News

Bernard Roizman, pioneering University of Chicago virologist, 1929–2026

Matt Wood — 04/23/2026 - 02:05pm

Bernard Roizman, the world’s leading expert on herpes simplex virus and the Joseph Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, died April 13 at the age of 96.

Over a career spanning seven decades, Roizman reshaped the field of virology through his work on the herpes simplex virus, commonly referred to as HSV—a common, lifelong infection responsible for a range of human diseases. He mapped the virus’s genome, defined how it infects host cells, and developed DNA-based techniques that revealed the roles of specific viral genes in infection and replication.

His work laid the foundation for efforts to develop vaccines against HSV, as well as gene therapies and anti-cancer treatments that use modified forms of the virus. Over the course of his career, he authored more than 650 peer-reviewed publications, a body of work that both shaped and reflected the evolution of modern virology.

More than his discoveries, Roizman was renowned for his approach to science itself. He viewed it “as an opportunity to discover the designs in the mosaics of life,” pursuing questions that revealed overarching themes and underlying patterns as opposed to filling in the details.

“Bernard was not only a towering figure in microbiology and virology, but he was also a devoted champion of the University of Chicago, where his passion for discovery and mentorship shaped generations of scientists,” said Shabaana Khader, the Betty and Bernard Roizman Professor and Chair of Microbiology at UChicago.

“As the holder of the endowed Betty and Bernard Roizman Chair, I am deeply honored to carry forward his legacy of excellence and intellectual courage. He will be deeply missed by all who had the honor of knowing him.”

‘My second love at first sight’

Roizman was born in Romania in 1929. His early life was shaped by the upheaval of World War II, including years of displacement, deprivation, and survival as a refugee as his family fled advancing armies across Eastern Europe. This eventually brought his family to the United States in 1947, where they settled in Philadelphia and he enrolled at Temple University.

Science was not his first calling, however. “The truth is that as I was growing up I wanted to be a writer,” he wrote in a 2015 autobiographical essay. “My aspirations came to an end when, in order to speed up my graduation from college, I took courses in microbiology. It was my second love at first sight—that of my wife preceded it.”

Roizman married Betty in 1950 and remained deeply devoted to her throughout their 70-year marriage. He took care to ensure that others recognized her warmth and gift for conversation, often directing attention toward her rather than himself.

He earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Temple before attending the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he received his Doctor of Science in 1956. After serving on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the University of Chicago in 1965 and spent the next 52 years there, where he was dedicated to scientific discovery and mentoring the next generation of scientists.

The birth of molecular epidemiology

In the late 1950s, Roizman pioneered methods for purifying herpes simplex virus DNA and describing its unique structure.

Among his most consequential discoveries was that HSV gene sequences vary among unrelated individuals, but are identical among related individuals infected with the virus. These “genetic fingerprints” enabled the tracing of viral transmission from person to person, giving rise to a field that would be known as molecular epidemiology.

Using this approach, Roizman demonstrated that nurses in hospital maternity wards were inadvertently transmitting HSV between infants by failing to wash their hands between patients. His findings led directly to changes in hospital practices and a dramatic reduction in neonatal HSV infections.

Roizman later used early DNA editing techniques to manipulate the HSV genome, identifying the functions of many of its 84 genes, particularly those essential for viral replication. Among these was an enzyme that became a key target for antiviral drug development.

He also discovered ways to harness HSV’s biology for therapeutic purposes. He engineered forms of the virus that lack its ability to damage the central nervous system, but retain the capacity to selectively infect and destroy cancer cells. He further demonstrated that modified HSV could serve as a vector for delivering and expressing foreign genes, advancing the development of gene therapy.

A legacy of teaching

Roizman prioritized mentorship, and his influence extended far beyond the laboratory. Over his career, he trained generations of scientists who went on to establish research programs across the United States, Europe, and Asia, extending his impact throughout the global scientific community.

Beginning with his 60th birthday and continuing every five years thereafter, his former students and postdoctoral fellows returned to UChicago for scientific symposia to celebrate his continuing contributions to science, a testament to the lasting impact he had on their lives and careers.

Those who trained with Roizman frequently recalled acts of generosity that extended well beyond science—support offered quietly and without expectation of acknowledgment.

He often said that the true measure of his work was the young scientists he mentored and shaped. “What lasts are not the scientific reports, but rather the generations of scientists whose education I may have influenced,” he wrote.

In his later years, he took particular pleasure in visits from former trainees and colleagues, and in the conversations about science that continued long after his formal career had ended. He retired from the University of Chicago in 2017 but remained active in teaching and mentoring students in virology.

In 2021, the Roizmans endowed the Bernard and Betty Roizman Professorship at the University of Chicago, an enduring commitment to future generations of scientists in the field he helped define. Khader is the first faculty member to hold the distinction.

Roizman was elected to numerous prestigious scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the National Academy of Medicine, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (Medicine) and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

While Roizman’s contributions to science were extensive and profound, they reflect only part of his legacy, family members said: Those who knew him experienced a man of unwavering integrity, humility, and quiet generosity—deeply attentive to others and committed to elevating the people around him.

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

How do AI ‘judges’ compare to human ones? It's complicated, says a UChicago scholar

Mark Cohen — 04/23/2026 - 01:55pm

As AI rapidly works its way into the legal system, Prof. Eric Posner is asking a pointed question: What happens when machines fill the role of a judge?

That question drives much of Posner’s research as the Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Arthur and Esther Kane Research Chair at the University of Chicago Law School. He was elected by his faculty peers to share his findings in the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture, a prestigious annual address at the University.

Speaking on April 16 in a packed Friedman Hall at the Rubenstein Forum, Posner offered a probing examination of how large language models are already influencing legal decision-making—and why, despite their growing sophistication, they are unlikely to replace human judges anytime soon.

Introduced by University President Paul Alivisatos—who described the Ryerson Lecture as “the ultimate celebration” of UChicago scholarship—Posner began with a note of cautious realism.

While U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently predicted that “human judges will be around for a while,” Posner pointed to growing evidence that AI is gaining a foothold in judicial workflow. Surveys suggest a majority of federal judges report using AI tools in some capacity, and some have openly acknowledged experimenting with them.

In one example, a federal appellate judge consulted an AI model to help interpret whether installing an in-ground trampoline qualified as “landscaping” under an insurance policy.

“I just want people to know that I did this,” the judge wrote, describing the AI’s answer as helpful, even though the issue ultimately did not determine the outcome of the case.

Beyond isolated uses, Posner highlighted the emergence of AI-driven arbitration platforms, including one developed by the American Arbitration Association. These systems promise faster and dramatically cheaper dispute resolution, raising the prospect that AI could first gain traction not in courts, but instead in private adjudication.

At the same time, Posner emphasized that AI is already influencing litigation in less welcome ways. Courts are increasingly receiving filings with AI-generated text containing fabricated legal citations, often referred to as “hallucinations,” prompting sanctions and ethical concerns.

Against this backdrop, Posner turned to the core of his lecture: a series of experiments testing how AI “judges” compare to human ones.

How AI handles legal questions

Drawing on prior scholarship in legal realism, Posner and his collaborators examined whether decision-makers follow legal rules strictly—a “formalist” approach—or are influenced by broader considerations such as fairness or sympathy in a “realist” approach.

In one study, human judges evaluated a war crimes case involving sympathetic and unsympathetic defendants. The result was that judges were influenced, at the margins, by the attributes of the defendant.

But AI models behaved differently.

