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Distant exoplanets may be hiding water beyond Webb Telescope's reach, study finds

Louise Lerner — 07/13/2026 - 10:30am

The planets that appear most common in the universe could have a lot of water—but it could be hiding where telescopes can't detect it, according to a new study led by scientists with the University of Chicago.

Their study examines a vast, mysterious class of worlds known as mini- or sub-Neptunes, which are a little smaller than Neptune. They are the most common type of planet we have catalogued around the galaxy, yet they have no equivalent in our solar system, so scientists must build detailed simulations to try to understand what these planets actually look like.

According to the new analysis, these worlds may have more water than previously thought: water could sink deep inside the planets, where it can’t be seen by even the James Webb Space Telescope.

“It’s very possible these planets are hiding much more water than their atmospheres let on,” said Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb, UChicago postdoctoral researcher and the first author on the study.

“It’s an interesting question, both because water is so important for life as we know it, and because it signals we have to interpret the data coming in from new, powerful telescopes in a more nuanced way to really know what’s going on,” she said.

The study is accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.

A planetary puzzle

Most of the universe’s planets—and there are millions if not billions of them out there in our Mily Way galaxy—circle faraway stars, much as we do our sun. These stars far outshine the planets themselves, making such planets difficult to see directly, but scientists have learned to tease out clues about them.

For example, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can catalogue the molecules present on the planet by capturing the starlight that filters through the planet’s atmosphere as it crosses in front of its host star.

“The challenge is, how do we extrapolate from what’s in the atmosphere to what the surface is like?” said Piaulet-Ghorayeb.

The surprisingly large population of ‘mini-Neptune’ planets has been a mystery in particular, since we don’t have an easy comparison in our own solar system: these planets are too dense to be gas giants like Jupiter, but not dense enough to be a rocky planet like ours. They are likely some mix of rock, gas and water, but no one knows exactly how that mix plays out for each planet.

In the last few years, scientists’ working assumption has been that because these planets are warm, their molecules would be fairly evenly mixed, like a well-shaken cocktail. That would mean the readings from the atmosphere give a decent approximation of the molecules deeper inside.

But running the numbers, Piaulet-Ghorayeb and the team found that wasn’t the entire picture.

How to tell what planets are like

Planets are complicated. Even what we know about Earth still involves guesswork—we’ve never managed to drill down further than seven and a half miles, barely a scratch on the crust—and that’s when we’re standing on the planet itself.

So to try to understand what faraway planets actually look like, scientists must build simulations. These combine data from telescopes, our knowledge of planetary science, and the laws of chemistry and physics.

As a case study, the team used a planet known as TOI-270 d, which circles a star in the constellation Pictor. The Webb telescope had picked up readings in its atmosphere indicating the presence of hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, which should be accompanied by abundant water, the scientists said.

But water behaves very differently under different conditions; it could be frozen, gaseous, liquid or even a supercritical fluid, a strange phase that water can reach at extremely high pressures.

The scientists looked more closely into the conditions under which hydrogen and water mix or separate, and found that the answer depends closely on the exact composition of the mix.

In cold atmospheres, or when water is very abundant as it is on TOI-270 d, for example, water could sink below the lighter hydrogen—where it is then hidden from the sight of telescopes.

With current techniques, we don’t yet have the capacity to confirm or rule out which category planet TOI-270 d falls into, explained study co-author Prof. Eliza Kempton; for now, these types of planets exist in a gray area.

The key ingredient for life

TOI-270 d and planets like it aren’t very likely to be friendly to Earthlings. If they have water, it would be under the immense pressures and temperatures of thick, heavy atmospheres.

But a better grasp of the physics and chemistry of these planets will boost our understanding of how planets form more generally—essential for any search for habitable worlds.

This is particularly true for the mechanisms that would produce and maintain water, which is a key ingredient for life as we know it.

Unfortunately, according to study co-author Assoc. Prof. Leslie Rogers, water is one of the more difficult molecules to pin down.

“Water has an intermediate density, so it could be mimicked with a mix of rock and gas,” she explained. “We’re trying to get any constraint we can for this problem.”

Citation: “A window for water-hydrogen demixing on warm metal-rich sub-Neptunes.” Piaulet-Ghorayeb et al, The Astrophysical Journal.

Funding: NASA, Brinson Foundation, Suzuki Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Researchers build light-powered ‘artificial leaf’ for wireless medical implants

Emily Ayshford — 07/10/2026 - 09:24am

Plants convert light into energy efficiently through photosynthesis—an ability that scientists and engineers still struggle to match with electronic devices.

Recently, researchers have looked beyond traditional semiconductor materials to create devices using a promising class of materials called nanoplasmonics. These tiny metal structures can absorb and concentrate optical energy and generate energetic charge carriers.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Department of Chemistry developed a nanoplasmonic “leaf,” a wireless bioelectronic device that they used to stimulate nerves and pace heartbeats in an animal model.

The team also showed that their material could be used as a computer-like sensing platform, where users can interact with the screen using invisible light—a potentially secure way to transmit information.

“These materials are very unique and are different from other light-sensitive devices, like photovoltaics,” said Pengju Li, a former UChicago PME graduate student who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. “Through our design, we have increased these nanostructures’ ability to store energy, so now they can potentially be used as new forms of therapy and in new human-computer interfaces.”

