News

UChicago partners with Midwest universities on hub to connect startups with Bay Area venture capital

03/10/2026 - 02:01pm

The University of Chicago, in partnership with seven other leading Midwestern universities, on March 10 announced the launch of Third Coast Foundry, a new San Francisco-based hub designed to strengthen the collective presence of Midwest research institutions in one of the world’s most active venture ecosystems.

The initiative creates a shared base in the Bay Area, where partner universities can support venture engagement and cross-institutional collaboration for university startups, researchers and entrepreneurs.

Besides UChicago, the other participating universities include Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Washington University in St. Louis

Located in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, Third Coast Foundry features 3,500 square feet of workspace steps from one of the largest concentrations of venture capital in the world and the city’s emerging AI corridor.

Universities across the Midwest produce an enormous amount of talent and innovation. Together, the institutions participating in Third Coast Foundry represent nearly $10 billion in annual research investment and more than 300,000 students. But founders outside the coasts often face challenges when raising early capital.

According to PitchBook analysis, startups in the Midwest can take about 18 months longer than their coastal peers to raise their first $500,000 in funding—a critical early milestone that often shapes a startup’s trajectory.

“Midwest universities are producing extraordinary innovation and entrepreneurial talent,” said Samir Mayekar, managing director of the Polsky Center. “But venture capital remains highly concentrated in places like the Bay Area. Third Coast Foundry is about helping our founders access those networks while continuing to build their companies in the Midwest.”

The idea for Third Coast Foundry grew out of last year’s Midwest Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, where startups from UChicago, Northwestern and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presented to more than 200 investors.

The success of that event sparked a larger question: What if these universities collaborated to create a shared space where founders could meet investors and partners in person?

Rather than each institution establishing its own separate presence, Third Coast Foundry pools resources to create a shared hub where investors can engage with a broad set of Midwest founders at once.

“San Francisco is the global hub of innovation, technology, and venture capital, and with yet another investment from leading institutions of higher education, we are accelerating our city’s recovery and strengthening our city center as a place where people live, work, play and learn,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie. "I look forward to welcoming students and leaders from the Midwest and partnering with these universities to open our doors to the next generation of innovators.”

The physical space is designed to support a wide range of activities, from investor meetings and startup showcases to alumni gatherings and university-hosted events.The building also includes shared amenity space capable of hosting larger events and gatherings, allowing the universities to organize demo days and other programming.

Third Coast Foundry is launching as a two-year pilot, allowing the universities to test the model and evaluate how the space supports founders and investor engagement.

The initiative is driven by entrepreneurship, innovation, and commercialization programs across the participating universities, including the Polsky Center at UChicago, Northwestern Innovation + New Ventures (INVO), Purdue Innovates, the Center for Software Innovation at Ohio State University, the Technology Entrepreneur Center and Origin Ventures Office of Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois, the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and entrepreneurship leaders at Carnegie Mellon and Washington University in St. Louis.

Third Coast Foundry sponsors include G2C Venture Partners and Wisconsin Investment Management Company (WISIMCO).

—This article was originally published on the Polsky Center website.

Harnessing the history of Chicago through its archives

Colin Terrill — 03/10/2026 - 12:15pm

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

The thought of an archive might bring to mind images of dusty books and dark basements where items are stored but rarely touched. A new course at the University of Chicago is proving otherwise.

“Archived Chicago: Uncovering the Hidden Stories of the Second City” takes students into real collections across the city to learn how they actually work—as well as how to harness these often overlooked assets for their own research.

“I wanted to teach students how to use an archive but not keep them contained to a classroom,” said Nick Foster, the assistant instructional professor who leads this new offering from Chicago Studies. “This class gets them out into a city that is steeped in such fascinating history where they can explore these resources and meet the people who help preserve it for generations to come.”

Each archive tells a different story

The class visited a different archive each week, learning how each is compiled and maintained to best preserve its historical record.

Locations ranged from UChicago’s very own Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center to the Harold Washington Library Center and the Stockyard Institute at the DePaul Art Museum.

At the Harold Washington Library, the largest public library building in the world, students met with one of the Chicago Public Library’s archivists to understand what goes into the job of organizing and displaying its exhibits. In a later discussion with Stockyard Institute founder Jim Duignan, students explored the idea of an archive not as a static collection of items but as an ever-evolving display of artistic expression that captures moments in time.

These looks behind the curtain gave first-year student Jacqueline Collins a unique understanding of the work that goes into maintaining a collection, including the impact that financial resources have on one.

“We have been able to hear from all different perspectives and it’s been enlightening,” she said. “However, we also learned that an archive greatly depends on funding and how each allocates their limited resources in order to keep the preservation of history going.”

Foster doesn’t just want the students to know where to go when they need a rare book to provide their next paper’s source material. Learning how to interpret what you find in each archive is just as important.

“It’s useful for students to see how the story that survives is that story that is preserved,” he said. “There are basic facts that we can agree on. For example, we know that the Haymarket Affair took place on specific days but the meaning of the documents and items that have been found on the grounds are open to interpretation. These archives that collect and maintain these items play a major role in how we look at history.”

Researching the research

The age of digitalization has put a universe of information in the hands of anyone with an Internet connection.

However, Foster would argue that even being able to look up documents from a website takes away from the experience that one would have if they were to do it in person.

“We’ve been conditioned to be able to get answers right away, but deep thinking and researching something takes time,” he said. “It takes being wrong a lot and finding the unexpected in papers, letters or even obscure objects that eventually lead to the stories that explain something bigger than the questions they started with.”

Collins, a political science major, took the class to learn more about Chicago but came away with a deeper appreciation for how these archives will continue to help her throughout her educational and professional career.

“I have a newfound respect for the sources found in non-fiction books now that I know how archives played a pivotal role in allowing those works to come together,” she said. “The class has deepened my appreciation for history, primary sources and ephemera and I hope to incorporate this knowledge into my work moving forward.”

That takeaway is exactly what Foster was hoping his students would find during their series of visits.

To drive it home, he asked them to research an archive and use its collection as the basis for a future project, whether that be an academic thesis, a documentary or a longform non-fiction investigation.

The open-endedness of the final project is intentional,as Foster hopes the class has instilled a sense of excitement in asking deeper questions about topics that they have always wanted to know more about.

“I hope they’ll take this experience forward, even beyond academia, so that they’ll know how to research questions that may arise in their professional lives or at least scrutinize what others have written,” he said. “I think it’s important in the age of search engines, AI and instant gratification to learn how to navigate these immense, and often intimidating, wells of knowledge.”

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

Karl F. Freed, pioneering theoretical chemist and decoder of molecular complexity, 1942–2026

Brian Foley — 03/09/2026 - 11:36am

University of Chicago Prof. Emeritus Karl Frederick Freed, whose mathematical rigor provided the scaffolding for modern molecular theory, died Jan. 11 at the age of 83.

A cornerstone of the Department of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute for over five decades, Freed was internationally recognized for his fundamental contributions to polymer physics, molecular electronic structure theory, and the dynamics of complex systems. He famously bridged the gap between “clean” physics and “messy” chemistry, proving that the most complex biological and material systems could be understood through elegant, rigorous mathematical foundations.

He was also known for his commitment to collaboration and mentorship; two of his students would go on to win Nobel Prizes.

‘Reagent-grade’ foundations

Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Freed’s scientific trajectory began early; he and his brother Jack, who himself would go on to become a distinguished chemist at Cornell University, transformed the family basement into a sophisticated laboratory stocked with professional-standard, reagent-grade chemicals.

This early immersion provided a vital foundation in the physical world, ensuring that even his most complex mathematical theories were always designed to explain how real molecules actually behave, colleagues wrote in a 2008 special edition of the journal Physical Chemistry B dedicated to Freed.

Freed attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1963. He did his graduate work at Harvard University, where he developed a rare scientific fluency by bridging abstract mathematics with the mechanical realities of the laboratory, and established a lifelong practice of studying instrumentation and engaging with researchers to ensure his own mathematical frameworks remained in dialogue with physical observation, according to colleagues. He earned his master's degree in 1965 and Ph.D. in 1967.

Joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1968, Freed settled into the James Franck Institute, where the culture of interdisciplinary research perfectly mirrored his own wide-ranging interests.

Evolution of theory

The reach of Freed’s work is best understood as foundational shifts in how scientists conceptualize molecular behavior.

“In areas that were qualitative before his arrival, Freed demanded quantitative accuracy—never fearing mathematically demanding approaches to achieve it,” said Aaron Dinner, professor of chemistry and Freed’s longtime colleague in the James Franck Institute.

He transformed polymer physics through his development of the lattice cluster theory, which accounted for the specific geometry—the unique shapes and sizes—of molecules. His discovery of the “screening of hydrodynamic interactions” remains essential for calculating how polymers move and interact within solutions. His 1987 book Renormalization Group Theory of Macromolecules “taught generations of theoretical scientists how to approach problems in this area by showing the technical details of calculations,” according to Dinner.

Simultaneously, Freed transformed quantum chemistry by proving that simplified calculation methods were not merely educated guesses but mathematically sound versions of exact calculations grounded in the fundamental laws of physics. His landmark 1972 paper on the derivation of the exact π-electron Hamiltonian remains a cornerstone of the discipline.

He also made definitive contributions to the theory of radiationless transitions and electronic structure calculations that included relativistic effects.

In later years, Freed turned toward the problem of how proteins fold. He published dozens of papers in this area, many with his colleague Prof. Tobin Sosnick and their co-mentored trainees. They developed increasingly advanced protein folding simulations that involved the early application of machine learning methods, which remain in use today.

“Karl understood the physical world with a level of intuition that was almost startling,” said Laurie Butler, professor emeritus of chemistry in the James Franck Institute. “He could take a perplexing set of experimental results and find the elegant, theoretical thread that tied them all together. He wasn’t just interested in the math; he was interested in the truth of the chemistry.”

A quarter-century of collaboration

Freed served as the director of the James Franck Institute from 1983 to 1986, guiding the center through a period of significant growth. His impact as a collaborator was profound, defined by an egalitarian spirit that bridged generations of scholars.

“I started working with Karl as a junior professor while he was already world-renowned,” said Sosnick. “Nevertheless, Karl was always generous and treated me as an equal.”

Collaborators and mentees alike described Freed’s open-door philosophy, which paired absolute rigor with a subtle, dry humor. He famously warned his students, “Too much rigor leads to rigor mortis.”

Among these former students are two consecutive Nobel laureates: Moungi Bawendi in 2023 and John Jumper in 2024. Bawendi has characterized this mentorship as an “imprinting” of a specific scientific methodology that prioritized rigor and fundamental physical truths; Jumper described Freed as a “consummate theorist” and an inspiration for the elegance of his work and the depth of his physical insight.

“Karl would always say to me that the key to mentorship is to try to make a difference in other people’s lives,” said colleague Prof. David Mazziotti, “to help other people.”

In 2019, the University recognized Freed’s broad and enduring impact on the campus community with the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, which honors faculty who have made extraordinary contributions to teaching and the quality of student life.

Freed’s other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, the Faraday Division of the Chemical Society’s Marlow Medal in 1973, the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry in 1976, and the American Physical Society’s Polymer Physics Prize in 2014. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he enjoyed spending time with his beloved wife Gina, and their adored cats, Isosceles, Cleo and Kaboodle.

Freed is survived by daughters Michele and Nicole; beloved granddaughter Cambria; and brother Jack. He was predeceased by his wife Gina.

The University of Chicago is planning a memorial service to honor his life and work in the spring. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Department of Chemistry Scholarship fund.

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

Nanoparticle-infused saline could help people facing kidney stone surgery

Paul Dailing — 03/06/2026 - 12:41pm

During a procedure known as laser lithotripsy, urologists use a small, video-guided laser to blast painful, potentially damaging kidney stones to smithereens.

It’s better for the patient if urologists can break kidney stones down as finely as possible, ideally to a dust that can be safely suctioned out. But that’s not always easy—and using more powerful lasers creates additional heat that can damage surrounding tissue and hurt the patient.

“Obviously, you don't want to over-pump the energy into your kidney, because that's something that's very dangerous,” said Po-Chun Hsu, assistant professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME). “What we demonstrate in our work is a way to better utilize the laser energy that is already being employed.”

Hsu co-authored a paper published in Advanced Science about a way to improve lasers’ efficiency on kidney stones—upwards of 700% in some cases—without changing the lasers. The result of collaboration between engineers and doctors from UChicago PME and Duke University, this work could lead to shorter surgeries, faster recoveries and less recurrence of a disease that affects 11% of Americans and accounts for billions of dollars in healthcare spending.

“This is a classical example of how connecting dots can create something that's transformative,” said Hsu, whose research mostly involves heat-reflective construction materials and fabrics.

Co-author Michael Lipkin, a urologist at Duke, praised the collaboration between engineers and doctors.

“It’s a great opportunity as a clinician to be able to partner with world-class research scientists to attack a problem that has direct benefits for our patients,” Lipkin said. “These types of partnerships are fertile ground for great ideas that change the world.”