“The AI was a formalist,” Posner explained. “It simply followed the law. It disregarded the degree of sympathy that one might have felt.”

The pattern held across additional experiments. In a complex “choice of law” scenario, where courts must determine which jurisdiction’s law applies, human judges produced inconsistent outcomes and occasionally made factual or legal errors. By contrast, AI models applied the governing rules with complete consistency and without mistake.

Yet that apparent strength, Posner suggested, may also be a weakness. Studies have shown that law students, like AI, tend to apply the law in a rigid formalistic fashion.

“Would you want law students to be judges?” he asked.

For Posner, the comparison underscores a deeper truth about the legal system—human judging is not, and has never been, purely mechanical. From the legal realist critique of the early 20th century to contemporary debates over originalism, scholars have long recognized that judicial decisions are shaped not only by rules, but by judgment, experience and social context.

AI, by contrast, is trained on the “official story” of law—the formal reasoning found in judicial opinions—without access to the underlying motivations or institutional dynamics that shape real-world decisions.

Limits of AI in judging

Posner identified three main obstacles to replacing human judges with AI.

First, AI systems cannot reliably explain their own reasoning. While they produce plausible legal arguments, “it’s not clear that the reasons are the motivations for their actual decisions,” he said.

Second, judging is embedded in a complex institutional structure. Courts operate within hierarchies, interact across jurisdictions and respond directly or indirectly to political and social pressures.

“Human judges are part of this enormously complex institutional structure,” Posner said, one that would be difficult to replicate artificially.

Finally, he pointed to what he called the “paradox of the official story,” the gap between how judicial decisions are publicly justified and how they are actually made.

AI systems, trained on formal legal texts, may faithfully reproduce the rhetoric of judging without capturing its reality.

Even so, Posner acknowledged reasons for optimism about AI’s role in the legal system.

AI platforms are remarkably effective at identifying patterns across recurring fact scenarios, a core feature of legal reasoning. They also produce polished, coherent opinions that can be difficult to distinguish from those written by humans.

Despite these advantages, Posner remains skeptical that AI will displace judges. More likely is a quieter transformation—judges will increasingly rely on AI tools behind the scenes, even if they do not always publicly acknowledge it.

Posner finds the prospect of continued human involvement in judicial decision-making both essential and reassuring, especially in the event of a close call that could go either way.

“I want a human to flip the coin so we can argue about it,” he said. “I don’t want an LLM to do that.”

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

Three UChicago scholars elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

04/22/2026 - 11:30am

Three members of the University of Chicago faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. They are Profs. William Baude, Elisabeth Clemens and Alison LaCroix.

These scholars have made breakthroughs in sociology and law, studying issues spanning the rise of interest group politics to constitutional law and the rise of American federalism. They join the 2026 class, announced April 22, which includes more than 250 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors.

The academy, founded in 1780, is an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members as well as an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines to address significant challenges.

William Baude, SB’04, is the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute.

Baude teaches a range of subjects such as federal courts, constitutional law, election law, conflict of laws and elements of the law. His current research interests include judicial remedies available against the federal government, the Supreme Court's emergency docket and the legacy of William Winslow Crosskey.

The co-editor of two textbooks, The Constitution of the United States and Hart & Wechsler's Federal Courts in the Federal System, Baude is also a podcaster and blogger at Divided Argument.

Elisabeth Clemens, AM'85, PhD'90, is a professor of sociology and a former master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.

Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Clemens' first book, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925, received best book awards in both organizational sociology and political sociology.

She is also co-editor of Private Action and the Public Good, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology, Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America's Past and Present, and the journal Studies in American Political Development. She is now completing Civic Nation, which traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in the development of the American nation-state.

Clemens has served terms as chair of both the political sociology and comparative historical sociology sections of the American Sociological Association, as a member of the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Third Sector, and as president of the Social Science History Association for 2012-13.

Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and an associate member of the Department of History.

LaCroix is a scholar of U.S. legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and 18th- and 19th-century legal thought.

LaCroix’s second book is the prize-winning The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the book examines the transformation of U.S. constitutional law between the nation's founding and the Civil War. She is also the author of the prior The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.

In 2021, former President Joe Biden appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. She is also slated to deliver the address for this year’s UChicago Convocation ceremony on June 6.

UChicago team wins funding to develop AI weather forecasts for underserved areas

Casey Keel — 04/22/2026 - 11:05am

Millions of farmers around the world rely on rain for their crops, but don’t have access to accurate weather forecasts that could help them decide when to plant, when to harvest, what crops to plant, and when to use inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation.

A new project funded by the Laude Institute's inaugural Moonshots program—a research competition that asks how AI should be used to solve humanity's hardest problems—aims to change that.

The interdisciplinary group, led by researchers with the University of Chicago, is working to develop AI-based forecasting technology to support farmers and citizens around the world to plan agricultural decisions, public health decisions, and avoid extreme heat.

The hope is to deliver forecasts that combine AI weather and climate models, data from developing countries, and metrics that are explicitly designed to reflect farmer and public health concerns.

“AI is redefining what’s possible in modeling the Earth system. For example, it allows for the development of faster and cheaper weather forecasts that can be tailored to local needs, making them a game changer for developing countries on the frontlines of climate change,” said project member Pedram Hassanzadeh, UChicago Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences.

“By bridging disciplines and moving the rapidly advancing theoretical work of AI and climate scientists beyond the lab—just two years after our team helped co-develop FourCastNet, the first pioneering global AI weather model—this project will deliver transformative tools to harness this AI-driven revolution and better prepare vulnerable communities for the climate realities they face today,” said Hassanzadeh, who directs the AICE: AI for Climate program, a collaborative initiative led by UChicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth and the Data Science Institute.

Hassanzadeh is one of four UChicago scientists on the project, along with Michael Kremer, the University Professor in Economics and the Harris School of Public Policy and Nobel laureate and Ian Foster, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory; the project is led by Rebecca Willett, the Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows and Faculty Director of AI in the Data Science Institute.

Providing ‘human-centered’ AI weather forecasts

The team is actively working on partnerships to reach hundreds of millions of additional beneficiaries. Through partnerships with the Asian Development Bank, the researchers have already initiated conversations with officials from four other countries in Asia.

Hassanzadeh’s team also runs a training program on AI-based weather forecasting for officials from Meteorological Offices, with five countries (Bangladesh, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria) participating in 2025 and a further five (Colombia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Senegal) scheduled to participate in 2026.

For the Laude seed grant, Foster, Hassanzadeh, Kremer, and Willett said they are developing software systems to make the forecasting and circulation of forecasts simple and user-friendly so that other countries can incorporate their own data.

The interdisciplinary team will develop new benchmarks that enable easy assessments of different AI forecasts across countries using their own local data, as well as AI tools that will yield more accurate forecasts and uncertainty estimates.

“Human-centered AI weather forecasts have the potential to save lives and boost prosperity by providing accurate, actionable information to millions in developing economies,” said Willett. “We are delighted by the Laude Foundation’s support of this effort to translate state-of-the-art AI methods to massive societal benefits for the people most exposed to climate risk.”

The Laude Institute backs computer science researchers turning breakthroughs into real-world impact from early-stage ideas to open-source projects and multi-year labs. Anchored by a $100 million pledge from founder Andy Konwinski, the co-creator of Apache Spark and co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI. Its Moonshots program selected eight teams to receive $250,000 seed grants, with each team competing for $10 million to fund a three-to-five-year lab to scale the open-source system globally.