The research, published in Nature Photonics, was led by the lab of UChicago chemistry Prof. Bozhi Tian and included researchers from across UChicago, Seoul National University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.

A new kind of bioelectronic

Current light-harvesting devices, such as solar cells, use semiconductor materials to convert sunlight into energy. But these materials have efficiency limits due to the laws of physics.

Nanoplasmonics could theoretically be more efficient. These materials are made from noble metals, such as gold. The metal is combined with titanium dioxide into tiny nanostructures—about 15 nanometers in size—that absorb light.

In these materials, light excites plasmons that decay into energetic electrons and holes. These electrons and holes, called hot carriers, allow researchers to manipulate electrical and chemical processes at the nano level. These structures essentially act as tiny light-powered energy converters, providing electrical energy without the need for wired power sources.

But researchers needed to understand how to design and build these materials to amplify the electrical current from them. For years, Li worked on this problem until he discovered a new idea: a gold nanoparticle surrounded by a hemisphere of titanium dioxide, bottomed by a gold film. The structure absorbs the light, and the gold film acts as a mirror that reflects and amplifies the energy within.

“If you don’t have that gold layer, the light just passes through,” said Yuze Zheng, a co-first author of the paper and a graduate student in the Tian lab. “But having the film amplifies the performance of the material to make it useful for devices.”

After creating the material in UChicago’s Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility, the team tested it in a rat model. They placed a patch of material on the heart and demonstrated that they could control the pacing of the heart by shining light onto it. They also attached it to the sciatic nerve; when light was shined onto the material, it stimulated the nerve—demonstrating a potential therapy for nerve pain.

The material has a performance level of milliamperes per square centimeter—a value that is considered very high for wireless systems. It is as high or higher than comparable semiconductor materials.

“We haven’t seen any other nanoplasmonic device like this that can achieve this sort of performance and perform these useful bio-interface applications,” said Guangqing Yang, another of Tian’s graduate students and a co-first author of the paper.

The future of sensing and stimulation devices

To demonstrate the other possibilities of this material, the team also developed an optosensing platform. Similar to a touch screen, this pixel-less platform responds to light instead of touch. Researchers interacted with the screen using a laser pointer, then used an AI program to reconstruct the patterns they had shone.

“A device like this could change the way people interact with computers,” Li said. “Instead of using touch, you can use light to input certain information. And the light can be invisible, which would improve security. AI can then be used to decode what you wrote. This opens up new directions for our material.”

Next, the team is developing a fully implantable device that could be used for biostimulation for a year or longer. They also hope to develop similar platforms for quantum-based sensors.

“What really makes research like this possible is a collaboration across different research areas,” Li said. “We work with biochemists and biophysicists, people who understand the quantum mechanics of these materials. That collaborative spirit is essential to PME, and it’s something that is really commendable.”

Citation: “Self-organized nanoplasmonic artificial leaf for hot-carrier bioelectronic interfaces.” Li et al. Nature Photonics, June 24, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41566-026-01949-5.

Funding: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, US Army Research Office.

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

UChicago convenes leaders from across country to explore free expression, academic freedom

Ted Gregory — 07/07/2026 - 04:28pm

When the University of Chicago launched the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression in 2023, President Paul Alivisatos said it would be a place where “free expression genuinely serves the seeking of truths, through listening as well as sharing our own ideas.”

As part of its mission, the Chicago Forum created the Academic Freedom Institute, an annual event which invites administrators and academics to learn about topics related to free expression and academic freedom. The Chicago Forum recently hosted 56 attendees from across the country to UChicago to discuss these complex topics from their experiences at college and university campuses—and draw lessons from UChicago’s history of defending and upholding these important academic principles.

During the three-day gathering, participants heard from leaders from across the country as well as UChicago. They examined subjects such as the boundaries of academic freedom, institutional neutrality, current threats and actions against free expression, and cultivating a vibrant student culture of free expression.

“To have the chance to meet with people who are not just practitioners and working in universities across the country, but people from the University of Chicago, who are the established experts in this field and helped build this field, to get their take on some of the things we’re dealing with, was really helpful,” said Eric Johnson, senior advisor at the University of North Carolina System.

Attendees said they appreciated the opportunity to exchange diverse viewpoints openly.

“The community cultivated by the institute fostered open dialogue, critical thinking, intellectual curiosity and civility,” said Belinda Higgs Hyppolite, vice president in the Division of Access and Opportunity at the University of Oklahoma. “It created an environment where participants felt empowered to both challenge and support one another in productive and respectful ways.”

Leaders at the Chicago Forum said they were encouraged by the vigorous debate at this year’s gathering.

“People were really engaged with each other,” said Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the Chicago Forum and the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law, who spoke and moderated discussions at the event. “It was a good example of free expression and felt like we were living the principles we were trying to practice and promote.”

Leila Brammer, director of curriculum at the Chicago Forum and an organizer of the conference, said those kinds of conversations are the goal of the institute as well as the Chicago Forum. She also said the event was an important opportunity for the University to share its history of defending free expression and academic freedom.

“There is a sense of our role externally as a convener of conversations around these values that are at the very bedrock of our existence,” Brammer said, “and we take that role and mission seriously when we think about what we can offer externally to our colleagues across the country.”

