the rate of evidence accumulation or the amount of evidence required to commit to a choice.

Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, the findings indicate that anorexia does not involve a breakdown in the cognitive process of deliberation for either food or non-food decisions. Instead, these results shift the focus to the input to the decision process, or the valuation stage, that leads individuals to choose one food over another.

Where the groups did diverge was in the brain. The fMRI results showed greater hippocampal activation in the control group during food choice deliberation, specifically as decision time increased, compared with perceptual decisions.

Patients with anorexia showed a similar hippocampal effect but additionally recruited the striatum. The researchers interpret the results to suggest that individuals with anorexia recruit different neural systems to compute and generate internal evidence as inputs to the decision process.

Bakkour said this means the source of evidence for decision-making in anorexia may be drawn from a more rigid system, whereas healthy individuals draw on a more flexible one. The direction of causality is still unknown, and it remains unclear whether striatal involvement is a cause or consequence of the disorder.

The team will next explore the attributes that contribute most strongly to choice and valuation between patients with anorexia and those without. But as Bakkour and his colleagues continue to probe the behavioral decision-making angle behind the disorder, they may open new treatment opportunities.

“That might give us some hope that maybe we can move things around,” Bakkour said. “If we can just tip the balance a little bit more toward the hippocampus in the patients, maybe we would normalize decisions.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is available at 1-866-662-1235. UChicago students can reach Student Wellness at 773-702-3625.

—This article originally appeared on the Social Sciences Division website.

Senior theses put UChicago students' economics training to work on messy reality

Kevin McKeough — 08/11/2026 - 09:53am

Immigration. The media and elections. Commodity prices and war.

These subjects are front-page news almost daily. They’re also among the widely varied topics that were investigated this past year by students in the Undergraduate Honors Workshop in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

During the year-long capstone course, fourth-year students in the undergraduate honors economics program conduct in-depth research on a topic of their choosing and write a thesis paper about it, guided by faculty and input from their fellow students in the workshop.

“It’s their first foray into research, into creation of knowledge,” said Senior Instructional Prof. Victor Lima, AM’96, PhD’00, the co-director of undergraduate studies and master’s programs in economics. “The honors variant of the standard economics track equips students with the tools and topical knowledge necessary to arrive at the honors workshop ready to pursue research into a topic of their choice.”

The range of these inquiries is wide. The 26 theses from this year’s workshop spanned public transit in national parks, the 2016 Olympics and Rio de Janeiro’s labor market, online collectibles auctions and vacation rentals in Hawaii.

“The breadth is incredible,” Lima said. “Here, there’s a philosophy that economics is a set of tools and that set of tools is applicable to anything people do. This department has a history of taking these tools and applying them to questions of broad interest to social scientists.”

That range extends to the faculty advisor that each student seeks to coach them in the research process. The advisor can be an economist in any of the University’s colleges and schools, such as the business, law and medical schools, and the crime and poverty labs.

For some students, their thesis paper will become part of their application for Ph.D. programs. Lima said that in recent years, multiple honors economics graduates have been admitted to each of the top five doctoral programs in economics in the country, with one cohort making up a third of an entering class at Harvard University.

What’s more, “students report back that they feel well prepared and ready to engage when they arrive at their Ph.D. programs.”

Other students go on to work in consulting or tech.

“A lot of the really good private sector jobs that students take place a premium on problem-solving and the ability to analyze questions,” Lima said.

“The first step in all these journeys is taking the honors workshop, where they learn how to take this ideal world we put on blackboards and put that ideal work into the messy, complicated, roundabout real world we encounter.”

Staying on track to study emigration and birth rates

Ben Miele, AB’26, credits his advisor Yana Gallen, AB’09, with literally keeping his research on the right track—or rather, tracks. For his thesis, Miele investigated the effect emigration from Mexico to the United States had on Mexico’s birth rate, drawing on Mexican government migration and birth rate data.

In addition, his calculations incorporated municipalities’ nearness to sections of railroad track whose top allowable speeds were slow enough that migrants could jump on board trains there and ride them into the U.S.

Using the rail data eliminated potential factors on birth rate other than migration.

“You estimate the effect of proximity to those sections of rail on emigration rates, and under certain assumptions, using fancy linear algebra, you can estimate the causal effect of migration on fertility,” Miele explained.

He added that he’d wanted to focus on rail travel for a long time, but that Gallen had helped him figure out the details of his work. Gallen is an assistant professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and an alumna of the Honors Workshop herself.

“It’s an incredible privilege to have someone as smart as she is look at your work and give you feedback about it,” Miele said.

His thesis considers the period from 2000-2020, when emigration from Mexico to the U.S. increased dramatically. His analysis found that on average, 0.5 fewer births occur annually in a Mexican municipality for each local household with an emigrant in the U.S.

“The idea is, if someone leaves Chicago and goes to the United Kingdom, there would be one-half fewer births in Chicago,” Miele said. However, in some subsets of his research, he found a positive correlation between emigration and birth rates.

In the second part of his thesis, Miele assesses factors that might explain latter results, using data from the Mexican Migration Project, a collaboration between Brown University and El Colegio de Mexico. He looked at unmarried women’s rates of birth and marriage and births among couples that didn’t emigrate.

He found no effects of emigration on unmarried women, but that emigration corresponded to a decrease in birth rates among married couples. However, Miele also found increased emigration was linked with increased birth rates among financially poorer-than-average couples.

Miele is going to work for a consulting firm in the Bay Area after leaving Hyde Park. He said being in the workshop was “a tremendous amount of fun.”

Considering an airwaves auction’s civic consequences

Fittingly for a project centered around broadcasting, Vera Chaudhry, AB’26, got the idea for her thesis from a podcast. After listening to an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that discussed market demand for the broadcast spectrum of the airwaves last fall, she became fascinated with the topic.

That fascination led Chaudhry to explore whether a U.S. government auction of broadcast frequencies in 2016 led to closure of television stations that provided local news programming, and if in turn the stations going dark was followed by a decline in voter participation in their broadcast areas. As she discusses in her thesis, the federal government has regulated the use of broadcast airwaves, which are a public resource, to varying degrees and in varying ways ever since the advent of radio in the early 20th century.

The government has auctioned frequencies on the broadcast spectrum for commercial use since 1994, Chaudhry said. Responding to increased demand for use in wireless communications, the 2016 auction was noteworthy for allowing owners of some existing stations to sell their station’s bandwidth in addition to the established practice of businesses buying the use of as-yet unallocated airwave frequencies.

A subset of stations at the far end of the spectrum were even required to sell their wavelengths and either move to another channel or close.

Chaudhry drew on Federal Communications Commission records and data from the auction to determine which stations closed due to selling their frequencies, and which closed stations had provided news programming. She then looked at data from an MIT lab that studies elections and U.S. census data to compare levels of voter participation in areas with those closed stations in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

Chaudhry’s analysis of this data found the stations required to sell their wavelengths were 16.2% more likely to close due to the auction than the stations with the option of selling their share of the broadcast spectrum. She also found that voter turnout in affected areas decreased by 0.83 percentage points in 2020 compared to the 2016 election and by 1.26 percentage points from the 2016 to 2018 elections.

Chaudhry already had an interest in the intersection of markets and public resources prior to beginning her research. It first was piqued by a class on crony capitalism she took as a third-year taught by Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, in the Chicago Booth School of Business.

“It was the first time I started thinking about some of these questions,” she recalled. “I was pretty inspired.”

She enlisted Zingales as her thesis advisor, and he helped guide her research process, even connecting her with journalists and scholars who had covered and studied the broadcast airwaves and the spectrum auction.

In addition to developing research skills, the Honors Workshop often nurtures strong camaraderie among the students. Chaudhry is among the students who exemplify this aspect of the program—Miele even includes her among a handful of students he cites for contributing to the development of his thesis.

“The economics thesis workshop is very much student-led. Students present their ideas and their papers and their work throughout the year. That was a part of the seminar that I really enjoyed,” Chaudhry said.

Measuring mitigators of conflict, with a Nobelist’s mentoring

Anderson Hu, AB/SB’26, observed that “conflict doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There has to be some sort of shock” that prompts it, and the resulting devastation that war and political violence cause.

Hu’s research examined recent civil conflict in Africa, and how much state capacity could prevent or diminish conflict by offsetting the shocks that cause it. Specifically, Hu considered both state administrative capacity—the ability to provide public goods and services—and coercive capacity, the use of force via police and the military to impose order.

To assess capacity, Hu took data on 24 countries from the Afrobarometer, a research network that measures public opinion on economics and government in dozens of African nations, using survey results from 2014 to 2024.

To derive conflict incidence and fatalities, he relied on Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a non-profit organization that monitors conflict worldwide. He chose commodity price changes as a representative economic shock that could lead to conflict, which he obtained from an International Monetary Fund dataset.

Hu’s analysis of this data found that greater administrative capacity could lessen conflict by reducing the negative effects of commodity price shocks. However, “in general, coercive capacity doesn’t seem to be that significant, which is a bit surprising,” Hu said.