—Adapted from an article first published by the Data Science Institute.

At UChicago event, Russian journalist Maria Pevchikh talks Kremlin investigations and Navalny’s legacy

Julian Veenstra-VanderWeele — 04/21/2026 - 12:59pm

For the past five years, journalist Maria Pevchikh has kept an eye on the political elites of her native Russia from a state of self-exile.

Pevchikh is the head of investigations at the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), a watchdog group created by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. For this, she tracks the hidden wealth of the country’s oligarchs across foreign bank accounts, compounds and superyachts—work that has been difficult under the authoritarian rule of President Vladimir Putin.

“Investigations when the entire world is against you, this is our daily reality,” she said.

Pevchikh shared her work at an April 8 event organized by the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression in partnership with Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity at the UChicago Law School and the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Speaking with political scientist Scott Gehlbach, the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy, Pevchikh was frank about the realities of her style of journalism under authoritarian rule.

She explained that amidst increasing censorship, repression of free speech and legal pressures, independent media was especially important to hold power to account.

“You didn’t hear any contradictory news for 26 years,” she said, urging the audience to stay “alert” when engaging with news media. “Never get used to it [the corruption]; never think that one story is too small.”

Investigating under censorship, after Navalny’s death

For Pevchikh and the FBK, just getting their journalistic work to an audience can be a challenge.

Since 2019, the Russian government has required all internet service providers to install hardware that allows the government to directly block content. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, such restrictions have increased, with social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram completely blocked.

There are still ways for the population to access these sites, with virtual private networks (VPNs) allowing some Russian users to bypass the internet restrictions. Some sites like TikTok are intermittently accessible even without a VPN.

The FBK is able to get their content out through these windows of accessibility. Pevchikh described it as a “whack-a-mole” situation, with the foundation constantly adapting to shifts in censorship.

“Where are people getting their information from? You take the information to that source, to the people,” she said.

Social media repression within Russia has made the foundation’s work more difficult, but Pevchikh’s self-imposed exile has also created challenges.

In 2020, Pevchikh traveled to Siberia with Navalny for an investigation there. During his flight back to Moscow, Navalny fell ill. He was hospitalized immediately upon landing and medically evacuated for treatment in Germany—where medical officials announced he had been poisoned with a chemical nerve agent.

After months of treatment, Navalny returned to Russia and was arrested upon arrival. The FBK was declared an “extremist” organization and dissolved by the state; Navalny died in a Russian penal colony in 2024.

The events of the poisoning were depicted in the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, for which Pevchikh was an executive producer. The dramatic turn brought worldwide attention to the FBK’s cause, but also fed Pevchikh’s fear. She left Russia on Navalny’s evacuation flight and never went back.

“What we lost with our exile was our ability to film inside Russia,” Pevchikh said.

In earlier investigations, the FBK had filmed the massive compounds of Russian elites with paragliders and drones. These visuals made the alleged corruption tangible.

“When people got to actually see, that’s when everything changed,” Pevchikh said.

But with the loss of direct access, the foundation has adapted by shifting its focus abroad, investigating the overseas assets of Russian elites.

Pevchikh worked to locate Putin’s superyacht, which she found docked in Italy when Russia first invaded Ukraine. Working on a tip from Pevchikh, Italian authorities seized the yacht and have held it ever since. Since her exile in 2020, Pevchikh and the FBK have been able to prompt the arrest of billions of dollars’ worth of assets.

Gehlbach asked Pevchikh to “connect the dots,” asking what motivates her to keep doing this work.

“I’m after some accountability and some justice,” she said, and “the only mechanism we have to do this is to cut them off from their money.”

Alison LaCroix named speaker for UChicago’s 2026 Convocation ceremony

04/21/2026 - 11:00am

Prof. Alison LaCroix has been named the speaker for the University of Chicago’s Convocation on June 6, as part of the campus-wide celebration of the Class of 2026.

A renowned scholar of U.S. legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and 18th- and 19th-century legal thought, LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the Law School. She is also an associate member of the Department of History and has been a member of the UChicago faculty since 2006.

“I’m tremendously honored to address the Class of 2026 at this year’s Convocation,” LaCroix said. “Gathering the University community to celebrate our graduates’ accomplishments and to send them forth on their next endeavors gives us a wonderful opportunity to reflect on how integral the life of the mind is to the values of American democracy.”

LaCroix is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (2010) and The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (2024). The Interbellum Constitution, which examines a transformative yet overlooked period in U.S. history between the War of 1812 and the Civil War (1815 to 1861), was awarded two major book prizes: the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association and the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

LaCroix is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of American Constitutional History and the American Journal of Legal History and has served as a member of the board of directors of the American Society for Legal History.

In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed her to a bipartisan commission to examine possible reform to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2018.

Information about Convocation weekend

The 540th campus-wide Convocation celebration—the annual “calling together” of the UChicago community—will begin at 9:15 a.m. June 6 on the Main Quadrangles. Convocation weekend begins on June 5 with the College’s Class Day ceremony, which will honor graduating students and will include an address by Tony Award-winning playwright David Auburn, AB’91.

Ceremonies for the College and UChicago’s schools and divisions will take place from June 4-7. For more information and event schedules, visit the Convocation website.

UChicago physicist Clay Córdova awarded 2026 New Horizons Prize in Physics

04/20/2026 - 03:18pm

University of Chicago physicist Clay Córdova has been named a recipient of the 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize for his work in quantum field theory.

He was recognized alongside three colleagues: Thomas Dumitrescu of UCLA, Shu-Heng Shao of MIT, and Yifan Wang of New York University.

The New Horizons prize, which is given to early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields, includes an award of $100,000.

The prizes are part of a larger set awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors: Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Sometimes referred to as the “Oscars of Science,” the Breakthrough Prizes are presented annually in the fields of life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.

Córdova and his colleagues were cited for “generalizing the notion of symmetry in various ways, and for exploring the consequences of these generalized symmetries, in quantum field theory, particle physics, condensed matter physics, string theory, and quantum information theory.”

“I am very happy to receive this prize!” Córdova wrote. “It means a great deal to have this work recognized, because it grows out of deep questions about quantum field theory, symmetry, and phases of matter that I have been lucky to explore with my wonderful collaborators.

“Most of all, it encourages me to keep pursuing ambitious ideas at the frontier of theoretical physics.”

Córdova is a theoretical physicist focusing primarily on quantum field theory, a unifying framework for a broad array of physical phenomena. His research has involved aspects of particle physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity, as well as related topics in mathematics.

Córdova holds a PhD in physics from Harvard University. Prior to joining UChicago, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Long-Term Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The collaboration that conducted the Muon g-2 experiment—led at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago—was also recognized this year with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The Muon g-2 experiment provided the world’s most precise measurement to date of the muon, one of the fundamental subatomic particles.

A history of breakthroughs

Breakthrough Prizes have previously been awarded to multiple University of Chicago-affiliated researchers.

These include mathematician Alex Eskin in 2019 for the “magic wand” theorem; physicist Craig Hogan, who received the Breakthrough Prize in 2015 for his work on the High-Z Supernova Search Team that helped prove that the universe is expanding faster and faster over time; several scientists in 2019 who were part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration that created the first image of a black hole; Daniel Holz and Hsin-Yu Chen in 2016 for their work as part of the LIGO collaboration that made the first detection of gravitational waves; and in 2023, to two scientists who discovered a fundamental way that cells organize while teaching a course at the UChicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory. UChicago scientists were also part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, which was recognized in 2025.