A solution in solution

To improve a laser’s performance without altering the laser itself, the interdisciplinary team required an innovative solution. An innovative saline solution.

Doctors use saline—mildly salty water—to distend the hollow part of the kidney and maintain visibility during the procedure. Much of the laser energy is typically dissipated in the saline in the form of heat. The researchers found adding dark nanoparticles that absorb laser wavelengths to this saline solution keeps the laser focused on the stone, rather than reflecting or dissipating away.

This improves how much laser energy is transmitted to and absorbed by the kidney stones, a feature many thought couldn’t be easily manipulated, said corresponding author and Duke engineering Prof. Pei Zhong.

“Each laser has its own inherent wavelength based on the technology by which the laser was generated. People thought, ‘If the wavelength is fixed, you cannot change the absorption of the laser in the working fluid or in the stone that you're trying to target,’” Zhong said. “Nanofluid brings a new dimension, independent of the stone composition, independent of the laser, that can affect this very complex physical procedure.”

But not every nanofluid is appropriate for a medical procedure, said first author Qingsong Fan, a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago PME.

“First of all, the solution should be absorptive at the wavelengths of the laser, which is around 2,000 nanometers or two micrometers,” Fan said. “The second criterion is that the nanoparticles should disperse well in water because that's how we irrigate the kidney. And the third one—and the most important criterion—is that it should be safe.”

Tests on lab-grown kidney stones revealed that the team hit all three marks. The nanofluid improved stone ablation efficiency by the wide range of 38-727% in spot treatment and 26-75% in scanning treatment. Immersing living cells in the nanofluid for various durations up to 24 hours demonstrated that the effective nanoparticle solution was also nontoxic and safe.

In practice, however, this material will never be in contact with cells for nearly that long. Lithotripsy is an outpatient procedure that lasts about 30 minutes. Hsu hopes that improving the absorption efficiency could cut that time down to 10 minutes.

“If you spend too much time in this surgery, then waste heat from the laser will accumulate, and that's actually going to be more harmful than the ablation itself,” Hsu said.

Different stones, different lasers

The study focused on holmium:yttrium-aluminum-garnet (Ho-YAG) lasers and lab-grown kidney stones. The gold standard for laser lithotripsy, Ho-YAG is by far the most common—but far from the only—type of laser used.

Next steps include testing to see how their new technique works using other common lithotripsy lasers and how it impacts real, rather than lab-grown, kidney stones.

“Some lasers perform well in dusting, other lasers perform better in fragmenting, but no laser can perform exceptionally well both in dusting and fragmenting,” Zhong said. “Unless you are at a major hospital like the University of Chicago or Duke, community doctors may not be able to afford multiple lasers. Nanofluid has the potential to enhance the performance of each laser under different clinical scenarios.”

Co-author Christine Payne, Donald M. Alstadt Chair of the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke, called the research “a good example of how fundamental research gets translated into clinical applications.”

“One of the most exciting aspects of this research is how a team of scientists and clinicians worked together using their own expertise to address an important question—how to better treat kidney stones,” Payne said.

Citation: “Nanofluid-Enhanced Laser Lithotripsy Using Conducting Polymer Nanoparticles,” Fan et al. Advanced Science, October 5, 2025. DOI: 10.1002/advs.202507714

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

Chicago Booth students leading on and off the basketball court

Justin Curto — 03/05/2026 - 09:00am

The University of Chicago basketball team headed into halftime on Feb. 1 with their work cut out for them. They trailed by 11 against Emory University, then the top-ranked team in Division III.

But guard Shane Regan didn’t stress. Instead, the UChicago graduate student approached the second half like he would a case from one of his classes at Chicago Booth.

“It’s all about shifting your mindset and taking actionable steps,” said Regan, a student in the Master in Management program, who scored 18 of his team-high 24 points after halftime in the Maroons’ 74–64 comeback win. “You look at what’s going on in the game and come up with solutions and things that we can better as a team.”

At 21-4, UChicago is enjoying one of the best seasons in its history, due in part to the leadership of Regan and fellow Booth student Nick Roper. Both were named preseason all-Americans and are the team’s top two leading point scorers. Behind the scenes, Josh Steinberg, another Booth student, is guiding the team as a graduate assistant coach.

Following the Emory win, the Maroons earned a No. 1 ranking for the first time since 2001. They finished the season ranked fourth in the country, with their best record since 2001. This weekend, the Maroons will host an NCAA Tournament Regional, making their eighth tournament berth.

But these Maroons have their sights set on history. “The goal for us is to go places that UChicago basketball never has,” Regan said.

Balancing basketball and business

When Roper and Regan finished their undergraduate degrees last year, they knew they weren’t finished with basketball. They each had an extra year of NCAA eligibility after missing a year for injury earlier in their careers. Continuing their basketball careers at a school where they could also earn a graduate degree was a perfect opportunity.

While Roper and Regan each received offers from Division I and II schools, they both wanted the academic balance a Division III school would provide. As part of Division III’s stated goal to prioritize academics, basketball teams have less demanding practice schedules and only play on Fridays and weekends. UChicago stood out—and, specifically, Booth’s Master in Management Program.

Roper had majored in finance at Illinois Wesleyan University and felt like the Booth program was the “perfect in-between” of continuing his business education while broadening his skills. Meanwhile, Regan wanted to explore what business career paths could be available to him, after previously studying psychology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

“Having that flexibility, getting to choose a lot of different classes, and just getting that general business background was going to be very beneficial for me,” said Regan, who is pursuing a specialization in finance. “I knew that I would learn a lot.”

Steinberg also wanted to deepen his business education with a master’s degree, after studying marketing at Calvin University. He played basketball there for two years, but discovered a passion for coaching when he began working as head coach of Calvin’s junior varsity team and an assistant on the varsity team. He wanted to continue coaching during graduate school, and knew he could land and balance the job better at a Division III school like UChicago.

Even in Division III, though, balancing a master’s program and athletics has tested all three students’ time-management skills.

“Booth is known for its rigorous coursework, and I’m witnessing that firsthand,” Roper said. “But practice is a nice break from the work, and then I get back to it in the evening.”

Taking leadership skills off the court

Throughout the season, the Booth students have gotten to apply management and leadership lessons from the classroom on the court. All three specifically said the required managerial psychology course, taught by Linda Ginzel, has given them valuable insight into being better team players.

“We’re learning how the brain functions when people talk to leaders and receive instructions,” Roper said. “So on the basketball court, I try to pick up on my teammates’ signals and how they’re receiving what I’m saying.”

The season also has been a crash course in leadership for Regan and Roper, who the team immediately expected to lead despite being new additions.

“I look at it as a privilege to get to lead,” Regan said. “Early on in my college career, I had great mentors that I learned a lot from. Now, getting to pay it forward and be a great mentor to younger guys is something I really embrace and enjoy.”

To Roper, basketball is practice for the perseverance he’ll need in his career. He’s interested in private credit and structured finance, with the long-term goal of starting his own fund.

“You’ve got to be tough and figure things out when they aren’t going your way on the court,” he said. “And I think that’s the same way in business—everything isn’t going to go in your favor, but you need to keep grinding, keep getting up when you get knocked down.”

Steinberg takes a different perspective on leadership and management from the sidelines. His in-game responsibilities include taking notes on how the opponent is defending their offense and what the team is struggling with, along with reviewing live statistics, to help the coaching staff figure out adjustments.

Against Carnegie Mellon in January, for instance, he noticed the team was having issues scoring off defensive stops, and conveyed this to the coaching staff.

“You could take that and extrapolate it to the business world,” said Steinberg, who’s pursuing public affairs consulting. “What are your targets and how do you meet them using the data you’re given on the fly?”

As the Maroons aim for a deep run in the NCAA tournament, Regan is reflecting on another lesson basketball has taught him: discipline.

“You can recognize we have these lofty goals, but the most important thing is that, day by day, we’re taking the right steps,” Regan said. “We’re just going to continue to stack good days, and hopefully we’ll get good outcomes from that.”

—Adapted from a story first published on the Chicago Booth website.

UChicago scientists clock a driving factor in the evolution of error correction

Maureen Searcy — 03/04/2026 - 12:40pm

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to evolve error-correcting strategies.

Scientists have long assumed that the time spent correcting errors is simply an unavoidable cost to organisms. But in a new study published in Science, a team of UChicago physicists and chemists found that fixing errors can actually make the synthesis process faster overall—suggesting that speed alone could be the factor driving the evolution of error correction.

“We found that proofreading mechanisms can evolve just because biology wants to go fast, without having to care about accuracy,” said co–first author Kabir Husain, a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago at the time of the research and now faculty at University College London.

“These results imply that error correction is easier to evolve than previously thought and could have arisen earlier during the origins of life.”

The wrong puzzle piece

A common type of error-correcting mechanism in biology is called kinetic proofreading. For example, if errors turn up when cells are making new DNA, enzymes can cut out incorrect nucleotides. They can also backtrack to fix errors during RNA transcription, or disassemble incorrectly-made protein complexes to try again.

Fixing these mistakes takes time. Scientists have widely assumed that the error correction has to be done despite it slowing down the process, because mistakes could be so harmful to the organism. (Uncorrected errors, for example, are often the basis of cancer).

However, this assumption does not take into account that the errors themselves inherently slow down the process.

“For example, the assembly of a complex structure such as the ribosome can be stalled when some step in the assembly process goes awry,” said coauthor Jack Szostak, University Professor in the Department of Chemistry. “In such cases, the fastest way to complete the assembly process may be to go back a few steps and start over.”

The UChicago team became interested after an unrelated experiment in the lab of Arvind Murugan, associate professor in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute, which studies the essential functions of life—learning, self-replication, and evolution—in the simplest possible systems.

Murugan, Husain, and other lab members were running experiments looking at the mutation rate of DNA polymerase, which is the molecular machine that copies DNA.

They found that mutated polymerases that made more mistakes slowed down the process, which was the opposite of what they had intuitively thought—that doing the job “sloppily” would speed it up.

This effect, called stalling, happens when an uncorrected error slows down subsequent steps.

Husain compared it to placing the wrong piece in a jigsaw puzzle. “You’re stuck, because now the next piece is really hard to put in, and because of that, it takes you longer to finish the puzzle.”

Around that time, Riccardo Ravasio, a postdoctoral researcher in Murugan’s lab and co–first author on the paper, joined the team. Ravasio developed a physics-based computational model, stripped of biological elements, to test whether stalling takes longer than error correction.

The model is an extension of a fundamental classical physics model of kinetic proofreading introduced over 50 years ago.

“We turned the model on its head by introducing this new ingredient of stalling after mismatches, to investigate whether there actually is a trade-off between speed and accuracy,” said Ravasio.

Using this model, the team simulated the evolution of a DNA polymerase. They found that proofreading took less overall time than stalling—indicating that evolutionary selection for speed alone leads to more proofreading and improved accuracy, regardless of how harmful or harmless errors might be.

The study also raises further questions about the stalling effect, found to be widespread in biological processes: “Is stalling a property that can itself evolve?” asked Ravasio. “What’s driving the emergence of stalling in the first place?”

A growing genome

The highly collaborative study, which leveraged the different backgrounds, knowledge, and skills of scholars from UChicago’s Physics Department and Chemistry Department, University College London, Maynooth University, California Institute of Technology, and Université PSL, contributes to UChicago’s Origins of Life initiative.

The results offer a new advancement toward understanding how life developed on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere—the mission of the Chicago Center for the Origins of Life. The center unites chemists, physicists, astronomers, and Earth and planetary scientists to investigate questions so immense that no one discipline can answer.

“One of the many puzzles about the origin and early evolution of life is how and why the fidelity of genome replication increased so that larger and larger amounts of information could be transmitted from generation to generation,” said Szostak, director of the Center for the Origins of Life. “The surprising results of our study, which show that selection for speed of replication alone can lead to the evolution of error correcting mechanisms, independent of selection for maintenance of the underlying information, gives a new perspective on the evolution of error correction.”

The project is a good example of what happens when UChicago brings different kinds of scientists together. “My group had been all-theory until we tried some wet-lab experiments and couldn't make sense of our results,” said Murugan. “A chance conversation with Jack during his recruitment to the Origins initiative made us realize that this was something bigger, and we now have several follow-ups that span physics, chemistry and evolution.”

Citation: Evolution of error correction through a need for speed. Riccardo Ravasio et al., Science, Feb. 19, 2026.

Funding: Sloan Foundation, Moore Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health, European Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland, Evans Foundation for Molecular Medicine

—Adapted from an article originally published on the Physical Sciences Division website

Radical posters, real students: Unboxing the life of Barbara Morgan

Julian Veenstra-VanderWeele — 03/02/2026 - 02:24pm

Hand-lettered posters in bold colors line the walls of the ground floor of the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Though designed over 50 years ago, they don't seem like objects of a distant past but artifacts of an activist playbook still in use.