Hu’s thesis advisor was James A. Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at Harris and the Department of Political Science. A recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics, Robinson is among numerous Nobel faculty who have served as an Honors Workshop advisor over the years.

At the suggestion of one of his TAs, Hu had begun working for Robinson as a research assistant in the fall of 2024, shortly before the Nobel award was announced.

“It was very cool to wake up to one morning,” Hu said.

Having an established relationship made it easier to ask Robinson to be his thesis advisor, even if he was a little nervous about his question being “salient and interesting enough to be worth his time.”

But Robinson eagerly suggested research papers for Hu to read and discussed with him how to interpret the results of his data synthesis.

“What perspective to take when it comes to numbers, the attenuating effect of state capacity is something he helped me develop,” Hu said. “A large part of my thesis was shaped by meeting with him.”

Hu said his experience with Robinson and the workshop overall showed that “the University is very rigorous, it’s very intense, and that results in a very important research output.

“It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. There’s a high standard of what research ought to look like, a high standard of the quality of research.”

—This article originally appeared on the College website.

Researchers discover cleaner route to purifying rare earth elements

Sarah C.P. Williams — 08/10/2026 - 10:34pm

Rare earth elements such as lanthanum, neodymium and dysprosium are used to build the electric motor in your car, the LED lights in your house and the MRI machine at your doctor’s office.

But first, they have to be mined and separated from each other. Historically, that purification has been a costly, difficult process, relying on huge amounts of toxic chemicals.

Now, researchers in the lab of Assoc. Prof. Chong Liu at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), working with colleagues at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, have discovered a cleaner method to separate rare earth elements from each other.

The new approach relies on a layered form of manganese oxide—a mineral material with the right size layers to allow ions to slip in and out and to differentiate rare earth elements.

“This is the first time that people have used electrochemical intercalation and harnessed the structural characteristics to separate similar lanthanides, which are intrinsically very hard to separate,” said Liu, senior author of the new study, which published in Nature Chemical Engineering. “What’s also valuable is that we provided a lot of new understanding of how rare earth ions are interacting with this material and how we can manipulate it to better selectivity.”

“This kind of separation is competitive with other rare earth separation methods, but it’s done in water, without organic solvents,” said George Schatz, professor of chemistry at Northwestern and a co-author of the study. “That’s a difference that could actually matter at manufacturing scale.”

Squeezing elements through channels

The 17 rare earth elements—including the 15 lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium—rarely occur alone. They’re almost always mined together and chemically they’re nearly identical, with only tiny differences in ion size and acidity differentiating each one. Pulling them apart typically requires custom-built molecules and large amounts of acid, which is used to strip each element off those molecules.

“Rare earths always come mixed together, whether they’re in an ore or in a waste stream, and separating them from each other is a second, very challenging step even after you’ve pulled them away from everything else,” said UChicago PME graduate student Jiadong Liu, a co-first author of the new paper.

Chong Liu and her colleagues knew that one of the differences between rare earth ions was the size of the water shell surrounding each one when they are dissolved in solution. Lighter rare earths like lanthanum have a larger first water shell, while heavier rare earths like dysprosium have a smaller first shell.

Taking advantage of that size difference, Chong Liu’s group engineered manganese oxide so that the gaps between its stacked layers were only a few water molecules wide. Then, they squeezed raw mixtures of rare earth elements inside.

The approach divided the elements into two groups. Heavier lanthanides with smaller water shells stuck in the channels more tightly. Lighter lanthanides with larger shells pushed the layers apart, loosening their grip.

To confirm what was happening at a molecular level, the UChicago PME team collaborated with Schatz’s group at Northwestern to run quantum mechanical simulations using a method called density functional theory, which predicts how atoms arrange themselves and interact based on the underlying physics. They also worked with Argonne scientists to obtain experimental X-ray data.

“It was incredibly rewarding to see how closely our density functional theory calculations matched the synchrotron X-ray measurements,” said co-first author Woo Cheol Jeon, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher in Schatz’s lab at Northwestern. “The calculations let us see, atom by atom, how each rare earth element arranges its hydration shell inside the confined channel, which experiments couldn’t resolve directly.”

Fine-tuning the purification

While the new process separated the heaviest and lightest rare earths, some of the most useful elements still behaved too similarly to separate. To fine-tune the purification so that it could differentiate similar pairs of rare earth elements, the research team used an electric current and added magnesium ions.

The magnesium acted as a scaffold, holding the manganese oxide channels to their designed spacing, even when rare earth elements tried to expand it—an effect called pinning. Now, rare earth ions showed differences in binding to the layered material even when they were extremely similar.

“Even elements that behave almost identically will still try to expand the material to make room for their water molecules,” said Siqi Zou, PhD'24, co-first author of the study and former UChicago PME graduate student. “By pinning the channel so it can’t expand at all, we forced that small difference in behavior to become a much bigger difference in how strongly each element binds.”

With the addition of magnesium, the enrichment of neodymium over lanthanum jumped from a 1.6-fold difference to a 5.4-fold difference. After two cycles of purification, researchers could get a neodymium sample that was 97% pure. Similar improvements were seen for other rare earth elements.

A cleaner future

The new purification method could ultimately point toward different ways of thinking about where rare earth processing happens, the researchers said.

“Right now, rare earth ores get mined all over the world, but almost all of them end up being sent overseas for processing,” said Schatz, co-author of the study. “A method like this, that just uses water and electricity instead of organic solvents, is the kind of technology that could actually change how and where that processing gets done.”

The method isn’t yet ready to be scaled up to replace industrial purification. Still, it points to a broader design principle: tuning a channel’s width can determine which ions a material prefers, even for ions that differ by a fraction of an angstrom.

Chong Liu’s group is now testing the approach against more of the 15 lanthanides, while Schatz is refining his computational models, aiming to explain the pinning effect more quantitatively. He is also using the same modeling approach developed for this work to study other materials.

Citation: “Pinning Angstrom-size solid ionic channel for the separation of rare earth elements,” Zou et al, Nature Chemical Engineering, July 21, 2026, DOI: 10.1038/s44286-026-00418-8

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

Space travel doesn’t affect the strength of heart muscle cells, study finds

Matt Wood — 08/07/2026 - 03:58pm

It’s common to see images of astronauts on the International Space Station exercising, running on special treadmills and pedaling cycles designed for tight quarters.

Besides breaking the monotony of long missions, these workouts are important because astronauts who spend an extended amount of time in space lose muscle mass and strength, since they don’t have to deal with gravity to move their bodies and push, pull or lift things.

The effects of zero gravity on the body’s most important muscle—the heart—are less clear, but new research from the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska shows encouraging signs that heart muscle cells aren’t negatively affected by space travel.

The researchers analyzed heart cells from five mice that spent 38.5 days on the space station, looking specifically at their sarcomeres, the molecular motors inside the cells that make the heart contract. The contracting force of these motors in mice from the space station was just as strong as those in control mice that stayed on the ground.

Molecular testing also showed no major differences in the proteins that made up the sarcomere between the space mice and their earthbound controls, suggesting that heart cells would continue functioning well during a long trip to space. This is promising news as NASA considers longer missions back to the moon and potentially to Mars.

“There are a lot of things in common between cardiac and skeletal muscle, so we thought that we would see some decrease in heart function from space travel,” said UChicago Assoc. Prof. Jonathan Kirk, a co-senior author of the paper, which was published in the journal npj Microgravity. “But in the end, we’re pretty happy that this is the result we found. It doesn’t give us something else to dig into scientifically, but it’s obviously wonderful news for astronauts in the space program that the heart is going to be okay in space.”

An out-of-this-world offer

Kirk’s lab studies cardiovascular disease, particularly what affects the heart’s ability to function as a mechanical pump to circulate blood. His team has developed a wide variety of tests to study heart function in frozen tissues, giving them more flexibility to study samples after the fact, perhaps collected for a different purpose, without having to rely on fresh tissue collected on the spot.

In August 2023, Kirk was giving a presentation at the University of Nebraska, which included some Star Wars references to make it more relatable to the audience. After the talk, Pooneh Bagher, an associate professor of cellular and integrative physiology at Nebraska and co-senior author of the new paper, approached him with a proposition: How would he like to study mice from space?

She had access to frozen heart tissue from mice that had been on the space station, left over from a project by scientists at Baylor University.

“I said, ‘Absolutely, that sounds awesome,’” Kirk said. “It was a perfect fit, and that’s exactly why we go to seminars and have in-person conversations with our peers.”

Science from a new angle

Even though this study used a small sample size of mice that had been in space for a relatively short period of human time, Kirk said it’s still extremely useful because mice have accelerated lifespans.

Their hearts beat up to 600 times a minute—compared to the human range of 60 to 100 beats per minute—so 38.5 days in space for a mouse is more like 7.5 to 10 months for a human heart.

“If there’s going to be a problem with the heart, you’re going to see it in the sarcomeres first. So, the nice thing about this is that with the biophysical assays of how this little engine inside the heart works, we are able to gauge very early, before a person starts to feel sick or a mouse looks sick, whether or not there was something at the molecular level starting to go wrong,” Kirk said.