The ‘struggle’ of free expression

The Academic Freedom Institute is a key initiative of the Chicago Forum’s mission to promote open discourse, building on UChicago’s core principles of free speech and academic freedom. Teams from participating universities and colleges create a self-report on structures for academic freedom at their campus, and develop plans for implementation after the workshop concludes.

Alivisatos opened the event by discussing UChicago’s longstanding commitment to free expression, which he traced to the founding of the University and William Rainey Harper, its first president. He talked about ongoing challenges in free expression, which he called a “good struggle” that is at the essence of colleges and universities.

Subsequent sessions explored issues around institutional neutrality and UChicago’s landmark 1967 Kalven Report; as well as the Chicago Principles on Free Expression, created in 2014 in response to attempts to limit free speech on campuses across the U.S.

One of the more wide-ranging discussions included Geoffrey Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at UChicago; and Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York University School of Law and senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The two discussed what Stone called the “extraordinarily ambiguous” wording of the First Amendment, how free speech and freedom of the press evolved over centuries, especially through landmark Supreme Court cases in the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as more recent assaults on academic freedom and free speech.

For participant Sonja Wentling, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and professor of history at Concordia College in Minnesota, the conference helped her appreciate the dedication an institution must have to free expression.

“Pronouncements alone will not protect or advance free inquiry and expression,” she said. “Those principles have to be rooted in a campus culture that actively sustains, models, and engages in robust conversation, and that requires an ongoing commitment.”

UChicago’s Kiphart Center helps faculty tackle global health, social development issues

Mallory Brabrand — 07/07/2026 - 02:00pm

Complex global problems require complex global solutions. They also necessitate collaboration, coordination, trials and funding. For faculty interested in approaching a global public health crisis from a new perspective, this means managing a whole host of factors across thousands of miles and international borders.

Since 2022, The Susan and Richard Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development has sought social solutions to public health’s biggest global challenges. The center leads educational programs for undergraduate and graduate students, engages in community outreach and funds faculty research projects that promote global health equity, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries.

Administered jointly between the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and the Biological Sciences Division, the Kiphart Center supports innovative projects by funding annual faculty research grants that put theoretical ideas into action.

Alan Zarychta, faculty director of the Kiphart Center since July 2025, believes the center is unique not only for its programming, but also for its cross-disciplinary collaboration.

“Kiphart has a real comparative advantage being at the University of Chicago, situated within this intellectual community,” Zarychta said. “There is a culture here of really just focusing on problems, on questions and pursuing whatever knowledge can be gathered to answer them.”

Seeding solutions

The Kiphart Center’s Fund for Research and Innovation in Global Health and Social Development research grants facilitate faculty research all over the world, including Tanzania, China and Uruguay. Each cycle, five to 10 projects ranging from behavioral social studies to ecology and beyond, are awarded up to $50,000. Though this amount isn’t always enough to support large-scale implementation, it is often enough to collect the initial data necessary to propel a study forward.

“We are trying to be a catalyst to help faculty do the work that they're already interested in doing,” Zarychta said.

Where other funding mechanisms value strictly disciplinary approaches, the Kiphart Center seeks imaginative proposals, since public health crises require out-of-the-box thinking.

“We want to encourage people to have multiple viewpoints, from the start of a project through its execution,” Zarychta said.

This approach is facilitated by a faculty advisory committee composed of faculty from a range of departments, including the Crown Family School and the Biological Sciences Division but also the Social Science Division, the Harris School of Public Policy and more. Erick Amick, who has been the executive director of the Kiphart Center since its inception, finds this board drives the grant program in selecting exciting and innovative projects.

“Because we’re an interdisciplinary center, we’re not driven exclusively by a single line of research,” he explained. “That enables us to see what's out there and be bold in selecting innovative projects to address complex issues.”

The faculty committee has also served over the years to ensure that while creative approaches are emphasized, the driving force behind the work is not lost.

“Our focus is the social determinants of health for vulnerable populations and communities around the world, so we can take a very expansive approach,” he said. “Having brought a truly interdisciplinary group of folks together to get ideas and think through challenges that we might encounter, we spend a lot of time speaking with the committee about setting priorities for the kinds of research that we want to fund because we get a broad range of proposals each application cycle.”

In 2023, Leyla Ismayilova, an associate professor in the Crown Family School, received a Kiphart Center research grant to fund pilot-testing for a program in Azerbaijan centered around economic interventions for youth as a means to reduce vulnerability to a range of adolescent risk behaviors, including school disengagement, delinquency, unsafe peer influences and substance use, and to promote positive financial and social habits.

Over her time at UChicago, Ismayilova has been involved in a range of global programs that provide support for faculty. Though there have historically been a variety of certificate programs that focus on global social development, the formation of the Kiphart Center formally established a hub of research and collaboration that faculty interested in global health can reach to.

For Ismayilova, whose larger studies are often funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Kiphart Center grant helped to fund initial testing that would be used to apply for other grants.

“Many studies require pilot data and that's the part that I think is not always easy to get,” she said. “That's where I think Kiphart’s seed grant program comes very much in handy.”

Ismayilova’s project took her to Azerbaijan where she collaborated with Aflatoun International, Bank Respublika and local community-based organizations to adapt an existing model premised on youth savings accounts that incentivize families to save toward education, housing or small business development. The intervention addresses challenges common to many low-resource communities across low- and middle-income countries, where adolescents from families facing economic insecurity often have limited educational and employment opportunities—circumstances that may increase young people’s risk of negative outcomes.