The exhibition “Radical Posters: Women’s Graphics Collectives” showcases posters and archival materials donated by the estate of Barbara Morgan, AM’65, a historian, artist and activist who helped found the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective in the 1970s before later establishing Red Pepper Posters in San Francisco.

However, the real story isn’t just about Morgan. It’s also about how the exhibition was made.

Rather than curators quietly assembling the pieces behind the scenes, the College Summer Institute project had UChicago undergraduates design the display. The students navigated the entire process themselves, from opening the boxes for the first time to constructing the final exhibit. According to faculty director Prof. Daisy Delogu, the experience was fundamentally different from normal student research.

“Some of our students go to archives, but that’s to look at stuff that’s already been organized by someone else,” said Delogu. “To actually be unpacking these boxes and not knowing what you’re going to find in there, that’s a very unique experience.”

Unboxing a life

Ahan Jayakumar, a third-year in the College and one of the students on the project, explained that the exhibition process began with four big cardboard boxes.

“My role was to help Special Collections sort and index the contents of every box,” he said. “This involved reading through her personal and work journals, going through photo albums and all sorts of miscellaneous stuff.”

Jayakumar and the other students worked with these archival fragments to reconstruct decades of Morgan’s life and activism. The diaries became central to the project and served almost like a roadmap written by Morgan herself.

“Something that really stood out to me was how meticulously she had logged her weekly life,” Jayakumar said. “We would often come across personal struggles like breakups, professional struggles with funding or other work-related issues and even her thoughts on how to organize group meetings.”

The result was a kind of historical intimacy that’s hard to achieve through textbooks. Rather than through theory, Jayakuma was able to learn about the movement through Morgan’s personal diary as she figured it out in real time.

After the archival work came the difficult task of turning the raw history into an organized public exhibition. The students decided to divide the gallery into thematic zones, writing wall text under strict museum-style word limits and guidelines. Although the team collaborated with advisors from across the University, Delogu emphasized how “the students really did all of it.”

Along the way, Jayakumar said the posters changed how he thought about art and activism entirely.

“Working on this project opened my eyes to how the process of creating art is a unifying phenomenon,” he said.

The posters were not meant to be stored away or held in exclusive galleries. They were designed collectively, cheaply printed and meant to circulate everywhere, functioning as community-building tools.

That’s also what visitors are meant to notice, according to Jayakumar.

“It is not just ‘art with a message’; it represents a more sophisticated movement to empower women and build community,” he said.

Like the posters, the exhibition was a group effort built collaboratively and meant for public use. Through working together to turn Morgan’s private materials into shared public history, the students did not just study activism this summer, they lived it.

The exhibition is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will remain open until the end of the Winter Quarter. A closing event and panel discussion are scheduled for Tuesday, March 3, at 5 pm CST. It will be a hybrid event and all those interested are encouraged to attend.

—This article was originally published on the UChicago College website

How Colorado Springs became an evangelical mecca

Tori Lee — 02/27/2026 - 04:10pm

A mile above sea level, nestled at the base of Pikes Peak, sits the city of Colorado Springs.

Among the dazzling rock formations are the United States Air Force Academy, a bustling high-tech industry and the headquarters of over 50 evangelical Christian organizations.

“This is everything that I want to study in one place,” said Asst. Prof. William Schultz, a historian of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

In Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City, Schultz outlines how Colorado Springs transformed from a resort town to a booming military complex to a sprawling network of evangelical megachurches, media outlets and missionary groups.

“As America grows this unprecedented wealth and power after World War II, what does that do to this faith?” Schultz said. “This is where Colorado Springs is significant; it is the headquarters of this project.”

In the following edited Q&A, Schultz delves into the transformative power of military spending, charisma and the myth of the American West.

In the book, you discuss how it’s a tricky term to pin down. In your view, what is evangelicalism?

Evangelicalism, to give my definition, is a form of Protestant Christianity with an emphasis on transforming the self so that you can transform society.

There are many kinds of evangelicalism throughout history, but American evangelicals have always felt that the United States is something special, that it’s God’s country. Today, many evangelical Christians believe the U.S. has a special destiny in the world. One reason so many of them thrilled to Donald Trump is because he talks in those same terms.

What was happening in American evangelical communities during and after World War II? Why did so many move to Colorado Springs?

A lot of these evangelical organizations felt, with some good reason, that they were excluded from where American culture was going.

In the 1940s, during this wartime religious revival and surge of patriotism, many leaders in evangelical movements said: All right, here’s a chance to get back to the mainstream.

This is an era when “teenager” is emerging as a specific market segment. Just as corporations are thinking about how to market to teenagers, evangelical groups are thinking about how to sell Christianity.

Young Life, the very first organization to move out to Colorado Springs, is figuring out that teenagers don’t want boring church services; they want songs, skits and sports. Colorado Springs is a place where they can build these summer camps where kids can have fun, but also learn about Jesus.

Many of these groups wanted a lot of land. You can’t get that cheaply in suburban Chicago, but you can get it in Colorado or Utah or Wyoming. In ideological terms, the beauty of this landscape also enhances the idea that this is where the future is.

Right after WWII, the U.S. is plunged into the Cold War. How does this era shape evangelicalism in Colorado Springs?

During the Cold War, the federal government was building this warfare state across the U.S.—military bases, military installations and missile launching bases.

The city leaders of Colorado Springs realize that military money is a way to shake their city out of its economic doldrums. That is, for instance, how the Air Force Academy winds up there.

The military is what allows Colorado Springs to turn from this little resort town into a city. It’s that transformation which starts bringing in evangelical groups.

And ideologically? How did the U.S.’s war against communism factor into evangelical thought at the time?

This is another point where evangelicals see an opportunity to demonstrate that they are good Americans.

Many evangelical groups in Colorado Springs put anti-communism at the heart of their message; they believe in it ideologically and recognize that it puts them in sympathy with the American military and politicians.

For instance, Summit Ministries moved to Colorado Springs in the 1960s and ran classes every summer to teach students about the evils of communism and the virtues of America, capitalism and the free market.

Speaking of the free market, how do capitalism and faith come together in Colorado Springs?

In Colorado Springs, they are all religious leaders, but they are also all businessmen.

These organizations are all in this intense competition for money. When you succeed in that competition, you naturally start to think of the market as the work of God. Money becomes a measure of piety. If they are bringing in a lot of money, they must be doing God’s will.

I think there’s a strong tendency among many leaders in this evangelical community to equate the workings of the free market with providence.

In the book, you mention the charisma of these leaders—why is that so important? Is this a particular feature of American evangelicalism?

Charisma is always a weird thing to work with because it’s hard to define.

In the American context, you have a tradition of people saying: I am going to break the bonds of the old church and create something new. These evangelical ministers are all following in this tradition.

For so many of these Christian organizations that move to Colorado Springs, they ultimately started with a charismatic person—Jim Rayburn, Dawson Trotman and later, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Ted Haggard of New Life Church—saying, “Join me in this cause.”

Their charisma comes not from being particularly well spoken, but from making people feel like they’re part of something.

What is the political influence of American evangelicalism today?

By the 1970s and ‘80s, a lot of the evangelical leaders, especially the ones in Colorado Springs, feel like the culture is slipping further away from them. Voices emerge in the evangelical community, saying, forget about this cultural persuasion, we need to win back political power.

That’s where you get what we now think of as the Christian right.

It is this group of politicians, activists and ministers who try to take a vague conservatism among many evangelicals and turn it into a specific political agenda. It’s an attempt to tell evangelicals, “Hey, you are under attack by secularism, liberalism, feminism, etc. You need to get involved.”

Now, I don’t want to overstate evangelical influence. Even in Colorado Springs, there are limits. They’re never the majority, and they must try to make alliances. While evangelicalism and the Christian right have been really influential in American politics, it’s not unopposed.

Many evangelicals see themselves as defending a tradition that’s been abandoned by other Americans. They look back to the early Cold War and see this world where government and religion seem to go hand in hand. As a new generation of evangelical leaders comes forward: Will they carry on this message, or will they try to adopt it and change it?

It remains to be seen.

Excavating Armageddon and the art of imagining the end

MacKenzie Tucker — 02/27/2026 - 01:31pm

Throughout history, people have imagined the end of the world in countless ways, often marked by awe, dread and morbid fascination.

The University of Chicago has an unusual claim on that imagination. It helped usher in the nuclear age, houses the Doomsday Clock—and, from 1925-39, sent archaeologists to excavate the prophesied site of Armageddon itself, at the ancient city of Megiddo.

“As objects were uncovered, studied and photographed, they also entered a parallel world of media and spectacle,” said Kiersten Neumann, curator at the University’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum. “Our current exhibition marks the centennial of that campaign, revisiting not only what was unearthed, but also what was imagined.”

This collision of the real and constructed was at the center of ISAC’s Jan. 22 program “Translating the End of Times: Art, Science, and the Media of Apocalypse.” Neumann led a panel discussion featuring visual artists Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson with Prof. Daniel Holz, a UChicago physicist and chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the hands of the Doomsday Clock to reflect the risk of global catastrophe. In the week following the program, the Bulletin advanced the clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been in its history.

The ISAC program was organized in conjunction with the museum’s current special exhibition Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined, curated by Neumann. The seemingly disparate group came together, she said, “to reflect more broadly on how art, science and the media translate complex ideas into images and stories that shape our collective imagination and discourse.”

The discussion centered on the role of media and history in shaping public understanding of risk. Together, a biblical battleground, a film that loops through dawn without ever reaching day, and a clock that measures the world’s risks in minutes to midnight became three ways of approaching the same question—how we imagine the end.

Promoting the story of Armageddon

The story of Megiddo as a real place is inseparable from its symbolic role in the Bible—the site of a prophesied final battle between good and evil in the Book of Revelation.

This was something UChicago archaeologists were keenly aware of as they excavated this historic site at a crossroads in the Jezreel Valley—located in what was then British Mandate Palestine and is now modern-day Israel—as featured in the ISAC museum’s current special exhibition.

Neumann explained that archival correspondence connected with the Megiddo Expedition shows field directors and ISAC leadership in Chicago discussing how to best promote their findings through a “carefully orchestrated media campaign.”

“One narrative stands out among others,” Neumann said. “Megiddo’s legacy as biblical Armageddon.”

Headlines from the time leaned into this angle, she noted, pointing to news hooks such as “spoils of the spade at Armageddon” and “new revelations from Armageddon.”

In the decades that followed, the concept of Armageddon developed in the public imagination, eventually splitting completely from the historical location. That imagined apocalypse took on a new immediacy after World War II, when the development of atomic weapons reframed the end of the world as a closer human-made possibility rather than a distant prophecy.

Both the Bulletin and its Doomsday Clock emerged from that realization. Created in 1947 by Manhattan Project scientists at UChicago, the clock reflected a new scale of human-made risk.

“They were freaked out,” Holz said of the clock’s creators. “For the first time humans really directly had a tool for Armageddon.”

With that level of immediacy, this broader understanding of apocalypse almost entirely displaced the more specific place-based one. Rawlinson said he and Crowe were fascinated to learn that Armageddon referred to something tangible, rather than a media abstraction.

“This thing that you’ve grown up with as a metaphor for a thing that’s going to happen is actually a physical location on the planet,” he said.

That “crosswiring,” he added, kept returning to them until it became their 2017 film, the experimental Song for Armageddon, currently on view in ISAC's Megiddo exhibition on loan from the artists.

Structured around a Doomsday Clock-style "minutes to midnight" elasticity and shot on-site at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tel Megiddo, the film loops through sequences following a team of workers setting up and wiping down thousands of chairs, preparing for an audience that never arrives.

“Of course it needs to be a loop,” Rawlinson said. “That sense of being caught before the moment of the end—is this it? Is this it now?”

Living at 85 seconds to midnight

In addition to his other work, Holz is also the founding director of the UChicago Existential Risk Laboratory. He described his own initial understanding of Armageddon as abstract—“this term for the end of everything”—until he began thinking through the practical mechanisms of global catastrophe.

“When you really think about the end of the world,” he said, “it’s most likely to be due to humans.”

Though it started to measure the risk of nuclear war, the Doomsday Clock today incorporates threats such as climate change, pandemics, disinformation and emerging risks from new technologies, including AI. Holz acknowledged the limits of assessing all these threats but said that setting the clock’s hands “captures people’s attention and starts that conversation.”

“The most important aspect of that number is how is it changing—is the clock turning forward or back?” he said.

Crowe and Rawlinson saw a similar ethic in their own work.

“We see our responsibility as artists as keeping our antennas up, tuning into the airwaves as it were,” said Rawlinson. “Our job was to stay alert, to tune in to what’s going on in the world and to reflect it, amplify it and focus it in some way.”

They pointed out that most apocalypse stories rush straight to destruction, skipping the moment when people still have choices. Like the Doomsday Clock, Song for Armageddon stays in the uneasy space of waiting before disaster strikes.

By lingering in that moment, these projects make room for the possibility that tomorrow still exists—and that what we do today can make a difference.

“The whole point of this exercise is to turn it back,” Holz said of the Doomsday Clock. “It’s this idea of hope.”

Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined is a free exhibition at the University's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum, on view through March 15.

A recording of the program "Translating the End of Times: Art, Science, and the Media of Apocalypse" is available to stream on ISAC's YouTube channel.

UChicago paleontologists investigate how life entered and adapted to the deep sea

Maureen Searcy — 02/27/2026 - 09:57am

The deep sea is a dark, cold place. It’s just a few degrees above freezing, subject to immense pressure, and beyond the reach of the sunlight needed for photosynthesis. The life that does survive in such a hostile place must find a different way to thrive.

A new study led by scientists at the University of Chicago sheds new light on how certain species adapted to deep-sea living—by looking at when their ancestors moved into those harsh depths and whether they were already fit for such conditions.

“The deep sea is the biggest habitat on the planet, but very few lineages have actually managed to penetrate that environment,” said David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences at UChicago and co-author on the paper. “You might imagine one key to fit that lock, but we found that there are different ways of getting through.”

The scientists examined the lineages of two groups of bivalves—marine invertebrates that include clams, oysters, mussels, and scallops—that successfully inhabit the deep sea.

They found that some lineages already well-suited to the harsh environment moved into that habitat in a sporadic way without diversifying much once they were there.

For other lineages, a single species made its way down and, having adapted to conditions there, split into a swarm of new species.

Tracing adaptations

Two of the most-studied groups of bivalves include mussels and a type of marine clam called hatchet shells. These ancient families include hundreds of species found all over the world, in both deep and shallow water.

Jablonski’s team used these lineages as case studies to trace how and when these organisms became suited to different environments, including adaptations that allow them to live deep underwater.

There is a wealth of publicly available information on these lineages, including geographical distribution, fossil records and molecular data, such as genetic and protein sequences. This material can be used assembled and reanalyzed to build a phylogeny—an evolutionary family tree that helps infer the relationship between related species.

From there, the team looked for patterns in the lineages, said co-author Ava Ghezelayagh, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the Data Science Institute, who led the data analyses.

“For example, are shallow-water species that are closely related to deep-sea lineages more likely to live in colder temperatures? That might have prepared them to enter the deep sea.”

These analyses helped the team trace which lineages failed to make it to the deep sea, which ones got there but died out, and which ones made the leap and established residence.

‘Dribs and drabs’ versus a breakthrough

Most bivalves feed on phytoplankton, which rely on sunlight—a diet incompatible with the deep sea.

Certain lineages of hatchet shells and mussels are successful in the deep sea because they have both developed a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that derive energy from sulfur, methane, and other chemicals released by hydrothermal vents and cold seeps at the bottom of the ocean. These bacteria live in the bivalves’ gills and share their energy with their hosts.

The results of the study show that these bivalve lineages managed to acquire this ability in different ways, “and that seems to have affected how they invaded and then exploited the deep-sea environment,” said co-author Stewart Edie, PhD’18, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Clearly there’s more than one path into the deep sea.”

The hatchet shells set up their partnership with the bacteria in shallow water very early on, with evidence dating back to the early Paleozoic, more than 450 million years ago. For 300 million years, they seemed content to remain in the shallows, cooperating with their symbiotic bacteria.

Then in the mid-Mesozoic, “they began invading the deep-sea in dribs and drabs,” said Jablonski. Because of their relationship to the bacteria, “they were ‘preadapted’ for the deep-sea, and so—we think—just opportunistically slid an occasional species into the deep when the chance arose, but they almost never diversified down there.” The team calls this a “piecemeal model” of entry to the deep sea.

On the other hand, about 60 million years ago, one lineage of mussels acquired the same partnership with bacteria for their nutrition, allowing it to break into the deep-sea habitat. That one entry diversified into at least 70 species.

“Of course, there are nuances and complications, and when we look across all bivalve lineages, we find some that fall somewhere in between,” said Jablonski. “But the idea that lineages can trickle into the deep sea and not do much or can send one branch down there with a key adaptation and explode provides a new framework to guide future study of the evolution and biodiversity in this really harsh, strange environment.”

3D evolutionary tree

A related but separate project that Ghezelayagh and Edie are working on is creating a more comprehensive phylogeny using machine learning.

To build an evolutionary family tree, scientists can use molecular data, like their genetic sequence, or morphology, the form and structure of their bodies. Ghezelayagh and Edie are working on a hybrid bivalve phylogeny by marrying these two types of data.

Jablonski’s team has 3D micro-CT scanned images of 90% of living bivalve genera, which can show physical traits such as shell shape and texture, muscle attachments, and details of how the hinge fits the two shells together. Morphological data from fossils can also be integrated into the hybrid evolutionary tree. But gathering such data is a slow and painstaking effort, requiring someone to go through each taxon one by one. Machine learning can speed up the process considerably.

“We can include living and extinct taxa, which you normally can't do in a molecular tree,” said Ghezelayagh. “This project allows for a level of completeness that’s never been attained. Then we can ask some really great new questions.”

Citation: “Alternative pathways into the deep sea: patterns in Bivalvia.” Ava Ghezelayagh, Stewart M. Edie, David Jablonski, Proc Biol Sci, Feb. 1, 2026.

Funding: NSF, NASA, the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, Smithsonian Institution.

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

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

02/26/2026 - 10:00am

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

Shankar Balasubramanian, the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

The senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute, Balasubramanian researches the chemistry, structure and function of nucleic acids. Along with David Klenerman, he invented the DNA sequencing technology Solexa (now Illumina), which revolutionized biology and medicine and enabled the accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this technology was central to identifying the SARS-CoV-2 genome, tracking the emergence of variants and guiding updates of vaccines. He also has made fundamental contributions to the study of DNA structures and nucleic acids to help pioneer new therapies.

Knighted in 2017, Balasubramanian has received numerous honors, including the Royal Society’s Royal Medal, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, the Novo Nordisk Award and the Canada Gairdner International Prize in Life Sciences. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, an international member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association of Cancer Research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist-mathematician finds beauty in symmetry

Chandler A. Calderon — 02/26/2026 - 09:48am

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

Carolyn Yackel, SB'92, flipped through photos of herself sporting brightly dyed, handsewn garments—a red pleated skirt, a blue sarong, a pink tunic.

Last summer, she showed off the distinct look on the runway at Bridges, the annual conference for mathematics and the arts.

“I’ve never been in the fashion show before,” said Yackel, a professor at Mercer University, ahead of the gathering in the Netherlands.

For her, math is a thing of beauty—literally. She dyed the fabrics for the garments using a Japanese technique known as itajime shibori to reproduce “wallpaper groups,” a mathematical concept of repeating, symmetrical patterns. An expert in mathematical art, she works in different fiber arts—shibori, temari and knitting among them—each with its own constraints and possibilities.

Raised by two mathematicians, Yackel incorporated math into creative play from an early age. When her grandmother taught her to crochet, she found joy in deciphering complicated instructions and puzzling out how to correct mistakes. She brings this same curiosity to her research today, starting from questions of how and to what extent she can reproduce a mathematical concept in a handicraft.

Her research often revolves around symmetry, which Yackel has been drawn to since childhood.

“My mom used to tease me when I was a little kid,” she said, “like with blocks, I would always make these really symmetrical arrangements and be like, ‘Please come take a picture of this!’”

Dyeing for symmetry

Yackel’s shibori work began with a challenge—reproducing as many of the 17 total wallpaper groups as she could on handkerchiefs and other pieces of fabric.

“I dreamt of all the symmetry types I would produce using shibori, even before I had tried the technique,” wrote Yackel in the introduction to a 2021 paper about her efforts.

Itajime shibori involves folding fabric and applying “resists” to prevent the dye from penetrating certain areas of the textile.

You can think of wallpaper groups as all possible patterns you would get from orienting a patterned tile in different ways across the floor. One, for example, involves simple translation, keeping the tiles oriented the same way as you place them in horizontal and vertical rows. Some wallpaper groups exhibit reflection, which mirrors the tile across a vertical or horizontal axis, or both. Others involve rotational symmetry, or turning your tile by, say, 90 degrees.

Some of the wallpaper groups were immediately out because they can’t be reproduced in three-dimensional space—they would require passing a handkerchief through itself. Others were also impossible without cutting the fabric.

Given these constraints, Yackel was able to reproduce seven of the wallpaper groups.

Stitching solids onto spheres

Temari, a Japanese folk art of intricately embroidered balls, evolved from handmade balls used centuries ago for a game akin to hacky sack. Today the core of the balls is made of scrap fabric or Styrofoam, which is wrapped in fabric batting and then in layers of thread.

“One of the things that’s considered really beautiful about temari balls is when you make these symmetric motifs all around the ball,” said Yackel, “and you just don’t have a shot at doing that unless you make some lines on your canvas.”

For those with a mathematical eye, the guidelines used in temari naturally generate Platonic solids. These are five three-dimensional shapes made of the same regular polygons, which meet at identical angles at the vertices.

As you embroider symmetric designs around a temari ball, it’s common for both a Platonic solid and its dual—a kind of counterpoint shape—to emerge.

Just as there are 17 wallpaper groups, there are 14 discrete spherical symmetry groups. Yackel and her frequent collaborator sarah-marie belcastro proved that you can represent all of them using temari balls.

They found that while all spherical symmetry groups were possible in temari, this mathematical classification system couldn’t fully describe the art form: Two balls could exhibit the same symmetry even while representing different solids.

As a result of the project, they proposed a more precise classification system for spherical symmetry in temari.

Yackel’s latest project involves using temari balls to illustrate the 13 Catalan solids, another mathematical concept.

This work started as part of Mathemalchemy, a traveling exhibition of whimsical math-related art—including a cryptographic quilt, a knit tortoise with heptagonal tiling on its ceramic shell and a cat serving pi-shaped cookies—created by a team of 24 mathematicians and artists.

For the exhibition, Yackel designed two giant arches made of more than 120 temari balls, some of them embroidered with Catalan solids.

Knitting to the limit

Yackel has also set out to bring mathematical symmetry to a technique known as mosaic knitting.

She and her collaborator Susan Goldstine attempted to use it to reproduce all 17 two-color frieze symmetries. But they found that the rows of alternating working color and slipped stitches that characterize mosaic knitting introduced some complications.

Three of the frieze symmetries proved impossible to produce with mosaic knitting, either because the technique constrains how colors stack, or because they would require some stitches to be two colors at once.

The wall hanging “Float Free, Bumblebee,” which Goldstine knitted, exhibits the 14 attainable two-color frieze symmetries.

Weaving a community

Yackel is part of a small but highly passionate mathematical art community.

In 2001 she cofounded a knitting circle at the Joint Math Meetings, the American Mathematical Society’s major annual conference, where she and her compatriots have now gathered for 25 years. The circle’s meetups have led to several special sessions at the Joint Math Meetings as well as a special issue of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts and three books, all of which Yackel coedited.

In the books, readers can explore all manner of concept and craft—socks with algebraic structure, group actions in cross-stitch, Gosper-like fractals and intermeshed crochet, tessellations and quilting.

Next year a new open-access journal dedicated to mathematics and fiber arts, Interlace, coedited by Yackel, will publish its first issue, providing another forum for this research.

Yackel hopes it will make questions at the intersection of math and art accessible to those outside the academic math community, allowing as many people as possible to engage with these new ways of understanding—and creating—the world around us.

It’s a mathematical outlook that many share, even if they don’t realize it.

As Yackel wrote in the dedication to her 2008 edited volume, Making Mathematics with Needlework: Ten Papers and Ten Projects: “To my grandmothers, who were excellent needleworkers but didn’t know they were mathematicians.”

—This article was adapted from a piece originally published in the Fall/25 University of Chicago Magazine. You can find the full version here.

New tech shows promise for ‘engineering’ cells to prevent type 1 diabetes

Matt Wood — 02/25/2026 - 01:00pm

Research on preventing type 1 diabetes often focuses on limiting the autoimmune response that destroys the body’s ability to produce its own insulin.

A new technology developed by scientists at the University of Chicago takes a different approach—preserving insulin-producing beta cells by giving them the ability to protect themselves.

In a study published in Cell Reports Medicine, researchers showed how nanoparticles created with lipids can deliver mRNA molecules to beta cells and prompt them to express more PD-L1, a cell surface protein that helps them evade the immune system.

In experiments with both mouse and human beta cells, the nanoparticles successfully reached their target and triggered PD-L1 expression. The same approach, which is similar to that used in some COVID-19 vaccines, also worked in a model where human beta cells were transplanted into mice.

“In this initial therapeutic proof of concept, we showed that we were able to deliver PD-L1 mRNA with our nanoparticle system, enable a delay in type 1 diabetes progression in mice, and also show potential translational relevance within human cells,” said Jacob Enriquez, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago who led the study.

“So not only have we provided a vehicle for delivery to beta cells, which is innovative and exciting, but we've also shown that they can produce PD-L1 for immune protection.”

Building on success of RNA delivery technology

The breakthrough draws on collaboration between researchers from UChicago’s Biological Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME).