The researchers did see some traces of inflammation in the heart cells, and Kirk said they would like to study mice that had been in space longer to see if that increases over time. They would also like to study tissues that were collected while on the space station instead of from animals that returned to Earth, to potentially rule out the effects of stress from the trip back home.

As someone who drops Star Wars references into his academic presentations, Kirk said the appeal of studying the effects of space travel on biology is irresistible.

“Space science is fascinating because it lets you look at science from a totally new angle. Everything is different, and therefore it’s a tool to understand our biological system under entirely new conditions from anything else we can do in the lab,” he said.

“Sometimes you find something that opens a whole new area of research, and sometimes you just confirm that, yeah, astronauts will be fine. Let’s go to Mars.”

The study, “Space travel does not significantly impact cardiac sarcomere function but does induce immune-related proteomic changes,” was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and NASA. Additional authors include Henry M. Gong, Hana K. Pak and Ahmed Zied from UChicago; Christine E. Delligatti from Johns Hopkins University; Ray Mitchell from Nebraska; Binu Tharakan from Morehouse School of Medicine; and Travis W. Hein and David C. Zawieja from Texas A&M University.

—This article originally appeared on the Biological Sciences Division website.

With real artifacts, students piece together the ancient past

Colin Terrill — 08/07/2026 - 10:15am

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

Chances are that you’ve used something made of ceramic today. Maybe it was sipping your morning coffee from the mug you pulled from the cabinet or hitting the brakes on your car during your evening commute.

But how can something so simple give us a glimpse into past civilizations? In the basement of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) around real ancient artifacts—some as old as 5,000 years—students in the “Ceramic Analysis in Archaeology” course at the University of Chicago are looking back in time with their work.

Each week in the Spring Quarter, students learned from veteran archaeologist Prof. Derek Kennet about a different era or technique of pottery-making before going hands-on with everything from fragments to nearly intact pieces.

One class had students inspect samples before drawing them like an archeologist would do in the field, considering details such as the materials used, the colors and design details and even the surface texture before and after glazing.

Naomi Elkin, a second-year College student, is one of two undergraduates in the ceramics course, learning alongside graduate students and Ph.D. candidates.

“Taking a class inside ISAC and engaging with artifacts from around the world is a dream,” said Elkin, who is among the first archaeology majors at UChicago. “Encounters with even the smallest of fragments are capable of providing a wealth of information about their story.”

The goal of the course, said Kennet, is to teach someone with no experience with pottery to think like an archaeologist. With expertise in the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding regions, Kennet argues that our understanding of history is based on the things left behind by humans–and he’s quick to point out that ceramic artifacts are a near-perfect tool for investigating the past.

“Just like today, everybody had some sort of ceramic in their homes,” he said. "They are one of the best sources of evidence left to archaeologists because they can tell us about many of the things people did in ancient societies—eating, cooking, storage and trade.”

A collaborative atmosphere

Elkin is one of just two undergraduate students taking the course with the rest of the ranks being filled out by graduate students and Ph.D. candidates. Kennet believes that this type of collaboration is something that is special about UChicago.

“The equality of students here—from undergraduates to those working towards advanced degrees—is amazing,” he said. “They are all very ambitious, engaged and willing to not only learn for themselves but help others along the way.”

Elkin agrees, believing that this only enhances the experience for them in the class.

“Being in a classroom setting with students further along in their academic careers has provided us with a unique opportunity,” she said. "We've been able to gain plenty of helpful pointers during the hands-on exercises, and hearing about their experience in the field has been a real privilege.”

The big picture from small objects

ISAC has more than 350,000 artifacts to study, offering a glimpse into the daily lives of the past. While being able to literally pick up and draw pieces of history is a fun exercise, the aim of the class is to reach a much bigger goal than that.

“You’ll never find a human society in the past, present or future that you could ask where they came from and be met with a shrug and a ‘we don’t know,’” said Kennet. “There is always a story. Even the tiniest of fragments can help us tell whether that story is true or whether it’s just one of the thousands of myths storytellers have come up with to creatively explain the past.”

The quest of being able to explain the past is one of the things that excites Elkin so much.

She said holding the artifacts doesn't guarantee a full understanding of the worlds they came from, adding that this will also be true when future archaeologists study us. That imperfection is part of the appeal. Elkin said she'll make mistakes as she learns, but she finds a kind of beauty in it—similar to that she sees in the failed pieces she studies.

“I love when we get to handle wasters because we get to learn from the same imperfections that the vessel's creator did,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing that I find links us very strongly to the past. We come from long traditions of making mistakes and learning lessons from them.”

—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago College website.

Engineered gut bacteria show promise against pancreatic cancer

Chandrika Abburi — 08/05/2026 - 10:30am

Cancer immunotherapies have transformed treatment for many cancers, but pancreatic cancer remains especially difficult to treat. One major reason is that pancreatic tumors are particularly good at preventing the body’s natural immune cells from mounting a strong attack.

Researchers at the University of Chicago report a promising new strategy to overcome this barrier using an engineered version of Bifidobacterium longum, a probiotic bacterium naturally found in the gut, to deliver an immune-stimulating therapy directly inside tumors.

In tests with mice, the treatment successfully suppressed pancreatic tumor growth by selectively activating cancer-fighting T cells. The effects were further enhanced when combined with chemotherapy, radiotherapy or immunotherapy.

The study, published July 23 in Science Advances, offers a potentially powerful approach for improving treatment response in pancreatic cancer. It feeds into a growing “bugs as drugs” strategy, in which engineered probiotic bacteria could provide a new way to deliver immune therapies directly into hard-to-treat tumors, while limiting side effects elsewhere in the body.

A novel bacterial delivery strategy

“A big unmet medical need has been pancreatic cancer, and so that was going to be our mountain to climb,” said Ralph Weichselbaum, the Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of Radiation and Cellular Oncology at UChicago.

The new therapy, called BifidoSumIL-2, is designed to release a modified form of interleukin-2 (IL-2) inside tumors.

IL-2 is a powerful immune molecule that activates T cells, which help the body fight cancer. However, traditional IL-2 therapy can cause harmful side effects, and may also activate immune cells that suppress the antitumor response.

To address this, the team created SumIL-2, an engineered version of IL-2 designed to more selectively stimulate cancer-fighting T cells while limiting activation of regulatory T cells.

Next, by placing SumIL-2 inside Bifidobacterium longum, the researchers aimed to concentrate the treatment directly within tumors.

Bifidobacterium was an attractive delivery vehicle for two reasons. First, it is generally recognized as a safe, off-the-shelf probiotic—commonly found in yogurt.

Second, it thrives in low-oxygen environments, a common feature of many solid tumors, including pancreatic tumors. Healthy tissues generally have higher oxygen levels, making them less favorable for bacterial growth.

“Bifidobacterium is an obligate anaerobe, so it doesn’t grow in the presence of oxygen,” said study co-author Mark Mimee, assistant professor of microbiology at UChicago. This means that after they are injected, the bacteria are cleared away from oxygen-rich healthy tissues but can become active in the low-oxygen regions of tumors.

This tumor-seeking behavior allows the bacteria to act like microscopic drug factories. Essentially, these little factories produce the SumIL-2 only on the tumor site where the drug is needed.

Enhanced effects with combination therapy

In animal models, the researchers found that BifidoSumIL-2 selectively accumulated in tumors, activated immune responses, and slowed pancreatic tumor growth. The treatment also helped reshape the tumor microenvironment by increasing the activity of cancer-fighting CD8+ T cells.

The therapy became even more effective when combined with standard cancer treatments. Pairing BifidoSumIL-2 with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy further improved tumor control and survival compared with single treatments alone.

“This combination potential is one of the study’s most important findings; BifidoSumIL-2 not only works by itself—it works with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy," Weichselbaum said.

Although the results are promising, BifidoSumIL-2 has not yet been tested in people. Future studies will need to evaluate long-term safety, possible off-target effects, durability of the immune response, and whether the bacteria can be delivered orally rather than by injection.

Researchers are also interested in combining this approach with newer pancreatic cancer therapies, including KRAS inhibitors.

The work required expertise across multiple fields, from microbiology and synthetic biology to oncology and immunology.

“This was a highly interdisciplinary effort,” said Mimee. “We had to bring together people who understand bacteria, people who understand tumors, and people who understand the immune system to make something like this possible.”

Additional authors include Jaehyun Lee, Kaiting Yang, Christina Nowicki, Wei Liu, Emile Naccasha and Hua Liang from UChicago; Zhichen Sun from the University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas; and Yang-Xin Fu from the Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

UChicago Medicine and the Biological Sciences Division continue to be at the forefront of cancer care and research. In April 2027, UChicago Medicine will open the AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion, Chicago’s first freestanding cancer pavilion, to bring advanced diagnostics, innovative treatments, translational discoveries, and comprehensive support to patients and the community.

Citation: “Engineered probiotic Bifidobacterium for tumor-targeted pancreatic cancer therapy.” Lee et al, Science Advances, July 23, 2026.

Funding: Ludwig Foundation, National Institutes of Health.