The adapted Aflatoun International curriculum introduced a 12-session social and financial skills course designed to build practical money-management skills while instilling new ideas about entrepreneurship, social responsibility, career pathways and future possibilities for youth.

This educational programming integrated with direct economic intervention not only begins the process of building strong entrepreneurial skills and saving habits for the participants, but also provides them with tangible resources that can be cashed out in the future as adolescents transition into adulthood. This could pay for vocational training, to purchase equipment or pursue other pathways toward economic independence.

Ismayilova is also investigating the impacts of the intervention on the children’s emotional wellbeing, recognizing the strain that family’s financial instability puts on even the youngest members of communities. Many of the children in the trial come from high-risk family backgrounds that expose them to stress, instability and exposure to risky environments, which can further compound the risk of problem behaviors, including substance use.

“Adolescents who are at risk of kind of behavioral problems often for financial reasons, cannot find their way of being integrated in the society and therefore can be at risk for substance use and other kinds of risky behaviors,” she explained. “This program introduces concepts of financial literacy from an early age, but it also focuses on emotional and social skills that are very important in the context of money so that they can be mentally prepared to face these kinds of issues.”

By adapting existing curriculum centered around building financial toolkits for youth, Ismayilova is hoping to find the best suited programming that uplifts youth to dream beyond their current situations. Ismayilova, along with her collaborators, hopes that such interventions will be adaptable to a host of global situations and be able to support youth as they progress through school and think about what's next.

“These adolescents often don't see any other opportunities for growth and development, so they don't see many options for their futures,” she explained. “Through this program, they have a chance to see that alternatives are available, even for them, and that you don't always need to get a university degree in order to have a successful or have manageable life.”

Working with 30 participants over a one-year period across two cities, Ismayilova also examined the effects of an urban and semi-urban setting on the efficacy of the program with the goal of figuring out how to best adapt the curriculum to each situation. With the research grant, Ismayilova was also able to host training sessions with teachers and school psychologists from 11 schools across Azerbaijan led by trainers from the Netherlands and the Teachers Academy Foundation in Turkey.

In line with the Kiphart Center’s mission, Ismayilova’s project seeks to test adaptable social solutions to global public health and social development challenges by creating pathways to opportunity, strengthening future aspirations and fostering hope among youth from low-resource families and communities—factors that may help improve long-term health trajectories and reduce vulnerability to behavioral risks.

Having completed the necessary pilot-testing and data collection of the program with the funds from the Kiphart Center faculty research grant, Isamyilova is now working on a larger-scale application of the program. This will test how support for savings accounts for younger children can build strong foundations for learning, developmental outcomes, future aspirations and longer-term psychosocial well-being.

As the Kiphart Center moves into its fifth year, they are looking forward to finding new ways to spark conversations around global health and social development, whether it be through new study abroad programs for students, symposia for researchers to present their findings or continuing outward-facing programming such as World Health Day.

“We have these complex challenges that cross health and social development in lower- and middle-income countries, and in a lot of cases, it's difficult to think about addressing them from a single disciplinary perspective,” Zarychta said. “The Kiphart Center is really an effort to bring biomedical, public health and social science perspectives together to help improve health and well-being in communities around the world.”

South Pole Telescope analysis releases new catalog of more than 7,000 galaxy clusters

Christina Nunez — 07/06/2026 - 11:45am

Researchers working with data from the South Pole Telescope have released a major catalog of galaxy clusters, giving scientists a powerful new tool for studying how the universe grew and changed over billions of years.

The catalog is based on five years of observations from the South Pole Telescope at the National Science Foundation Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, and involves a collaboration of researchers from institutions around the world, including the University of Chicago.

Using exceptionally sensitive measurements of the cosmic microwave background—the faint afterglow of the Big Bang—the team identified 8,892 possible galaxy clusters, and confirmed 7,190 of them using optical and infrared data.

Of those confirmed clusters, roughly 20% do not appear in any previous catalog. And for 67% of the sample—some 4,824 systems—this marks the first time the hot gas within these clusters has ever been detected, making the majority of the catalog a genuinely new window into the large-scale structure of the universe.

“Our analysis draws on the SPT-3G’s phenomenally deep cosmic microwave background data to open a new window onto the ancient universe,” said lead study author Lindsey Bleem, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and senior associate at the UChicago Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. “It's a new milestone for cluster cosmology to have this catalog as a resource. It will be the core of many, many studies over the years to come.”

SPT-3G refers to the camera mounted on the telescope, which was upgraded in 2017 with 16,000 detectors built at Argonne. The sample in the newly published study reaches across about 4% of the sky, or 1,600 square degrees, and includes about 1,800 clusters that date back more than 7.8 billion years.

Galaxy clusters are enormous structures containing hundreds to thousands of galaxies, hot gas and large amounts of dark matter, all bound together by gravity. Because they are the largest gravitationally bound systems in the universe, they are useful for probing ideas about dark matter, dark energy and how cosmic structure formed over time.

While earlier surveys have scanned larger areas of sky, the new catalog is remarkable for its depth, showing more faint and distant clusters.

The team found the clusters by looking for distortions they cause in the cosmic microwave background, known as the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. As the cosmic microwave background light travels through a galaxy cluster, high-energy particles in the cluster alter the light, creating a subtle signal that can be detected in microwave observations. The Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect allows researchers to image the clusters as shadows on the backdrop of the cosmic microwave background.