The New Horizons Prize was awarded in 2025 to Ewain Gwynne for mathematical contributions in the field of conformal probability; in 2023 to Hannes Bernien and colleagues for developing methods to control individual atoms; in 2022 to mathematician Sebastian Hurtado-Salazar for proving the Zimmer conjecture; in 2019 to physicist Michael Levin for “incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them;” and in 2016 to mathematician André Neves for contributions to several areas of differential geometry.

Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment receives Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

04/20/2026 - 03:17pm

A tiny elementary particle called the muon has won a big prize: the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Researchers with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—which is affiliated with the University of Chicago—are among the winners of this year’s Breakthrough Prize, one of the world’s most notable and prestigious scientific awards that celebrates new scientific discoveries.

The 2026 award in Fundamental Physics recognized three generations of the Muon g-2 experiment, which provided the world’s most precise measurement to date of the muon, one of the fundamental subatomic particles. The experiment began at CERN in the 1970s, shifted to Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1990s and concluded at Fermilab with final publication in 2025.

“I’m proud of the role Fermilab played in the Muon g-2 experiment, which is set to stand as the most accurate measurement of the muon for years to come,” said Fermilab director Norbert Holtkamp. “Fermilab has a strong role as a collaborator and integrator, and this was demonstrated by our work with our colleagues at CERN, Brookhaven and institutions from around the world.”

The Breakthrough Prizes, sometimes called the “Oscars of Science,” recognize the world’s top scientists. The $3 million prize is being awarded to the hundreds of collaborators who contributed to publications reporting key results from CERN, Brookhaven and Fermilab.

Also awarded this year was UChicago physicist Clay Córdova, who won the New Horizons prize for pioneering work in quantum field theory.

Exploring the quantum realm

The three generations of Muon g-2 experiments were designed to measure the magnetic moment of the muon with ever-increasing precision, exploring the quantum realm where particles briefly appear and vanish—and where even tiny deviations could point to entirely new laws of nature outside of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The latest and most precise measurement of the muon’s magnetic moment was announced in 2025 and was important because it provided a sensitive test of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Fermilab led the most recent stage of the experiment that reused a 50-foot-diameter superconducting magnetic storage ring from the Brookhaven National Laboratory experiment when it was transported on a land-and-sea journey in 2013 from Long Island, New York, to Fermilab in Illinois.

In 2021, the first result from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab confirmed a two-decade-old measurement from Brookhaven, revealing a tantalizing tension with established theoretical predictions—while new calculations continue to refine what the Standard Model itself expects. The second run at Fermilab further improved the precision measurement. The third and final result in 2025 was in perfect agreement with the experiment’s previous results and proved to be the world’s most precise measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners.

Fermilab is managed by the Fermi Forward Discovery Group for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science; Fermi Forward is a partnership of the University of Chicago and the University Research Association, with industrial subcontractors.

—Adapted from an article published by Fermilab.

Coming to campus this spring? Check out these exhibitions.

Tori Lee — 04/17/2026 - 01:50pm

Catching up with old friends during Alumni Weekend? Supporting your graduate during Convocation? Looking for a fun, free activity on a rainy afternoon? Whatever your reasons for coming to campus, a wealth of exhibitions at the University of Chicago has got you covered.

From African modernism to the colorful art of Alma Thomas to the intellectual life of Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, check out these exhibitions open this spring.

A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures | 1155 E 58th St. | Open April 16 – August 16

Ancient Nubia, a region located along the Nile in what is today southern Egypt and northern Sudan, lived in symbiosis with animals. Companions of daily life, sources of artistic and religious inspiration, subjects of trade, familiar even in the afterlife, animals in the ancient world had their place at the top of society and power.

From the lion to the crocodile, from the ibis to the ibex, from cattle to insects, A Bestiary of Ancient Nubia presents a world-first panorama of animals in ancient Nubia from the A-Group culture to the medieval period (3800 B.C.E.–900 C.E.).

Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart

Smart Museum of Art | 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. | Open March 24 – July 5

In February 1999, UChicago Prof. Wu Hung opened his first exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art. The field-defining Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century—and many more exhibitions Wu curated in the ensuing years—forged new avenues for situating Chinese art within a broader global contemporary framework.

Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart reflects on the enduring adaptability of contemporary art from China as it continues to grow within and beyond cultural and academic institutions.

Bringing together artworks acquired by the Museum over the last three decades, archival materials, ephemera, and new work, Beyond Boundaries explores how artists navigate and challenge physical limitations across cultural, environmental and political terrains.

Black Culture in Chicago

Logan Center for the Arts, Cafe Logan | 915 E 60th St. | Open April 17 – July 30

Black Culture in Chicago, a photography exhibition by internationally renowned photographer Mark Joseph and director Ada Nivia López, began with a question: Who gets to define how a community is seen?

Chicago has been shaped by those who arrived carrying memory, culture, and hope. This collection stands in respect of the contributions of African Americans and their enduring legacy.

Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Smart Museum of Art | 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. | Open March 24 – July 5

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) is a singular figure of twentieth-century American art. She developed her form of abstraction—characterized by the dazzling interplay of pattern and hue—late in life, after retiring from a long career as a schoolteacher. Her vibrant and rhythmic art transcended established genres, incorporating elements of gestural abstraction and color field painting and creating a style distinctly her own.

Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas draws on the extensive holdings of the artist’s paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and offers an intimate view of Thomas’s evolving practice during her most prolific period, from 1959 to 1978.

History on the Edges: Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Caribbean

Regenstein Library, Special Collections Research Center | Open April 20 – August 21 | Gallery hours: Weekdays, 9 a.m. – 4:45 p.m.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, passed away in 2012 at the age of 62. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti into a family of professionals and intellectuals, Trouillot is best known for his magnum opus, Silencing the Past, which meditates on the question of power and the production of history in colonial archives, academic writing, and popular memory.

Through his personal archive of writings, manuscripts and ephemera, this exhibition traces Trouillot’s intellectual development alongside his status as a Haitian national exiled by the Duvalier dictatorship and an anthropologist who understood history to be shaped equally by peasants and professional historians.

Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society | 5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue | Open April 7 – June 28

The Chicago-based artist couple Mike Cloud and Nyeema Morgan deploy starkly divergent aesthetics. Cloud’s work is steeped in effusive colors and symbols, while Morgan’s tends toward minimalism. Yet despite these formal differences, both artists share an interest in works that explore the complexity of communication.

This exhibition features a mixed-media installation continuing Morgan’s “Studies for Traps” series alongside Cloud’s signature multi-dimensional paintings and a jointly produced sound work.

Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible

Arts Incubator | 301 E. Garfield Blvd. | Open March 26 – July 25 | Gallery hours: Thursday–Saturday, 1–5 p.m.

Jess Atieno’s (the 2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in-Residence) latest exhibition considers the shifting legacy of African modernism through the afterlives of independence-era architecture.

Once positioned as markers of a newly imagined modern Africa, many Brutalist and modernist structures now exist in states of weathering and transformation, revealing modernism as unstable, incomplete and continually renegotiated.

In dialogue with Black diasporic histories across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, the work engages water, sound and circulation as spatial forces that complicate architectural permanence.

2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition: Too Much, Not Enough

Logan Center for the Arts | 915 E 60th St.