Joel Snyder, pioneer of the study and practice of photography, 1940-2026

Rivky Mondal — 08/05/2026 - 09:13am

Joel Snyder, among the first scholars in the United States hired to teach the history of photography, died on June 5. He was 86.

Snyder, a professor emeritus in the Department of Art History, joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1969 and, for over five decades, helped establish a field of study at a moment when photography was still peripheral to art history.

Snyder’s research ranged across the history and theory of photography, keeping focus on the 19th-century rise of commercial photography in the United States and Europe. His scholarship illuminated the ways photography developed in dialogue with painting and sculpture.

A professional photographer whose work is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Snyder, SB’61, urged all scholars of the medium to understand how a work was made in order to interpret it.

Colleagues and students remember Snyder not simply for what he studied but for his attention to the ill-defined relationship between idea and practice, the camera and the eye behind it.

“He was our department’s uncompromising intellectual compass,” recalled Christine Mehring, Mary L. Block Professor of Art History and former department chair. “His combination of connoisseurial and technical expertise in photographic media with an understanding of their hermeneutic potentials were pathbreaking for our discipline.”

Photography as an intellectual problem

Synder helped transform the study of photography by refusing to accept it as distinct from the pantheon of the arts.

“Perhaps his most radical provocation was that photography, despite its technological underpinnings, does not produce pictures that we ought to regard as categorically distinct from other kinds of pictures,” said mentee Carl Fuldner, PhD’18, assistant instructional professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.

Snyder contested assumptions that photographs were neutral records of the world. In the landmark essay “Territorial Photographs,” Snyder examines 19th-century landscape photography to show how images presented the American West as tamable land open to settler conquest. His analysis of the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan reveals how photographs participated in projects of territorial mapping, scientific knowledge and nationalist expansion.

As Prof. W.J.T. Mitchell writes in a remembrance in Critical Inquiry, where Snyder was an editor and contributor for about forty years, this habit of looking again and looking harder was fundamental to Snyder’s intellectual character.

“It is as if Joel’s basic instinct in front of an interesting visual image—whether painting, photography, sculpture, shadow, reflection, or view from the window—was to say: ‘wake up!’”

Theory together with practice

Snyder’s scholarship combined deep knowledge of art history with firsthand experience as a photographer and maker.

As a professional photographer, Synder operated a Chicago studio, produced original documentary work, and collaborated with institutions including the Smithsonian. He also participated in projects ranging from historical photographic reconstructions to film photography—most famously on the sets of Star Wars and the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It (1992), where Snyder took pictures of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt used in the film to mark the passing of time.

In 1965, Snyder co-founded Chicago Albumen Works with Doug and Dorothy Munson. The organization became one of the nation’s foremost studios for the restoration and reproduction of historical photographs.

Snyder’s technical expertise earned international recognition. Working from original negatives by Eugène Atget, he produced albumen prints for a Museum of Modern Art portfolio that curator John Szarkowski praised for representing Atget’s work “with great sensitivity and fidelity.”

Snyder was connected to the Smart Museum of Art from its earliest days, serving as the unofficial photographer of its opening and becoming a collaborator, curator, advisor, lender and donor over subsequent decades. His exhibitions—including the groundbreaking 1976 exhibition The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876 and the 2006 exhibition One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan—helped make photography a central area of inquiry in the museum.

Within the Department of Art History, Snyder served multiple terms as chair and played a pivotal role in shaping the department’s direction. His influence lives on through the Joel Snyder Research Fund, which supports faculty and graduate student research, and through the Joel Snyder Materials Collection, established in his honor by the Department of Art History in its Visual Resources Center.

The collection reflects a Snyderian principle: that art should be handled, examined and understood materially as well as intellectually.

Teaching people how to see

Again and again, former students describe Snyder’s greatest gift as teaching them to examine photographic art more carefully.

For Sarah Miller, PhD‘09, independent scholar and current ACLS Fellow, Snyder’s advising style overturned assumptions of prevalent topics and methodologies that had gone unquestioned.

“What unites Snyder’s advisees,” Miller reflected, “is a penchant for starting new projects by asking the question nobody had previously thought to ask or by revisiting what others considered utterly settled knowledge.”

Rather than presume photographs are static objects, Snyder counseled students to work from the ground up to re-open avenues of inquiry.

“I feel Joel lodged permanently in my brain,” as Miller put it, and other mentees echoed.

According to Mitchell, Snyder pushed students and colleagues “into zones of alertness, second looks, double takes, puzzlement, curiosity, irritation, and discovery.”

Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English & Art History and Snyder’s close friend for more than fifty years, reflected on a question Snyder posed that became emblematic of his pedagogy: “Why would you want to say that?”

Britt Salvesen, PhD‘98, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints & Drawings Department, recalled Snyder as a mentor who took endless pleasure in following his students down research paths.

“Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, Joel had strong beliefs that he carried lightly,” she said.

The 2018 “Joelfest” (part-symposium, part-celebration of Snyder’s retirement) drew art critics from across the country to take stock of his momentous career. His students, colleagues and friends continue to carry forward the habits of mind he cultivated: looking closely, questioning assumptions and refusing easy answers.

Snyder was preceded in death by his first wife, Jean Maclean Snyder, the mother of his two sons. He is survived by his wife and long-time partner, Katherine Fischer Taylor, Associate Professor of Art History emerita, and his sons, Jacob Samuel Snyder and his wife Kaoutar and son Dashiell, and Noah Scot Snyder, his wife Julie and son Joshua. A memorial is being planned.

—Adapted from a story originally published by the Division of the Arts & Humanities.

AI-powered robotic labs at UChicago, Argonne receive $20 million NSF grant

Paul Dailing — 08/03/2026 - 09:16am

Tomorrow’s clean energy, advanced manufacturing, healthcare and national defense rely on developing novel, next-generation soft materials.

But creating these new materials—including a range of liquids, polymers, gels, colloids, foams and granular materials—is slow, expensive and largely manual.

A $20 million grant will remove many of these barriers, developing a remotely accessible, robot-operated laboratory where researchers across the United States can design and run experiments without traveling.

Leveraging the expertise of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), UChicago Department of Computer Science and Argonne National Laboratory, the Polymer Laboratory for AI, Robotics, Informatics, and Standards (PoLARIS) will strengthen domestic supply chains, reduce dependence on foreign materials, and help American companies compete globally in industries worth over $200 billion annually.

“PoLARIS is designed to make advanced polymer research faster, more accessible, and more reproducible. It will connect AI, robotics, specialized instruments, and data infrastructure into a cloud laboratory that researchers can access remotely,” said PoLARIS co-principal investigator Asst. Prof. Jie Xu, co-lead of Polybot Lab, a research group that spans UChicago PME and Argonne’s Nanoscience and Technology Division.

“The goal is to allow strong scientific ideas to move forward even when the researchers do not have expensive equipment on their own campus.”

Through cloud interfaces, researchers from universities, industry, government laboratories and under-resourced institutions will design and execute autonomous experiments that PoLARIS will execute at more than 20 stations. These will be spread across five labs at UChicago and Argonne, supported by top-tier researchers from both institutions.

“We are combining robots and AI with deep expertise in soft material and polymer science,” said Xu, who has a joint appointment with Argonne.

Once fully operational, PoLARIS will be capable of running anywhere from 100 to 300 experiments a day.

“PoLARIS is essentially a distributed operating system for scientific discovery. We're connecting instruments across buildings and institutions so they function as a single intelligent laboratory, with AI agents coordinating when and how experiments run,” said co-principal investigator Prof. Ian Foster, co-head of Globus Labs, a research group that spans the UChicago Computer Science Department and Argonne's Data Science and Learning Division.

“The same infrastructure principles that let millions of scientists move data seamlessly through Globus now let them orchestrate physical experiments from anywhere.”

Foster said the team expects to complete end-to-end autonomous experiments for initial science drivers within 18 months. Full user-service launch, where external researchers can submit their own projects, is expected by the end of year two of the grant.

The five facilities running PoLARIS stations will be UChicago’s Hyde Park High-throughput Polymer lab, Soft Matter Characterization Facility, and Materials Preparation and Measurement Laboratory and Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source and Polybot.

“This democratizes access to frontier science and lets good ideas succeed regardless of where they originate,” said Foster, who is also the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science.

Xu and Foster will serve as co-principal investigators along with UChicago PME interim Dean Stuart Rowan and Computer Science Department Asst. Prof. Yuxin Chen.

Chen said the AI behind PoLARIS was designed to look beyond just single experiments, helping users plan longer-term strategies the way a seasoned researcher would.

“A skilled experimentalist plans a whole campaign, not just the next experiment—sometimes running one not for its immediate answer but because it sets up the decisive one later,” he said. “Teaching AI to reason that far ahead, for many users sharing the same instruments and adapting as every result arrives, is what separates a truly intelligent laboratory from a collection of robots.”

Rowan, who is also the Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise, a professor of chemistry and has a staff appointment at Argonne, said the impacts will go far beyond any one institution.

“This is a critical investment at a revolutionary time across all science and engineering,” Rowan said.