“Building a catalog like this takes a lot of careful checking behind the scenes,” said Kayla Kornoelje, a UChicago graduate student working at Argonne, whose earlier research helped validate signals from a portion of the data featured in the catalog. “A big part of our work was making sure the detections are reliable so that this sample can be used with confidence in future cosmological studies.”

Probing cosmic structure formation

The work also showed that the survey is sensitive enough to study not only the clusters themselves, but also how conditions within them changed over time. The researchers found a strong increase in dust-related emission from cluster environments at earlier times in the universe, helping reveal how activity such as star formation evolved in and around these massive systems.

“With the SPT-3G cluster sample, we will probe the evolution of cosmic structure formation over the past 10 billion years,” said Sebastian Bocquet, senior staff scientist at the Ludwig Maximilian University Observatory in Munich, Germany—a member of the South Pole Telescsope collaboration.

Future work will focus on refining cluster mass measurements and using the catalog to test models of the universe. Upcoming surveys, including observations from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera at the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, are also expected to provide optical confirmation of even more distant galaxy clusters in the SPT-3G data sample.

The South Pole Telescope is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and is operated by a collaboration led by UChicago. Optical data used to confirm the clusters came from the Dark Energy Survey, which is jointly supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. More information on the collaboration and the funding for this project can be found here.

Authors on the paper from UChicago include CASE associate Amy Bender and Assoc. Prof. Clarence Chang; coauthors with Argonne include Giulia Campitiello, Florian Kéruzoré and Wei Quan, as well as Zhaodi Pan, PhD’20, a former Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellow.

Additional authors include:

Adam Anderson, CASE associate and Fermilab scientist; Melanie Archipley, postdoctoral researcher; Prof. Bradford Benson; Prof. John Carlstrom (joint appointment with Argonne); Paul Chichura, postdoctoral researcher; Aman Chokshi, former South Pole Telescope winterover; Ti-Lin Chou, former graduate student; Research Prof. Thomas Crawford; Karia Dibert, former graduate student; Kyra Fichman, graduate student; John Hood, postdoctoral researcher; Alec Hryciuk, former graduate student; Tanisha Jhaveri, graduate student; Yunyang Li, postdoctoral researcher; Emily Martsen, graduate student; Tyler Natoli, senior researcher; Yuuki Omori, research scientist; Alexander Pollak, former South Pole Telescope winterover; Research Asst. Prof. Alexandra Rahlin; Aidan Simpson, graduate student; Prof. Abigail Vieregg; and Asst. Prof. Jessica Zebrowski.

Citation: “Galaxy Clusters Selected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect in 5 year data from the SPT-3G Main Survey.” Bleem et al.

—Adapted from an article by Argonne National Laboratory

Fossil fish with preserved brain sheds light on ‘bottom of the evolutionary tree’

Matt Wood — 07/02/2026 - 04:25pm

Over 300 million years ago, a minnow-sized fish died and fell to the bottom of the prehistoric swamp near what is now the village of Trawden, in northwest England.

The remains of this tiny fish—known as Trawdenia planti—became fossilized, embedding proof of its existence in a layer of soapstone sandwiched between coal seams in the Burnley Coalfield. By some combination of marine chemistry, mineral composition of the seafloor, timing and luck, not only was the bony skeleton of this fish preserved, but so too were the soft neural tissues of its brain.

The fossil was unearthed in a coal seam by Trawden more than a century ago, but its secrets would take modern imaging to reveal.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by paleontologists at the University of Chicago describes this extraordinary preservation of an early ray-finned fish brain. Using CT scans of the skull and preserved soft tissues, the researchers show how the brain fit snugly inside, unlike other fossil brains that appear too small for the interior brain case. This means the inside of fossilized skulls can serve as a reliable proxy for brain size and shape of such fishes even when brain tissues are not well preserved.

“Soft tissue preservation, in general, is not common in the fossil record, and usually what gets preserved are things like skin or muscles. It's quite rare for neural tissues to be preserved at all because they decay so quickly,” said Abigail Caron, PhD’25, lead author of the study. “So, the importance of this specimen is that we can now study brain evolution in similar fossils where we only have the bony parts or the infill.”

The bush at the bottom of the evolutionary tree

Ray-finned fishes, so called for their thin fins stretched between bony spines, make up nearly 99% of the more than 30,000 living species of fish, and about half of all modern vertebrates.

Scientists understand the origins of birds and modern tetrapods like mammals, reptiles and amphibians fairly well, but the early days of ray-finned fishes are “like a bush at the bottom of the evolutionary tree,” said Prof. Michael Coates, the chair of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the new study.

The dense thicket of fish species that proliferated after the end of the Devonian period have been difficult to relate to modern groups of fish. But the well-preserved brain of Trawdenia has distinct characteristics, including part of the cerebellum that wraps around the middle of the brain, that suggest a deep-time relationship to some modern fish.

“What we’re learning by looking at the shapes of the soft tissues is that it's not their relative sizes that matter; it's how they're packed together inside the skull,” Coates said. “We might be seeing the earliest radiation of fishes that nowadays are represented by paddlefish and sturgeons.”