Enriquez works in the lab of Prof. Raghu Mirmira, where researchers focus on finding treatments to increase insulin production. For the new study, they teamed up with Prof. Yun Fang and Zhengjie Zhou, a former postdoc at UChicago who trained with Fang and Matthew Tirrell, the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at UChicago PME.

Their team specializes in developing nanoparticles to deliver therapeutic cargo to cells and tissues. In this case, Zhou, who is now at Temple University, created a nanoparticle made of four lipids that can encapsulate mRNA molecules, as in some COVID-19 vaccines.

This lipid nanoparticle contained mRNA instructions for the PD-L1 protein, an immune system inhibitor. PD-L1 limits the activity of T-cells—white blood cells essential to the immune system—and prevents autoimmune disease, inflammation and damage to healthy tissues during infection.

It is often co-opted by cancers to evade the immune system, which is why immunotherapy treatments are designed to block it.

“Nanomedicine approaches were central to the clinical success of RNA vaccines,” Fang said. “Our conceptual and technological advances establish a strong foundation for extending this paradigm to metabolic diseases through selective targeting of insulin-producing cells and, ultimately, other key cell types involved in type 1 diabetes.”

Precisely targeting beta cells

Beta cells have GLP-1 receptors—the same targeted by weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy—on their surface. The team used this for a test, creating two versions of the nanoparticles. One was tagged with a peptide to target GLP-1 receptors to see if it helped it find the beta cells, and the other was not.

During in vitro testing, both versions were able to enrich PD-L1 expression in mouse and human cells, although the GLP-1 tagged version performed a little better for mice. The approach also worked in an experimental model where human islet cells—clusters of cells in the pancreas that include insulin-producing beta cells— were transplanted into mice before the nanoparticles were injected.

Ideally, such a treatment in humans would be delivered before full disease onset, while some beta cells are still functional to preserve insulin production.

One of the big advantages of this approach is that both versions of the nanoparticles can target beta cells without affecting other cell types, thereby avoiding unintended results. The team also hopes to leverage them to deliver other therapeutic molecules and possibly add more surface peptides to target receptors on human beta cells more effectively.

“This is generating a new level of excitement, because now we're thinking about engineering beta cells with the knowledge we've accumulated over the years,” said Mirmira, who is also director of the UChicago Diabetes Research and Training Center. “Going forward, it's a promising tool because we can target a specific cell type without harming other cells.”

The study, “Messenger RNA Delivery to Islet β cells Using 1 Conjugated Lipid Nanoparticles,” was supported by Breakthrough T1D and the National Institutes of Health. Additional authors include Jennifer B. Nelson, Fei Huang, Kayla T. Figatner, Advaita Chakraborty, Sarida Pratuangtham, Brian Xi, Sarah C. May and Sarah A. Tersey.

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

In polarized times, when should corporations speak out?

Hal Conick — 02/25/2026 - 09:00am

Months before the 2024 election, University of Chicago law professors Anthony Casey, JD’02, and Tom Ginsburg were racing to finish an opinion piece for The New York Times.

They had written on why corporations should stay quiet on nonbusiness issues, and a new example to affirm that argument seemed to pop up every day.

“Taking a stand on controversial issues is difficult enough in a plural society,” Ginsburg said, “but it’s nearly impossible in a plural society with increasing polarization. For every customer you are satisfying with your corporate statement, you are alienating someone else.”

That calculus hasn’t gone anywhere—if anything, the stakes have only continued to rise. Corporate leaders face a landscape where First Amendment protections are strong but the political and business consequences of speaking out, or choosing silence, are unpredictable. In such a charged landscape, five Law School faculty weighed in on the rights, risks and strategy behind corporate free speech.

About a decade ago, Ginsburg—the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and faculty director of UChicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression—said there was a “virtue cascade,” a movement of consumers who wanted the companies they bought from to express messages in line with their own values.

By 2018, Edelman’s “Earned Brand” study found that 64% of consumers wanted companies to take a stand on social issues.

In an article published in the UChicago Business Law Review earlier in 2024, Casey and Ginsburg had written that corporations should consider a structured process for when to speak on issues, arguing that corporations should insist on institutional neutrality for political and social issues. Rather than responding to a given moment—a war, a controversy, a social movement—executives could point to their policy of commenting only on what impacts business.

In the pair’s later editorial for The New York Times, they found themselves scrambling to fine-tune their own message.

“The world was moving fast,” said Casey, the Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics and faculty director of the Center on Law and Finance. “We had to be updating constantly before we got [the opinion piece] out.”

First Amendment rights and the limits of corporate speech

Expression may have the potential to influence consumer behavior, but it’s a protected right for corporations just the same as for any United States citizen.

Consumers may boycott, shareholders may sell, but if a government threatens or punishes a corporation for expression, that raises a serious First Amendment concern, according to Prof. Genevieve Lakier.

This wasn’t always true. Corporations aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, with most corporate free speech wins coming via the courts. In the late 1800s, corporate lawyers often used the 14th Amendment to ensure equal treatment of corporations by states, especially regarding tax law. And expression rights of corporations were often taken away—the Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporate involvement in federal election campaigns.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that corporations began to gain the right of expression. In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court struck down a statute that restricted corporations from participating in state ballot measures.

Perhaps the best-known corporate speech decision is 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that laws restricting the spending of corporations and unions are not consistent with the First Amendment. This decision allowed corporate money to enter politics.

The trend in courts for decades has been that the First Amendment protects corporate free speech. Even on controversial issues, such as religious freedom, corporations have rights. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that privately held, for-profit companies can be exempt from regulations that their owners object to for religious reasons.

Although corporations and people share the same free expression rights, asking whether corporations are people is the wrong question, said M. Todd Henderson, JD’98, the Michael J. Marks Professor of Law.

Instead, he said that it’s a good practice to ask whether recognizing that group expands the expressive or religious freedom of individuals: If The New York Times can have freedom of speech, Henderson said, doesn’t it make sense that Hobby Lobby also has religious rights?

How government pressure is reshaping corporate free speech

Lakier said recent years have brought a change in how we discuss free expression in the context of corporations.

The First Amendment is organized around a sharp divide between the public and private sectors, she said, and in the mid-2010s, many seemed to believe that corporate and commercial speech was too expansive and deregulated. But now, Lakier explained, many believe the system does not protect corporations from being swayed by government intimidation and other forms of informal control, like cutting federal funding.

“The problem is when the government is such a major player in the economic, political, social life of the country, especially the federal government,” she said. “When it finances so many projects, when it does business with so many private actors, and when it has such a forceful bully pulpit, maintaining these formal divisions is not always enough to fully protect the independence of the private sector.”

This has been seen in universities and law firms. While not public corporations, both types of organizations are part of the private sector and have been targeted since the 2024 election. Multiple universities came under investigation, with others losing millions of dollars in grants, largely due to their response to pro-Palestinian campus protests.

The Trump administration has used executive orders to target multiple law firms by blocking their access to federal buildings, removing security clearances and terminating government contracts. A number of these executive orders have been ruled unconstitutional in district courts.

Social media companies were in a similar position under the Biden administration, Lakier said. Many believed the Biden administration was overly aggressive in forcing social media platforms to report on information regarding the pandemic in ways the government deemed fit. Five social media users sued the Biden administration, but their lawsuit was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Should corporations speak out or stay neutral?

Ultimately, Ginsburg and Casey’s published piece in The New York Times advised corporate leaders to “keep their mouths shut.”

Unless the company or executive has a reason to speak up on something that directly affects business, having a norm of “institutional neutrality” would make it easy to stay silent on hot-button issues.

But sometimes, corporations have a good reason to speak out. In a 2008 article on corporate philanthropy and market altruism, Henderson and Anup Malani, the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law, noted that corporations that do altruistic acts or express a point of view allow stakeholders to support businesses that support causes they favor.

“Staying quiet on issues may pay off in the short term,” said Asst. Prof. Hajin Kim, “but taking stands on bigger issues may lead to positive long-term results. For example, if a company wants to point to a bigger societal issue through its products, such as Patagonia’s environmental work, that may lead to a better corporate reputation.”

The main issue corporations face on free expression is navigating the path of disagreements between stakeholders, according to Casey. That, he added, plus the risk of looking disingenuous if walking back a big statement, is why speaking out can be a risk and why having a policy of staying silent on most issues can be freeing.

“But it must be done consistently for it to truly be freeing, otherwise the silence on certain issues stands out,” Casey said.

Staying neutral could come with a cost of its own. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 53% believe that if a brand is not mentioning what it’s doing to address societal issues, they assume it’s doing nothing or hiding something, with 51% saying that they would be less likely to buy from that brand.

Kim said there may be an unexpected upside to the heightened risks to corporate expression—it separates genuine commitment from posturing.

“The positive side of the backlash is maybe this gets rid of virtue washing,” Kim said. “If people say that they're doing good, you feel like it's a more credible signal because they're saying that in an environment where they may get targeted or punished."

The future of corporate free speech

Ginsburg predicted companies will speak out less often in the coming years, whether they buy into institutional neutrality or not, given the potential social and political repercussions.

“The threat of unfavorable regulatory treatment from this administration makes it a tough environment to do business right now,” Ginsburg said. “Being a CEO is a harder job than ever before.”

Meanwhile, Lakier believes that the future of free speech for corporations has two potential paths to follow. On one path, greater limits are imposed on a government’s ability to demand political agreement from the private sector. On the other path, government control of expression expands, undermining the independent marketplace of ideas the First Amendment is supposed to protect.

As corporations currently have strong First Amendment protections, Lakier believes they should not be afraid to use them.

“Appeasement is not a good strategy for corporations, universities or individuals in a free society, so I would suggest that corporations commit to higher values,” she said.

Henderson took a different view, saying he believes capitalism will serve as a force of neutrality. Sometimes, a product is just a product—no need to attach a message—and he thinks society would be better if political speech and commerce were more separate.

“The bottom line is that companies are going to make a lot of mistakes, because they are faced with something that’s new,” Henderson said. “There’s no one in the boardroom who is skilled in thinking about these issues, because they’ve never faced issues like this before.”

—The full version of this article appeared in the UChicago Law magazine. You can find it online here.

UChicago scientists find better way to make infrared light—using quantum dots

Louise Lerner — 02/24/2026 - 01:00pm

Thanks to modern LED bulbs, light is cheaper than ever to make—except for one particular kind.

Three University of Chicago scientists have announced an innovative way to create infrared light, which has long been a more difficult task than making visible light due to the different materials required.

The new method, which uses quantum dots, performs as well as or better than current infrared light sources while being much simpler to make. The scientists hope the breakthrough could lead to cheaper and more efficient infrared technology—which is used in everything from medicine to vehicle emissions tests.

“The configuration improves the power conversion efficiency by about 100-fold,” said study coauthor Philippe Guyot-Sionnest, professor of physics and chemistry at UChicago and member of the James Frank Institute, “leading to possibly the most efficient mid-infrared LEDs made so far with any materials.”

The results are published Feb. 24 in Nature Photonics.

The ins and outs of infrared

Our eyes can see much of the world, but we’re unable to perceive any light that shines in the infrared spectrum, which means we’re missing out on a lot.

For example, the moths you might dismiss as drab are secretly beautiful—it’s just that their patterns and colors show up only in the infrared, which our sorry human eyes cannot perceive. Similarly, salmon use infrared light to navigate streams; snakes use it to hunt at night; and plants use it to attract pollinators.

But for humans to see and use this light, we must create devices. The trouble is that the energy of infrared light makes it more difficult to create and capture than visible light.

Guyot-Sionnest’s laboratory specializes in quantum dots—particles so tiny that you would need to pile trillions of them together to make a single visible speck. The lab had previously created a new technique to make these particles emit light in the infrared spectrum, but they wanted to make the method even more efficient.

Former UChicago graduate student Xingyu Shen, PhD’25, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had developed an ink that could be used to “print” high-quality quantum dots on a surface. Meanwhile, postdoc Augustin Caillas began tinkering with the geometry of the devices themselves.

The researchers figured they could try a decades-old trick in physics. If they could funnel the electrons and the electromagnetic field of the light into the same tiny spot, that would create the conditions for them to fluoresce faster—creating a brighter light.

The ideal geometry turned out to be a circuit that looks like an extremely miniature bow tie. Two gold triangles meet at one point in the middle, with an infinitesimally small gap in between. The whole setup is just 60 nanometers thick, which is about how long your fingernails grow in one minute.

When the researchers run a current across the device, the electrons shuffle along towards the tip, where they “fall” down energy levels from dot to dot, and emit light as they go.

The team tested the devices and found a 100-fold improvement in efficiency over their previous versions.

“The performance was really quite good right away—it was striking,” said Caillas.

The method to make the devices is much simpler than the infrared light sources used in devices you might buy at the store today. Those are all made with a technique known as molecular epitaxy, which involves evaporating semiconductors in a special ultra-high vacuum and condensing it into many atomically-thin layers, which is expensive both in time and fabrication tools. The team hopes their work could make infrared light LEDs, lasers, and cameras more readily available.

