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Winners of the 2026 UChicago Science as Art competition announced

04/09/2026 - 11:30am

The University of Chicago has announced the winners of its 2026 “Science as Art” contest, which highlights images resulting from research from the UChicago community.

From mathematics to meteorites, the entries display the gorgeous landscape of scientific research going on every day at the University of Chicago.

The grand-prize winner is: “Yin and Yang: Harmony in Chaos” by Takumi Matsuzawa (PhD’23).

Matsuzawa studies the chaotic motions of swirling fluids, known as turbulence. This image captures the trajectories of particles in water as turbulence winds down in a specially designed tank. The color represents the speed of the particles.

“The image also shows that turbulence can persist for surprisingly long times,” Matsuzawa wrote. “When this image was taken, the particles were barely moving, yet long-exposure measurements still reveal the characteristic vortex structure of turbulence.”

The audience favorite, chosen by a March Madness-style bracket on UChicago’s Instagram, is “Cartography of the Mouse” by staff scientist Margarette Clevenger and Prof. Nicolas Chevrier.

This image maps gene expression patterns across the different organ systems in a mouse, using a gene sequencing platform developed by the Chevrier Lab.

Two entries also received honorable mentions:

"Turquoise" by Aqiil Gopee, graduate student in anthropology

Gopee wrote:

During the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) excavations in Sohar, Oman, this year, I unearthed this fragment of turquoise alkaline-glazed earthenware (TURQ.T)—likely Abbasid and probably produced in Iraq circa 9th century CE.

As I brushed the sand away, the relief with appliqué decoration and vivid turquoise glaze gradually appeared, revealing the contrast between the ceramic’s preserved surface and the sand in which it had remained buried for over a millennium.

In the early Islamic period, Sohar was a major port city vibrant with trade across the Indian Ocean, and intricately ornamented pottery such as this would have circulated through the terrestrial and maritime networks that connected Arabia, East Africa, South Asia, and China.

“Plasma Turbulence” by postdoctoral researcher Ludwig Boess

Boess studies turbulent plasmas—a state of superheated matter made up of charged particles. While running a simulation of such a plasma, Boess was struck by the shapes of the structures. The left side shows the number density of the electrons and protons in the plasma; the right side shows their electric current density.

Winners and entries will be displayed around campus in the coming year.

Many more stunning images were submitted this year. Check out more at the Flickr gallery.

Want to see more? Check out past contests here.

Health programs promise personalization. A new tool tests if they deliver

Irene Hsiao — 04/08/2026 - 02:16pm

Treating chronic diseases can involve intensive programs designed to change people’s diet, exercise and other health behaviors.

But a typical program, while packed with information and advice, may overlook a fundamental reality: People’s lives can contain a variety of barriers to behaviors that can improve their health.

“The assumption is that if people follow these programs, their health will improve,” said Emily Fu, a clinical psychologist at the University of Chicago. “However, when you consider people’s real lives—busy schedules, different environments, mental health, social determinants of health and life circumstances—all of that affects whether they can engage in recommended behaviors.

“For example, you might recommend that someone walk for 30 minutes a day, but if they live somewhere without sidewalks or where they don’t feel safe walking, that’s not realistic.”

Fu, in her first year in the PITCH Fellowship at UChicago, studies how such real-world conditions influence long-term health. Yet while the importance of tailoring treatments to account for these factors is broadly accepted, it is neither a standardized practice nor well-understood.

“People often say they’re tailoring interventions, especially in behavioral medicine, but they rarely define what that means,” Fu said.

In a paper published in Prevention Science, she proposed a new way to measure whether health interventions are truly tailored to individuals—and showed that personalization can make a measurable difference in how people engage with treatment.

Scoring how well programs are tailored

The new framework describes tailoring as a structured process in which providers assess a participant’s health behaviors, mental health and social circumstances using validated questionnaires and discussions. Providers then work

collaboratively with participants to create a plan that addresses the most relevant barriers.

Fu applied her new Observational Assessment Tool for Tailoring (OATT) to data from two trials of the Family Check-Up 4® Health intervention, an adaptation of the internationally recognized Family Check-Up®, designed to support families to promote positive child outcomes. Families periodically met with a trained FCU4Health coordinator to develop strategies for improving health. At the beginning of the intervention and a year later, these families completed multiple surveys about family, parent and child health behaviors, mental health and social needs.

Using video recordings of feedback sessions with the FCU4Health coordinator and the parent, Fu and collaborators developed an observation-based scoring system to evaluate how well coordinators tailored their recommendations.

Coders watched nearly 200 recorded sessions across two trials, examining whether coordinators accurately identified the family’s needs and collaborated with them to develop personalized goals.

The scale ranged from zero to five, with higher scores reflecting stronger tailoring. A mid-range score indicated that the coordinator followed expected practices, while higher scores reflected especially thorough personalization and collaboration.

“Good tailoring means the coordinator accurately understands the family’s needs and collaborates with them to develop an appropriate plan,” she explains. “For example, if a parent says mental health is the main barrier and the coordinator connects them to a therapist, that’s good tailoring. If the parent says mental health is the issue but the coordinator focuses only on exercise, that’s poor tailoring.”

Personalized plans make a difference

The results showed that personalizing treatments made a difference.

“We found that better tailoring led to higher engagement during the intervention, which in turn predicted improvements in parents’ health behaviors after 12 months,” said Fu.

Moreover, the findings suggest that starting interventions on a strong personal note can help patients invest long-term in following the treatment.

“The tailoring session we analyzed was only the first session,” she said. “Even that initial session predicted later engagement. The key takeaway is the importance of thorough assessments and collaborative prioritization. Even if a program can’t perfectly tailor every element, focusing on participants’ main needs can improve engagement and outcomes.”

The work also addresses a practical challenge in health care—intensive programs can be expensive and difficult to implement widely. By identifying which elements of personalization matter most, Fu hopes future programs can deliver more efficient interventions that still maintain strong patient engagement.

In the future, she wants to adapt OATT into simpler checklists or self-assessment tools that clinicians can use in everyday practice.

Ultimately, her research aims to shift the focus of behavioral health interventions away from standardized prescriptions and toward a more collaborative model—one that recognizes that improving health behaviors often starts with understanding the complexities of people’s lives.

“Many health problems seen in primary care have behavioral components,” said Fu. “Clinicians and researchers work very hard to help patients change behaviors, often by adding more interventions. I’m interested in creating shorter, efficient, tailored behavioral interventions that fit into that setting.”

Citation: "Validation of the Observational Assessment Tool for Tailoring (OATT)." Fu et al, Prevention Science, Jan. 30, 2026.

Funding: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Agriculture, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, University of Chicago Primary Care Investigators Training in Chronic Disease & Health Disparities (PITCH) Fellowship.

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

Celebrate Earth Day with events at UChicago

04/08/2026 - 10:53am

As new buds and blossoms mark the coming of spring, they also plant the seeds for Earth Day on April 22.

To celebrate, the University of Chicago has organized events throughout the month, led by the Office of Sustainability. Catch a special screening of a documentary featuring UChicago scholars, take a guided technical tour of campus facilities and explore an outdoor lab of “living sculpture.”

Read on for more Earth Day events, including volunteer opportunities, or check out the full sustainability calendar.

April 9
Earth Month Tour: ‘Untidy Objects’
Thursday, April 9, 3-4 p.m., in the garden south of David and Reva Logan Center for the Arts, 5620 S. Drexel Ave. | RSVP
Join a tour of the outdoor research lab “Untidy Objects” led by visual artist and DOVA lecturer Amber Ginsburg, who will invite visitors into how this “living sculpture” that includes water and vegetation is also a social intervention. The lab prompts viewers to consider that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights. Participants can use their phones to explore sites of “augmented reality” that alter viewers’ responses to the sculpture’s propositions. The tour will begin in the circular drive behind the Logan Center for the Arts when entering from 5620 S. Drexel Ave.

April 10
Earth Month Tour: Campus data center
Friday, April 10, 3-4 p.m., Location TBD | RSVP
Join a tour of a campus data center led by Raymond Parpart, director of UChicago’s Data Center Strategy & Operations office, for an inside look at how his team earned a top efficiency certification for implementing sustainability strategies related to airflow management, mechanical systems, electrical systems and processes. The campus’s five data centers collectively run 368 cabinets to support teaching, learning and research.

April 11
Chicago Energy Conference co-presented by the energy and sustainability clubs of UChicago and Northwestern University
Saturday, April 11, 9 a.m.-4:50 p.m., Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center, 303 E. Superior St., Chicago | Tickets free for UChicago students, faculty and staff
Attend the inaugural UChicago College student-run Chicago Energy Conference with the theme: “Resilience in a Changing World: Stability, Strength, and Innovation for a World in Flux.”

The event will feature keynote speakers from leading energy research and sustainability organizations, as well as panel discussions and networking opportunities.

ENERGY STAR® 2026 Battle of the Buildings
April 14-28
UChicago residence hall communities will compete to conserve as much energy and water as possible in this annual contest. Seven halls, from Campus North to Woodlawn, will vie for the title. Learn more.

April 13
Earth Month Tour: Rockefeller Memorial Chapel
Monday, April 13, 5-6 p.m., 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. | RSVP
Join a tour of the historic 1928 Rockefeller Memorial Chapel led by Patrick Lummen, the capital project manager of the recently completed large-scale renovation project to restore the chapel’s stained-glass windows and masonry. The project also enhanced the sustainability of the building exterior. Tour will meet at the south entrance doors.

April 16
Earth Month Tour: West Campus Combined Utility Plant
Thursday, April 16, 12-1:30 p.m., 5801 S. Maryland Ave. | RSVP
Join a walking tour of the West Campus Combined Utility Plant—designed by architect Helmut Jahn, who also designed the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library—led by maintenance mechanic Abdull Gregory for an in-depth look at the processes responsible for bringing critical utilities such as steam and chilled water across campus and to UChicago Medicine. This unique behind-the-scenes tour requires comfort with a noisy environment and the use of stairs. Gather promptly at the entrance doors on 5801 S. Maryland Ave., doors will be locked at 12:05 p.m.

April 18
UCSC Earth Day of Service
Saturday, April 18, 10 a.m.-2 p.m., gather in McCormick-Tribune Lounge of the Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University Ave. | RSVP
Join the University Community Service Center and community partners for sustainability-focused service projects on the South Side. The service day, in partnership with community organizations across Englewood, Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Greater Grand Crossing and beyond, will focus on beautification, outreach and capacity-building projects at local community sites.

Participants will gather for breakfast and check-in at the McCormick-Tribune Lounge at 10 a.m. before heading out and getting to work. Most projects will be at sites within walking distance of the University, within one mile, though there will be transportation available for a select few project sites. Projects will last approximately 2.5 hours, with time built in to learn about the organization and hear about upcoming opportunities to engage. All participants should expect to return to campus by approximately 2 p.m.

April 21
“Plan C for Civilization” film screening and Q&A
Tuesday, April 21, 5:30-8:20 p.m., International House, Assembly Hall, 1414 E. 59th St (enter via the side entrance on Dorchester Avenue) | RSVP
Enjoy a free screening of Plan C for Civilization, a new documentary that prominently features Prof. David Keith, founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative (CSEi). The film, which “reveals the hidden world” of the solar geoengineering tech race, runs approximately 108 minutes and will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with Keith, director Ben Kalina and geophysical sciences Prof. Elisabeth Moyer. Food will be provided.

April 24
Earth Month Tour: The Keller Center
Friday, April 24, 9:30-10:30 a.m., 1307 E. 60th St. | RSVP
Join a tour of the Keller Center led by Gabriel Wilcox, director of sustainable design at the architecture firm Krueck Sexton Partners, who will explore the restoration and reimagining of a 1960s Edward Durrell Stone historic limestone residence hall into the most sustainable building on campus. Home to the Harris School, the center is LEED Platinum certified and has earned recognition through the rigorous Living Building Challenge.

April 25
Jackson Park Clean-Up
Saturday, April 25, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., the Hayes Parking Lot at 63rd Street and Lake Shore Drive | RSVP

Clean up swathes of Jackson Park, the 552-acre park in the Woodlawn community east of campus that is home to the Wooded Island, Japanese Garden and 63rd Street Beach. The Chicago Parks District and the Office of Sustainability will provide tools, pickers, bags and gloves. Meet at the Hayes Parking Lot at 63rd Street and Lake Shore Drive. Waiver required.

April 25
Spring Community Shred Fest
Saturday, April 25, 11 a.m.- 2 p.m.,1427 E. 60th St. (behind The UChicago Press building) | More Info
In recognition of Earth Month, IT Services hosts this event that is free and open to all faculty, staff, students and local community members. Join us to safely and securely destroy unwanted documents and e-waste. IT Services team members will be on site to offer tips on how you can protect yourself against identity theft.

April 28
Earth Month Tour: Recycling center
Tues., April 28, 12 p.m.-1:30 p.m., 4121 S. Packers Ave. (Back of the Yards) | RSVP
Join us for a tour of the state-of-the-art $50M Chicago facility that processes all the single-stream recycling collected on campus, led by Jess Valete, a sustainability specialist. All visitors need to sign a safety waiver before visiting. Participants should be prepared to enter a loud environment, with three flights of stairs to climb, and will be provided with safety attire.