Part 1: Open May 1 – 16 | Part 2: Open May 22 – June 7

The University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts and Logan Center Exhibitions present the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition Too Much, Not Enough in two parts, featuring works (in Part 1) by Jef Biesinger, Faye Yingfei Liang, Olivia Isabel Rosato and Kiana Shahnia; (in Part 2) Otis Boat, Maya Janine D’Costa, el n.k. lee, Zihan Qiu and Hyeseul Song.

Could AI help us be more thoughtful voters?

Manasa Reddy — 04/17/2026 - 09:05am

Democracy depends on an informed electorate.

But diving into the context swirling around ballot measures, where some of today’s consequential policy questions in the country are now decided, is no easy task. The last decade has seen social media inflame passions and amplify misinformation. Can newer forms of technology nudge us to reason more carefully?

University of Chicago Assoc. Prof. Chenhao Tan and his team hope so. They’ve developed CivicChats, an AI platform designed to help voters engage more critically and thoughtfully with the issues shaping their communities.

Tan is an associate professor and the faculty co-director of Novel Intelligence at the UChicago Data Science Institute. CivicChats grew out of his research on the relationship between language, technology and political discourse. His lab’s prior work has used computational tools to study how political speech divides and persuades—including research that developed novel metrics for measuring the divisiveness and uniqueness of presidential rhetoric. That body of work diagnosed how existing technology such as social media tends to reinforce division rather than support deliberation.

CivicChats is, in many ways, a response to that diagnosis—a tool built around the question of what AI should do to support democratic participation, not just what it can do.

The team, which includes collaborators at the Australian National University, began with the premise that good civic reasoning involves understanding what’s at stake, grappling with competing considerations and examining the values driving your own position. Many popular large language models fall short of this standard, tending toward sycophancy, simply agreeing with users rather than challenging or clarifying their thinking.

“Endorsements replace deliberation rather than facilitate it,” said Mourad Heddaya, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and member of the CivicChats team. “Campaign messaging is designed to persuade, not clarify. And AI assistants tend to accept your frame and move too quickly toward a tidy answer. We wanted to build something that actually sits with the tensions in a political question.”

Building a chatbot that genuinely supports civic reasoning meant paying careful attention to what makes a productive political conversation. The team designed CivicChats to push back on user positions and probe reasoning rather than simply agreeing. To systematically assess how well it does this, the team also built CivicEval, an evaluation framework that reviews conversations against structured rubrics, assessing whether the chatbot is being evenhanded, appropriately challenging and avoiding sycophantic tendencies.

The CivicChats platform offers three conversation modes depending on what users are looking for.

These include a Q&A mode, which helps users understand what a measure does and what its main considerations are, presenting relevant information evenhandedly without favoring one side. There’s also an argumentative mode, which presents strong arguments opposing the user’s position, helping them consider alternative perspectives and stress-test their views. Finally, the reflective mode asks questions about what values are driving a user’s reaction, what their position depends on and what it would take to change their view.

Users can browse measures on their state’s ballot or search nationally by topic or status to learn more about an issue and the policy options under consideration. As they discuss a measure, they can record their position—yes, no or undecided—and update it as their thinking develops.

Whether good chatbot behavior translates into better outcomes for voters is a question the team plans to investigate next. A preregistered user study is underway to compare CivicChats’ three modes against non-chatbot baselines across several measures of civic reasoning: voter understanding of ballot measures and their tradeoffs, decision confidence and the quality of participants’ justifications for their positions.

The team is actively seeking partners and participants for the study. If you’re interested, you can try CivicChats at civicchats.org or reach out to Mourad Heddaya (mourad@uchicago.edu) to learn more.

—This article was originally published on the UChicago Data Science Institute blog.

Samuel Peltzman to receive 2026 Norman Maclean Faculty Award

04/15/2026 - 11:45am

Named for a renowned University of Chicago professor who shaped minds with his sense of duty and dedication to students, the Norman Maclean Faculty Award honors those who do the same.

As part of the 2026 Alumni Awards program, Prof. Emeritus Samuel Peltzman, PhD’65, will receive the Norman Maclean Faculty Award for his extraordinary contribution to teaching and student life at UChicago.

Established in 1997, the annual award recognizes those who carry on the spirit of Maclean, PhD’40, the acclaimed author of A River Runs Through It, who taught at UChicago for 40 years.

The awards are presented by the UChicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board, which also have recognized eight alumni recipients for their professional achievements and service to the UChicago community. All of these honorees will be celebrated during Alumni Weekend from April 30 to May 3.

Learn more about this year’s Norman Maclean Faculty Award honoree:

Sam Peltzman is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the UChicago Booth School of Business. He has served on the Chicago Booth faculty since 1973, and previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also served as senior staff economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Peltzman’s research has focused on issues related to the interface between the public sector and the private economy. He has authored and edited several books and journal articles on government regulation and industrial organization. This includes work on banking, automobile safety, pharmaceutical innovation, the political economy of public education, and the economic analysis of voters and legislators.

Peltzman is an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. He is the director emeritus of UChicago’s George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, which he led from 1991 to 2005.

UChicago announces 2026 Alumni Award honorees

04/15/2026 - 11:45am

The University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board have announced the recipients of the 2026 Alumni Awards.

The awards recognize accomplished UChicago graduates for their outstanding professional achievement, service to society and contributions to the UChicago community. This year’s honorees span a wide range of fields, including global economic policy, theoretical physics, healthcare innovation, nonprofit leadership, public service and finance.

The recipients of the Professional Achievement Award, Early Career Achievement Award, Recent Alumni Service Award, Alumni Service Medal and Alumni Service Award will be honored during Alumni Weekend from April 30 to May 3.

In addition, Prof. Emeritus Samuel Peltzman, PhD’65, will be recognized with the Norman Maclean Faculty Award for extraordinary contributions to teaching and student experience.

Learn more about the 2026 Alumni Award honorees:

Professional Achievement Award

Krishnamurthy V. Subramanian, PhD’05, MBA’05, is an academic and policymaker whose scholarship and public service have enabled emerging economies to navigate crises, growth and institutional renewal. A tenured professor of finance at the Indian School of Business, he has advanced evidence-based approaches to growth, financial stability and development in the Global South.

As chief economic adviser to the Indian government, Subramanian served as the principal economic voice during the COVID-19 crisis. His three landmark Economic Surveys of India shaped national discourse on post-pandemic recovery and laid the intellectual foundation for India’s approach to self-reliance, anchored in competitive markets, policy autonomy and inclusive growth. Subsequently, as India’s executive director at the International Monetary Fund, he brought analytical independence and conviction-driven leadership to foster evidence-based reflection while leading the fund’s engagement with South Asia during periods of acute economic stress. Through his engagement with multilateral institutions, best-selling books and public discourse, he has sought to advance analytical rigor and fairness in global economic policy. Subramanian also earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Richard “Dick” Chandler, MBA’66, also earned degrees from Princeton University and Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, all with honors. For 12 years, he worked in corporate America for Bell & Howell and later Sara Lee Corporation. He then led three venture-funded start-ups. Sunrise Medical, which he founded in 1983, became a leading global manufacturer of rehabilitation and respiratory equipment with distribution in 100+ countries and a New York Stock Exchange listing when it was sold to private equity in 2000.

In 2003, Chandler became an adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Montana business schools. Over the next 18 years, he taught MBA courses in entrepreneurship and more, for which he was voted outstanding professor by five UC Irvine graduating classes.