From coal mine to CT scanner

This particular Trawdenia specimen was first discovered in 1888 and has a long, adventurous history. Coal miners used to collect fossils dug from mines around Lancashire as novelties, but geologists also studied them because the presence of plant fossils provided a means of mapping productive coal seams.

The rock nodule containing Trawdenia was split in two and ended up at a natural history museum in London as separate specimens, until Coates realized they belonged together.

Coates started studying the fossil in the 1990s, first describing its skeleton in detail in a 1999 paper, and later CT scanning it for a 2018 publication with Kristen Tietjen, a scientific illustrator who worked in Coates’ lab and is now at the University of Kansas, and a co-author on the new PNAS study. Caron continued that work for her Ph.D. thesis, applying more sophisticated imaging techniques and computational analyses to learn more about these ancient fish.

The new technology helped the researchers detect signatures of the outer and inner membranes of neural tissues filling the interior cavities of the brain case, including ventricle structures that helped circulate cerebrospinal fluid. 3D models of the skull created from the CT scans show that the brain filled the interior of the skull’s brain case.

Caron said that as imaging technology improves, it’s likely that researchers will be able to learn more about brains and nervous systems in these early fish, even when they aren’t as well preserved as Trawdenia’s—especially now that they know what they’re looking for.

“It's possible that we just didn't have the technology before to look for that kind of signature, but this kind of preservation also would only happen in very special circumstances,” she said.

“There are definitely a lot more specimens out there that have reasonably good brain case morphology than there are specimens with good soft tissue preservation. So, that really expands the data set that you can use to study brain evolution across these different fossils.”

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

Thirteen UChicago faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships in July 2026

07/01/2026 - 11:55am

Thirteen members of the University of Chicago faculty have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Frederic Chong, Christian Hansen, Augusta McMahon and Marcelo Nóbrega have been named distinguished service professorships; Profs. Megan Applewhite, Luís Bettencourt, Susan Burns, E. Summerson Carr, Henry Frisch, Linda Ginzel, Scott Oakes, Jiwoong Park and Ming-Te Wang have received named professorships.

Their appointments are effective July 1.

Biological Sciences Division

Megan Applewhite has been named the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor in Honor of Mark Siegler in the Department of Surgery.

Applewhite is a board-certified surgeon who specializes in endocrine surgery, specifically focused on the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands. She performs surgical procedures that involve operating on these glands to help manage a wide range of conditions, including thyroid cancer, benign thyroid disease, parathyroid disease and adrenal disease. In addition to her clinical work, Applewhite conducts research on the care of endocrine surgery patients, as well topics at the intersection of surgery and clinical medical ethics. In her role as the associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, she focuses on bioethics education and research ethics, including the challenges surrounding surgical informed consent.

Her work in clinical research, as well as ethics research, has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Surgery, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics and more. She is also dedicated teacher who has guided medical students as they embark on their medical careers and serves as a committed mentor for residents and fellows, inspiring and educating the next generation of health care professionals.

Luís Bettencourt has been named the Lorna Puttkammer Straus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College.

Bettencourt’s research focuses on the theory and modeling of complex systems and the processes that underlie the structure and growth of cities. His work creates multidisciplinary theory and methods that integrate concepts from the natural and social sciences, based on network structures and dynamical processes of learning and adaptation. His research also explores new data and global contexts that allow for quantitative comparisons through time and space to advance our understanding of nature and society.

He collaborates with governments, non-governmental organizations and interdisciplinary researchers worldwide to co-produce new insights and transformative practices for sustainable development. He is a pioneer in the field of urban science and wrote one of its foundational textbooks. His work has contributed significantly to a new sense of excitement about our scientific understanding of cities and processes of development, unifying urban themes over space and time and leading to new insights across complex systems more generally.

Bettencourt is also associate faculty of the Department of Sociology and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vienna Complexity Science Hub.

Marcelo Nóbrega has been named the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and the College.

Nóbrega was recently named chair of the Department of Human Genetics. He is a globally respected investigator whose work has deepened understanding of how noncoding regions of the genome influence gene regulation and human diseases, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, asthma and preterm birth. By combining functional genomics, computational biology and experimental approaches, his research has provided important insights into how genetic variation contributes to complex traits. This work is helping to advance the field of precision medicine and expand opportunities for therapeutic innovation.

In addition to his scientific contributions, Nóbrega is a highly regarded mentor and collaborator who has strengthened interdisciplinary partnerships across the Biological Sciences Division and the University. He is deeply committed to fostering scientific curiosity, collaboration and the development of future leaders in genetics.

He has served as an associate dean for faculty affairs for basic science faculty in the Biological Sciences Division, where he helped lead efforts to promote faculty development, including orientation of new faculty, career development and skill building workshops on such topics as preparing for promotion, scientific writing, grantsmanship, trainee mentoring, leadership training and wellness. He has also served as the chair of the Committee on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology, along with several committees focused on recruitment, mentoring and training of graduate students and faculty.

Scott Oakes has been named the first Frank W. Fitch Professor in the Department of Pathology.

A pathologist and cell biologist, Oakes studies the signaling pathways that allow mammalian cells to sense, communicate and respond to intracellular stress and injury. His laboratory has made key discoveries into how these ancient stress-signaling pathways contribute to cancer, diabetes and other diseases, and has designed early therapeutics to control them.