April 30
Earth Month Tour: Botany Pond
Thursday, April 30, 11 a.m.-12 p.m., south of Cobb Gate in the Main Quadrangles | RSVP
Join a tour of Botany Pond led by Kathleen Golomb, manager of campus environment, to learn how its recent historic renovation utilizes an innovative ecological engineering design, nature-based water management, and native wildlife and plantings to provide a balanced ecosystem. Gather at the west end of the pond, just past Cobb Gate on East 57th Street, in the Main Quadrangles.

Ongoing
Earth Month Tour: Gardens & Sustainability on Campus
Take the self-led Garden Tour and Sustainability Tour. Explore the campus-wide botanic garden and learn about sustainability features throughout campus, while reading about highlights on your phone.

—Read a full version of this article on the Office of Sustainability website.

First-ever cellular ‘blueprint’ for tiny C. elegans worm could hold big clues for humans

Matt Wood — 04/07/2026 - 11:34am

Every multicellular organism, from tiny worms to humans, elephants and whales, needs a way for their cells to work together.

Cells have a variety of protein receptors on their surfaces that connect with receptors on other cells to form so-called adhesive structures. These help them communicate and respond to cues from their environment. The sum of these interactions is called the cell surface “interactome,” which serves as a reference manual for understanding how these tiny units coordinate—and ultimately form tissues and organs, and organize their overall body plan.

In a recent study published in Cell Genomics, scientists from the University of Chicago published the first extracellular interactome for the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a classic model organism for studying genetic and cellular development. The data describes extracellular interactions for 374 proteins, including 159 interactions that were previously unknown, revealing unexpected connections involved in neuron development and insulin signaling.

For Engin Özkan, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UChicago and senior author of the paper, building this interactome has been a decade-long quest.

“Multicellular life is one complex manual—so many parts have to come together. The cells need to get to the right place to perform and have the correct molecules to connect with other molecules from surrounding tissues and other cells,” he said. “We've been missing so much of this blueprint because we lacked the basic data about which molecules interact with which. And that's the gap my lab has been trying to fill for the last 10 years, so that we can understand how the synaptic connections between all neurons form.”

Why C. elegans matters for human biology

While the tiny—less than 1 mm long—C. elegans worm couldn’t look more different from complex multicellular animals such as humans, it’s a powerful and beloved scientific model.

Simplicity helps—an adult worm has about 1,000 cells, with exactly 302 neurons, all carefully mapped and genetically sequenced. They are easily manipulated with modern genetic tools, plus they grow quickly and are easy to maintain, making them ideal experimental animals.

Despite these differences, many molecular pathways—including processes for cell death, aging, metabolism and development—work the same way in both organisms, making discoveries in worms relevant to human biology.

“You would think by 2026, we would know the majority of interactions that hold this animal’s cells together, but we still don't, which is an opportunity for a lab like mine,” Özkan said.

As a structural biologist by trade, his lab specializes in building a variety of biochemical tools, imaging techniques, protein engineering strategies and genetic modifications to document and decipher the surface receptors that help cells connect to each other.

Most surface receptors are embedded in cell membranes made from lipids, which pose a lot of technical challenges for researchers trying to study them. Özkan’s team has developed several biochemical tools that allow them to study these receptors at high volume, uncovering as much as 80% of their interactions that hadn’t been discovered yet.

Asst. Prof. István Kovács’s group at Northwestern University also contributed novel mathematical analysis methods for the study, which was a collaboration made possible by the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, a joint partnership between the two universities.

New cell interactions point toward disease research

The research uncovered several protein families that interact in unexpected ways, including one group thought to be involved in neuron growth that also participates in insulin signaling.

Experiments that increased the expression of these proteins also extended the lifespan of the worms. Other new interactions had unexpected roles in signaling for growth factors.

Since so many of these receptors are similar in humans, understanding how they work is important for understanding what they do—and, more importantly, what happens when something goes wrong and leads to disease.

Combining this new set of interaction data (the interactome) with decades of work cataloging C. elegans genes (the genome) and gene expression (the transcriptome) builds a more complete reference manual for understanding basic biology.

“The modern biologist is often after this thing we call mechanism, or how it works,” Özkan said. “Now at least for cell surface molecules, we know what those molecules are supposed to interact with. Now we have good ideas about how to connect that to function, through decades of genetics work by others, and begin to complete the circle into a full understanding of multicellular function.”

The study, “Nematode extracellular protein interactome expands connections between signaling pathways,” was supported by the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology; the National Science Foundation; and the Simons Foundation. Additional authors include Wioletta I. Nawrocka, Shouqiang Cheng, Matthew C. Rosen, Elena Cortés, Elana E. Baltrusaitis and Zainab Aziz from UChicago; Leo T.H. Tang from the University of Vermont; and Bingjie Hao and István A. Kovács from Northwestern.

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

Press start to change your mind

Benjamin Ransom — 04/06/2026 - 01:37pm

Imagine a video game where you’re a squirrel in a beautiful forest, gathering acorns to prepare for the winter.

At first, collecting them is satisfying. But then a narrator warns you: acorns with sap attract predators. Now you need to clean every one.

The pressure mounts. You realize you need to clean more and more acorns if you want to survive the winter. It becomes less obvious which acorns are contaminated or not. Now you’re worried that you are contaminated, and you have to clean all your acorns again because you’ve touched them. And once they’re wet from being washed in the river, you realize they’ll rot if you don’t arrange them in your nest in just the right way.

“It becomes essentially incompletable, to the point where it causes a sense of anxiety,” said fourth-year Haley Breslin, who is designing the game as her capstone for the Media Arts and Design (MADD) major.

Breslin’s game—which lulls players with comfort before slowly accumulating unsettling elements—is designed to give players a visceral feeling of what it’s like to live with contamination OCD. The condition is characterized by an intense fear that objects, people or oneself have been tainted or made unsafe.

Breslin is one of several UChicago students using their MADD capstone to test what interactive media can uniquely do—not just represent an experience, but invite you to participate in one. That instinct is at the core of MADD. Since the program launched in 2021, students and researchers have converged around clusters ranging from games to algorithmic music, creative computing and expanded cinema.

The University recently received a milestone gift to create the Mouly Carlson Chair, marking the first endowed professorship in the fields of media arts, design and game studies at UChicago.

For Breslin, the MADD capstone project is personal. She designed it from her own experience with OCD, hoping the game could do what conversation often couldn't.

In her game, subtle triggers—a jittery camera, and ghost frequencies too low to consciously hear—build into a creeping sense of dread. The game's insistent, worrying narrator represents the mental voice of OCD, giving players a firsthand perspective about what Breslin has long struggled to communicate.

“I can explain these feelings to someone, but they’re inherently irrational,” she said. “So I made something for people who haven’t experienced these things at all.”

Playing the prosecutor

Like Breslin, Aimee Stachowiak believes games can make players feel things no other medium can. A MADD and human rights double-major, her capstone video essay explores how two very different games implicate players in questions of justice and punishment.

“Games offer a safe space to engage with very complex moral quandaries,” she said. "When you are forced to do those actions, it's much more personal.”

Her project grew out of a research question that kept nagging at her: Has the United States confused punishment with justice? And should justice always entail retribution?

She was drawn to two games in particular. The first is Ace Attorney, a game she discovered through her older sister—who was also in MADD—that casts the player as a defense lawyer carefully thinking through arguments to exonerate the wrongly accused. When evidence cuts against your own case, the game doesn't let you ignore it: Both sides pause, return to the scene and keep looking.

The second, L.A. Noire, is a detective game where players patrol, interrogate and arrest their way through 1940s Los Angeles—and where tracking down a parolee gives you a choice: arrest them, or throw them off a building. The game rewards both equally.

"In L.A. Noire you are trying to figure out who did it and punish them. In Ace Attorney, you are trying to figure out the truth. It's a very simple difference," she said.

For Stachowiak, games can show us that justice isn’t an abstraction. It’s carried out by ordinary people with assumptions they often never examine. While L.A. Noire makes those assumptions feel natural—even rewarded—she loves Ace Attorney because it forces you to question them at every turn.

“It makes you go through the processes of determining everything for yourself—what it means to engage more critically with evidence, to engage with justice systems, to notice corruption and ways to address it."

A passport to anywhere

Stachowiak, like Breslin, shows how games can do things other media can't—forcing your hand in an ethical dilemma.

But for fellow MADD student Mack Minter, games and the fantasy genre can also do something more boundless: take you somewhere that never existed. They can immerse you in worlds built from imagination, ruled by different logic and alive with creative potential.

"Fantasy for me is a philosophy—a way of interacting with the world that draws on utopia and imagination," said Minter.

Minter's video essay project aims to answer a deceptively simple question: why does that feeling matter? And why, as we grow up, do we learn to take it less seriously—to treat fantasy as something to be set aside rather than explored?

For Minter, what they see as the academy's indifference to the fantasy genre is both a symptom of that problem and a provocation.

"Everything I know about fantasy studies has been because I sought it out," they said. "It’s a pretty niche field."

To drive at that theme, Minter's video essay on fantasy and tabletop role-playing games blends scholarly analysis with autobiography—scenes from Minter's own childhood rendered as a fairy-tale. We see a 9-year-old Minter cracking open a novel from the Percy Jackson series for the first time, surrounded by costumes, props and theatrical sets.

“It’s difficult figuring out how to make other people understand how engaging fantasy feels,” Minter said. "It’s also a fun exercise in creative writing to dramatize things that happened to me as a kid."

As Minter reflects in the essay, J.R.R. Tolkien argued that fantasy lets you reclaim something lost in growing up. Minter's project partially tests that idea and challenges everyone who decided losing it was inevitable: from skeptical family members to those literature scholars who scoff at the genre.

"So much of this project is really me trying to prove to people that this matters,” said Minter. "It feels like I'm treading new ground in a way that’s intimidating, but exciting."

Say it or play it?

Breslin, Stachowiak and Minter arrived at their capstones from very different places—a personal struggle, a conversation on human rights, a childhood full of dice and dragons. But they landed on the same conviction: that games don't just entertain. They put you somewhere you've never been, make you feel something you couldn't have predicted and ask you to reckon with it.

Through the MADD program, all three have appreciated the chance to bring their perspectives to life through games and videos—especially in a world where they’re such dominant forms of popular culture.

“People my age watch YouTube videos and play games,” said Stachowiak. “If I'm trying to get that message across, I should use a medium they're more likely to engage with.”

Patrick Jagoda, a professor and chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, sees that thought as central to what the program is for.

"The MADD program helps students make sense of the rapid developments in media and design that have fundamentally transformed contemporary life," he said. "It supports students’ passion for cultural objects: like video games, anime and interactive film. It invites them to both criticize and experiment with generative AI and design methods. The program gives students the tools to be able to contribute to emergent media cultures in a meaningful way.”

Scientists discover ‘most chemically pristine’ star yet found in the universe

Louise Lerner — 04/03/2026 - 10:58am

A group of scientists, including a class of undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, has discovered the most chemically pristine star yet known in the universe.

This star dates back to the early ages of the universe, formed long before our sun or Earth in the first several billion years after the Big Bang. The finding gives scientists a rare look into the evolution of the earliest stars in the universe—particularly how they transitioned from the first generation of massive stars into the smaller ones common today.

“These pristine stars are windows into the dawn of stars and galaxies in the universe,” said Alexander Ji, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago and the first author on the study, published April 3 in Nature Astronomy. “I expected great things from the students, but this is above and beyond.”

‘You could feel the energy in the room’

In the beginning, just after the Big Bang, stars began to form.

These stars were big—made up of just helium and hydrogen, they burned hot and died early. But inside their cores, atoms had fused into heavier elements. When those huge stars exploded, new stars formed out of the debris. As this happened over and over, we got more heavy elements, until there was enough to make up the iron in our blood and the oxygen we breathe.

Scientists know this much, but are still investigating how the following generation of stars became smaller and longer-lived.

The most direct way to learn more would be to locate some of these ancient stars. This is what Ji’s research focuses on—so when it was his turn to teach an undergraduate astronomy field course focused on making actual scientific observations, he set the students to the problem.

The class combed star catalogs made by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, looking for stars with hints of anomalous readings. Because it takes time to build up an accumulation of heavy elements, the less of them a star has, the older it must be.

The students identified a handful of candidate stars. Then, over spring break of 2025, the class journeyed down to the Magellan Telescopes at Carnegie Science's Las Campanas Observatory, located in the remote mountains of Chile. These powerful telescopes can make more detailed measurements of the elements present in stars.

On the first night there, the students began scanning the candidate stars they’d identified. In the early hours of the morning, they got an inkling that something was up.

“I think we still had one or two stars left on the observing run, but meanwhile [teaching assistant Hillary Diane Andales] was doing some preliminary analysis on what we’d collected so far,” said Natalie Orrantia, a fourth-year College student. “She started making these little noises, and then, ‘This is nuts, could it be a mistake?’ But the more we looked at it the more it looked like it was real.”

“You could feel the energy in the room,” added Ha Do, a fourth-year student. “I think Professor Ji was doing mental backflips.”

The team allotted multiple hours the next night to observing the star, gathering all the data they could to get a clear reading. Then, on the flight home, Ji said, “I sat there just scrapping and rewriting the entire curriculum I had planned for the next quarter. Instead, we were going to throw everything into analyzing this star.”