In 2017 a Princeton classmate asked Chandler to support a start-up non-governmental organization called Bulamu Healthcare International that operated pop-up medical camps in Uganda. It provided free primary healthcare for the rural poor using only locally trained and licensed Ugandan clinicians. Sadly, a few weeks after Chandler agreed to join the board, his classmate unexpectedly passed away, and he found himself as Bulamu’s first CEO.

Over the next eight years, Bulamu annual revenues grew from $100,000 in 2016 to $7 million in 2025. During that period, it provided free primary care to 288,000 Ugandans, performed free surgeries for 15,000 patients and trained health workers while supplying neonatal care equipment in 104 government maternity hospitals. Chandler applied basic management disciplines novel in Uganda that produced dramatic improvements in patient care and saved many lives.

John E. Milad, AB’94, has made a significant impact on healthcare innovation through his leadership of life sciences companies, venture investments in medical technologies and commitment to improving patient outcomes.

As CEO and co-founder of Quanta Dialysis Technologies, he led the development and global launch of an award-winning portable hemodialysis system that is transforming kidney care delivery for patients with end-stage kidney disease. His leadership has fostered companies that serve millions of patients.

Milad studied political science at UChicago and, after working on Wall Street, moved to the United Kingdom, where he has lived for the past 25 years. At Quanta, he secured the largest venture funding round ever in his industry and built a transatlantic team of almost 300 people across the U.K. and United States. He currently serves as CEO of ERS Genomics, the global licensing leader for Nobel-Prize-winning CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.

He is a recipient of the MacRobert Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering, the U.K.'s most prestigious prize for engineering innovation, and was named to the Sunday Times list of top "Game-Changing Innovators and Entrepreneurs." Milad served for six years on the Invention for Innovation (i4i) selection committee for the British National Institute for Health Research, evaluating translational research funding for medical innovation. He serves as a non-executive director at Northern Venture Trust plc and as a trustee of Kidney Research UK.

Marc Kamionkowski, PhD’91, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2011.

Before that, he was on the faculty of Columbia University and then the California Institute of Technology, where he was the Robinson Professor of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics. He is a theoretical physicist who has worked on a broad range of topics in theoretical astrophysics, cosmology and particle theory.

Kamionkowski is known for early work on the possibility that dark matter could be composed of elementary particles and more recent work on the hypothesis that the dark matter may be black holes. He has made important contributions to the study of dark energy in the late and early universe. His work on the cosmic microwave background polarization is widely credited for helping provide the science case for a suite of increasingly precise experiments that have over the past quarter century revolutionized our understanding of the early universe. He is also known for the many students and postdocs he has mentored over the years.

Early Career Achievement Award

William Godwin, JD’10, serves as senior advisor to the Calumet Township Trustee and principal of Garard Strategies LLC, a pro-social external affairs consulting firm. In 2023, President Joe Biden appointed him a White House fellow, leading Godwin to serve in the Executive Office of the President until 2024. In September 2025, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton appointed him a commissioner on the Gary/Chicago International Airport Board. From 2020 until 2023, he served as president of the Gary City Council and 1st district councilman. He is the founder and managing broker of Godwin Realty Company, a real estate brokerage licensed in Indiana and Illinois.

Previously, he served as a commissioner on the Gary Port Authority, board president of the South Shore Chamber of Commerce in Chicago, and external affairs manager at the non-profit Communities In Schools of Chicago. He served as associate vice-chancellor of Workforce & Economic Development at City Colleges of Chicago, managing district-wide workforce partnerships. A native of Jackson, Tenn., William earned his B.A. in sociology, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University, and completed the year-long General Course at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He also earned a master’s degree from the Chicago Theological Seminary. William is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in higher education leadership and policy studies at Howard University. He is an attorney member of the Illinois State Bar Association.

Recent Alumni Service Award

Olivia Miller, AB’21, is co-president of the Chicago Women’s Alliance (CWA), an affinity group for UChicago alumni and friends. Throughout her time on the Board, Miller has had extensive involvement in CWA’s programming and events. Her events are widely attended and engage hundreds of diverse alumni through intellectual and social activities, often offering alumni the opportunity to share their expertise and teach others. In particular, Miller is passionate about engaging recent alumni in University initiatives. As a leader in UChicago’s new Alumni Amplify program, she leverages social media to cultivate online engagement among recent alumni from all around the globe. Miller also enjoys encouraging community within the College as co-chair for her 5th Reunion.

Outside of her volunteer work with the University, Miller is an Associate on Morgan Stanley’s ultra-high-net-worth lending team in New York City. Miller is honored to come back home to UChicago in her next chapter as an MBA candidate at the Booth School of Business.

Alumni Service Medal

Jeffrey Schvimer, AB’79, MBA’86, studied English language and literature before attending Chicago Booth and specializing in finance with a concentration in statistics. Schvimer has a long history of service to the University. He has served on several reunion committees, including as a co-chair. He also served seven years on the Alumni Board, including as its president. During his time on the Executive Committee, he was part of the leadership team that reorganized and redirected the mission of the board. He has also served on the Alumni Schools Committee interviewing prospective students. Schvimer has volunteered in several other ways when the University has called, such as in speaking engagements, mentoring and career counseling.

His primary career was in both institutional and high-net-worth investment management with Morgan Stanley, Mesirow Financial and PNC Bank. He ended his investment career in 2018 as investment director for PNC in Chicago and the Midwest. Thereafter, Schvimer served as chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for Oodles, a startup company founded by another former UChicago alum, in which he had been a seed investor. Now retired, he spends his time writing, volunteering and playing golf.

Alumni Service Award

Lara Druyan, AB’89, serves on the advisory council of the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. Previously, she served on the University’s Alumni Board, where she was a member of the Executive Committee and chaired the Awards Committee. Druyan has also been a long-standing member of the San Francisco Bay Area Leadership Council, which supports College students’ job searches for summer internships and full-time opportunities. Her service to the University began immediately after college graduation, when she headed alumni interviewing in the Bay Area for two years—she continues to work closely with college admissions, serving as an active ambassador in the community. She has also helped launch the Chicago Society in the Bay Area, judged the New Venture Competition and has served on every reunion committee since her 10th, co-chairing her 30th.

Lara is a founding general partner of secondary investment fund Private Liquidity Partners, and a venture partner at Silicon Valley Data Capital, a seed- and early-stage venture firm, where she served as a managing director for five years. Previously, she was the managing director and head of innovation at the Royal Bank of Canada. Druyan also serves on the boards of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Bancorp USA, Healogix, an analytics and research firm in the health care sector, and Synfini, a computational chemistry start-up. She is also a member of Astia’s Investor Council, which promotes female entrepreneurship. Druyan graduated with honors from UChicago and earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Four UChicago scholars receive 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships

Tori Lee — 04/14/2026 - 10:21am

Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded this year to four scholars from the University of Chicago. Announced April 14, the distinguished writers and scholars join the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, honored for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Profs. Neil Brenner, Claudia Brittenham, Faith Hillis and Alexandra Z. Worden are among the 223 distinguished individuals selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue work under “the freest possible conditions.”

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

Several UChicago alumni also join the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows, including poet Christopher Kempf, PhD’20; comparative urbanist Xuefei Ren, PhD’07; and historians Andrew Sartori, PhD’03, and Eric Zolov, MA'90, PhD’95.

Neil Brenner

Brenner, PhD’99, is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, director of the Urban Theory Lab, and chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU). He is a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer whose writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions. A key concern of his current work is to explore the connections between the capitalist form of urbanization and the planetary socioenvironmental crises of our time.