Infrared light has many uses. It is what you see in night-vision cameras that detect body heat, but it’s also used in sensors (such as breathalyzers), fiber optics, and environmental monitoring. Doctors are also investigating how it can be used in medicine, including wound healing, arthritis and cancer care.

The new technique could be especially useful for sensors, Shen explained.

“Right now, you cannot make infrared devices that emit different colors on the same chip, which means you cannot test for multiple wavelengths using the same chip,” she said. “But with our method, you can easily print the dots on any area.”

To make the devices, Caillas used the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility, a specialized research facility at UChicago that supports advanced lithography techniques.

Citation: “Purcell enhanced mid-IR cascade LEDs.” Caillas, Shen, and Guyot-Sionnest, Nature Photonics, Feb. 24, 2026.

Funding: U.S. Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, Martha Ann & Joseph A. Chenicek Fellowship.

U.S. weather and climate disasters could top $1 trillion by 2030

Benjamin Peltz — 02/23/2026 - 09:35am

From tornadoes and hurricanes to wildfires and floods, weather and climate disasters cause billions of dollars in damage, on top of their steep human toll.

Those costs could rise sharply in the years ahead, finds a new study by University of Chicago Asst. Prof. B. B. Cael—potentially amounting to more than $1 trillion in damages between 2026 and 2030 in the United States alone.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed four decades of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) database of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. By examining how often these events occur and how costly they have become since 1980, the research offers a clearer picture of what the next several years may bring.

“There is a tendency to see the biggest disasters as isolated events,” Cael said. “But thanks to NOAA’s efforts, we now have enough data to identify the broader statistical patterns of these extreme events. Once we’ve found these patterns, we can utilize them to get a better sense of what the future might hold.”

To understand these trends, Cael simplified NOAA’s billion-dollar weather and climate disaster categories into two broad buckets based on how their frequency and damages change over time.

One bucket contains severe storms, such as tornadoes and hailstorms, which NOAA tracks as a separate category and which show a distinct statistical frequency. The other combines all remaining disaster categories. These include hurricanes, which are classified as a unique meteorological category, floods and wildfires, which do not differ as clearly from one another in NOAA’s statistics on frequency and damages.

The analysis shows that both buckets are becoming more frequent and more damaging, though not for the same reasons.

The rise in billion-dollar severe storms is most likely linked to climate change, which is increasing the likelihood of extreme weather conditions. At the same time, the growing size of damages across both disaster types appears to be driven largely by social and economic factors.

As populations grow and development expands, more homes, businesses and infrastructure are exposed to harm, increasing the cost of each event.

Using a statistical model that captures these changing patterns, the study estimates the range of possible economic damages over the rest of the decade. While outcomes of the model vary, the results suggest a greater than 90% chance that total U.S. disaster damages from 2026 to 2030 will exceed $500 billion, and a 54% chance they will exceed $1 trillion.

The research also sheds new light on how past disasters are understood.

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast—New Orleans, in particular—in 2005, is often described as a statistical anomaly in terms of economic damage. But the results of this study suggest otherwise. Statistically speaking, Katrina’s damages fall near the middle of the expected range for the single most damaging event over the past few decades.

Despite these projections, the study emphasizes uncertainty rather than inevitability.

Weather and climate disasters are highly variable, and the exact scale of future damages cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy. Even so, the high probability of future events nearing the trillion-dollar mark highlights the importance of continuing to systematically track disasters and to invest in resilience and preparedness.

“This kind of statistical approach cannot tell us exactly what will happen. So, we can’t say when exactly to expect the next major wildfire or Hurricane Katrina,” Cael said. “But it can serve as a guide to the range of outcomes we can expect, which is critical for planning.”

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth website.

How quantum science is moving from lab to hospital

Paul Dailing — 02/20/2026 - 11:38am

Greg Engel and Julian Solway are building a new field to deliver cutting-edge patient care that requires a level of precision most patients won’t need to understand—and that’s just fine.

“Think of an MRI machine,” said Engel, a professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Chemistry Department. “You may not know that it’s flipping nuclear spins in water and imaging the water in your body, but you know when it catches a tumor early enough that it can be treated. Or that using this technology prevented a painful, expensive exploratory surgery. We want the next generation of quantum healthcare to be similarly patient-friendly and effective.”

Engel and Solway, professor emeritus of medicine at UChicago, are co-directors of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine. Created last year through a generous $21 million donation from philanthropist Thea Berggren, the center represents a groundbreaking approach to applying quantum innovation to human health.

“One of the Berggren Center’s fundamental goals is training a medical workforce to be able to leverage quantum physics,” Solway said. “At the start, we’ll focus on MD/Ph.D. or MD-only students who are interested in quantum systems, so that they can work side-by-side with other Ph.D. quantum scientists in order to develop new devices, diagnostics and potentially even therapeutics.”

In a Q&A, Engel and Solway discuss how the Berggren Center is melding these two diverse fields to create a new generation of “bilingual scientists” fluent in both.

How does quantum science relate to medicine?

Engel: Quantum science gets a little bit of a strange reputation in the public media, and people like to lean into the philosophy or the science fiction. I want to discard that. It’s much simpler. It’s a mathematical model that we use to represent behaviors of some of the smallest particles that we know. It makes predictions—some of those predictions are a little counterintuitive, but they have been borne out. Quantum science has proven very successful in helping us understand the world around us, so we want to use it to understand the world within us as well.

Solway: Medicine is fundamentally about solving problems. It’s identifying what’s the health problem, figuring out what’s the best solution, working with the patient, and drawing on everything that the physician and the medical community know. With quantum science, quantum sensing and quantum computing reaching a point where they’re suitable for adding to the medical arsenal, it’s very natural to be excited about the prospect of quantum medicine.

What kind of training does it take to work between medicine and quantum science?

Solway: That’s the same challenge as combining basic science research of any stripe with clinical science and insights. Presently, biological basic scientists often work with clinicians who aren’t biological basic scientists, and to do so effectively they each need to learn the other’s terminology and viewpoints. Collaboration between quantum scientists and clinician scientists is a similar situation, though their respective viewpoints and technical languages may be even further apart.

Facilitating their coming together—by learning of each other’s language in a sufficient degree to communicate effectively—is one of the center’s main goals. And experience shows that one outstanding way to facilitate that coming together is to train individuals to become experts in both fields.

Engel: When you take a young student, you put them in a lab between these different principal investigators and they train there, they feel like they’re a full member of both spaces. They’re translators, and those students are the ones who bring the ideas back and forth from hospital bed to quantum lab.

What medical problems could quantum science help solve?

Solway: I would like to detect tissue hypoxia—inadequate oxygenation—throughout the body. Tissue hypoxia plays a very important role in the pathology of lots of diseases, from lung and cardiovascular problems to metabolic disorders and cancer. Being able to visualize oxygen throughout the body using quantum sensor technologies—wow, that would be useful for critical care physicians and for cardiologists and everybody studying disorders in which there isn’t enough blood flow or a disordered metabolism.

Engel: Quantum sensing will let you see things you could never see before. You’re seeing new ways to see what a cell is doing, how they’re talking, how you become more than the sum of the parts, how your cells work together and communicate. Then in some circumstances, you see disease, you can begin to understand what’s wrong.

There are applications ex vivo, calculating new molecules or diagnostics in the laboratory. And then there are research tools that let you see biology in a different way so you can begin to understand the problems that you couldn’t even frame—the questions you couldn’t even ask before. And that’s the most exciting part.

—Adapted from an article originally published on the UChicago PME website.

‘Hell-heron’ dinosaur discovered in the central Sahara

Grace Niewijk — 02/19/2026 - 09:56am

When the paleontologists first plucked a massive, scimitar-shaped bone from the desolate sands of the central Sahara in 2019, they didn't immediately recognize it for what it was.

It took a return expedition, two more crests and a 3D digital skull assembly powered by solar panels in the middle of the desert in Niger before the realization sank in—they’d unearthed the towering head crest of an entirely new species of dinosaur.

"This find was so sudden and amazing, it was really emotional for our team," said Paul Sereno, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, who led the 20-person group. "I'll forever cherish the moment in camp when we crowded around a laptop to look at the new species for the first time."

A new paper published in Science describes their journeys in 2019 and 2022 to find Spinosaurus mirabilis, the first new spinosaurid species discovered in more than a century.

A large, fish-eating predator, S. mirabilis adds important new fossil finds to the closing chapter of its genus’s evolution. Based on the crest’s surface texture and interior vascular canals, the experts believe it was sheathed in keratin and brightly colored in life, curving toward the sky as a blade-shaped beacon.

Another striking feature of the skull is its interlocking teeth, where those of the lower jaw protrude outward and between those of the uppers to make a deadly trap for slippery fish. This is a common adaptation among fish-eaters in the fossil record—including aquatic ichthyosaurs, semi-aquatic crocodiles and airborne pterosaurs. Among dinosaurs, it sets Spinosaurus and closest kin apart.

Before, spinosaurid bones and teeth had been found mainly in coastal deposits not far from the shoreline, leading some experts to hypothesize that these fish-eating theropods may have been fully aquatic, pursuing prey underwater.

However, the new fossil area in Niger documents animals that were living inland, some as far as about 620 miles from the nearest marine shoreline. Their proximity to intact partial skeletons of long-necked dinosaurs, all buried in river sediments, suggests they lived in a forested inland habitat dissected by rivers.

“I envision this dinosaur as a kind of ‘hell heron’ that had no problem wading on its sturdy legs into two meters of water but probably spent most of its time stalking shallower traps for the many large fish of the day,” Sereno said.

A remarkable expedition to Niger

The journey that culminated in this discovery started with a single sentence in a monograph from the 1950s, where a French geologist mentioned finding a single saber-shaped fossilized tooth resembling those of the giant predator Carcharodontosaurus found in Egypt’s Western Desert at the turn of the last century.

“No one had been back to that tooth site in over 70 years,” Sereno mused. “It was an adventure and a half wandering into the sand seas to search for this locale and then find an even more remote fossil area with the new species. Now all of the young scholars who joined me are co-authors on the report gracing the cover of Science.”

The team ended up meeting a local Tuareg man who led them on his motorbike deep into the center of the Sahara, where he had seen huge fossil bones. After nearly a full day of travel with no shortage of doubts regarding the success of the effort, he led them to a fossil field. There, with little time to spare before returning to camp, the team found teeth and jaw bones of the new species of Spinosaurus.

Sereno has excavated more than 100 tons of fossil finds in the Sahara over the past 30 years—much of which have added to Niger’s rich legacy in paleontology and archaeology. He has also led an international award-winning effort to build the world’s first zero-energy museum, the Museum of the River, on an island in the center of Niger’s capital city of Niamey.

This facility will showcase the country’s world-class patrimony that documents Africa’s lost world of dinosaurs, now including an astonishing spinosaur species, as well as stone-age cultures that once lived in a green, humid Sahara.

“The local people we work with are my lifelong friends, now including the man who led us to Jenguebi and the astonishing spinosaur. They understand the importance of what we’re doing together—for science and for their country,” Sereno said.

Bringing Spinosaurus mirabilis to the world

Back home in Chicago, Sereno’s team at his South Side Fossil Lab in Washington Park cleaned and then CT scanned the teeth and bones, assembling a digital skull rendering for the research report. Using that rendering, Sereno worked with paleoartist Dani Navarro in Madrid to create an action scene involving flesh reconstructions of the new species tussling over a coelacanth carcass. Navarro went farther, creating a detailed 3D physical model of S. mirabilis by adding flesh over a skeletal reconstruction.

Other paleoartists—Jonathan Metzger in Chicago and Davide la Torre in Italy—animated Navarro’s model, bringing to life the scene chosen for the cover of Science.

As part of these reconstruction efforts, the team also prepared a replica of the newly discovered skull and a touchable, colorful model of the scimitar crest.

On March 1, in the wake of the Science paper, both replicas will join Sereno’s previous Dinosaur Expedition exhibit at the Chicago Children’s Museum, where young learners will be among the first to see this latest dinosaur find.

“Letting kids feel the excitement of new discoveries—that’s key to ensuring the next generation of scientists who will discover many more things about our precious planet worth preserving,” Sereno said.

“New scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation” was published in Science in February 2026. Co-authors are Paul C. Sereno, Daniel Vidal, Nathan P. Myhrvold, Evan Johnson-Ransom, María Ciudad Real, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Noelia Sánchez Fontela, Todd L. Green, Evan T. Saitta, Boubé Adamou, Lauren L. Bop, Tyler M. Keillor, Erin C. Fitzgerald, Didier B. Dutheil, Robert A. S. Laroche, Alexandre V. Demers-Potvin, Álvaro Simarro, Francesc Gascó-Lluna, Ana Lázaro, Arturo Gamonal, Charles V. Beightol, Vincent Reneleau, Rachel Vautrin, Filippo Bertozzo, Alejandro Granados, Grace Kinney-Broderick, Jordan C. Mallon, Rafael M. Lindoso and Jahandar Ramezani.