Early star formation

Over the course of the next quarter, the class divided into small groups and set to work analyzing the data and writing the scientific paper, which would eventually be accepted to Nature Astronomy. They also presented their findings to the entire Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration.

The star, named SDSS J0715−7334, resides about 80,000 light-years away from us. According to the team’s analysis, it had just half the amount of heavy elements measured in the previous record-holder, making it the oldest-known star by a wide margin. They also found it is a galactic immigrant, originally formed elsewhere but currently being pulled into the Milky Way.

The finding also sheds light on why later generations of stars grew smaller than the first. Previously, scientists had two leading theories—one being the presence of heavy elements, the other being cosmic dust (solid particles, such as soot or silicates).

“That dust is everywhere in the universe now, but we weren’t sure whether dust would have existed back then,” explained Pierre Thibodeaux, a graduate student at UChicago and co-author on the study. “If there was dust present, that could cause the gas to fragment into clumps, and then you get several smaller stars instead of one big one.”

Heavy elements in the gas phase could have also caused the same fragmentation. But when the scientists added up all the elements in this newly discovered star, they found there weren’t sufficient amounts to make this explanation work.

“It seems the transition was much more likely caused by that cosmic dust,” said Thibodeaux.

An ‘incredible’ experience

Orrantia explained that now that scientists have identified this star, they can use the data to narrow their search for similar stars.

“So it’s really cool that we found this star, but also, the more you find, the stronger the claims you make about these early stars and how our universe evolved,” she said.

Asked what they took away from the experience, both students named the trip to the observatory as “incredible.”

“It’s a great experience for the science, but also for having an appreciation for the human aspect of things. We met the engineers who work on the telescopes, and the operators were up at night with us,” said Do. “We really got to understand how many human hands these photons go through before they come to us.”

The other undergraduate students on the study were Selenna Mejias-Torres, Zhongyuan Zhang and Rithika Tudmilla, as well as graduate student Hillary Diane Andales and postdoctoral researcher Guilherme Limberg.

The study used the resources of UChicago’s Research Computing Center.

Citation: “A nearly pristine star from the Large Magellanic Cloud.” Ji et al, Nature Astronomy, April 3, 2026.

Funding: The University of Chicago, the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Max Planck Society, European Research Council, NASA, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Gruber Science Fellowship, ANID, Joint Committee ESO-Government of Chile, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, UChicago Data Science Institute.

$50 million gift to advance UChicago research and support faculty in AI

04/02/2026 - 11:43am

A $50 million gift to the University of Chicago from Trustee Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80, will advance the University’s ambitious vision for AI by supporting the formation of a cohort of faculty who are pioneers in the use of AI in research in disciplines across the University.

It will launch the Mansueto Faculty of Mind and Machine Challenge, which seeks to generate nearly $200 million to recruit, retain, and support 20 leading scholars from a wide range of fields who are exemplary in the use of the computational lens of thought in their disciplines. The match challenge will catalyze additional philanthropy from donors who are inspired by the University’s distinctive approach to AI. In addition to the 20 faculty positions, the complete program will also foster investments in the broader academic ecosystem of research and education as it relates to the topics of mind and machine.

The gift reflects the University’s ambitions to develop an interdisciplinary model to advance discovery, knowledge, and human flourishing in the AI era. It builds upon UChicago’s AI Initiative, which supports 10 faculty-led AI-driven research projects in fields ranging from oncology to visual arts. It also supports a dozen projects that promote a wide range of pedagogical innovation, seeking to expand and leverage machine learning and AI in the classroom—or to deliberately limit the use of AI.

“This extraordinary commitment reflects Rika and Joe Mansueto’s deep belief in the University of Chicago’s distinctive approach to inquiry—one that prizes groundbreaking scholarship, intellectual freedom and dialogue across disciplines,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “This is a signal period in intellectual history, and this gift will greatly advance the University as it seeks to shape advances in human thought during this era of AI and machine learning.”

Rather than confining AI to a single department, school or division, the gift will support computational-focused research and education at UChicago—teaching students how to think, with, without, and about machines—and enabling faculty to open new lines of questioning and fields of study around AI.

The faculty supported through the challenge may work in fields ranging from the arts and humanities to the social sciences, science, medicine, economics, business, law, and beyond—advancing a holistic approach in which questions about human intelligence, creativity and responsibility are considered alongside technical knowledge and innovation. In some cases, these scholars will hold joint appointments in computer science, mathematics and statistics.

“For me, the University of Chicago has always stood for a particular way of thinking—rigorous, curious and unafraid to ask fundamental questions,” said Rika Mansueto. “As artificial intelligence reshapes nearly every field, it’s essential that this work be grounded not just in technical excellence, but in a deep understanding of human judgment, responsibility and purpose.”

Rika received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the College in 1991. In addition to serving on the UChicago Board of Trustees, Rika is an active leader in philanthropy, education and civic life. Joe Mansueto received his bachelor’s degree in business administration from the College in 1978 and his MBA from the Graduate School of Business in 1980. Joe is the founder and executive chairman of Morningstar, a global financial information and investment research company he launched in 1984.

The Mansuetos have long supported initiatives across the University, including a gift establishing the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. With this gift, the Mansuetos’ lifetime commitment to the University now exceeds $117 million, reflecting decades of investment in faculty excellence, student opportunity, and bold institutional vision. The Mansueto Faculty of Mind and Machine Challenge will extend their philanthropic mark on the University.

“With AI advancing at an unprecedented pace, the most important breakthroughs won’t come from technology alone,” said Joe Mansueto. “They will come from institutions that insist on asking bigger questions—about how intelligence works, how humans and machines interact, and how innovation can serve society responsibly. The University of Chicago has always embraced that kind of expansive, interdisciplinary inquiry, and this initiative is meant to help ensure that those values shape the future of AI.”

Stevie Wonder is beloved. But can anyone explain his legacy?

MacKenzie Tucker — 04/02/2026 - 10:00am

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

In a University of Chicago classroom, an activist in her 80s who grew up hearing Stevie Wonder in his prime sat a few seats from a 19-year-old discovering his music for the first time.

That was the scene every Wednesday evening in "Wonder Lab: Learning from the Musical Art and Craft of Stevie Wonder,” a Winter Quarter course developed and led by Adam Green, an associate professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History.

“Part of it is, surprise, I love Stevie Wonder, and thought that it would be fun and exciting and revelatory to teach his music," Green said, explaining the rationale behind the course. But he also set out to explore a “paradox” at the heart of Wonder's legacy—that “he's beloved, but people have a hard time explaining why he's influential.”

Born in Michigan in 1950, Wonder started his long career as a child prodigy, signing with the Motown label at the age of 11. From 1972-76, a time that became known as his “classic period,” Wonder released five major albums—three of which won consecutive Grammys for Album of the Year, making him the only artist ever to achieve this feat. In total, Wonder has won 25 Grammys, the most of any solo artist.

But for all this acclaim, Green said, Wonder's work remains curiously underexamined. Green pointed to the often-unsung influence of the musician's long history of activism; his fight for creative control at Motown; pioneering approach to synthesizers and studio production; and the depth of his collaborations with other artists. The Wonder Lab pushes into this scholarly gap, examining questions of craft, politics and history that reverence tends to obscure.

“Everything he did that changed the ways people think about popular music, how it’s recorded and its relationship to Black musical forms—all of that is implicit for some people,” Green said.

Students in the course listen closely to albums and live performances while reading biography, criticism and scholarship on Black cultural leadership.

A class discussion may begin with a song—for example, “Happy Birthday,” which Wonder wrote as part of a years-long campaign to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday—and move outward into questions of race, legacy and the uses of art.

What makes the Wonder Lab especially distinctive, though, is the people who fill the room.

Half the seats are filled by UChicago undergraduates while the other half are for community members from across the city, ranging in age from their mid-20s to their 80s. Green hopes this mixed enrollment model can become an even more regular fixture of courses offered by the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and, perhaps, the wider University.

“There are many roots and sources of wisdom,” Green said.

Wonder, heard across generations

Community members included musicians, educators, critics, activists and lifelong Chicagoans.

Some brought professional experience in the arts, others came because they loved Wonder and wanted to think more deeply about his work. The result, Green said, was a course in which students were not simply responding to a professor, but learning from one another.

For participants, that mixed-enrollment model gave the course much of its meaning.

Jasmine Barnes, a Hyde Park resident and community participant in the course, said what stayed with her most was the range of people in the room.

“I think about Miss Billie [Jean Miller Gray] and Miss Dorothy [Burge], and the one or two other folks who are elders, who really grew up in time with Stevie Wonder’s music,” she said. “That’s been really special.”

At the same time, she said, learning alongside younger students brought something equally valuable.

“To be with students who are 19 and who are maybe discovering music for the first time, or who have a very different viewpoint on the world than I do … that’s been really special too,” she said. “A lot of people in this class would never have imagined going to UChicago, but who got to kind of get a taste of what that type of academic rigor was like because of this class.”

Another community participant, Steven Jackson, a musician and producer at the Old Town School of Folk Music, said the course’s richness came from the range of experiences gathered in one place.

“You have Dorothy [Burge], who’s an older Black woman, who’s been an activist since before I was alive, and she grew up hearing Stevie when he was dropping music fresh,” he said. “Then you also have students that maybe aren’t as familiar with Stevie, and they’re kind of really getting into him for the first time through this class.”

Music as a living document

Part of what made those conversations so resonant was the way the course treated music not as an isolated object of study, but as something that moves through people’s lives.

Green recalled one discussion of Wonder’s song “Big Brother,” inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, in which a community member connected the song’s themes of surveillance and political consciousness to her own activism against police violence in Chicago.

“That’s a great sort of testimony to bring in,” Green said, “in terms of thinking about what a song like that brings you to, and what it reminds you of.”

Jackson described one early session as something like a listening party, with participants responding not only to Wonder’s lyrics and themes, but to the music’s finer details.

“We had ladies talking about the whole-tone scale. We had men talking about how the hi-hat grooves. We had, ‘Oh, he’s repeating this lyric over and over again—why?’” he said. “So that was really cool.”

The course’s final projects were original music inspired by Wonder’s work, visual art, traditional academic responses and a concluding gathering built around presentations and a shared meal.

Participants left with a stronger understanding of Stevie Wonder’s artistry and a greater willingness to share their own ideas.

“It made me want to share more,” Jackson said. “It reminded me it’s very rich to offer up what you have, what you think anyway.”

Barnes said those shared conversations will stay with her.

“I’ll never forget this experience. Whenever I hear his music, I’ll think about the conversations that I had in this class.”

For UChicago Law, the Supreme Court tariffs case was a tale of two alumni

Mark Cohen — 04/01/2026 - 09:36am

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that sweeping tariffs imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump were unlawful, two Law School alumni found themselves at the center of the landmark decision—one as the business owner whose company challenged the tariffs, the other as a constitutional scholar helping argue the case.

Rick Woldenberg, JD’86, is the CEO of the educational products company Learning Resources. Meanwhile, Michael McConnell, JD’79, is a professor of law at Stanford University, a former judge on the 10th U.S. Court of Appeals and, before that, was on the faculty of UChicago Law.

In Learning Resources v. Trump and V.O.S. Selections v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the administration exceeded its authority by imposing sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The 1977 statute allows the executive branch to respond to national emergencies but does not explicitly authorize tariffs.

Together, their efforts helped produce a decision holding that absent exceptional circumstances or a clear congressional delegation, the power to impose taxes and tariffs belongs to Congress—not the president.

And while the decision dealt a major blow to a signature policy of the Trump administration, neither alum was motivated by politics.

McConnell, a conservative legal scholar who was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush, was drawn by the important constitutional issues the case presented.

For Woldenberg, “it was business, not politics.”

A business owner takes on the tariffs

The case for Woldenberg began not in a courtroom but in the day-to-day realities of running a family business.

Northern-Illinois-based Learning Resources, which manufactures educational toys and classroom materials, employs 500 people. Woldenberg joined the company in 1990, when, after graduating UChicago Law and four years of private practice, he opted to join the multigenerational business that his family had founded in 1916.

Like many consumer-goods companies, Learning Resources relies heavily on imported products and components. When the tariffs were announced, the financial consequences were immediate.

“Based on our 2025 budget, and the rates that prevailed at peak that week, I determined that on a run rate basis they were asking us to pay $100 million a year in taxes,” Woldenberg said.

Even after tariff rates shifted, the burden remained extraordinary.

“Our marginal tax rate, with IEEPA tariffs thrown into regular tariffs and duties, federal taxes and state taxes, was in excess of 100 cents on the dollar,” he said. “Make a dollar, pay more than a dollar in taxes—you’re not going to stay in business for long.”

Initially, Woldenberg searched for existing litigation he could support. But when other plaintiffs withdrew from a planned lawsuit, the case suddenly lacked anyone willing to challenge the tariffs.

Rather than step aside, he moved forward himself.

“So, I’m not part of a group,” he said. “I am the group.”

The decision was driven partly by economics—but also by responsibility.

“Hundreds of families living in the Chicago area depend on our family enterprise for their livelihood,” he said.

Facing that reality, Woldenberg felt compelled to act.