Brenner will use the fellowship to continue work on a research project and forthcoming book titled Into the Shatter Zone: Planetary Urbanization, Fossil Energy, and Biospheric Crisis. The joint project, with environmental historian and geographer Swarnabh Ghosh (Harvard University), offers a geohistorical reinterpretation of capitalist urbanization in the context of intensifying climate and ecological breakdown.

The book argues that non-city territories and environments—"operational landscapes" of extraction, energy, agriculture, logistics, and waste—are the sociometabolic foundation of capitalist urbanization.

“This proposition requires us to rethink such basic questions as how cities contribute to carbon emissions or biodiversity loss, or more generally, global warming or overpollution,” Brenner said. “It also means we need to rethink, on a fundamental level, the question of urban 'sustainability' to include the question of how cities are supplied with materials, energy, and food, and how they process their waste.”

Claudia Brittenham

A professor in the Departments of Art History and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, Brittenham's research focuses on the art of ancient Mesoamerica, with particular attention to the ways that the materiality of art and the politics of style contribute to our understanding of the nature and meaning of images. Her most recent book Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, explores the distance between ancient experiences of works of art and the modern practice of museum display.

During her fellowship year, Brittenham will continue work on her current book project, The Interconnected Mesoamerican World. The project examines how people, objects and ideas moved throughout Mesoamerica—modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras—and the history of how we understand and talk about the region.

“The stories we tell about the past are always in some ways stories about the present,” said Brittenham. “In this moment, I feel it is imperative to emphasize that this hemisphere has always been interconnected.”

Faith Hillis

A professor in the Department of History, Hillis is a historian of Russia and modern Europe, with special interests in 19th- and 20th-century politics, culture, ideas and transnational exchanges. Her research and writing have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Hillis plans to spend the fellowship year finishing her forthcoming book, Forging The Protocols: How Swindlers, Opportunists, and a Host of Historical Accidents Created the Most Notorious Conspiracy of All Time.

A "biography" of the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book examines the many works from which the notorious forgery drew—adventure novels, political satires and family sagas—and asks how these diverse sources came together to form a single, monstrous libel.

“Shedding new light on the enduring mystery of the forgery's origins, I show how an international group of conspirators collectively co-authored the text over the course of several decades in the service of multiple, chaotic agendas,” Hillis said. “It is quite unsettling to think that the ideas of The Protocols came not from ideological maniacs, but from people driven mostly by avarice and ego—precisely because there are so many of these kinds of people in the world.”

Alexandra Z. Worden

A senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory who is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, Worden’s research focuses on the fate and transport of carbon in the oceans—with an emphasis on the photosynthetic microbes that live in the sunlit surface ocean and form the base of marine food chains.

Her group develops methods and technologies for sea-going studies of bacteria, protists, and viruses, and for quantifying their contributions to global primary production, cell-to-cell interactions, and trajectories in future oceans. In addition to pioneering methods for targeting uncultivated microbes in the ocean, her lab has focused on developing methods for investigating environmentally relevant algae in culture under climate change simulations, as well as methods for genetic manipulation of these species.

With the fellowship, Worden will pursue understanding of how deep ocean microbes respond to photosynthetic algae that sink to the seafloor—“a process that results in the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but with poorly understood impacts on community transitions in the vast dark ocean,” she said.

A ‘blob’ in a tank is helping scientists tease out the secrets of turbulence

Louise Lerner — 04/13/2026 - 11:33am

In a tank on the bottom floor of a University of Chicago research laboratory, scientists summon “The Blob” into existence by firing water jets to create an artfully choreographed series of rings.

First created three years ago in the laboratory of UChicago Prof. William Irvine in collaboration with graduate student Takumi Matsuzawa, The Blob is one of the only ways that researchers can study the strange properties of turbulence—the chaotic swirling of fluids such as air and water—in its purest form: stationary in a lab and isolated from boundaries.

Turbulence is a bit of a paradox. It governs everything from the movements of ocean currents and hurricane clouds to the swirling of cream in your coffee and blood in your veins. But as widespread as it is, turbulence has been fiendishly difficult for scientists to understand, compared with most other everyday physics phenomena.

In a new study, the Irvine lab reported its first findings from the strange blob. They include several insights into the behavior of turbulence as it spreads and dissipates—including that it lingers far longer than visible to the human eye.

“It’s a totally fundamental question—what does turbulence do when you let it loose?—and yet we had no way to study it in such a clean setting before,” said Irvine, a professor of physics and member of the James Franck and Enrico Fermi Institutes.

The study was co-authored by Prof. Nigel Goldenfeld, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego and Minhui Zhu, then a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and now at Argonne National Laboratory, and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How turbulence spreads

Understanding the rules of turbulence is crucial for designing planes and turbines, and for building fusion reactors, among other uses. But simulating turbulence and testing it in experiments has been difficult.

Researchers always want to study the purest, simplest form of a phenomenon in order to understand the basics and extract the fundamental rules of its behavior. The trouble is that by creating turbulence to study it, you are always interfering with the system in some way. If you stick a paddle into a tank of water to stir it up, both paddle and tank walls unavoidably interfere with how the motion plays out.

That was, until The Blob.

Irvine and Matsuzawa created an experimental setup in which vortex rings were fired into the center of a tank from all corners. This created a perfect, stationary ball of turbulence on its own at the center of the tank.

“It’s a very unique experiment to ask the question, because in no other situation do you have turbulence separated from the walls—with properties not controlled by the box where it exists, but by how you made it,” said Irvine.

In this study, Matsuzawa set up a camera to take high-speed images to track the movements of The Blob as it played out. It first expanded, filled the chamber, and then gradually decayed back to rest.

One new observation concerned how turbulence spreads. Unlike, say, tea molecules spreading diffusely out from a teabag in a teacup, turbulent eddies organize themselves to spread in a sharp front. However, this effect had only been experimentally observed in superfluid helium in the 1990s as part of a collaboration by Goldenfeld with the late famed experimentalist Russell Donnelly.

Irvine and Matsuzawa’s experiment captured evidence of the same effect in water for the first time. Using modern flow visualization techniques, they were able to perform more nuanced measurements than previously possible to confirm this mechanism of turbulence spreading.

How turbulence decays

The team also discovered something unexpected about how turbulence died out.

They observed two distinct stages in how the energy decayed in The Blob: early on, the energy dropped in one characteristic way, but later it followed a different pattern of decrease.

To dig deeper, Irvine and Matsuzawa created turbulence with a different method—by placing a plastic mesh, or grid, into the water tank and shaking it. When they did, they saw that the energy decayed in just a single pattern.

“What this shows is that you can have two different laws of decay of turbulence in the same box,” Matsuzawa explained.

The difference comes down to the structure of the eddies at the start. In The Blob, the largest eddy starts out about as large as the blob itself and keeps growing until it reaches the size of the container. By contrast, turbulence generated by the grid already contains eddies as large as the container from the start.

These findings extend a model for the evolution of freely decaying turbulence, first developed by A.N. Kolmogorov and G.I. Barenblatt, the scientists said. However, it had to be extended to take into account surprising new findings about the technical details by which turbulence evolved once created.

“Even a single isolated blob of turbulence is a complex system. It’s amazing that a minimal theoretical picture can still capture the essential behaviors observed in the experiment,” said Zhu. “The analysis of the experimental data performed by the team was able to rule out previously proposed theories for the decay of turbulence, thus providing new puzzles for theorists.”