—Adapted from an article originally published on the UChicago Biological Sciences Division website.

Submit your images from UChicago research to 2026 Science as Art contest

Louise Lerner — 02/18/2026 - 01:00pm

Science and art are intimately intertwined. During the course of scientific research, beautiful images might appear in simulations, under microscopes or in photography. These images can offer a window into the process of scientific research to the public, as well as inspiring a moment to step back and consider the beauty of the world.

University Communications invites all members of the UChicago community to submit images from their scientific research for the fifth annual Science as Art contest. (See the winning entries from 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, or browse all the entries submitted.)

The winner will receive $300. A “fan favorite,” judged by the public on UChicago’s social media feeds, will also receive $150. The images will be displayed on the UChicago main website, the UChicago Intranet, social media and in exhibitions around campus.

Requirements: The images must be the result of research affiliated with the University of Chicago. They must be original images created by the submitters. The images must not be created using A.I. image generation tools, and must not be derived from patient data or samples.

Any commonly used image format is acceptable (though TIFFs are preferred). It should be the largest possible resolution. Multiple submissions are allowed.

The deadline to enter is Friday, March 13.

Submit an image to the contest.

Questions? Send inquiries to contest@uchicago.edu.

Neubauer Collegium announces 10 new projects for 2026-27

02/18/2026 - 11:33am

The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has announced 10 new research collaborations for 2026–2027. The projects range broadly in scope and methodology, though all adopt a multi-disciplinary, humanistic perspective to address complex questions.

Now entering its second decade, the Collegium has supported more than 150 projects with faculty representing all divisions and schools at the University. Many of these initiatives, including those launching this summer, draw in scholars, practitioners, artists and members of the public from around the world as research partners.

“The projects our faculty advisory board selected this year represent an astonishing range of scholarly interests and approaches, from ancient poetic traditions to the current housing crisis in U.S. cities,” said David J. Levin, interim director of the Neubauer Collegium for the 2025-2026 academic year. “What unites them is a shared conviction that rigorous collaborative work, grounded in evidence and guided by curiosity, is a compelling way to pursue knowledge. I am excited to see what new insights these projects will generate.”

The following projects launch on July 1:

Beyond the Colonial Divide: Middle Eastern Poetry and Poetics in the Longue Durée

Pamela Klasova (Middle Eastern Studies) and Jana Matuszak (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Middle Eastern Studies)

This project will demonstrate the value of considering ancient and medieval Middle Eastern poetry as one continuous poetic tradition rather than two separate fields. The research team will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars to challenge existing boundaries between historical periods and geographic regions.

Boundaries of Benevolence: Exploring the Limits of Compassion

Baddr Shakhsheer (Surgery), Fan Yang (Psychology), Asim Farooq (Ophthalmology), Jade Pagkas-Bather (Infectious Diseases), Anton Ford (Philosophy), Ania Aizman (Slavic Languages and Literature), John Schneider (Medicine and Epidemiology)

This seed-stage project will focus on community healthcare settings to explore the dynamics of compassion, ethical obligations, and pathways for fostering empathy across regional and social divides.

Egypt, the Levant, and the Rise of the Alphabet

Aren Wilson-Wright (Middle Eastern Studies) and Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek (Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)

Integrating methods from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and digital humanities, this project will explore the circumstances that led to the rise of the alphabet. The research team will produce a digital edition of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions and create a database to trace the transmission of this new system of writing.

Housing Imaginaries

Robin Bartram (Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice) and Adrienne Brown (English Language and Literature; Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity)

What is the role of imagination in addressing the contemporary housing crisis? Through a combination of archival research, field interviews, and collaborative workshops, the research team will integrate creative and humanistic modes of thinking into social scientific research on Chicago housing. The aim is to inform both academic and public discourse on a crucial policy issue.

Love/Music: Problematics of a Relationship

Martha Feldman (Music), Martin Stokes (Kings College London), Dafni Tragaki (University of Thessaly)

This global collaboration queries the presumed relationship between love and music. Through a series of international workshops, artistic exhibitions and publications, the team will advance understanding of an undertheorized but significant cultural nexus.

Nonrelation, Noncomparison, and Dissensus

Na’ama Rokem (Comparative Literature), Dima Ayoub (Middlebury College)

This project will build a digital platform on the translation networks of modern Hebrew and Arabic literature that will make points of divergence, asymmetry and refusal more legible. The aim is to develop a new methodological framework that will be useful for scholars thinking about histories of conflict and political crisis.

Revolutionary Disappointment and Recalibration

Daragh Grant (Social Sciences Collegiate Division), Ghenwa Hayek (Middle Eastern Studies), Jennifer Pitts (Political Science; Committee on Social Thought), David Scott (Columbia University), Lisa Wedeen (Political Science)

Is radical social transformation still possible without a belief in guaranteed progress? This collaboration between political and social theorists and historians of modern revolutionary movements will investigate the forms that political hope might take.

Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine

Jodi Byrd (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Alireza Doostdar (Divinity School), Eve Ewing (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Darryl Li (Anthropology)

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this project will use a mixed-methods approach in undertaking empirical research and comparative analysis to investigate “scholasticide” as a critical category for political and historical analysis. In addition to the resident research team, the project will involve a sequence of virtual visiting fellows.

What Was Theatre in 1609?

Ellen MacKay (English Language and Literature; Committee on Theatre and Performance Studies), Katherine Williams (University of Toronto), Siri Lee (Museum of Modern Art)

Beginning with the Harrington corpus, an idiosyncratic list of early modern drama compiled by a single person in 1609, this project will build a digital resource that identifies discrete units of theatrical activity beyond the play text. The research team will pilot a new methodology to make these patterns of expression discoverable and broadly available. The project will afford rare insight into everyday experiences of theatre in the early 17th century.

Which Side are You On? The Labor Movement Between Theory and Practice

Ben Laurence (Philosophy), Gabriel Winant (History), Steven Klein (King’s College London), Alex Gourevitch (Brown University), Mie Inouye (Bard College)

How can experimental encounters between labor scholars and organizers influence the exchange of knowledge about the labor movement? Building on research questions catalyzed during the What Force on Earth project at the Collegium, a group of political theorists, philosophers, historians and labor organizers will pilot a new technique for facilitating dialogue between labor theory and practice.

—This story was first published by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

A student-led quest to map the hidden history of Chicago's neighborhoods

Patrick O. Maguire — 02/18/2026 - 11:15am

Fire insurance maps are an invaluable resource for anyone trying to understand how cities have changed over the past century. The challenge has always been unlocking what's inside them—that is, until the Chicago Urban Heritage Project came online.

Founded and led by Parker Otto, AB'24, the ambitious project at the University of Chicago is turning high-resolution scans of early 20th century Sanborn Atlases into clickable, searchable digital maps. With the help of undergraduate researchers, the project is bringing the history of the city’s neighborhoods to life.

“Our work is impacting communities, changing narratives and educating people about their places," said Otto. "I love doing this research, we’re helping people realize that we can learn from how things used to be to build a better future.”

The project is an initiative of the Chicago Studies program in close collaboration with the UChicago Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. Students comb through city record archives and use tools such as QGIS software to digitize building footprints and organize spatial data. They also learn to explore historical questions through large, complex datasets.

The Sanborn company began producing its finely detailed atlases in the 1860s to help insurance firms assess fire risk in cities across the United States. Today, they offer a rich record of the construction, location, use and purpose of buildings in historic Chicago.

“The Sanborn maps offer a window into a very particular period of a neighborhood’s history,” said Chris Skrable, executive director of Chicago Studies & Experiential Learning and assistant dean of the College.

When complete, the project’s interactive online maps will offer urban scholars a comprehensive new tool to digitally explore how the residential, commercial and environmental landscape of the city has changed over the past century.

Mapping beyond Hyde Park and Woodlawn

The Urban Heritage Project grew from the Chicago Centuries Project, an initiative that studied the evolution of the neighborhoods around UChicago’s campus, with a focus on the 55th and 63rd Street corridors between 1920 and 2020.

Student researchers collected data about every building on each neighborhood block and used Sanborn maps and historic aerial photos to digitally represent their findings, decade by decade.

Initially, they did their digital mapping by hand—a painstakingly long and tedious process. Only after the team had drawn and georeferenced accurate building footprints could they layer contextual data about the buildings onto the map.

As the project progressed, it became clear that the volume of historic data was quickly outpacing the mapping team’s capacity.

“I thought, ‘There has to be a faster way,’” said Otto, who was then a third-year environmental and urban studies major working on the 63rd Street project.

Taking on the challenge, he experimented with a machine-learning workflow and wrote his own Python code to speed up the work. It was an effort that Skrable said “became an obsession.”

That obsession paid off. Now, instead of tracing every building corner by hand, researchers deploy Otto’s code to identify buildings in the high-resolution scans and turn them into building-footprint polygons that import directly into QGIS. The process reduces the time needed to create full-resolution footprints.

After graduating, Otto became the inaugural Herbert Zar Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in GIS at the UChicago Library's Center for Digital Scholarship. Due to the fellowship, Otto was able to focus significant time on the project, allowing him to make substantial progress and map the remaining neighborhoods. He worked with GIS librarian Rob Shepard to refine the computational workflow and underlying code to make it faster and more reliable.

Using his new workflow, Otto mapped the neighborhoods needed to represent the Chicago Centuries Project data. Then, he posed a question to Skrable: “What if we just kept going?”

That question became the foundation of the Chicago Urban Heritage Project, shifting the work from a corridor-based study to a citywide research effort.

A cohort model for undergraduate research

The Chicago Urban Heritage Project launched with its first cohort of undergraduate researchers last spring.

Otto, now a master’s student in the University of Pennsylvania’s urban planning program, continues to lead the project from Philadelphia. As a graduate research coordinator for the Chicago Studies Program, he hires, trains and supervises a cohort of undergraduate researchers who work alongside him to map Chicago.

Sophia Liu, a second-year public policy major, found her way to the project through the Chicago Studies newsletter. Growing up in New York City nurtured her fascination with how cities evolve and how physical spaces can shape history.

When she arrived at UChicago, she wanted to engage deeply with the city. The project’s blend of a technical approach with archival research only deepened its appeal.

“I just thought that the idea of looking at old insurance maps was really cool,” she said.

Liu interviewed to join the inaugural research cohort, led by Otto—“this young guy in his twenties.”

“It was inspiring to me that undergraduate students were conceptualizing these research ideas,” Liu said, noting that the current cohort is diverse in majors, backgrounds and perspectives but united by curiosity and “a shared interest in the history of Chicago.”

Fellow researcher Griggs Fuller, a second-year public policy major with a GIS minor, described himself as “really into cities and urban planning” and was energized by the opportunity to contribute to an active research project in Chicago.

Liu, Fuller and their fellow researchers began working on the project with Otto and Skrable last spring. Otto trained and mentored the new research group on campus until the end of his fellowship, and Fuller and Liu have since taken new leadership roles as undergraduate supervisors.

Working closely with Otto, they support recruitment and hiring, manage training, oversee research workflows and lead weekly meetings with the cohort. Students also rely on a shared Slack channel, where questions about coding, historical content or mapping decisions can be answered in real time.

“The joke with the cohort is that I never sleep,” Otto said. “Students reach out to me at 3 a.m. and I’ll respond in like five seconds!”

For Liu, that culture of collaborative learning is a defining feature of the project.

“You don’t need to have all the skills to start,” she said. “It’s really accessible, and a learning experience for everyone.”

From the archives to real-world impact

For urban scholars, Sanborn fire insurance maps are “an incredibly valuable data source,” Skrable said.

But finding complete, high-quality sets can be difficult, especially for persons not connected to an academic institution. And the analog nature of the historic images is an obstacle to their being analyzed with contemporary questions in mind. By digitizing map sheets for the entire city, the Chicago Urban Heritage Project is making these materials more accessible for and useful to a new generation of researchers.

When students aren’t digitizing, they might be tracking down additional Sanborn maps in places such as the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago History Museum and the Library of Congress.

“They can be found in odd places,” Liu said. “I think we found a couple on a website called OldInsuranceMaps.net.”

Fuller recalled encountering Sanborn images in an out-of-print book from the University Library’s GIS Collection.

“I think Parker also has a picture of one that we can’t find anywhere else,” he said—possibly, rumor has it, from a local collector with a large private Sanborn archive.

Students georeference each scanned sheet by matching points on the historic map to intersections on a modern map of Chicago. After a sheet is accurately aligned, students run Otto’s Python model to extract building outlines and convert them into digital polygons, after which Liu and Fuller guide the cohort through reviewing and cleaning the results. New researchers learn the workflow in introductory training sessions, followed by hands-on practice and regular feedback.

The resulting data is already being shared with the public. The team developed a website, with initial design assistance from Taylor Faires and Shepard, that allows users to explore every map with multiple overlays and filters, making the Sanborn maps an even richer, consolidated resource for Chicagoans to learn from.

“The website was a really cool way that we were able to take the existing data and make it more interactive,” Fuller said.