“You don’t know in your lifetime when you’re going to be called upon,” he said. “I felt as if my values were being tested … I felt that I would be better off taking the risk than not.”

A separation-of-powers question

While Woldenberg entered the litigation as a business leader confronting an existential financial threat, McConnell came to the case from the world of constitutional law—as a scholar, former federal judge and veteran Supreme Court advocate.

McConnell, who is faculty director of Stanford Law’s Constitutional Law Center, initially became involved by helping to draft an amicus brief analyzing the constitutional issues raised by the tariffs. At the center of the dispute was a fundamental question: whether the presidential administration could rely on emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs without explicit authorization from Congress.

“The core issue was the scope of presidential authority,” McConnell said. “The administration relied on a statute that arguably gave the president extremely broad authority to impose economic sanctions in response to international crises.”

But the Constitution assigns tariff authority to Congress.

“So, the question was whether Congress had actually delegated authority in the way the administration claimed,” he said. “That raises a classic separation-of-powers question.”

McConnell later joined the legal team representing businesses in the V.O.S. Selections litigation challenging the tariffs, serving as counsel of record. When the case reached the Supreme Court, former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued on behalf of the private plaintiffs.

The two cases—Learning Resources and V.O.S. Selections—were consolidated for argument before the Supreme Court. The primary difference between them was procedural: the Learning Resources case originated in federal district court, while the V.O.S. Selections case began in the U.S. Court of International Trade.

That procedural choice had its own UChicago connection. The V.O.S. Selections case was originally filed by the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit then headed by UChicago Law alum, Jacob Huebert, JD’04—and another alum at the organization, Bridget Conlan, JD’24, made the procedural recommendation to file in the Court of International Trade.

In a footnote, the Supreme Court agreed that the Court of International Trade was the proper venue.

“It was a collaborative effort,” McConnell said, adding that it was striking to watch the argument unfold after months of preparation. He said it’s a feeling that never gets old—even after first arguing before the Supreme Court as an assistant solicitor general when he was 28.

“You’ve spent months thinking about the issues, writing briefs and discussing the case with the team,” he said, “then suddenly everything is condensed into a short argument in front of the Court.”

Who has the power to impose tariffs?

Although the case had major economic implications, both alumni emphasized the constitutional stakes.

Woldenberg framed the dispute in historical terms.

“The Boston Tea Party was a tariff dispute,” he said. “The Constitution reflected that history by placing taxing authority in Congress. In representative government, a single individual cannot impose a tax on Americans.”

McConnell agreed.

“If Congress wants to give the president broad authority in a particular area, it needs to say so clearly,” he said. “The Constitution places the power over tariffs and trade policy in Congress.”

McConnell also viewed the decision as reinforcing principles articulated in the landmark separation-of-powers case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Supreme Court’s 1952 steel-seizure ruling limiting presidential authority during the Truman administration. The case has long been a staple of constitutional law courses.

A case for the classroom

Like Youngstown, the Suprme Court’s decision in Learning Resources is likely to become a fixture in constitutional law classrooms for generations to come.

For Woldenberg, whose journey into judicial history was far less predictable than McConnell’s, the experience of seeing his family business’s name attached to a landmark Supreme Court decision is deeply personal.

“Ask any University of Chicago Law School grad how they would feel with their name on seminal litigation that's going to be in ‘Elements of the Law’ for the rest of their life,” he said, referring to the 1L stalwart course. “I can't really think of anything that would be more thrilling.”

Then he added with a laugh:

“I prefer this over winning the Powerball.”

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

In Senegal, students navigate homestays and urban Wolof with UChicago rigor

Mallory Brabrand — 03/31/2026 - 09:16am

Editor’s note: This story is part of Dispatches from Abroad, a series highlighting UChicago community members who are researching, studying and working around the world.

Her first weekend in Dakar, thousands of miles from Chicago and her hometown of New York City, third-year student Talia Crichlow smelled something familiar while walking down the street.

After a moment, she realized the aroma was coming from women roasting peanuts in sugar—a streetside snack sold both on the streets of Senegal’s bustling capital and in New York. This experience was the first of many that Crichlow said made the city feel like a home away from home during her time in the “Dakar: African Civilizations” Study Abroad program in Senegal.

“I thought it was going to be more of a disparate experience to my life back home,” she explained. “But there are so many things that are so familiar.”

The Dakar Civilizations sequence was started in 2018 by Prof. Emily Osborn, a historian of Africa, and Prof. Francois Richard, an archaeologist in the Department of Anthropology. The program in Senegal, for which Osborn currently serves as the faculty director, is joined by two others on the continent, in Morocco and Egypt, but remains the first and only University of Chicago Study Abroad program in Francophone West Africa.

Over the course of nine weeks in Dakar, students live with Senegalese families in homestays and take classes with UChicago professors at the West African Research Center (WARC), a nonprofit education organization. Along with classes, students go on excursions and have opportunities to explore the city on their own, visiting museums, cultural sites and markets. Their classroom study of urban Dakar is further deepened by their daily routines: walking through city streets, meeting people in their neighborhoods and joining the activities of their homestay family.

Longer outings to other regions and cities further extend student perspectives. The student cohort and professors take weekend trips to places such as the former colonial capital Saint-Louis, the picturesque river delta Sine-Saloum and Gorée Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a historic hub of the transatlantic slave trade. Recent cohorts have also spent time in the interior border town of Karang, where students break into groups based on interest and visit local institutions, such as schools and healthcare centers.

Coursework built for immersion

The curriculum is divided into separate courses that focus on different elements of Senegalese and West African civilization, history and culture, while staying grounded in the sights and experiences of present-day Dakar.

“The whole sequence is premised on this idea of lowering the walls between the classroom and the city,” Osborn said. “We invite students to think critically about what they're learning about in their daily lives and bring it into the classroom, and visa versa.”

This year, the students took four courses. These spanned three weeks with Osborn, two weeks with linguist Prof. Salikoko Mufwene, three weeks on Francophone literature with Prof. Nikhita Obeegadoo and a one-week course on the history of slavery with Prof. Mamamrame Seck of University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar.

Osborn noted that students read and discuss scholarly and primary source texts, and also complete written assignments and mini-research projects. But the wider setting offers opportunities for further enrichment.

“For example, we carry out readings on religion, focusing especially on the history of Islam in Senegal, which is the faith of the vast majority of the country," Osborn said. "Students learn from those texts, but then they also can consider how those insights relate to the faith practices and culture of their homestay family, to sites of worship in their neighborhood, as well as to the religious iconography that abounds in the city at large.”

As the program has grown and developed, Osborn has increasingly interwoven the curriculum and classroom learning with real-world experiences. She said the immersive aspect of the program is critical for learning—even for her, eight years into leading it.

“I've become much more explicit and much more open about really encouraging students to learn by doing," she said. "The stuff of daily life—conversations, observations, experiences—offer all sorts of opportunities for rigorous thinking and serious reflection, just as we expect in our standard classroom,” said Osborn, who herself studied abroad in Dakar as an undergraduate student.

She added that the program is still teaching her new ways to approach her work—lessons she's brought back to her teaching in Chicago.

‘Survival Wolof’ and other lessons

For fourth-year data science and economics student Dayo Oladitan, traveling to Dakar as a part of study abroad was a means to connect to his own cultural heritage. Having parents who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, Oladitan was excited to visit West Africa.

“It gave me an opportunity to see a life different from mine and connect to Africa in a way that I've never been able to before,” he said. “And it gave me the insight to know that there are more opportunities to come to Africa in the future.”

While in Dakar, students face challenges and adjust to new cultural expectations, all while managing their studies. Crichlow, who is studying history and education in the College, had no prior experience with French or Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca. So, although she took the program's "Survival Wolof" course, there was still a constant need to figure out how to move through the world, both at home and out in the city.

“There are points of difficulty and fatigue,” she explained. “It is tiring to exist in a language that you don't know all the time, but it’s balanced out well by being in a cohort of fellow UChicago students everyday so that you can learn and grow more when you’re at your homestay.”

Oladitan, who spent this winter in Dakar, emphasized the initial barrier that language posed with his host family and in markets, where urban Wolof—which blends standard Wolof with French and Arabic—is spoken most frequently and where many people do not know English.

However, language was also a unifying force in Oladitan’s study abroad experience. This past quarter, a few members of the cohort connected with a WARC program assistant and English professor at the Institut UniPro Senegal, a private university in Dakar. The professor invited students to join his class for a day to engage with students there who were learning English.

“It was nice just to break the barrier for them around the English language, and to show them that it's not this whole foreign, mysterious language that only certain people have access to,” he explained. “I feel like that's one of the most positive experiences I've had where my American identity has been used for something very good.”

As her program neared completion, Crichlow reflected on the ways in which the program impacted her trajectory at UChicago and beyond. As a third-year student, much of her near future is planned, whether it be the courses she has left to take or the internship she will work this summer. But her time in Dakar has been a well-placed variation from her routine.

“I've learned a lot about being more flexible and more open, just approaching the world with a greater curiosity,” she said. “You can still accomplish your goals, but you could do them in a radically different way than you'd expect.”

The program’s impacts after College

Samantha Taylor, AB’25, decided to study abroad in Dakar during her third year in the College because it was off the “well-worn path” and offered her the unique opportunity to travel somewhere she may not have ever gone on her own.

“I thought, if I want to study abroad, and I want to grow and learn from it, I want to be the most out of my comfort zone that I possibly can be, and that's why I chose Dakar,” she said.

Taylor continues to carry these lessons with her as a part of a global scholarship program at Stanford Law School, where she is attending as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. She even wrote about her experience in Dakar in her graduate school applications, citing it as a transformative and eye-opening experience that shaped both her time at UChicago and her understanding of the world.

Given the small size of the Dakar Civilizations cohorts, students often form deep friendships with students whom they may not have met on campus due to being in different years or having different majors. Two years after her program, Taylor still regularly talks to Osborn and the friends that she made abroad.

“It's one of those experiences that has given me long-term friendships because of how challenging it was and how much we all had to grow together because of it,” Taylor said. “There were obstacles, but that's exactly what makes it worthwhile if you're looking for community growth.”

To teach social-emotional skills, does a robot need to pretend to be human?

Miranda Redenbaugh — 03/30/2026 - 02:03pm

In a crowded fourth-grade classroom in Chicago, a new kind of tutor is shaping how children learn about empathy, conflict, and problem-solving.

These robots aren’t programmed to act like friendly classmates with invented emotions and backstories. Instead, they speak plainly, without pretense or fiction.

The research behind it, led by graduate student Lauren Wright and overseen by Asst. Prof. Sarah Sebo at the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science, found that honest, factual robots can effectively supplement classroom instruction—challenging conventions and illuminating a new, ethical path for educational technology.

The study was honored with the Best Paper Award at the prestigious 2026 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

“We started not with a specific robot prototype, but by observing social and emotional learning instruction in Chicago Public Schools classrooms and talking with teachers about their experiences with social and emotional learning, and then starting to think about how robots might be able to supplement the amazing work teachers are already doing in schools,” said Sebo.

One-on-one learning

Social and emotional learning is a set of skills to help students recognize and manage emotions, establish solid relationships, and respond to challenges. Research has found that teaching these skills boosts long-term academic performance and mental wellness, and reduces rates of dropouts and violence, among other outcomes.

For teachers in Chicago Public Schools, social and emotional learning lessons usually mean whole-class activities delivered once a week.

In practice, however, many students tune out, and overstretched teachers would love more one-on-one opportunities.

Teachers interviewed in the study expressed concern that group social and emotional learning lessons rarely reach every child. This perspective, along with careful classroom observation and interviews, drove the research team to look for solutions.

“We wanted to create a team that would be able to uniquely design and study technology, informed by best practices in social and emotional learning education, with the input of principals, administrators, teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools,” said Sebo.

The plan came together as a partnership; Chicago Public Schools provided access to classrooms and teachers, and policy expert Kiljoong Kim at Chapin Hall built crucial connections that made this cross-institution project possible.

Wright’s team asked whether robots could supplement teachers and provide individualized instruction where group lessons fall short. And did it actually matter if those robots ‘acted’ human?

Straightforward robots

52 students participated in the experiment. One group learned social and emotional learning from robots with fictional, emotion-laden dialogue. Another worked with robots that spoke only in factual terms, openly acknowledging they had no feelings or friends. The third group received their regular curriculum with no robot involvement.

Both robot groups showed students improved in their mastery of social and emotional learning concepts compared to peers who only had classroom instruction. Yet the researchers found the factual robots, in their straightforward honesty, often encouraged deeper engagement with lesson vocabulary and problem-solving language.

These findings challenge conventional wisdom.

“Giving robots fictional personalities with the intent to make them more engaging is a common approach to educational robots, one which feels especially relevant for teaching social and emotional learning,” said Wright. “However, in our research study, we found that the robot’s fictional emotions and experiences may have distracted or made students feel less comfortable using lesson language.

“These findings challenge us to reconsider our assumptions when designing robot behaviors—just because an approach is common doesn’t mean it will always lead to the best outcomes.”

Authentic impact

As society becomes more concerned about children forming unhealthy attachments to AI, the Chicago team’s results provide timely guidance. Demonstrating that factual robots can perform as well or better without mimicking emotions points the way to a safer classroom technology.