“Within the rich research ecosystem UChicago PME and Argonne have built, a major focus is to reinvent how we access the next generation of materials that play such a role in our daily lives. This collaboration with UChicago researchers in computer science has gotten me very excited about the revolutionary advances that PoLARIS will enable not only here but across the U.S.”

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago PME website.

In a quiet UChicago garden, volunteers cultivate food and community

Kayla Davis — 07/30/2026 - 09:25am

In a small on-campus plot lined with benches, trees and a short fence to keep rabbits out, volunteers are busy planting a summer garden. Dill sprouts from one section, carrot tufts peek out from another. Someone kneels at the edge of a bed, patting the soil flat with both hands.

This is the work of Phoenix Farms, a student-run gardening and beekeeping organization, cultivated by volunteers from the wider University of Chicago community.

The registered student organization (RSO) has been quietly growing tomatoes, radishes, cucamelons and flowers between the Smart Museum of Art and the Young Memorial Building for over a decade. Many people who walk past the garden every day probably have no idea it’s there, or that they’re welcome to step in and help.

Faculty, staff and community members have all pitched in before, and the students who run the organization are always looking for more volunteers. The group takes its gardening seriously, but its leaders say the mission is more than just produce.

“It's to provide a space for people in the Chicago community to connect with the way that we grow our food and have some hands-on engagement with the land,” said Phoenix Farms co-president and co-head gardener Mira Tensuan-Eli, also known as the organization’s “Queen Bee.”

Roots in the community

Beyond the plot at the Smart Museum, Phoenix Farms also has a greenhouse on top of the Biological Sciences Learning Center, where seeds are started each spring, and beehives at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn, about a mile from campus.

A branch of the organization grows oyster mushrooms year-round using spent coffee grounds from campus cafés. What gets harvested goes to the students and other volunteers who grew it. There's no formal membership and no fee to participate.

Phoenix Farms began as two separate RSOs—Harper Hives, focused on beekeeping, and Avant Garden, focused on gardening—that merged around 2018. The mushroom-growing branch came later, born out of student curiosity about mycology.

Volunteers participate for a variety of reasons, from a desire to learn something new, to an interest in reigniting a childhood hobby.

“We get a lot of people who are like, ‘I gardened a lot when I was at home and I want to be able to reconnect with that,’” said Tensuan-Eli.

In addition to connecting with the land, Phoenix Farms gives volunteers the opportunity to connect with each other. They’ve hosted make-your-own pickle events, using produce they grew themselves, led foraging trips for volunteers, and enjoyed fresh sourdough at what they call “Brom” (Bread Prom).

Phoenix Farms regularly brings together other clubs for joint events. Their communal “Big Soup” —a tradition involving participants bringing in ingredients to cook a large soup together—in collaboration with the Phoenix Sustainability Initiative and the Environmental Justice Task Force is among the most popular. These partnerships tend to grow organically, shaped by the connections of whoever is leading the organizations at the time.

The bees—and the honey

Though Phoenix Farms’ hives recently relocated from the Charles M. Harper Center roof—giving the bees a break to settle into their new home before producing again—the honey has a fantastic reputation.

The campus linden trees, which bloom in late May and early June, are a big part of why.

“It's well-known that some of the best honey comes from the pollination of the linden trees,” said manager of campus environment Kathleen Golomb. The hives at First Presbyterian are close enough to campus that the bees forage freely across Hyde Park and Woodlawn to find them.

What helps too is the campus environment. UChicago’s campus—a recognized member of the American Public Garden Association since 1997—is dense with flowering trees and shrubs, and the University does not use broadcast herbicides or pesticides anywhere on grounds, only targeted spot treatment in specific cases. For bees, it's ideal foraging territory.

“It's incredibly helpful to our pollinators that they’re not being affected, and the honey is not being affected either,” Golomb said.

When honey production does start up again, Phoenix Farms sells it at student organization fairs on campus and at the Hyde Park Farmers Market.

Lending a hand

In the spring, summer and fall, when things are in bloom, Phoenix Farms’ garden is a quiet green space that anyone can sit in or stop by.

“Whenever people remember that we exist, they’re super happy about it,” said Tensuan-Eli. “‘There’s a garden and bees here?’ And it’s like, yeah. We’re here.”

Volunteer gardening sessions, or work days, happen on weekend mornings once the season kicks off in Spring Quarter—and anyone on campus is welcome, no sign-up or experience needed. To be notified about upcoming work days, added to the mailing list, or kept in the loop on when the bees will be producing, email incoming co-presidents Sadie Foer (sfoer@uchicago.edu) or Aubrey Barb (abarb@uchicago.edu).

—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago Intranet.

IBM, UChicago demonstrate ‘quantum advantage,’ outperforming traditional computers with a quantum computer

07/29/2026 - 04:19pm

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced July 30 a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for “quantum advantage”—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations.

The collaboration said their system had performed computations beyond the reach of leading classical simulation methods, while providing trust that the computation returned accurate results.

In their new paper, the researchers showed that these two goals could be achieved by a novel construction of encoded quantum circuits—one of the largest demonstrations of logical quantum computing to date.

Building trust into quantum results

For years, researchers have used a benchmark known as random circuit sampling, or RCS, to test whether quantum computers could outperform classical systems.

In simple terms, RCS asks a quantum computer to generate patterns so complex that a classical computer cannot efficiently reproduce them.

The challenge has been verification: as the problem becomes harder, it becomes increasingly difficult and then infeasible to prove the quantum computer’s answer is correct, without making strong assumptions about the inner workings of the quantum computer.

In their experiment, researchers addressed this obstacle with a structured alternative to RCS. The team was able to prove that this alternative retains the same hardness criteria as RCS, but crucially, the new structure can be used to detect errors during the computation.

“Verification remains one of the biggest challenges in firmly establishing experimental quantum advantage,” said Bill Fefferman, associate professor of computer science at UChicago and co-author on the paper. “This experiment develops techniques to better characterize the fidelity of hard quantum states under noise, increasing confidence that the quantum computer is solving a computationally hard problem.”

Co-author Soumik Ghosh, a graduate student in Fefferman’s group at UChicago, added: “Beyond strengthening experimental validation, advances in verification have the potential to unlock practical applications for the next generation of quantum computers.”

In one of the world’s largest error correction demonstrations to date, the team successfully executed 70 logical qubits while shielding them from errors. They ran 2,415 logical two-qubit operations and 468 logical “T gates,” both metrics that quantify the complexity of a quantum circuit.

“We are now firmly in the quantum advantage era,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “We have demonstrated a quantum computation beyond the practical reach of classical computers that establishes, with statistical confidence, a lower bound on how faithfully it was executed. This milestone gives scientists, developers and businesses a new foundation for trusting quantum computers as they scale to problems far beyond what we can achieve classically.”

The IBM quantum computer took approximately 15 minutes to accomplish the task; the team showed many leading classical simulation approaches faced prohibitive runtimes.

More information is available at IBM’s site.

—Adapted from a press release first posted by IBM.

How UChicago students staged a wordless play with an Emmy-winning company

Colin Terrill — 07/29/2026 - 01:05pm

As the theater filled with music and sound effects, a dozen performers buzzed on stage operating puppets and displaying imagery on overhead projector screens while others either used silhouettes or themselves on screen to complete the scene.

The sold-out crowd in the University of Chicago’s Theater East was watching the first official performance of Dream Delivery Service, a play guided by Manual Cinema, an Emmy Award-winning production company. Three of the five founders are UChicago alumni, and the company’s distinctive style combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music.

The performance was a joint effort between Manual Cinema and UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) program, as part of its twice-a-year “pro show” course, which gives students hands-on experience with those from the industry. Even still, it was safe to say the surreal, wordless show was a first-time experience for the College performers. This included fourth-year student Nina Maxin, a business economics major who added a TAPS major late into her UChicago tenure. Having already performed in two other TAPS pro shows in the past, Maxin knew how much work would go into the production—but she was “surprised” to learn how deep its roots went at the University.

“Knowing that there are creatively driven alumni like them who have paved their own way devising performances at the intersection of film, puppetry and theater is really inspiring. The nature of their work as inherently collaborative, human to human, is encouraging to me as I head towards graduation,” she said.

The show only took a few months to go from storyboard to stage, but the seeds for the idea were planted at UChicago nearly two decades ago.

From the ‘life of the mind’ to live on stage

Manual Cinema was founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter. The group came from backgrounds in theater, visual arts and live music, but their paths could have been much different if it weren’t for the College.

Kauffman, Dir and Fornace are each alumni of UChicago and got their start in theater just as the TAPS program was being formed. Fornace originally intended to become a biology major but then shifted to English literature because she liked “immersing herself in the life of the literary mind” and she started performing shortly thereafter.

“There was a really robust theater club which was great because people were there to perform while still majoring in biology, economics and neuroscience,” Fornace said referring to her work with University Theater (UT). “But at the end of the day, we would all come together and spend hours and hours each week creating amazing productions.”

The idea that eventually became Manual Cinema came from Miller while working at the now-defunct Redmoon Theater in Chicago. She wanted to use an overhead projector as a major tool in a new piece. Dir, now a playwright but working at the time as a dramaturg, joined the production and they enlisted a local band headed by Kauffman and Vegter to score it for them. A 20-minute short piece came out of the effort, giving birth to the company.