He has a long history of training college students, Ph.D. students, MD/Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows and physician-scientists who have gone on to successful careers in biomedical research.

Oakes holds multiple leadership positions in the Biological Sciences Division. As the vice chair of research for the Department of Pathology, he has greatly expanded the Experimental Pathology section through the recruitment of pathologist-scientists. He co-leads the Molecular Mechanisms of Cancer Program at the UChicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is vice dean of clinical science research in the BSD and plays a central role in steering the research enterprise for the division, including the creation of the new Therapeutics Discovery Institute and Hyde Park Labs.

Oakes has won numerous awards for his research, including an HHMI Early Career Physician Scientist Award, American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, Harrington Discovery Institute Scholar-Innovator Award, American Association for Cancer Research Award, Induction into the American Society for Clinical Investigation and Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology.

Physical Sciences Division

Frederic Chong has been named the Seymour Goodman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College.

Chong's research focuses on the design of software and hardware architectures for practical quantum computing. He was the lead principal investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing from 2018-2024. Chong was a member of the National Quantum Advisory Committee from 2020-25, which advised the president on the National Quantum Initiative Program. In 2020, he co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software company, which was acquired by Infleqtion (formerly ColdQuanta) in 2022. In addition to his faculty position, Chong currently serves as chief scientist for quantum software at Infleqtion.

Prior to joining UChicago, Chong was a faculty member and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis, from 1997-2005. He was also a professor of computer science, director of computer engineering and director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2005-2015.

He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 17 best paper awards, and both UChicago’s Quantrell Undergraduate Teaching Award and its Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Henry Frisch has been named the Herman C. Bernick Family Professor in the Department of Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute and the College.

Frisch’s early work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, with Nobel laureate Jim Cronin, resulted in successful searches for point-like substructure of the proton, later shown to be quarks, and for muons from short-lived heavy particles, later shown to contain the charm quark.

Frisch was one of the founding members of the Collider Detector at Fermilab Collaboration, where he concentrated on the trigger electronics and rapid analysis. He was co-editor of the design report, drafted the collaboration bylaws, and co-invented the “Godparent Review” process for detector sub-systems. He led the first precise measurements of the Z and W boson masses, and then searched for events that are highly suppressed in the standard model.

Later, Frisch focused on developing instrumentation for experiments that could be done on the UChicago campus. He and his students set direct limits on the flux of cosmic monopoles, and developed systems for precise time measurements for use in large-area applications in particle and nuclear physics and medical imaging; the work has resulted in 14 patents.

Frisch has served on the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Atomic Energy Commission, as divisional councilor of the American Physical Society, as an editor of Physical Review Letters and on the organizing committees of more than 30 conferences. At UChicago, he has served on the Committee of the College Council, as spokesman for the Committee of the Council of the Faculty Senate, and on the Presidential Search Committee of 2005.

He authored a 2025 textbook titled Honors Classical Mechanics: From Special Relativity to Newtonian Physics and has received UChicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Provost’s Teaching Award.

Jiwoong Park has been named the James Franck Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the College.

Park’s research focuses on the science and technology of precisely engineered nanomaterials. Among his laboratory’s main goals are building atomically thin integrated circuitry and exploring novel electrical, optical, thermal and quantum properties of two-dimensional nanomaterials. These may lead to the development of advanced devices such as highly efficient solar cells, ultrasensitive bolometric detectors, novel valleytronic devices and molecule-based transistors.

Park’s awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the David Turnbull Lectureship. He was named Scientist of the Year by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served as chair of the Department of Chemistry for the past three years.

Social Sciences Division

Susan Burns has been named the James Westfall Thompson Professor in the Departments of History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College.

A leading historian of early modern and modern Japanese history (1780s-1910s), Burns is especially known for her work in the history of medicine, law, gender and the body. She is the author of Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (2003) and Kingdom of the Sick: Leprosy, Citizenship, and Japan (2019). Her third book, Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868–1920 (2026), explores the history of medical modernization and public health in late-nineteenth- and early-20th-century Tokyo.

Burns also co-edited Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (2013/2014), has contributed numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and guest-edited a special issue of U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal on “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Context of Modernity.” Her work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the IIE Fulbright, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She currently chairs the Department of History and has previously directed the Center on East Asian Studies.

Booth School of Business

Linda Ginzel has been named the Konstantin Sokolov Clinical Professor of Managerial Psychology.

Ginzel specializes in negotiation, managerial psychology, leadership and executive development. She is an award-winning educator and the author of the best-selling book Choosing Leadership.

She served on the faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Academy of Management.

Her teaching has been recognized with numerous honors across Booth’s programs, including the Faculty Excellence Award, the inaugural Global Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Award, the Phoenix Award, multiple Hillel J. Einhorn Excellence in Teaching Awards, the Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching and the inaugural Master in Management Teaching Award from the Class of 2025.

Beyond the classroom, she is a prominent consumer and child-safety advocate. In 2000, President Bill Clinton presented her with the President’s Service Award in recognition of her work as cofounder of Kids In Danger, a nonprofit dedicated to improving children’s product safety. Linda also served on President Obama's Transition Team and on the board of Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.

Christian Hansen has been named the Wallace W. Booth Distinguished Service Professor of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied AI.

Hansen is the academic coordinator for Booth’s Sokolov Executive MBA Program and the faculty director of the CAIO program. He studies applied and theoretical econometrics and is co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.