The central message of the study is clear, the scientists said: Robots are powerful supplements, extending teachers’ capabilities and freeing up attention for students who need more support. But they do not replace the human element in teaching.

“We firmly believe that human teachers are the most important element in elementary education,” said Sebo. “As we all experienced during the pandemic, replacing in-person educational experiences with technology-mediated ones can be disastrous. Our work does not seek to replace human teachers, but instead, aims to create robot tools that extend a teacher’s reach, giving the ability to provide children with one-on-one attention without pulling them away from the rest of the class.”

As this school year winds down, Chicago’s classroom experiment stands as proof of what partnership-driven innovation can achieve in education. The findings invite other districts to rethink how technology can responsibly supplement teachers and ensure every child receives meaningful, individualized support.

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

No clear endgame to U.S. operation in Iran, UChicago experts say

Cristi Kempf — 03/27/2026 - 04:28pm

After four weeks of fighting in Iran, one question looms above the rest: What is the United States trying to accomplish?

That was the central tension at a March 23 panel at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where scholars and a policy leader examined a conflict that is reshaping global markets, alliances and the nature of modern warfare.

The goal of the fighting “is not clear,” said panelist Paul Poast, an associate professor of political science. He pointed to stated reasons that span regime change to nuclear deterrence and reopening shipping lanes—adding that, without an identifiable objective, it’s difficult to define success or find an exit.

Poast was joined by Ryan Kellogg, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor at the Harris School, and Jake Braun, executive director of the Harris Cyber Policy Initiative. Harris Senior Lecturer Rebecca Wolfe moderated, opening the discussion with a list of the conflict’s rising human toll. In parallel, the Pentagon has sent thousands of Marines to the Middle East and disruptions to global shipping routes have sent shockwaves through the international economy.

The conflict, named Operation Epic Fury, has triggered one of the most severe oil supply disruptions in decades, said Kellogg, an energy and environmental economist and deputy dean at Harris. Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, denying safe passage to tankers carrying oil and liquefied natural gas and cutting off roughly 10% of the world’s daily oil supply, he explained.

The result has been a sharp spike in energy prices, with cascading effects including inflation and food insecurity. Countries in South and Southeast Asia, heavily reliant on Middle Eastern oil, have been among the hardest hit. Even in energy-producing nations such as the United States, consumers have seen rising costs. In late March, gas prices were up more than $1 per gallon from one month earlier.

This is not something that can be fixed quickly, Kellogg added. Panelists warned that Americans may be unprepared for the human and economic costs of a prolonged engagement.

Dimming hope for a quick resolution, they said, are the competing interests being pushed by the U.S., Israel and Iran as well as what Wolfe described as Iran’s “less than traditional strategies.” Iran’s drones, mines and cyberattacks are “very hard to suppress,” Kellogg noted, a lesson Russia has learned in its war with Ukraine.

Braun warned that Iran is likely to expand its use of nontraditional tactics, including cyberattacks and disinformation and misinformation campaigns.

“Iran is the poster child for hybrid threats,” Braun said, pointing to its past attacks on U.S. banking systems, election integrity and water utilities.

He cautioned that future cyberattacks could be even more disruptive with the growing use of AI to rapidly scale cyber capabilities.

“That's really scary because then it's not human against human anymore, and it's much harder to defeat,” Braun said.

‘The modern version of a world war’

Russia and China are also being drawn into the conflict, panelists noted, though in indirect ways. Poast said the fighting illustrates a potential evolution in how global wars are waged.

“What you're witnessing right now is the modern version of a world war,” he said, explaining that it’s not a single, unified conflict, but a series of interconnected regional wars involving major powers.

Though Russia has deep ties with Iran and may continue to provide support, Braun noted it has its hands full with Ukraine. At the same time, rising energy prices are benefiting Moscow economically.

China, meanwhile, has taken a more restrained approach. Despite its reliance on Middle Eastern oil and longstanding relationship with Iran, Beijing appears focused on positioning itself as a stabilizing force on the global stage.

“I think China is trying to sit back a bit and not be viewed as one of the belligerents in all this so that the rest of the world, particularly folks in their sphere of influence in Asia, can view them as a stable partner,” Braun said.

China, sees an opportunity to contrast its steady approach with the more unpredictable approach of the U.S., panelists noted.

Why attack Iran now?

Panelists were united in their view that that U.S. approach has intensely complicated the situation. European nations and Gulf states, many of whom were not consulted ahead of the strikes, have been reluctant to fully support U.S. efforts.

What many say could have been a moment for coalition-building has instead created hesitation and, in some cases, distrust. Allies, especially those that host U.S. military bases and have been attacked by Iran, are now questioning Washington’s reliability and decision-making, Poast noted, and its ability to protect them.

But that question was overshadowed by an even bigger one: Why attack Iran now?

The U.S. and Iran have had tensions for decades, and it’s been less than 10 months since Operation Midnight Hammer, in which the U.S. claimed to have knocked out Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“One of the key things that explains the timing of what's happening now is what I've been calling ‘Maduro momentum,’” Poast said, referring to the January operation to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

“The Maduro raid went very well from the perspective of President Donald Trump,” Poast said, “And I think Trump took a lot of pride in that and that then gave him momentum to say, ‘Well, where can we turn next?’”

But that “next” may prove to be more problematic for the Trump administration.

“I think he's kicked the hornet's nest,” Poast said, “and it's not going to be something he can just easily extract the United States from.”

—This article was originally published on the Harris website.

The secret ingredient in a new biomedical device? Lithium-ion battery tech

Louise Lerner — 03/27/2026 - 09:13am

If your body needs a boost, the fix might already be in your phone.

A new study from the University of Chicago taps an ingredient most often used in the lithium-ion batteries that power our devices to open new avenues in biomedical technology.

Lithium plays vital roles in the body, but taking it orally can have unwanted side effects—so a pair of UChicago chemistry labs teamed up to find a way to deliver lithium only to the exact places where it’s needed.

Their study, published March 27th in Nature Materials, could be the foundation for future biomedical technologies to treat pain and disease.

“On the surface, it sounds like a crazy idea to place a lithium-ion battery electrode onto a living tissue, but the results we had are very promising,” said Zhe Cheng, first author of the study and a graduate student at UChicago. “Lithium calms nerve activity, which makes it potentially very useful—we have many biomedical approaches to precisely stimulate nerves, but less to dampen them, which is what is needed for pain relief and other disorders.”

The promise of lithium

Doctors have known for decades that lithium has applications in human health. It’s most widely used as a mood stabilizer, but is also being explored for pain relief, Alzheimer’s disease and even neural regeneration, among other areas.

The trouble is that taking lithium as a pill means it gets delivered to every part of the body, not just the part that needs it—which puts strain on the kidneys and liver as they work to clear it.

To tackle this, two sets of researchers teamed up: Prof. Bozhi Tian, whose lab specializes in creating innovative biomedical devices, and Assoc. Prof. Chong Liu, with the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, whose lab develops advanced materials.

They turned to lithium batteries, which are already designed to store lots of lithium ions and release them only on command. After a few tests, the team zeroed in on lithium iron phosphate, which is used as the cathode in many batteries and is stable and nontoxic.

“Plus, it’s a very mature technology, so we understand a lot about the material already,” explained Liu.

Cheng created a tiny, flexible patch with lithium iron phosphate, and tested it as a means of pain relief. Since lithium dampens nerve activity, their idea was to implant the patch near a nerve and deliver a brief electrical signal that would cause the patch to release lithium ions on command—reducing the nerve signaling and with it, the sensation of pain.

In experiments with mice and rats, the team found the patch successfully dampened nerve signals.

“We found the activity is very, very localized,” Cheng said. “The lithium doesn’t migrate far from the patch, while still delivering long-lasting neural inhibition.”

More ions, more possibilities

The initial study is a proof of concept, the scientists said, but they hope it could open the door for future technologies. For example, perhaps the technology could be incorporated into electrical acupuncture to avoid the need for an implant.

Another avenue, Tian said, could be to switch up the main ingredient.

“We focused on lithium, but we think you could potentially use other ions that are important in the body, like magnesium, zinc or calcium,” he said. “For example, magnesium is important for supporting protein folding and stabilizing protein structure, so could you use it to selectively treat diseases caused by misfolded proteins?”

The team is working with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to further the invention.

Other UChicago coauthors were postdoctoral researchers Tiantian Guo, Chuanwang Yang and Ananth Kamath; graduate student Suin Choi; Jing Zhang, then a postdoctoral researcher, now at Zhejiang University; Jiping Yue, now at AbbVie; and Gangbin Yan, PhD’24, now at Stanford University; and Saehyun Kim, PhD’25, now at CZ Chicago Biohub.

The study made use of the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility, the UChicago Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and the Soft Matter Characterization Facility at UChicago.

Citation: “Mineral-originated bioelectronics for inhibition via lithium electrochemistry.” Cheng et al, Nature Materials.

Funding: U.S. Army Research Office, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation.

Seth Green reappointed as dean of the Graham School

03/26/2026 - 09:54am

Seth Green has been reappointed as dean of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies for a second five-year term, President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker announced.

Since joining as dean in 2021, Green has strengthened the role the Graham School plays as the University’s center for lifelong learning, expanding the number of academic offerings and creating innovative programs and courses to engage with society’s most pressing challenges.

“Seth has a deep understanding of what it means to be part of a university community committed to rigorous intellectual engagement across the span of a lifetime,” Alivisatos said. “He has brought to his leadership a genuine appreciation for the Graham School’s mission and for the ways it opens the life of the mind to learners across generations.”

Green helped launch a new flagship fellowship for the Graham School, the Leadership & Society Initiative. The program helps accomplished individuals explore possibilities for the next chapter of their lives and careers through courses with UChicago faculty, as well as retreats, executive coaching and distinguished mentorship programming. Since its inception in 2023, the Leadership & Society Initiative has welcomed more than 100 fellows and has quickly become one of the top-tier programs in advanced leadership education.

“By every measure, Seth’s time as dean of the Graham School has been a tremendous success,” Baicker said. “There is a rich tradition at UChicago of creating educational opportunities for learners at all stages who value deep inquiry. Seth’s leadership, dedication, and generous spirit have been invaluable for the Graham School and for the entire University, and I am thrilled that he will continue in this role.”

In partnership with faculty and staff leaders, Green helped expand the Graham School’s Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program with a new Tech & Society concentration while also growing MLA admissions by more than 45%. The Graham School’s world-renowned Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults program also grew dramatically, with incoming students more than doubling during Green’s tenure. The Graham School also curated new courses on timely issues ranging from climate change to democracy and disinformation.

Increasing access continues to be a priority, according to Green. Financial assistance for Graham School students has grown more than six-fold in the last five years, and Green said he remains committed to continuing to “expand access for a broad community of learners to our transformative lifelong education.”

“It has been an extraordinary privilege to work alongside outstanding faculty and staff in extending the University’s intellectual life to lifelong learners around the world,” Green said. “I am energized to continue this work and to further connect the University’s deepest thinking with individuals who are seeking wisdom across their lives.”

Four UChicago scientists named Association for the Advancement of Science fellows in 2026

03/26/2026 - 08:27am

Four University of Chicago scholars were named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for their distinguished contributions to the sciences.

Erin J. Adams, Seth Darling, Vincenzo Vitelli and Carlos E.M. Wagner were among the fellows elected as AAAS members for their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science and its applications.

Erin J. Adams is the Joseph Regenstein Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and currently serves as Vice Provost for Research at UChicago.

Adams’ research uses structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics to understand how certain components of the immune system distinguish healthy tissue from that of diseased. Through understanding the biological mechanisms and outcomes of this recognition, her laboratory seeks to translate this information to clinical applications in the treatment of infectious disease, cancer, and autoimmunity.

As vice provost for research, she oversees both administration and development of the research enterprise at the University of Chicago, including managing the broad research infrastructure that constitutes the foundation to UChicago’s research enterprise, as well as facilitating large-scale, cross-disciplinary initiatives through her oversight of the Office of Research Development Support and the University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering. She is a member of the Committees on Immunology, Cancer Biology, Genetics, Genomics & Systems Biology; the Comprehensive Cancer Center; and was a founding faculty member of the myCHOICE Career Development program.

Adams was cited for “outstanding contributions to molecular immunology research, research administration and strategic leadership, community outreach and engagement, and graduate education and career development programming.”

Seth Darling is the chief science and technology officer for the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate and senior scientist in the Chemical Sciences & Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and is a CASE senior scientist at UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Darling is the director of the Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems (AMEWS) Energy Frontier Research Center. His group’s research centers around molecular engineering, with a current emphasis on advanced materials for cleaning water, having made previous contributions in fields ranging from self-assembly to advanced lithography to solar energy.

He has published over 140 scientific articles, holds over a dozen patents, is a co-author of popular books on water and on debunking climate skeptic myths, and lectures widely on topics related to energy, water, and climate.

He was cited for “pioneering advancements in materials for energy and environmental applications and for exceptional public engagement efforts, fostering widespread appreciation and understanding of scientific innovation.”

Vincenzo Vitelli is a professor of physics and a member of the James Franck Institute, the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Data Science Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics. He is the director of the UChicago-CNRS International Research Center for Fundamental Discovery.