At the start they acted like a newly formed band, performing wherever they could—bars, windows and park district facilities—just to make a name for themselves. Eventually a feature-length work took off which allowed them to tour the country and enter the international touring market, making it a full-time venture for the five.

Their pieces can be seen on television, in movie theaters and even in the newly opened Obama Presidential Center. But there was always a desire to return home.

A Unique Collaboration

Each section of the TAPS pro shows features a different scripted work, with students taught and mentored by local artists. Last fall, that featured a performance of Happy Birthday Mars Rover with Chicago director Helen Young.

When they enroll in a pro show course, each student picks a track to focus on during the production and performance process. Some decide that they want to act, others assist the costume designer or help direct.

Brianna Parry, TAPS production manager, said this year became the perfect time to pair with a group that had such strong ties to the College.

“Honestly, it’s something that we’ve always wanted to do but there was never a company that made sense before,” she said. “The relationship that Manual Cinema has with the University allowed this unique moment in the TAPS landscape to form.”

Within that relationship, Parry noted that Manual Cinema had one advantage that almost no other outside production could have if they were offered a residency at the University.

“The members in Manual ‘speak’ UChicago to a degree that many of our visiting artists don’t because they already know about the student experience,” she said. “They know these students are already overscheduled and overcommitted, but they have the type of mindset that they will always make room for one more thing if they find true interest in it.”

Fornace agreed and jumped at the chance to return to the place that she believes is responsible for her ending up with a career in theater.

“It was wild to be back after almost 20 years and to be talking with students about their thoughts, ideas and concerns as they go through the same educational experience that we did.”

The piece TAPS worked on with Manual Cinema was brand-new and in a style that had never been done before in the history of the program.

This allowed the committee to give students an experience that was completely unique while giving Manual Cinema a type of freedom they hardly are afforded anymore. Fornace said this allowed them to be more experimental while working in the academic setting.

Delivering a dream

Storyboards were offered to students at the first class of the quarter which presented the challenge that was being put in front of them—a work with no words that would require them to use paper puppets and hundreds of slides on projectors to convey a story to each audience member.

Throughout the piece, students would be asked to be in constant motion. Whether they were opening or closing a projector to display the image on the screen, bringing a puppet to life or tossing a prop to one of their castmates across the stage, the process forced individuals to work as one.

“This type of work really required a lot of trust and sense of confidence in College students, especially in working with puppets which most had never experienced before, within just eight short weeks,” Maxin said, adding that the learning curve was steep.

“We just had to keep going, to keep learning from each mistake or altering the choreography to make things a little bit easier to manage together. However, in the end the process became fun and rewarding. Each smooth execution of a sequence felt invigorating.”

True to its title, the piece is a dreamy, hour-long, three-part story that transports the audience to an alien planet, through the ups and downs of a dating app and back in time to a Middle Ages monastery where comical, mischievous characters lurked.

With a critical look at AI and technology, the play’s themes draw inspiration from the works of film director Alfred Hitchcock and television shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror.Each of the five shows, including a preview on Thursday, sold out. Fornace said the process took her back to when she was discovering storytelling for the first time.

“Each crew was working as separate units throughout most of the process, but when the costumes came in and the lights turned on during the last few weeks, everything just blossomed,” she said. “All of this acting and storytelling that I had not seen before all happened at once and it reminded me of when we all started working together for the first time 15 years ago.”

Manual Cinema plans on taking Dream Delivery Service and adapting it into one of the stories that they will perform while on tour. Fornace isn’t sure what will stay and what will be cut,but assured that the version seen in Theater East will be one of a kind.

For TAPS and UChicago, the partnership proved to be a success for all involved–which might lead to other distinctive opportunities in the future.

“We spent such a long time putting the whole production together and I believe that we experienced something truly special,” said Maxin. “I can only hope that future classes get to do something as transformative as this was for me for years to come.

—This story was originally published on the University of Chicago College website.

What to know about cyclospora, the parasite behind this summer’s outbreak

David Zhang — 07/29/2026 - 09:42am

This summer's outbreak of the cyclospora parasite is on track to be the worst on record, with more recorded cases in the past few months than in all last year combined.

Though linked to fresh produce such as iceberg lettuce—prompting recalls of some salad greens, herbs and berries—investigators have struggled to pin down a source. The outbreak has sickened thousands of Americans, often with intense gastrointestinal symptoms.

To better understand cyclospora and its health risks, we asked UChicago Medicine physician Asst. Prof. David Zhang, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease; and the UChicago Medicine Medical Group urgent care medical director, Joseph Newberg*.

What is cyclospora, and how is it different from what most people associate with food poisoning?

Cyclospora is a parasite, not a bacteria or virus.

Unlike norovirus, a stomach virus that spreads easily, cyclosporiasis (the illness resulting from cyclospora infection) isn’t contagious. It comes from eating affected food.

Cyclospora is harder to eradicate than viruses and bacteria, which are more likely to be naturally flushed out by diarrhea.

What are the common symptoms of cyclosporiasis?

After entering the body, cyclospora lodges in the small intestine and causes watery diarrhea and these other symptoms:

Loss of appetite
Abdominal cramping and bloating
Fatigue
Low-grade fever
Increased flatulence

How does public health track an outbreak like this, and what makes cyclospora so hard to trace?

Typically, the lab will report positive results and provide this information to the health department, which will initially conduct detailed interviews with the patients involved. They will ask about travel, food intake, restaurant visits, potlucks etc.

But it’s more difficult to identify the source of infections the longer the incubation period, and with cyclospora, it can be up to two weeks—it can be hard to remember what you ate weeks ago. Beyond that, the food system is very complex and includes many potential areas of contamination, including the farms and distribution networks, the various suppliers and retailers that make tracing this difficult, very laborious. Lastly, multiple outbreaks can happen at the same time from different sources and can stretch public health agencies even further.

However, since we know cyclospora thrives in certain climates and conditions, it is typically a summer illness. Certain vegetation is more likely to be the carrier, so they can usually narrow it down. The later in the outbreak the health department is notified, the greater the chance that the affected foods have made it into our groceries or restaurants, and the higher the numbers climb.

With no confirmed source, what should people do about fresh produce?

With no single food to avoid, it comes down to a few habits. Cooking is the most reliable step, as heating to at least 158 degrees Fahrenheit will kill cyclospora.

Washing alone won’t fully remove the parasite, but it is still important. Wash your produce thoroughly, rubbing items under cold water, using a colander for delicate produce and a scrub brush for root vegetables. Prevent cross-contamination by keeping produce separate from raw meat and cleaning cutting boards, knives and surfaces before and after food prep.

Be aware of recalls issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other health officials: outbreaks have been linked to fresh produce including bagged salads, leafy greens, berries and herbs. And as always with food, keep your hands clean. Scrub with soap and water for at least 20 seconds before preparing food and before eating.

How long does cyclosporiasis last and how is it treated?

Symptoms usually start about two to 14 days after exposure and can persist for several weeks.

Most healthy patients will recover without antibiotics, but cyclosporiasis can sometimes cause complications such as dehydration, reactive arthritis, malnutrition or gallbladder inflammation.

UChicago Medicine can test for cyclospora. Positive results are reported to the public health department to help manage outbreaks.

What should you do if you have symptoms of cyclosporiasis? And when should you see a doctor?

It depends on how severe the diarrhea is. If you’re otherwise healthy and able to keep down fluids and electrolytes, it is best to let your body naturally flush out the cause. Make sure to drink plenty of water or an electrolyte drink to stay hydrated.

If your diarrhea lasts longer than two or three days, or you have more than six bowel movements per day, contact your healthcare provider for further guidance.

Seek medical care if you have severe diarrhea lasting more than two or three days, or if you can’t hold down food or liquids. UChicago Medicine offers walk-in and virtual urgent care across Chicagoland.

If you have recently traveled outside the United States, you should see a doctor. Anyone experiencing lightheadedness, shortness of breath, or weakness when standing should seek medical attention immediately.

Immunocompromised individuals and those with kidney problems face a higher risk of complications and should consult a doctor if diarrhea lasts more than a day or two.

What should you eat and drink if you have symptoms?

Hydration is key. Make sure you’re drinking water and electrolyte solutions to prevent dehydration.

When you do eat, stick to bland foods like white rice and clear soup broth, which are gentle on the body. Avoid heavy, greasy or sugary foods, as they may worsen symptoms.

Eat slowly, as consuming too much too fast will only keep things moving through your system.

You may consider taking Imodium (loperamide) to help slow diarrhea, but do not use it if your stool is bloody or black, or if you have a fever.

*Joseph Newberg, MD, is the Medical Director of Urgent Care for UChicago Medicine Medical Group and a UChicago Medicine Medical Group provider. UChicago Medicine Medical Group comprises UCM Medical Group, Inc., f/k/a UCM Care Network Medical Group, Inc., and UCM Medical Group Sub, LLC f/k/a Primary Healthcare Associates, S.C. UChicago Medicine Medical Group providers are not employees or agents of the University of Chicago Medical Center, the University of Chicago, UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial, UChicago Medicine Medical Group - Homewood, UChicago Medicine Dearborn Station or UChicago Medicine River East.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago Medicine website.