“This work is an example of how fundamental aspects of one of the most complex physical phenomena can be explored scientifically through innovative experiments and imaginative theory, via a deep collaboration between theorists and experiments,” Goldenfeld commented. “Crucial to the success of this collaboration—spanning seven years from initial conception to completion—was the willingness of talented scientists to improvise and persevere on a very challenging problem!”

The scientists plan to continue to work with The Blob to explore the properties of turbulence, in particular to explore further the unexpected features of turbulent spreading and decay that they uncovered for the first time.

Irvine and Goldenfeld dedicated the paper to their fond memory of Russell Donnelly, who carried out seminal work on turbulence as a professor at UChicago and later at the University of Oregon.

The study used the resources of the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and the UChicago Research Computing Center.

Citation: “Nonlinear Diffusion and Decay of a Blob of Turbulence Spreading Into a Fluid at Rest.” Matsuzawa, Zhu, Goldenfeld and Irvine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb. 12, 2026.

Funding: U.S. Army Research Office, Simons Foundation, Brown Foundation, Schmidt Science Fellowship.

UChicago Press awards top honor to Sarah Newman for ‘Unmaking Waste’

Tori Lee — 04/13/2026 - 09:07am

The University of Chicago Press awarded the 2026 Gordon J. Laing Award to Assoc. Prof. Sarah Newman for her book Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things. President Paul Alivisatos presented the award at a gala reception on April 8 at the David Rubenstein Forum.

“Unmaking Waste is an insightful work, exposing at once the particulars by which human societies and civilizations have grappled with waste and what their conception of it reveals of their own position in the material world,” said Alivisatos. “It is a wonderful example of a UChicago mind in top form.”

Each year, the Laing Award is presented to the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press. Books published in 2023 and 2024 were eligible for the 2026 award.

In Unmaking Waste, Newman draws on archaeological finds, historical documents and ethnographic observations to examine what people have considered to be “waste” and how they interact with it from prehistory to the present day.

Newman shows how conceptions of waste have shaped reuse and renewal in ancient Mesoamerica, early modern ideas of civility and forced religious conversion in New Spain, and even the modern discipline of archaeology. Unmaking Waste reveals that waste is not—and never has been—an obvious or universal concept.

In its review, the journal Isis called Unmaking Waste a “particularly impressive example” of how “honing in on waste allows us to tell new histories.”

Prof. Aziz Huq, chair of the Board of University Publications, said that Newman’s work “embodies the best of what university press publishing can do.”

“Newman’s brilliant challenge to our conventional understanding of what it means to create ‘waste’ is not only an influential contribution to anthropology, it also offers all readers an enlightening new way of thinking about a common part of our lives and experience—what we treat as garbage—and why we think about it the way we do,” said Huq.

Newman said she relied on the advice and insights from both Anthropology department colleagues as well as the support of the Press throughout the process of publishing her first monograph.

“I am thrilled and honored to celebrate not only my book, but the intellectual environment and community at the University that helped to shape it,” said Newman.

The Press’s top award is named in honor of Gordon J. Laing, who served as general editor of the Press from 1909 until 1940, firmly establishing it as the premier academic publisher in the United States.

“Every year, we take pride in joining with the University to recognize the lasting impact and significance of the Press and its authors in shaping scholarship and expanding knowledge for all,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the Press. “We are proud to see Professor Newman honored with this award for her outstanding book and to celebrate her remarkable contributions.”

Newman joins a distinguished list of previous recipients that includes, most recently, Jenny Trinitapoli, Margareta Ingrid Christian, Elisabeth C. Clemens, Lisa Wedeen, Michael Rossi, Eve L. Ewing and Deborah Nelson.

—This story was adapted from a press release from the UChicago Press.

Smoking may spark lung-to-brain reaction tied to dementia, study finds

Paul Dailing — 04/10/2026 - 11:08am

Smoking cigarettes may raise dementia risk by triggering harmful chemical signals from the lungs to the brain, finds new research from the University of Chicago.

The study adds deeper understanding to a well-documented correlation between smoking and neurodegeneration. One study from 2011 found heavy smoking in midlife was associated with a more than doubled risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia decades later.

Many of the theories around this connection relate to smoking’s impact on the vascular and respiratory systems—essentially choking the flow of oxygen to the brain over decades of tobacco use. But the new study published in Science Advances points to the involvement of nicotine-triggered miscommunication.

“This research establishes a clear ‘lung-brain' axis that helps explain why cigarette smoking is linked to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative risks,” said UChicago postdoctoral researcher Kui Zhang, co-first author of the new work. “By understanding [this link], we open new doors for protecting neurons from smoke-induced damage.”

The researchers found a previously unmapped route from the lungs to the mind through pulmonary neuroendocrine cells (PNECs). When exposed to nicotine, these cells release exosomes—tiny particles that transport cellular products and waste—that disrupt the iron balance in neurons, triggering symptoms often found in dementia patients. 

Whether this proves to be a causal link for dementia or not, the research itself is a powerful advance in scientists’ understanding of the lungs.

“It reveals that the lung is not just a passive target of smoke exposure, but an active signaling organ influencing brain pathology,” said the paper’s corresponding author Asst. Prof. Joyce Chen, from UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and the Ben May Department for Cancer Research.

From lung to brain

PNECs are unique lung cells that blend the functions of both nerve cells and endocrine cells. Speaking the languages of both synapse and hormone, they are important sensors for the airway, but difficult to study.

“The primary challenge was the extreme rarity of PNECs, which make up less than 1% of lung cells, making them nearly impossible to isolate and study in depth,” Zhang said.

To research these elusive but important cells, the team generated induced PNECs (iPNECs) from human pluripotent stem cells in numbers large enough to research in the lab. 

When exposed to nicotine, the iPNECs emitted great quantities of exosomes. Most cell types produce exosomes, but those made by the iPNECs in response to nicotine were rich in a protein called serotransferrin, which the body uses to regulate the flow of iron through the bloodstream.

Applying this model to the human body could mean that with every puff of a cigarette, cigar or vape, the lung’s natural PNECs blast out massive amounts of a material that impacts how the body handles iron. 

“We are finding neurodegeneration-related markers, which are going up, and which can be linked with many cognitive and dementia-related diseases,” said co-first author Abhimanyu Thakur, who was with UChicago PME and the Ben May Department during the research and is now at Harvard Medical School.

Work ahead

This blast of serotransferrin would essentially be telling the body—wrongly—to change how it regulates iron. The vagus nerve, which snakes from the brain to organs throughout the body, regulating involuntary movement like heartbeats, breathing and digestion, would carry this message back to the brain. 

“This iron [dysregulation] drives oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and increased α-synuclein [protein] expression—hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease,” Chen said.

An iron imbalance in neurons can also wrongly trigger ferroptosis, a form of programmed cell death, in cells that weren’t supposed to die. Previous research has associated ferroptosis with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but much more study is needed before any causal link can be claimed.

The team is next looking to see if blocking the exosomes—the original source of the signal—could have therapeutic applications. While direct impact on humans is still years off, the research advances scientists’ understanding of how the brain and lungs communicate.

“Understanding these cross-organ communication pathways is critical for developing better prevention and intervention strategies for neurodegenerative diseases,” Chen said.

Citation: “Pulmonary Neuroendocrine Cell-derived Exosomes Regulate Iron Homeostasis and Oxidative Stress in Lung Neurons,” Thakur et al, Science Advances, April 8, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady2696

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

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.