His research interests span several areas at the interface between physical and biological sciences, engineering and applied mathematics. His recent work encompasses AI for science, quantitative biology, active matter, machine learning, robotics, metamaterials, topological insulators, hydrodynamics, dynamical systems and soft materials.

Vitelli’s research explores how the rich phenomenology of complex systems arises from the interplay between strong non-linearities, disorder and dynamics far from equilibrium that he explores using analytical and numerical tools and often in close collaboration with experimentalists.

He is cited for “foundational theoretical work in the fields of topological mechanics, odd elasticity and non-reciprocal interactions.”

Carlos E.M. Wagner is a professor of physics and member of the Enrico Fermi Institute, Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at UChicago. He also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, where he served as head of the high-energy physics theory group for 20 years. He is currently the Distinguished Visitor Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute.

Wagner’s area of research is phenomenology of particle physics, namely the study of the interactions of elementary particles, with a special emphasis on collider physics, Higgs physics, the theory of dark matter and the origin of the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter.

He is cited for “groundbreaking contributions to the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and its phenomenological consequences, and for outstanding mentorship of junior colleagues.”

Q&A with Madhav Rajan: UChicago’s ambitions for deeper global engagement

Peter Kujawinski — 03/25/2026 - 09:20am

Last summer, Madhav Rajan, dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, was also appointed to a new role as UChicago’s chief global strategist—representing the University as a whole.

We recently sat down with Rajan to discuss his vision for global engagement at UChicago. At the top of his agenda is to better connect UChicago’s overseas campuses into a true network that can extend UChicago’s distinctive education and research to the world. Inspired by his experience leading Booth as well as his own experience as an international student, Rajan emphasizes the need for UChicago to be flexible when operating globally, and to adjust and pivot as needed.

Although strategies may change depending on global circumstances, the University’s engagement with the world is at the core of its identity, Rajan said. He added that the University wants to meet the highest standard of excellence in everything it does around the world. “You want to do things that are going to have a global impact for a long time to come.”

Can you explain your role as chief global strategist and what drew you to it?

The fact that the role was set up really speaks to the University's commitment to being a global institution. We have very broad and very deep engagement with the world. This role is intended to find a way to look at synergies across these types of engagements, to provide opportunities for global engagement and to leverage our overseas resources more. From my standpoint as dean of Booth, which has always had a global presence, it seemed to be a natural way to take what I already knew and use that for this second role.

In our current moment, there are many challenges for American universities and their international work. Will the nature of UChicago’s global engagement change—and if so, how?

One of the great things about being in a place like UChicago, which has been around for 135-plus years, is that you can have a very long-term view. From that standpoint, the ethos underpinning our global engagement is completely unchanged. We want to be an institution that helps come up with ideas, plans and policies that will solve the world's toughest problems. We want to educate the people who will run organizations and corporations across the world. We want faculty who will have global impact. The only way to do that is by being international.

Booth has long been one of UChicago’s most globally active units. What lessons from there are you applying to this University-wide role?

Booth went abroad before anyone else did. Our first executive MBA was set up in Barcelona back in 1994. Then we set up a campus in Singapore in 2000. That changed over time. We moved from Barcelona to London, and from Singapore to Hong Kong. To me, one of the big lessons is the notion that you need to be flexible, particularly in the global realm. Being willing to adjust and pivot as needed is key. In London, we had a faculty committee evaluate our presence there. Their message to me was we should go big or go home. We decided to go big and we went to this new facility in London, which has been transformative not just for Booth, but for UChicago. We get more UChicago students in the College from England now than any other country.

The message from UChicago President Paul Alivisatos announcing your appointment emphasized aligning our global engagement “with priority areas across our research and education mission.” Can you discuss how engagement might differ depending on whether the activity is research or education?

Our research-promoting activities provide access to partnerships and new sources of funding, and the place where we see that most clearly is in Europe. We've partnered with the Berlin University Alliance to provide seed funding for new research collaborations. In France, it's a combination of both student and faculty interest.

We have joint programs where Ph.D. students can spend time in French institutions, then come to UChicago to get their Ph.D. Something I didn't know until I took this job is that CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in France is UChicago's most frequent research collaborator in terms of number of co-publications. On the student side, Hong Kong is a great example, where international high school students first learn about UChicago through our summer academy. We obviously have UChicago students doing study abroad all over the world, including in China. We work in India with the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. They have a summer fellows program in Ahmedabad with the university there, and the goal is to bring cohorts of like-minded students for a shared global experience.

Your role includes oversight of UChicago’s presence in Beijing, Delhi and Hong Kong, as well as Paris in collaboration with the College and London with Booth. What role do you expect them to play in advancing UChicago’s engagement globally?

The fact that we have these centers helps us maintain local ties, maintain research collaborations, and engage better with institutions and alumni there. If I look at Hong Kong as an example, for instance, the construction of the Hong Kong campus was largely funded by our alumni living locally. The fact that we were able to make that physical investment made them a lot more committed to being a part of that and giving back. I think it's also great for our faculty. One thing we've done at Booth, which I would love to see done more in other places, is we set up global faculty-in-residence programs where faculty will go spend three months or longer living in a particular location.

We have chosen to invest in regions that are going to be important for years to come. Having a presence is a first step. Over time, how do we modify that presence? How do we change it depending on the needs of our faculty or students? I think it's been a marvelous thing that we made these investments. There’s a lot of time and effort spent in managing these centers and campuses, but it's absolutely worth it for the University.

Looking ahead, what do you see as UChicago’s greatest opportunities internationally?

First, it’s figuring out a way to transform these overseas centers and campuses into a true network. Second, we're not insensitive to the University's financial situation. How we manage these facilities in a more financially sustainable manner is something that we take really seriously. And third, given the geopolitical situation, can we make these sites places where we can educate more students? We're using them as a way to support activities on behalf of all areas of the University, including figuring out, for example, how do we provide funding to people who want to do research in Africa? How do we want to provide resources to somebody who wants to do work in Vietnam or Indonesia, using the Hong Kong campus as a base?

Your undergraduate degree came from the University of Madras in India, followed by graduate degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. Does your experience as an international graduate student shape your role as UChicago’s Chief Global Strategist?

People of my generation know firsthand what this country does for foreign students. If you speak to them, you’ll find a deep appreciation for the institutions in this country. And for the openness that this country has always had to encourage the best talent to come. I bring the experience of coming in as a foreign student and navigating the U.S. educational system and then working as a faculty member. I appreciate the importance of having a global background and recognize that countries are different and unique in their own way.

$50 million gift to revitalize historic Ida Noyes Hall as a space for students, visitors

03/23/2026 - 03:00pm

A $50 million gift from Chair of the Board of Trustees David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, to the University of Chicago will support the modernization of Ida Noyes Hall, transforming the iconic 1916 building into a dynamic gathering place for students and the campus community—and a welcoming hub for alumni and visitors.

In recognition of Rubenstein’s gift, this new hub for activities will be named the David M. Rubenstein Commons. Plans for the building will ensure Rubenstein Commons honors the historic character and name of Ida Noyes Hall.

Rubenstein’s gift is the first step in the University’s ambitious plan to revitalize its historic campus buildings for the next century—preserving their architectural legacy while meeting the changing needs of the UChicago community.

“This gift does far more than reimagine a single building,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “It is the first project in our greater historic quads revitalization endeavor—the results of which will show that it is possible to preserve the beauty and meaning of our historic buildings, while updating them to serve generations of faculty and students yet to come. David’s leadership sets the pace for what is possible.”

“This project will create inviting spaces where students can gather, connect with one another or find a comfortable place to study,” said Melina Hale, dean of the College. “Rubenstein Commons will bring the campus community together like never before.”

Honoring a rich history while preparing for the future

The origins of the historic Ida Noyes Hall date to 1915, when businessman LaVerne Noyes made a donation to UChicago to honor his late wife, Ida. First designed as a women’s gymnasium, social center, the building has evolved over the past century while remaining a hub of social activity. It hosts academic-focused events for the campus community as well as film screenings at the Max Palevsky Cinema, home to the renowned student-run Doc Films.

Plans for Rubenstein Commons will create inviting spaces where students can gather, study and connect with one another. The project will preserve the building’s neo-Gothic architecture and historic character while enhancing its infrastructure, accessibility and sustainability.

By preserving symbolic campus spaces, the University aims to create a campus that fosters learning, intellectual exchange, and innovation for the next 100 years and beyond.

“UChicago’s historic buildings and its quads are architectural treasures,” Rubenstein said. “I am excited by the opportunity to bring new life to this beloved building, with deep respect for its legacy of beautiful architecture and community. This work will create a center of gravity for the University community and welcome the world to this remarkable campus.”

The University will share designs and a project timeline as planning progresses.

A philanthropic leader and partner

The new gift builds upon Rubenstein’s longstanding commitment to the University.

Since 2022, he has served as chair of the Board of Trustees, working closely with Alivisatos to help steward the University’s vision and long-term priorities, strengthen its governance, and ensure that UChicago can sustain transformative education and field-defining research.

In 2010, Rubenstein established the Rubenstein Scholars Program, one of the nation’s most selective law school scholarship programs, which has provided full-tuition support to more than 200 students since it was created.

His support also enabled the creation of the Rubenstein Forum, which opened in 2021 as an intellectual destination that strengthens the University’s connection to the city and world, hosting conferences, lectures, academic symposia, arts events, and discussions with experts and leaders from campus and around the globe.

Rubenstein is co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm. He has demonstrated a deep commitment to preserving documents and buildings central to the nation’s history, advancing public understanding of the institutions that have defined the American experiment. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an original signer of The Giving Pledge, author of five books, and a television and podcast host.

On the pitch and beyond, UChicago goalkeeper gives his all

Colin Terrill — 03/23/2026 - 12:00pm

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. Read about the others here.

Of the 22 players on the pitch during a soccer match, the goalkeepers have one of the most important jobs—make sure nothing gets past.

That’s the task presented to University of Chicago second-year student Ali Alamery, the starting goalie on the Maroons men’s soccer team. His role can be the loneliest on the pitch, requiring a laser focus to stay locked on the game, especially when the action is happening far downfield.

“A lot can happen if I’m not fully concentrating for 90 minutes,” Alamery said. “Even if I stop focusing mentally just to relax for five seconds, one slip up or delayed reaction can be the difference between winning a game 1-0 or having that result flipped on you.”

It’s that drive for excellence that powers Alamery. But this energy isn't just confined to the pitch—he applies it to everything he does, from his academics as a pre-medicine student and aspiring neurosurgeon to the volunteer work he does with hospice patients and kids, including those at UChicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital.

“UChicago students, whether it’s myself, my teammates or just someone I share a class with, are very focused on trying to be at the top of whatever they want to do," he said. "We really want to make a difference.”

On the field, Alamery anchors the goal for a team built to compete.

The Maroons won a men’s national soccer championship just a few years ago and play in the toughest conference in the NCAA’s Division III. They take on equally competitive schools during non-conference play. That group includes St. Olaf University—a formidable opponent that also won a title this decade and squared up against UChicago in the second match of the season.

The Oles’ strikers sent shot after shot at Alamery’s goal, hoping to sneak one past him to break the stalemate. In all, they had 21 attempts, with Alamery stopping all 10 that ended up on goal to secure the first shutout of his career in a 0-0 tie.

He would start in all 20 games for the Maroons during the past season and record nine shutouts in total—good for eighth in the UChicago career record books after just one season.

Alamery maintains his goalie’s mindset through each challenge he takes on, no matter the venue.

“Being a keeper is all about trust,” he said. “The team trusts you to stop the ball, they trust you to do the work and be a team player. It’s the same thing with academics, right? If you don’t give it your all—your focus, your hard work, your dedication—you’re going to let yourself and your team down.”

Motivated by family and driven by teamwork

Growing up and attending school in East Lansing, Mich., Alamery performed at a high enough level to play Division I soccer and trained with Detroit City FC, a member of the USL Championship professional league.

But after starting at Michigan State University, he decided to transfer to UChicago for several reasons. He knew the Maroons always fielded a competitive team and that he could get a top-caliber education—but more than anything, he said he wanted to repay his parents, who immigrated to the United States from Iraq in 2001, for the sacrifices they made to give him the opportunities he’s had.

“In the end I wanted to make them proud and show them that all their hard work to give us the best life was worth it,” he said.

Off the field, Alamery is a neuroscience and psychology double major. He finds both interesting, but once again, his reasons for the choice are mostly tied back to family.

“My father was a prisoner of war for 15 years and with that has come post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I think my drive to pursue neuroscience is because I truly want to understand what my dad went through. Most Iraqi men were raised to hide their emotions, but I feel like if I take these classes and really understand the science behind it, I don’t need him to tell me anything—instead I can do what I can to help him feel more comfortable.”

Alamery wants to use the knowledge he gains from psychology to carry over into a career practicing neuro-oncology. He's a lab assistant for Prof. Bakhtiar Yamini in the UChicago Medicine Department of Neurological Surgery, studying the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma. The lab team is currently investigating various inhibitors to slow tumor progression or improve survival chances.

It didn’t come as a surprise to Yamini that Alamery is the truest form of a team player.

“Ali is intimately involved in the team,” Yamini said. “He’s not only learning things on his own but also passing those lessons on and teaching less experienced members of the group. Labs only work when each of the links are strong and his efforts strengthen those around him.”