GLP-1 drugs may hold few benefits beyond physical health, study finds

07/28/2026 - 10:45am

GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic have transformed the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, helping millions of patients better control their blood sugar while reducing cardiovascular risk and, for many, promoting substantial weight loss.

But do those health improvements also translate into better mental health, stronger relationships or greater success at work?

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy economist Robert Kaestner and coauthor Cuiping Schiman suggests the answer is more nuanced than popular narratives might imply. Studying adults with diabetes, the researchers found little evidence that taking GLP-1 medications led to measurable changes in mental health, self-rated health, employment or marital status.

“We know these drugs improve health outcomes, and there’s been a great deal of research documenting those benefits,” said Kaestner, a research professor. “What hadn’t really been examined was whether those improvements extended into other parts of people’s lives.”

The question has growing policy significance as insurers and government programs weigh the costs and benefits of expanding access to GLP-1 medications. While the drugs’ medical value is well established, less is known about whether they generate broader social and economic benefits that could strengthen the case for coverage.

To explore that question, Kaestner and Schiman analyzed more than a decade of data from the nationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, focusing on adults with diabetes between 2012 and 2023. Rather than simply comparing people who happened to take GLP-1 medications with those who did not, the researchers followed the same individuals over time, examining whether their circumstances changed after they began taking the drugs.

They looked for changes in several measures of wellbeing, including symptoms of depression and psychological distress, self-rated health, employment and marital status. Initial comparisons suggested GLP-1 users differed from non-users on some measures, including employment and marriage.

But those differences largely disappeared once the researchers tracked the same people over time, suggesting the apparent gaps reflected differences between the people taking the medications rather than changes caused by the drugs themselves.

The researchers reached similar conclusions whether they examined people after about one year of GLP-1 use or over a longer, two-year period. Across both analyses, they found little evidence that the medications produced meaningful changes in the broader outcomes they studied.

That does not mean the drugs have no effects beyond physical health, Kaestner cautioned. Rather, it suggests those effects may be more subtle—or harder to measure—than many people assume.

“We measured outcomes like whether someone became employed or unemployed, whether they got married or divorced, and standard indicators of mental health,” he said. “Those are important measures, but they don’t necessarily capture changes in self-esteem, relationship quality, or other day-to-day experiences.”

The findings also should not be interpreted as diminishing the medications’ medical value. Instead, Kaestner said, they suggest that the most clearly measurable benefits for adults with diabetes remain the ones already established through clinical research: better glycemic control, weight loss and improvements in physical health.

As GLP-1 medications continue to expand beyond diabetes treatment and become increasingly common for weight management, Kaestner believes more research will be needed to understand whether their broader social effects become more apparent in other populations or over longer periods of time.

“This is still a very new area of research,” he said. “As use continues to grow, understanding these broader consequences will become increasingly important for patients, clinicians and policymakers alike.”

—This article originally appeared on the Harris School website.

How AI is starting to explain stock-price moves

Matt Robinson — 07/27/2026 - 12:48pm

To explain the stock market’s reaction to earnings results, investors and other market participants have a standard tool that has been around for decades: the earnings surprise.

This measure, which compares reported earnings per share against analysts’ consensus earnings-per-share forecasts, indicates how much a company beat or missed analyst predictions.

Its intuitive nature has made it the primary go-to for describing post-announcement stock movements, even though the metric alone explains only about 5% of same-day stock moves. Adding in the rest of what researchers have learned over the years pushes that figure only a little higher.

However, new research by Ralph S.J. Koijen and Bradford Levy of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggests that AI can both significantly lift this percentage and help us understand why stock prices move the way that they do. The researchers find that the best AI models explained about 17% of same-day stock moves.

This performance boost was in part attributable to the models “learning” how to predict the moves. AI then recorded its insights into digital notebooks that humans could read and learn from.

Koijen, a distinguished service professor, and Levy, an assistant professor, conducted a live test rather than a simulation using past data. This eliminated the possibility of lookahead bias, which can creep in when a model has access to information that wasn’t known or available for the time period being studied. Their testing involved three frontier models and covered nearly 2,000 earnings announcements made in late 2025 by companies across a range of industries.

The AI models’ approach produced written explanations that could be read and analyzed, suggesting the models seemed to pick up on details in the earnings calls that were not captured solely by the numbers shared.

Some of those details were included in forward guidance given by executives and management commentary, while others were revealed through the way in which speakers discussed results in the call, such as the language used.

Many of the models’ insights were ones that seasoned financial professionals may find intuitive, such as that good news was often already reflected in a stock price. Instead of overreacting to strong results, the models treated those as an expected baseline. Record profits or 20% growth were not enough to move a stock.

Koijen and Levy expect these human-readable explanations can give researchers looking to understand what drives price moves more specific hypotheses to test. And as models advance and become more powerful, the explanations they generate could potentially be applied to smaller, cheaper models with similar results, suggesting a path to scaling these systems at lower cost.

These results are early, the researchers said, adding that most of the variation in stock moves following earnings releases remains unexplained.

So they have launched a competition, sponsored by the trading firm Optiver, and are inviting anyone to submit their own model that predicts how prices respond to earnings-call information. Models can be submitted through explainingmarkets.ai, which contains the contest’s rules.

Koijen said that forecasting these market movements is a “surprisingly challenging task” for people, even those armed with AI.

“Decades of research can explain just 8% of the variation,” he said. “We show that we can lift this to 20%, but there’s still a lot of room to go.”

—This article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth Review website.

New method boosts crop yield and drought resistance using plants’ own genes

Louise Lerner — 07/24/2026 - 10:29am

The way to make a plant grow more may be to take something away.

Trimming a section off a plant gene raised rice harvests up to 25% in new tests by University of Chicago scientists, with better tolerance for drought and heat.

The research builds on a striking finding five years ago, when the group showed that they could insert a gene into plants like rice or potatoes that resulted in a substantial increase in crop yield—but it required using an animal gene in a plant. He and his lab wanted to find a way to create a similar effect, using only genes that come from plants themselves.

The new study, published July 23 in Nature Genetics, lays out the path to do just that. It also reveals a new wrinkle in our understanding of the way that plants regulate their genes.

“My hope is that we are laying a scientific foundation for a new strategy to develop plants that not only offer higher yields, but are resilient to a variety of stresses, from drought to heat to salt,” said He, who is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

The root of the question

He’s lab specializes in understanding the fundamental ways that living things grow. Genetics is extraordinarily complex; three-quarters of a century after the discovery of DNA itself, humans are still untangling the ways that organisms get from DNA to what we see before us.

In 2011, He’s lab made a surprising discovery. They found that RNA—long thought to simply be a middleman between DNA instructions and protein makers—actually had a much more substantial role in which genes get expressed, by placing and removing markers.

That led to the lab’s huge finding in 2021, when the team inserted a common gene from animals known as FTO into plants. This turned out to loosen the RNA-associated reins that restrict plant growth, so plants with this gene grew larger crops and sent out longer roots—making them more resistant to drought.

But He wanted to find a way to do the same thing without inserting a foreign gene, which would be less concerning to consumers worried about genetically modified organisms. Nature often evolves multiple ways to do the same task, so the scientists hoped to find a mechanism in plants themselves that does the same thing.

They did—but it took years of research, and a new wrinkle in our understanding of genetics.

Intrinsic disorder

Virtually all life forms make proteins that carry out the basic functions of cells, such as processing nutrients, carrying signals and removing waste.

But a substantial chunk of the proteins most animals make are called intrinsically disordered regions. Instead of a “typical” protein, which assembles itself into a 3-D structure, these proteins instead exist as flexible segments. At first, scientists thought these segments simply served as links for larger proteins or unimportant tails to proteins, but they have come to understand these intrinsically disordered regions have a much larger and more active role in what happens in a cell.

He and his team encountered these regions during their search for a way to boost growth in plant cells.

Plants don’t have a direct equivalent of the FTO gene found in mammals, but they do have variants of another gene with a similar function, known as ALKBH5; the plant versions are ALKBH9 and ALKBH10.

While trying to understand how these variants worked, the scientists discovered that the intrinsically disordered regions restrict these plant proteins from acting on the packaged DNA in the cell, known as the chromatin.

But if the scientists removed the intrinsically disordered region from the end (known as the C-terminus) of ALKBH9 or 10, they found it instead would spread out around the cell and perform a similar function as the mammal gene FTO—affecting the chromatin and removing the brakes on growth.

The group tested the strategy in rice plants and saw boosts in yield of about 20 to 25%, as well as increased stress resistance.

Removing the C-terminus is a relatively small change. “We show that the growth benefit can be gained by simply expressing the plant’s own ALKBH9 or 10 with deletion of the C-terminus segments,” He said.

“This strategy promoted plant growth and improved rice yield, pointing to a new way of reprogramming chromatin dynamics to boost agricultural productivity using engineered plant proteins” said Liudan Jiang, the first author of the study.