Liu said the team wants to make it easier for researchers to do archival research.

“This kind of dataset just doesn’t exist right now,” Liu said. “We also want the website to be accessible to people who are simply curious about historical maps of Chicago and want to understand how their neighborhoods have changed over time.”

The work has already supported research projects in areas ranging from environmental justice to transit-oriented development.

“These research projects are fundamentally intended as educational opportunities for students,” Skrable said. “The goal is to teach students that these resources are out there, and to give them hands-on, mentored experience in working with them.”

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

Obama Presidency Oral History archive opens to public

02/17/2026 - 09:04am

Columbia University on Feb. 17 announced that the Obama Presidency Oral History archive—compiled from hundreds of interviews with people reflecting on Obama’s historic presidency, as well as the lives of Barack and Michelle Obama—is open to the public.

Produced by Columbia’s Incite Institute, in collaboration with scholars at the University of Chicago and the University of Hawaii, the groundbreaking digital archive includes 450 conversations with officials, activists, artists, organizers, and everyday people. The 1,100 hours of audio and video span the President’s childhood in Hawaii, the Obamas’ years in Chicago and at UChicago, and their tenure in Washington, D.C.

The faculty directors of the work at UChicago were Adam Green, associate professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History, and in the College, and Jacqueline Stewart, the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and in the College. The UChicago project director was Susan Sher, former senior advisor to the president at UChicago. The 23 oral histories they collected provide insights into the Obamas’ careers in Chicago—where Barack Obama was a community organizer and politician as well as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and Michelle Obama was a senior leader at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The interviews by UChicago scholars are available as a distinct subject heading on the Obama Presidency Oral History website. They include valuable records of perspectives on the Obamas from Chicago-based figures who have since died, including civil rights leader Timuel Black, AM’54; Chicago business leader James Crown; Chicago attorney Newton N. Minow; and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson. Others interviewed by the UChicago scholars include Illinois State Senators John Cullerton and Emil Jones; U.S. Senator Dick Durbin; Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson; and former U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush.

“We sought to understand the ways that Chicago shaped not only the Obamas’ professional activities, but also their philosophies about work, family, and community,” Stewart said. “The individuals we were privileged to interview fleshed out the fundamental importance of Chicago, and the South Side in particular, in the trajectory of Barack and Michelle Obama’s lives and their national and global impact.”

More than 10,000 stories available

The Obama archives encompass the experiences and actions of Americans and non-Americans, as well as those of top administration officials. The archive tells more than 10,000 stories: reminiscences of Obama supporters and opponents; of Democrats and Republicans; and of artists, mechanics, protest leaders, farmers, policy officials and refugees.

“This archive,” said Peter Bearman, principal investigator for the project and director of Incite, “reminds us how the government can work to enrich the varied communities that make up our enormously complex world.”

The Columbia-led interviews about the Obama presidency cover milestones such as the Affordable Care Act, the decision to increase troops in Afghanistan, and the deal limiting Iran’s nuclear enrichment efforts. The archive also illuminates dynamics between the White House and people who wrote personal letters to Obama about their economic hardships, health insurance, or the effects of gun violence on their lives.

The interviews are available at the Obama Oral History website. All of the transcripts, video and audio of this archive also will be housed at the Obama Presidential Center when it opens in Chicago in June.

—Adapted from a story first published by Columbia University.

Eight UChicago scholars awarded prestigious Sloan Fellowships in 2026

02/17/2026 - 09:00am

Eight University of Chicago scholars have earned Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. This year’s class of 2026 fellows, announced Feb. 17, will receive two-year fellowships in the amount of $75,000 to further their innovative research.

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 229 faculty from UChicago have received a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Learn more about this year’s winners:

Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory.

His research is focused on developing earth-abundant and intrinsically safe batteries for the electric grid; inventing new methods for integrated carbon capture and electrochemical conversion to valuable fuels and chemicals; and accelerating energy materials discovery using artificial intelligence/machine learning.

Amanchukwu received his PhD in chemical engineering from MIT and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge (UK).

Aloni Cohen is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science Institute.

Cohen is at the forefront of the emerging discipline of computer science and law, where rigorous computer science engages directly with legal questions. With a focus on data privacy and AI, he aims to understand and resolve the tensions between the theory of privacy and cryptography and the laws that govern the use of data in the real world. To do so, Cohen develops and studies computational frameworks to operationalize challenges from personally identifiable information, the right to be forgotten, the right to silence, and copyright.

By bridging conceptual gaps between computer science and legal approaches to data privacy and AI regulation, Cohen's work lays firm foundations for the development of socially beneficial data-driven technologies.

Cohen received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and previously held a postdoctoral appointment at Boston University.

Peter Maurer is an assistant professor of molecular engineering in the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Maurer focuses on the development and application of novel imaging and sensing modalities that enable the investigation of biological systems that are not accessible by conventional techniques. To this end, the lab explores coherent control techniques and quantum algorithms that harness solid state spin systems of increasing complexity and combines them with state-of-the-art biophysics tools. Physics World named his creation of a first-of-its-kind biological qubit one of the top 10 research breakthroughs of 2025.

Maurer received his PhD in physics from Harvard University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Jack Mountjoy is an associate professor of economics and the Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the Booth School of Business.

His research explores the economics and econometrics of education, labor markets and social mobility.

Mountjoy earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, Mountjoy completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He also worked as an economic research analyst at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Christina Patterson is an associate professor of economics and the Robert King Steel Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth.

Patterson studies macroeconomics and labor economics, focusing on how inequality across workers and firms can affect the economy’s response to shocks. Her research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, AEJ: Macroeconomics, and European Economic Review. She also serves as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Patterson earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. Prior to joining Booth, Patterson was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Prior to entering academia, Patterson served as a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Wang is an applied economist whose research spans political economy and development and environmental economics, with a regional focus on China. He investigates how political institutions shape policy design, implementation and outcomes, and the implications for economic performance, environmental regulation and governance.

A notable strand of his work explores the political economy of environmental regulation to understand how incentives faced by officials and citizens influence regulatory enforcement and environmental quality. Wang conducted one study in this area that provided one of the first rigorous estimates of the overall costs of environmental regulation in China.

In addition to his faculty role at Harris, Wang serves as deputy faculty director of the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC-China), helping to advance interdisciplinary research on energy and environmental policy relevant to China and beyond. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Anna Wuttig is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry.

The Wuttig Group is building a catalyst development platform aimed at synthesizing value-added products, from fuels to complex molecules, using readily available electricity and underutilized yet abundant feedstocks.

All electrochemical systems include a structurally complex, electrified interface, a dimension that challenges predictive design of efficient and selective electrocatalytic synthetic sequences. This challenge is amplified in the pursuit of scalable, reusable, and durable technologies; on the essential heterogeneous electrocatalysts, only a fraction of the surface sites is catalytically active. We advance in-situ spectroscopic and synthetic methods to distinguish and target scattered active sites. Combining these advances with mechanistic studies, we introduce a new conceptual catalyst development framework where the inherent structural disorder of heterogeneous electrocatalysts systems is a feature, not a deterrent.

Her previous honors include the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award in Chemistry and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley before joining UChicago in July 2021.

Zoe Yan is an assistant professor at the James Franck Institute and the Department of Physics. She studies experimental quantum many-body physics using the platform of ultracold atoms and molecules. Her experiments combine cutting-edge technologies in trapping and imaging particles and tailoring their interactions to study emergent phenomena of strongly interacting quantum systems.

Before joining UChicago in 2023, Yan earned her Ph.D. from MIT and was a Dicke Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. She has also been honored with the Packard Foundation Fellowship and the Air Force Young Investigator Program.

UChicago student named 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholar

Colin Terrill — 02/16/2026 - 01:17pm

University of Chicago fourth-year student Prithi Srinivasan has been named a 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholar and will pursue a Ph.D. in cell biology at the University of Cambridge this fall. She is one of just 26 students in the United States to earn the award, which aims to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

Though preparing to graduate from UChicago in June with degrees in biology and chemistry, Srinivasan admits this was not always her plan. She said her experiences in the Core curriculum changed her path as a first-year student.

“When I first came to UChicago, I wasn’t going to major in the sciences at all,” Srinivasan said. “The Advanced Biology sequence completely altered my perspective, and I found an unexpected beauty in thinking about how to probe complex biological processes. I changed my major as soon as the quarter was over.”

A Quad Undergraduate Research Scholar, Srinivasan has worked in the lab of Alexander Ruthenberg, an associate professor of molecular genetics and cell biology, for the past four years. While the group aims to understand how gene expression is physically and spatially regulated in the nucleus, Srinivasan credits Ruthenburg for allowing her to direct her research questions more broadly.

"I study nuclear transport, the process by which proteins are brought into and out of the nucleus to regulate gene expression," she said. "In looking more at how proteins are actually 'picked up,' before they are brought to their final destinations, I've been looking at things from a more holistic perspective, to consider the amount of communication that exists between cellular compartments."

In recognition of her high potential as a researcher, Srinivasan was named a Barry Goldwater Scholar last summer. As for her Ph.D., Srinivasan will be studying at Trinity College, a constituent college of Cambridge. She will be working in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology trying to understand the mechanisms of RNA translocation in cells, a process especially important in defining cell patterning and fate specification. It’s something that excites her, and she plans on taking advantage of the network of scientists she will be working with daily.

“I’m looking forward to joining this community of scholars and being able to work with biologists, chemists, and even physicists who are leaders in their fields,” Srinivasan said. “I think these kinds of connections are needed, to develop new experimental methods, and even to arrive at the most interesting questions.”

While the Gates Cambridge scholarship will help her develop her scientific skills, she also hopes to use the opportunity as a platform to push for increased accessibility in science education.

“Providing students hands-on opportunities to get excited about science, in the classroom and in the community at large is something that I hope to do throughout my career as a future professor and research investigator,” Srinivasan said.

There will be more than just academics during her adventure, however. Beyond the history and legacy that Cambridge and the area around the university offer, she also hopes to connect with her new home through craft.

“I love to knit and have loved being able to peruse the yarn stores in the area,” said Srinivasan. “It will definitely be nice to use a local wool blend on my next piece.”

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

—Adapted from an article originally published on the UChicago College website.

In pre-colonial Africa, political decentralization was by design

02/12/2026 - 08:30pm

Pre-colonial African societies have long been seen through the lens of what they didn't become.

New research argues they should be understood on their own terms—as a result of deliberate institutional choices.

A new working paper, “Africa as a Success Story: Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa,” by University of Chicago Prof. James A. Robinson and coauthor Asst. Prof. Soeren J. Henn of the University of Wisconsin, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of African political institutions before European colonization.

“Drawing on economics, history, and anthropology, we argue that African societies intentionally organized themselves to prevent political centralization—and that, by their own objectives, they largely succeeded in this political goal,” said Robinson, a Nobel laureate.

The paper uses ethnographic records and historical population data to make a striking new claim: that in 1880, on the eve of the European “scramble for Africa,” the continent was home to an estimated 45,000 independent political units, or polities. Fewer than 2% of these could reasonably be classified as states, and less than 1% were organized along ethnic lines. Even when larger states did exist, the paper finds, they encompassed at most a total of 44% of Africa’s population.

This level of political decentralization set Africa apart from Eurasia, where large, bureaucratic states became common. Rather than explaining this as a passive outcome of low population density or limited resources, Henn and Robinson argue that African societies deliberately maintained their decentralized systems through social norms, institutional design and political choice.

Much of the existing literature in economics explains state formation through material incentives, including issues of war, taxation, trade or the control of resources. While these help explain Eurasian trajectories, the authors argue they do not neatly apply to the context of Africa.

The authors emphasize the local community—often organized through kinship structures, but also diverse forms such as village councils, age sets and titling societies—as the fundamental unit of African social life. Centralized state authority was widely viewed as a threat to these local institutions. Even where states emerged, they were often what the literature calls “segmentary,” blending centralized authority with enduring kinship-based governance.

Seen on its own terms, the authors argue, Africa’s pre-colonial political organization represents a form of success. Societies achieved what they set out to do—preserving local autonomy and preventing the concentration of political power.

Yet this success carried unintended and historically consequential costs. Extreme decentralization made coordinated responses to external shocks difficult. It facilitated competition among polities during the Atlantic slave trade, increased vulnerability to European conquest through divide-and-rule strategies and complicated post-colonial state-building after independence.

The authors also argue that markets, accumulation and large-scale competition were often secondary to the political goal of maintaining community autonomy. While the economic costs of this choice were relatively small in a pre-industrial world, they became far more consequential in the face of European mercantile capitalism and colonial rule—setting in motion political and economic realities that continue to shape Africa today.

By reframing Africa not as “failed” but rather as a case of deliberate institutional choice, the paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship emphasizing the multiple paths to political and social organization.

“Africa’s past is not defined by what it lacked, but by what it intentionally built and defended,” Robinson said.

Robinson is the 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and the coauthor, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. The paper was released as a working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute at UChicago. 

—Adapted from an article originally published on the UChicago Harris School of Public Policy website.