Even with the demands of athletics and academics, Alamery still finds time to volunteer with hospice patients around the Chicago metro as well as children who are currently receiving treatment at Comer Children's—something he signed up for immediately during his first year on campus.

“These children are coming in with tough cases but all they want to do is escape and feel like a kid again,” said Alamery.“There are parallels to people who are in hospice care as well. I just want to be able to give them a little bit of comfort and show that people care about them, even if it’s only for a few minutes.”

Winning in the classroom and community

Back in the locker room, Alamery knows the success he achieves on the field is all for nothing if he doesn’t reach those same levels in the classroom. Being a student athlete and balancing academics can be a difficult task, especially at UChicago, but it helps when studying is also a team effort.

“As soon as we get to our hotel, whether that’s in New York City or Atlanta, you’ll put your bags in the room and by the time you get back to the lobby half of the team is already doing coursework,” Alamery said. “It pushes me more when I see them grinding it out through the night to reach our goals.”

Men’s soccer head coach Phil Kroft wants a good squad on the field—but he’s also trying to produce men that will do great things for society off it. It’s one of the reasons why Alamery ended up coming to play at UChicago.

“We are held to high standards, but we also know that he cares for us,” he said. “Whether it’s dedicated study time during travel or connecting us with alumni to help us form professional connections, he wants to see all of us go off and do great things in the world.”

Alamery’s effort to become the best version of himself hasn’t gone unnoticed by Kroft.

“Ali is not one to take shortcuts and his nose down, hardworking mentality carries over into the classroom as well,” he said. “During warmups with teammates, he is often talking about his latest lab, lecture or research that he’s working on. He truly loves being a premed student at UChicago.”

Kroft also said Alamery “single-handedly” convinced him that the squad should get more involved with the community. That volunteering spirit led to Maroons men’s soccer partnering with Team Impact, an organization that works with children dealing with serious illness or disability, matching them with teams across the country to give them a sense of belonging. It’s one way that Alamery can share his passion for service with his teammates.

“With Team Impact, we get to see their smiles, see them be able to leave the difficulty and hardships behind,” he said. “Being able to see this really pushes me and my teammates and puts a smile on all our faces too.”

Alamery has already made an impact both on and off the field but there is still time to do so much more as he’ll soon become a rising third-year. Leaving home and family behind was one of the tougher choices that he has made, but in the end, UChicago is where he belongs.

“I’ve come to realize that UChicago isn’t just a four-year thing,” he said. “Whether it’s soccer or my volunteer work, I know I am forming lifelong bonds and making a difference in others’ lives. I couldn’t be happier to be at UChicago and I hope the warmth and welcoming feelings that people showed me are the things that I can help pass on to the next generation of Maroons.”

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

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State to discuss U.S.-China relations amid war with Iran

Sarah Steimer — 03/23/2026 - 11:11am

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats’ 2026 Hagel Lecture will feature Kurt M. Campbell, the former U.S. deputy secretary of state, offering insights into the wide-ranging effects United States-China relations will have on global economics, technology and security.

The lecture, titled America's Role in Asia: Prospects for Peace and Stability in the Context of War with Iran, will be held April 17 at the University of Chicago’s Rubenstein Forum. The event is free and open to all.

The conversation between Campbell and former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will take place near the anticipated date of President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with President Xi Jinping. The event also comes on the tail of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that declared parts of Trump’s tariffs illegal, and ahead of China’s target 2027 date for a military takeover of Taiwan.

“Our conversation with Secretary Campbell and Secretary Hagel could not be happening at a more important time for America's relationship with China,” said UChicago Prof. Robert Pape, event moderator and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. “There's so much at stake.”

Prior to serving as the U.S. deputy secretary of state from 2024 to 2025, Campbell was deputy assistant advisor to President Joe Biden and National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific from 2021 to 2024. Often referred to as Biden's "Asia coordinator" or "Asia czar," Campbell was chief architect of the administration’s Asia strategy. Previously, he served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Barack Obama and was the chairman and CEO of The Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm focused on the Asia-Pacific region that he founded in February 2013.

“The relationship between the United States and China is the most pivotal great power relationship in the world,” Pape said. “America remains the No. 1 country in the world, but fast on America's heels is China, and in some areas, it's possible China may even be ahead.”

This Hagel Lecture will be held on campus at Friedman Hall in the Rubenstein Forum and streamed across the globe, including to military audiences through a partnership with the United States Military Academy. The event is free and open to all. Register here.

Previous Hagel Lectures focused on U.S. foreign policy with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2019, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul in 2023, former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in 2024, and former CIA Director William J. Burns in 2025.

—A version of this story was first published by the UChicago Department of Political Science.

Roll-call votes may understate polarization in Congress, study finds

03/20/2026 - 01:35pm

For decades, scholars have estimated the ideology of members of Congress by analyzing roll-call votes, recorded tallies of each member’s “yea-or-nay” on legislation.

But a new study from the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy finds this method is likely skewed by "protest voting"—suggesting that polarization in Congress may be even greater, and started even earlier, than researchers thought.

“We often assume that votes in Congress directly reveal ideology,” said UChicago Prof. Anthony Fowler, first author of the study. “But sometimes legislators vote ‘no’ as a way of signaling dissatisfaction or sending a different message. Our goal was to account for those moments so we can better measure what legislators actually believe.”

To do that, Fowler, the Sydney A. Stein, Jr. Professor at Harris, and his coauthor Prof. Jeffrey B. Lewis from UCLA examined roll-call votes in the United States House from 1889 to 2022. In a paper published in the journal Political Analysis, they developed a new statistical model that allows for the possibility of protest voting—something previous approaches did not. They then used it to estimate ideological positions of House members over more than a century.

Protest votes, as Fowler and Lewis define them, come from members of the majority party voting against legislation they would otherwise support. They're rare—roughly 1% to 3% of votes—but the authors found that accounting for even that small share can significantly reshape how individual lawmakers appear on the ideological spectrum.

One striking example involves U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other progressive lawmakers sometimes referred to as “the Squad.”

Traditional roll-call models identify them as relatively moderate Democrats, between the 56th and 187th most liberal members of the House. This result appears inconsistent with their public rhetoric and policy positions. When the researchers account for protest voting, however, these lawmakers emerge as six of the seven most liberal members of Congress—much closer to what observers would expect. This likely reflects voting against policies they believe do not go far enough.

The adjusted measures also line up more closely with other indicators of ideology that do not rely on roll-call votes.

When Fowler and Lewis account for protest voting, they find that ideological polarization in Congress is even greater than previous estimates suggested. Their results also indicate that polarization began rising earlier than many scholars previously thought, well before the period often described as the “textbook Congress” from about the 1940s to the 1970s.

At the same time, the research highlights an important distinction—polarization does not necessarily mean strong party discipline. Highly ideological lawmakers, especially in recent decades, may be more likely to cast protest votes against their own party’s proposals. This means Congress can appear somewhat less polarized in traditional voting models even when ideological differences between parties are quite large.

Using their adjusted measures of ideology, Fowler and Lewis also find that voters appear to impose a stronger electoral penalty on ideological excess than previously estimated, which relates to Fowler’s larger body of work on the power of moderates and the median voter in electoral politics. The study finds no evidence that protest voting itself is rewarded at the ballot box.

In fact, all else being equal, members who engage in more protest voting tend to raise less campaign money, the paper finds.

Although protest voting rarely determines the outcome of a bill, the authors show that even a small number of these votes can influence how scholars interpret congressional behavior. Their findings suggest that researchers studying ideology, elections and representation may benefit from accounting for protest voting when analyzing legislative data.

“Roll-call votes remain an incredibly valuable source of information about congressional behavior,” Fowler said. “But our findings show that accounting for a small number of non-ideological votes can give us a clearer picture of where legislators actually stand.”

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

Science stars at special UChicago, Argonne screening of ‘Project Hail Mary’

Paul Dailing — 03/19/2026 - 03:45pm

Forget Ryan Gosling. Science was the real star of the show at a special advance screening of the new film Project Hail Mary for University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory staff and students.

In the film, which opens to general audiences March 20, Gosling plays a man who wakes up alone and with amnesia in a spaceship nearing a distant star. Armed only with his knowledge of science, he must learn who he is, why he is there and what is waiting for him outside the airlock.

The film’s message of using science to discover the universe around us resonates with scientists of all stripes, said Argonne computational biologist Nicholas Lee-Ping Chia at a panel of UChicago and Argonne researchers after the screening.

“I always say one of my favorite things about my job is every day I get to wake up and decide what question I want to answer for the first time,” Chia told the audience at AMC Roosevelt Collection 16 theater in Chicago. “It's not done out of survival mode like it is in the movie, but this internal drive to pursue knowledge is powerful, and it's really what makes the job fun.”

Lights, camera, science!

The panel after the show dove into a wide-ranging (and spoiler-free) discussion of the science behind the cinema.

UChicago astronomy and astrophysics Prof. Wendy Friedman said she had been excited about the movie since first reading the novel by author Andy Weir.

“I found the book incredibly creative,” she said. “I was impressed by the imagination that he brought to this combined with this very real scientific approach of curiosity, testing things. It was very familiar as a scientist. Something doesn't work, okay, now think about another way to approach it, and eventually come up with a solution.”

Argonne postdoctoral researcher and UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) graduate Gregory Grant, PhD’24, said the film captured the sense of awe and wonder both from the book and that he experiences every day as a materials scientist.

“I definitely had the same sort of reaction, the reflex to wake up and then just go start figuring out the world around you. That resonates very strongly,” he said.

UChicago Geophysical Sciences Department Chair Prof. Fred Ciesla, who researches planets beyond our solar system, said he enjoyed how the film—while fantastical—was grounded in real-life science.

“I do science every day. I think about science all the time, and watching a movie or reading a book where they take too much liberty with the science is kind of a turn off for me,” Ciesla said.

Let’s all go to the lobby

The science actually started before the film did, with UChicago PME and Physical Sciences Department Ph.D. students filling the movie theater lobby with a slate of science displays organized through UChicago PME’s Science Communications Program.

UChicago PME Ph.D. student Thomas Marchese chose a science display close to his heart—a demonstration of how different materials glow under UV light. He saw a similar demonstration as a child and received a glowing bead bracelet as a souvenir. Both helped encourage him on his own path to science.

“I think I still have that bracelet somewhere,” he said, chuckling.

Chemistry Ph.D. student Sam Knight, meanwhile, demonstrated how scientists use spectroscopy to determine what materials are made of.

“The science that I have learned gives me a rich perspective on the world,” Knight said. “I get to understand why everyday, common items are the way they are, or why they change the way they do. I really like to share that.”

UChicago PME Ph.D. student Svetlana Altshuler demonstrated nitinol metals, thin wires of nickel titanium that can be bent into any shape, then spring back into their original form when placed in hot water.

As both a researcher and movie buff, Altshuler said film can “open the door to what is possible with science."

“If you see it on the big screen, it's something that can capture the wonder and awe that science has for me and I know has for a lot of other people,” she said.

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

Free UChicago talks to explore how particles from space can help us understand our world

Natalie Lund — 03/18/2026 - 02:38pm

Last month, a UChicago-led mission known as Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations, or PUEO, landed a few hundred miles from the South Pole after a journey aboard a NASA balloon. PUEO flew 120,000 feet above the ground on the hunt for some of the highest energy particles in the universe—neutrinos.

Signatures of these and other high-energy particles from outer space, known as astroparticles, could give us information about some of the most violent events in the universe, such as supermassive black holes or star explosions. They also have the potential to unlock mysteries closer to home, including information about the core of our planet, lightning formation, and water on the moon.

In this spring’s Compton Lectures, UChicago scientist Keith McBride will illuminate how these "messengers from the universe" can answer questions about the farthest reaches of our universe, as well as be harnessed as practical tools to understand our planet.

"We want to understand how these particles are getting here, where they're coming from, how old they are, and what they can tell us about their journey," said McBride, who has worked on multiple astroparticle-hunting missions.

During the Compton series, McBride will discuss how high-energy astroparticles like neutrinos and cosmic rays are not only helping us understand the universe but also helping us make measurements of extremely dense objects. Muons, for example, have been used to peer inside large structures like volcanoes and pyramids, and researchers are now using neutrinos to help understand the earth’s composition.

“Since neutrinos interact with dense materials, you can measure how many neutrinos have passed through the earth to potentially help us make a map of the core,” said McBride.

In another lecture in the series, McBride will discuss one of the leading theories about how lightning is formed.

“We know that lightning occurs when charged particles in the atmosphere go to ground. But what starts the charges moving in the first place?” said McBride. “Cosmic rays could be creating the seeds for lightning.”

Payton Linton, McBride’s collaborator and senior graduate student at The Ohio State University, will give a guest lecture on May 9, showcasing how a proposed lunar orbiter will use interactions of cosmic rays to help us detect ice beneath the moon's surface.

"What a lot of people don't realize is that particle physics has interdisciplinary applications. We can take what we've learned about astroparticles and their interactions to better understand the world around us," said McBride.

McBride, a UChicago postdoctoral researcher, led the development of major portions of the neutrino-hunting PUEO instrument. He also worked on another balloon mission, the High-Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX), which landed in June 2024 after six days in space.

The free public talks run every Saturday from March 28 through May 16 at 11 AM.