“In principle, we could just perform base-editing of the plant genome to remove the C-terminus of the plant’s intrinsic ALKBH9 or 10,” said He. “That is, we’re not introducing foreign genes, just changing one or a few base pairs in a plant’s existing genome.”

The group is still working to untangle precisely how this change promotes growth and makes the plants so much more resilient to stresses. They are also testing the strategy in other crops, because the ALKBH9 or 10 genes appear in many plants.

Additional authors on the study were Long Zhao, Jiangbo Wei, Bochen Jiang, Yu Xiao, Fan Yang, and Xiaolin Zeng.

Citation: “Intrinsically disordered regions restrain genomic targeting of RNA and histone demethylases in mammals and plants.” Nature Genetics, July 23, 2026.

Funding: The Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation, Gates Foundation Ag One, Harborview Foundation, Unorthodox Philanthropy.

UChicago Prof. Yu Deng receives Fields Medal, highest honor in mathematics

Maureen Searcy — 07/23/2026 - 11:00am

University of Chicago mathematics Prof. Yu Deng has received the Fields Medal for his contributions toward placing the laws of physics on a rigorous mathematical foundation.

The Fields Medal, announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, is awarded every four years to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. In the absence of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, the Fields Medal is regarded as the highest professional honor a mathematician can attain.

“On behalf of the whole University of Chicago community, I offer warm congratulations to Professor Deng. Today he is receiving the highest recognition for the rigor and significance of his contributions to mathematics,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “In his work, we see a scholar who has pursued fundamental questions to great depths and illuminated new understanding in the process. He has solved a problem that puzzled generations of scholars and in so doing, he is a true exemplar of what dedication to knowledge creation can achieve. We are proud of his accomplishments and that he is a member of our community of scholars.”

Deng was honored for addressing one of a famous set of problems laid out more than 125 years ago, at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, by German mathematician and philosopher David Hilbert. These problems have since become benchmarks of progress in the field.

Specifically, Deng and his collaborators cracked a longstanding problem within the overarching effort to mathematically connect the equations governing the motion of gases from the smallest to the largest scales.

The award also recognizes Deng’s research on the equations that govern wave dynamics that laid the foundation for this historic result.

“Yu’s beautiful and original work resolves a fundamental problem in mathematical physics that goes back to Hilbert more than a century ago,” said Frank Calegari, professor and chair of UChicago’s Mathematics Department. “It also introduces powerful new methods that will shape future research. This is a landmark achievement.”

Deng is the 11th current or former UChicago mathematician to become a Fields Medalist.

"This is a great honor for me—an important recognition for my works with collaborators and for the field that I am representing," said Deng.

A pattern of problem-solving

Deng’s mathematical roots run deep. He grew up in Shenzhen, China, where his computer programmer father would take him hiking, giving him little questions in combinatorics—the branch of mathematics focused on counting—to solve along the way.

In his youth, Deng displayed a gift for problem-solving, excelling in both math competitions and tournaments of Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game played with black and white stones on a grid. Deng said he entertained the idea of becoming a professional Go player before devoting himself to academia.

In 2006, at 16 years old, he represented China at the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a gold medal. “At that time, I realized, okay, so maybe I do have some talent in math,” said Deng.

The following year, he was admitted to Peking University, later transferring to MIT, where he became a Putnam Fellow in the 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Deng earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2011, followed by a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2015. He joined UChicago in 2024.

The breakthrough that earned Deng the Fields Medal, however, had unexpected beginnings. While he was spending a semester at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics in 2021, a thought came to him while in a Korean fried chicken stall in Providence, Rhode Island.

Deng wasn’t thinking about a new project, but in a moment of chicken-fueled insight, he hit on an idea: a way to solve complex problems by breaking them into smaller, more manageable pieces. This laid the foundation for his eventual resolution to Hilbert’s sixth problem—a challenge to ground physics in rigorous mathematics.

A way to understand nature

Deng works on analysis of partial differential equations, or PDEs, as a way of understanding nature.

A differential equation describes how something evolves: an ordinary differential equation might describe how a falling object speeds up due to gravity, but a partial differential equation handles questions with more than one dimension, such as how temperature spreads across both space and time.

Deng’s work involves PDEs connected to probability.

“There is a lot of randomness in this world,” he said, “and we need a mathematical way to capture it.”

Prior to turning his attention to Hilbert’s sixth, Deng’s focus was using PDEs to study wave turbulence, looking at how energy spreads through systems of waves, like those found on the surface of the ocean or waves in quantum systems. This work proved to be vital to his award-winning breakthrough.

His goal was to mathematically prove that energy spreads predictably, despite the tendency of waves to influence each other, shaping and changing future activity.

Statistical predictions work by averaging across large numbers to determine what is typical. This can only work if the elements work independently. When waves build relationships with other waves, they are no longer acting alone, and it is not possible to determine how a typical wave behaves; you can’t make predictions if you don’t know what typically happens.

Deng and his collaborator Zaher Hani, a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, accounted for those behavior-changing interactions by constructing a mathematical ledger that could capture every possible pattern.

These patterns range from interactions where waves meet and then continue on their separate ways, to encounters that form such a strong, behavior-affecting relationship that a feedback loop forms.

For extremely short time periods, the most strongly correlated, disruptive interactions were negligible, and the predictability of wave turbulence mathematically held.

However, with more time comes more frequent and complex interactions, and more opportunity to forge shared histories. The team needed a way to prove that the math held over longer periods.

It was in that chicken stall that a thought occurred to Deng: “What if we try to divide long time intervals into short time intervals?”

That is, what if they could cut up those interaction histories into shorter, more manageable segments?

Deng and Hani developed an algorithm that cuts up the complex patterns. The segments, representing smaller periods of time along the interaction record, still add up, but the entries are now small enough to manage statistically.

What their results showed was that even over long time periods, the impact of those coupled interactions is negligible; averaging is possible; and statistical predictability holds.

Bolstered by this success, Deng set his sights on a new—yet very old—problem to solve.

Hilbert’s challenge

One mission often associated with Hilbert’s sixth problem is bridging the equations describing the behavior of gases at the smallest, middle, and largest scales.

The motion of individual gas particles is described by Newtonian mechanics. The likelihood of finding particles in certain places at certain speeds is described by the Boltzmann equation. The behavior of gas as a continuous medium is described by the Navier-Stokes equations.

The ultimate goal is to show that each set of equations logically leads to the next. The link between the middle and largest scales had already been established. But the link between the smallest to the middle scales, Newtonian to Boltzmann equations, was still elusive.

Ludwig Boltzmann believed his equation, developed in 1872, followed from Newton’s laws, but only if the particles don’t collide repeatedly—they must move independently.

Proving that assumption mathematically was the challenge. In 1975, mathematician Oscar Lanford showed this proof, but only for very short time periods. Over longer periods of time, particles have more opportunities to collide more than once. There needed to be a way to analyze an impossibly large number of collision patterns.

Deng and Hani realized that their research on wave turbulence could translate to particle collisions where repeated interactions build shared histories that threaten a particle’s independence. This makes it harder to statistically predict the behavior of the group at the middle scale from the motion of its individual members at the smallest scale.

At a conference in 2023, Deng and Hani met Xiao Ma, a recent graduate from Princeton who studied under Deng’s former advisor, Alexandru Ionescu.

“We realized that he's very good in these fields,” said Deng, “so we invited him into the project.”

Particles behave very differently than waves, so the trio had to incorporate those differences, but they were able to use the same approach: a ledger to record every possible collision history—whether a particle pair had collided once or 100 times, for instance—and a cutting algorithm to break down the most complex histories into manageable pieces.

They started with an easier scenario: gas in an infinite amount of space, where particles have room to disperse and eventually stop colliding all together. They then moved on to gases in a box, where the particles are increasingly more likely to re-collide, creating more complicated patterns.

They found that, while particle re-collisions happen, especially inside a bounded box where particles have plenty of opportunity to meet repeatedly, the impact of re-collisions on the overall independence of the system was negligible.

Deng and his team mathematically proved Boltzmann’s assumption and completed the chain. Hilbert’s sixth problem, at least in this specific case, was resolved, and a new methodology for analyzing complex interactions was introduced. Deng, Hani, and Ma revealed their proof in 2025.

As for what’s next: “There are many things I am interested in,” said, Deng, “including long-time propagation of randomness in PDEs, and general critical problems in statistical physics.”

In addition to the 2026 Fields Medal, Deng has received the Gold Medal of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Award, and the Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics from the American Mathematical Society. He has also received a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an ICBS Frontiers of Science Award, an MCA (Mathematical Council of the Americas) Prize, an Oberwolfach Prize, and an Antonio Ambrosetti Medal.

“Yu’s extraordinary achievement adds to the University’s and the Division’s long tradition of innovative, foundational mathematics,” said Ka Yee C. Lee, dean of the Physical Sciences Division. “This richly deserved distinction recognizes Yu’s accomplishments in bridging across mathematics and physics, and his promise of shaping the course of mathematical inquiry.”