They are held at the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave., in Room 106, and will also be broadcast online.

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

Writer Yiyun Li to deliver Berlin Family Lectures beginning March 31

Rivky Mondal — 03/16/2026 - 04:06pm

Internationally renowned novelist and essayist Yiyun Li has become known for writing that probes life’s hardest realities.

Li, a recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, writes about loss and cruelty with measured clarity, focusing less on devastating events themselves than on the complex, shifting ways people account for them.

On March 31, April 7 and April 14, Li will deliver the 2026 Berlin Family Lectures, a series hosted annually by the University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts and Humanities.

Her three-part series, titled “Placeholder and Serendipity: Notes on Reading Literature in 2026,” will offer a meditation on literature as a space not for answers but for thinking, and why such a space matters in times of overwhelming uncertainty.

All lectures will be held in person at the David Rubenstein Forum, and virtually, at 6pm CDT and include a Q&A with the audience. The series is free and open to all; registration is required and space is limited.

Born and raised in Beijing, Li originally trained as a scientist, studying immunology before turning to literature after moving to the United States. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, beginning a literary career that has since yielded celebrated novels, story collections and essays.

Her award-winning novels, which frequently explore themes of grief, loss and language, include The Book of Goose (2022), Where Reasons End (2019) and Kinder Than Solitude (2014). Her short fiction and essay collections—among them A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), winner of the Guardian First Book Award—trace episodes of displacement, memory and ethical choice.

In her recent memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), Li writes about gardening and grief after the suicide of her two sons. Whether writing about personal despair, political memory or the rhythms of the natural world, Li often focuses on how people continue living amid unpredictability, where meaning and understanding remain provisional.

Rather than offer tidy moral lessons or familiar emotional arcs, her work treats reading and writing as a way of dwelling with difficult questions about love, loneliness and endurance.

Ahead of the series, Li spoke with us about writing as a form of inquiry, literary genealogy and the relationship between science and literature.

Your fiction and essays often treat writing not just as storytelling but as a way of thinking through experience. In a 2023 New Yorker piece, you amend a sentence midstream: “Fiction, one suspects, is often tamer than life. Some fiction is tamer than some life, I should amend.” That moment of self-revision seems to recompose a thought as it appears. Does writing function for you as a kind of inquiry?

This self-revision is how I write and how I think. Any time I make a statement, either to myself in writing, to my students in the classroom, or to a friend on the phone, my intuition is to reexamine that statement at once, to make sure I have not misstepped on many possible fronts: word choice, the inner logic between one sentence and the next, and information.

In writing, to come up with a thought is not difficult. It’s more important to think through things, to make that thought as precise as possible. This ongoing inquiry is what brings me joy in writing.

Across your work, you often read alongside earlier writers (Marianne Moore, Stefan Zwieg, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor). How do you think about building your own literary conversation through the writers you return to?

In one of my stories, “Wednesday’s Child,” the protagonist observes: “She wished that nature had installed a different system for people to choose their genealogy—not by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents but by the books they read, a genealogy that could be deliberately, purposefully, and revocably created and maintained.”

My conversation with writers past and present is to create a genealogy for my mind. It’s always an ongoing process, subject to revision and reimagination.

You’ve spoken about your early training in science and mathematics. How do you think about the relationship between scientific thinking and literary thinking? What might each field learn from each other?

This is a topic that I shall elaborate further in my lectures. I believe strongly that my scientific training has defined me as a writer. Science and literature are, to me, explorations that are driven by what we don’t know. In science as well as in literature, one can never say one knows a hundred percent about one’s subject, whether it’s a signal channel between B and T lymphocytes or a character’s relationship with her past.

One can only say: by researching or by writing, I have come to know this subject a little better than when I first set out.

The Berlin Family Lectures will take place March 31, April 7 and April 14 at the David Rubenstein Forum, 6-7:30 pm CDT, with audience Q&A following each talk. Register to attend in person or via Zoom.

Printing electronic parts for next-generation technologies

Amber Rose — 03/16/2026 - 03:23pm

Tiny devices called microelectronics may one day be printed as easily as words on a page, thanks to new research.

Building on years of progress in printed electronics, a team from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has shown a new way to create durable, low-power electronic switches, called transistors. This research could help create flexible sensors, smart windows and other new technologies that need reliable, energy-saving electronics.

“We chose printing methods for two main reasons,” said Argonne materials scientist Yuepeng Zhang. “First, printing enables rapid prototyping and iterative design, which helps us optimize materials and device structures quickly. Second, printed electronics have benefits for device functionality, especially since our devices show a well-modulated current response to voltage, making them suitable for printed logic devices and niche applications.”

The scientists used a method called aerosol jet printing, which works like an inkjet printer but uses specially formulated ink made from nanoparticles. The printer turns the ink into a fine mist and sprays it onto a surface, building up layers to form electronic parts.

Unlike traditional manufacturing, which often requires expensive equipment and high temperatures, aerosol jet printing works at lower temperatures and can print on flexible or even 3D surfaces. This approach makes it easier and faster to develop and test new electronic designs.

To fine-tune these inks, the team used the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne, to watch how nanoparticles clump together, see how they change with heat and check the stability and makeup of the dried films—insights that helped improve the ink formulations.

They also used X-ray tools at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source to map the shape and elemental makeup of the printed devices, complementing studies at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. All of these are user facilities from the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.

A key ingredient in these printed devices is vanadium dioxide. This material is special because it can act like a wire, letting electricity flow, or like an insulator, blocking electricity. This switching ability is important for making electronic circuits and memory devices, which store and process information.

By using these properties, the printed transistors use very little power, are built to last and show new behaviors not seen in earlier printed devices. To control the flow of electricity, the team used a process called redox gating. In simple terms, this means they use a chemical reaction to add or remove electrons from the vanadium dioxide.

By applying a small voltage—less than what is used in a typical battery—they can turn the transistor on or off. This method is less harsh than other techniques, which could damage the material and make devices wear out quickly.

UChicago CASE scientist Wei Chen emphasized the durability of the new devices.

“Redox gating is robust and does not damage the materials, so we can run thousands of cycles without issues,” he said. “In previous methods, devices could only run a few times, sometimes just 10 cycles, before failing. Our devices can run thousands of cycles with no problem.”

In laboratory tests, the printed transistors operated at voltages as low as 0.4 to 0.5 volts and kept working for more than 6,000 on-off cycles, which is much longer than previous printed devices. The switches also responded quickly, changing states in about one second.

When the printed transistor was switched on using a small control signal of 0.5 volts, it allowed about 50% more electricity to flow through it compared to when it was off. In other words, the device could boost the flow of electric current by half with just a tiny amount of power. This shows that the transistor can reliably control electricity using very little energy, which is important for making low-power and flexible electronic devices.

Right now, these printed transistors are larger and slower than the tiny silicon chips found in most electronics. But this research shows that it is possible to make strong, low-power devices with printing methods.

Chen added that the lab is already in contact with industry partners interested in testing the process for logic devices, the basic building blocks for computers. The researchers are also exploring how these printed devices could be used in neuromorphic computing, an area that mimics the way the human brain processes information.

To move printed electronics from the lab to real products, the researchers say more teamwork is needed between scientists and industry. They also believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning could help improve the printing process and make development faster.

“Printing involves many variables to adjust, and machine learning can help us find the best settings more quickly,” Zhang said.

With more research and collaboration, printed hybrid electronics could help make future technology more flexible, affordable and energy efficient.

The results of this research were published in Advanced Materials Technology.

Other contributors to this work include Samuel Miller and Hua Zhou from Argonne; and Evan Musterman, Andrew Kiss and Yang Yang from the National Synchrotron Light Source II at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Andrew Erwin and Shiyu Hu were at Argonne when this research was conducted.

This work was primarily supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Argonne, with additional support from DOE’s Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences.

—Adapted from an article originally published on the Argonne website.

Mutant gene behind aggressive adult leukemia offers new clues for treatment

Zakiya Barnes — 03/13/2026 - 09:56am

Imagine a tiny superhero inside every cell of your body whose job is to stop damaged cells before they turn dangerous. That superhero is a gene called TP53, and for decades scientists have known it as the “guardian of the genome.”

But what happens when the guardian breaks?

A recent study led by Asst. Prof. Caner Saygin at University of Chicago Medicine has uncovered how TP53 mutations make acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) one of the deadliest and most difficult to treat adult blood cancers. The team’s research, published in Blood Cancer Journal, could point to how doctors might one day outsmart this stubborn disease.

In a healthy cell, TP53 acts like both a brake and an emergency stop button. When DNA gets damaged, this gene either halts the cell to make repairs or orders it to self-destruct before it causes harm.

But when the gene mutates, those safety systems fail. The broken cell can keep dividing even while carrying genetic mistakes, which then pile up until cancer forms.

“In earlier lab work, we found that TP53-mutant ALL cells have increased growth signals and defective cell-death pathways,” Saygin said. “When treated with chemotherapy, these cells accumulate DNA damage, but they don’t die the way they should because the apoptosis pathways are broken, so they persist and eventually cause relapse. That’s why these cancers are so hard to eliminate with standard therapy alone.”

The recent study, which analyzed data from over 800 patients across eight institutions, found that about one in 10 adults diagnosed with ALL had a mutation in TP53. These patients were more likely to relapse and less likely to survive long-term than those without this genetic mutation.

“[This leukemia] is more common in children, so most of what we know comes from pediatric studies. But adult ALL behaves very differently. Adults tend to do worse, and we don’t fully understand why,” Saygin said. “These collaborations helped us recruit older adults with ALL and uncover the unique biology driving their disease.”

The cancer that learns to hide

Doctors have new “smart” medicines called immunotherapies that teach the body’s immune system to spot and destroy leukemia cells. At first, they work well, even in patients with TP53 mutations.

But the research team discovered a disturbing pattern. When TP53-mutant leukemia returned, many of the cancer cells had lost the surface markers that immune drugs target. It’s like the cancer learned to put on camouflage. Without those markers, cutting-edge therapies can’t “see” them anymore. This ability to adapt is one reason adult ALL remains so challenging.

Bone-marrow transplantation soon after initial remission was one of the few interventions that led to extended survival. Patients who underwent transplant lived about a year longer on average than those who did not. Still, relapse remained common, underscoring how tenacious TP53-mutant clones can be.

The broader challenge now is combining genomic information with treatment timing and immunotherapy choices to personalize care.

“Right now, we tend to treat adult ALL patients similarly, regardless of their genetics. But our study shows that patients with TP53 mutations need to be treated differently,” Saygin said. “We need to use immunotherapies early and then move quickly to transplant when patients reach remission. We think transplanting up front, based on genetic risk, could improve long-term survival for these patients.”

Why this discovery matters

Understanding TP53 isn’t just about one cancer, but rather unlocking how all cancers evolve and resist treatment.

In many tumors, mutations of this gene make cells nearly immortal. Usually the severity of the mutations also closely tracks with prognosis, meaning two defective copies almost always mean worse outcomes. The new data suggest leukemia behaves differently—which could change how researchers approach TP53 in other cancers as well.

“This work reminds us that TP53’s biology depends on cellular context,” noted co-author Wendy Stock, the Anjuli Seth Nayak Professor of Medicine at UChicago Medicine. “In blood cancers, this genetic network may be disrupted by other mechanisms entirely, offering opportunities to restore it indirectly.”

The research also underlines that cancer’s progression is variable depending on where it starts. That insight could help researchers design smarter, more flexible treatments that adjust as the cancer changes.

“We’re trying to understand why only a small percentage of people with TP53 mutations develop leukemia, and we’re seeking ways to prevent it—especially in cancer patients who receive chemotherapy or radiation,” Saygin said.

For example, someone with breast cancer who already carries a TP53 mutation has a higher risk of developing therapy-related leukemia later.

The scientists now hope to study TP53-mutant leukemia cells over time, watching how they grow, adapt and possibly reveal new weaknesses. The work combines advanced DNA sequencing, patient samples and computer modeling to trace cancer’s “family tree” as it evolves.

In the long run, decoding TP53’s mysteries could help scientists design drugs that restore its guardian powers or teach the immune system to recognize cancers that try to hide—especially when the body is already fighting another malignancy.

“We want to find ways to protect these patients, so they can live long, healthy lives without that devastating side effect of cancer treatment,” Saygin said.

“Clinical and molecular characterization of TP53-mutant acute lymphoblastic leukemia in adults” was published in Blood Cancer Journal in August 2025. Co-authors are Ethan J. Harris, Diren Arda Karaoglu, Madina Sukhanova, Yasmin Abaza, Theodoros Karantanos, Ann-Kathrin Eisfeld, Clare Anderson, Chenyu Lin, Yenny A. Moreno Vanegas, Talha Badar, Alexander Coltoff, Todd C. Knepper, Neval Ozkaya, Hamed Rahmani Youshanlouei, Sinan Cetin, Anand A. Patel, Adam S. DuVall, Michael W. Drazer, Peng Wang, Melissa Tjota, Jeremy P. Segal, Girish Venkataraman, Sandeep Gurbuxani, Jason X. Cheng, Daniel A. Arber, Richard A. Larson, Olatoyosi Odenike, Jonathan Webster, Bijal Shah, Wendy Stock and Caner Saygin.

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