Hansen’s research has chiefly been in the areas of the use of high-dimensional statistical methods in economic applications, estimation of panel data models, inference using clustered standard errors, quantile regression and weak instruments. His most recent research has looked at the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence as an input to estimation of causal and policy effects.

Hansen’s published work appears in leading journals in economics and statistics including the American Economic Review, Annals of Statistics, Econometrica, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Review of Economics and Statistics and Review of Economic Studies. Hansen has been a Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at Booth and a National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant recipient.

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

E. Summerson Carr has been named the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, the Department of Anthropology, and the College.

An anthropologist who studies social work and the helping professions, Carr’s ethnographic research has shaped how we understand expertise, professional knowledge and language in institutions. Working at the intersection of sociocultural, linguistic and medical anthropology, her work has especially influenced the study of behavioral health and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Carr’s first book, Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety (2010), traces the cultural and clinical history of American ideas about addiction and sobriety. Her most recent monograph, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnographic study of the rise and spread of a prominent behavioral intervention. She is also the co-editor of the 2016 volume, Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Carr’s current project is a study of full-time “facility dogs” who are employed as full-time workers in human service settings.

Carr is the former president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the premier scholarly organization in the field

Ming-Te Wang has been named the first Kersten Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows.

Wang is the faculty director of the Kersten Institute for Urban Education. His research seeks to understand how young people learn, grow and thrive across the many settings that shape their lives, including families, schools, neighborhoods, peer networks and digital spaces. With a focus on diversity, opportunity and equity, his work examines how social and educational environments can either widen or reduce disparities in academic, socioemotional and health outcomes among children and adolescents.

A central feature of Wang’s scholarship is its commitment to research-practice partnerships. He works closely with schools and communities to ensure that research is not only rigorous, but also useful, responsive and actionable. Through these partnerships, his work helps translate developmental science into strategies that support student engagement, strengthen school and family contexts, and promote more equitable opportunities for historically marginalized youth.

Wang has published extensively in leading peer-reviewed journals across child development, education, psychology and health. Since 2020, he has been consistently ranked among the top 1% of highly cited interdisciplinary researchers in science and social science. His scholarship has received national and international awards and recognition for advancing understanding of youth development, educational equity and the conditions that help young people thrive.

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

Augusta McMahon has been named the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the College.

McMahon, PhD’93, is an archaeologist who has excavated widely in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and Yemen, including directing excavation projects at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak in Syria and at Lagash in Iraq. She currently directs the ISAC excavations at the important 6th-1st millennium B.C.E. religious centre of Nippur in south Iraq. Her research focuses on late prehistoric and historic Mesopotamia, particularly issues of early cities and urban challenges, social stress and warfare, and sensory archaeology.

McMahon returned to Chicago in the autumn of 2022 after teaching in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge since 1995.

As America turns 250, how the Declaration of Independence endures

Andrew Haffner — 06/29/2026 - 04:17pm

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a document introducing a new nation to the world, composed of 13 “free and independent states.”

This Declaration of Independence, read to crowds gathered in town squares across the colonies, announced the ideals “of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—words that 250 years later, make the Declaration one of history’s most quoted and enduring texts. But what did the Declaration mean to the colonists 250 years ago, and how has its meaning changed along with the nation?

To explore some of the biggest questions about the nation's founding, we turned to four University of Chicago scholars: Prof. John Mark Hansen, a political scientist who studies American democracy and participation; Prof. Alison L. LaCroix, a legal historian and constitutional law expert; Prof. Steven Pincus, a historian of Britain and its empire; and Prof. Eric Slauter, a scholar of early American literature and culture who is currently curating a Newberry Library exhibition on the Declaration.

In this edited Q&A, they examine what the Declaration meant to colonists in 1776—and how its meaning has changed as the nation grew.

When the Congress declared that “all men are created equal,” what did readers in 1776 understand that to mean? How does that differ from how we read it now?

Slauter: In 1776, the claim that “all men are created equal” was a philosophical premise to establish the right of revolution. For many today the words represent a foundational promise.

It took generations of Americans to bring these words to the center of our understanding of the Declaration of Independence and to transform a manifesto of secession into a charter of liberty, equality and rights, but that process started as soon as the Declaration hit the streets in 1776.

So, who noticed the equality claim? A few American Loyalists and British writers, who scoffed at the distance between the high-sounding pretensions of Congress’s theories and the practice of slavery. A writer in a London newspaper in September 1776 described the Declaration’s philosophy as utter “nonsense.” He lectured Congress on the meaning of the word “unalienable” and how out of place it was in the Declaration: “where there are Slaves,” he noted, “Liberty is alienated.”

More interesting is the reaction from a small number of abolitionists in the new nation. They asked: Could the Declaration of Independence truly mean what it said? And what did those “self-evident” truths promise the enslaved? Rev. William Gordon seems to have been the first to get those questions into print, in a newspaper in Boston in October 1776, pointing explicitly to the fact that Congress had appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the World” for the rectitude of their intentions.

Were Americans then “acting hypocritically”? Gordon was hardly alone in asking, and we believe that months earlier a young Black soldier named Lemuel Haynes placed the sentence that has since become a creed on an unpublished antislavery manuscript. The White minister was, however, the first to get a printer to emphasize those words with italics and invite readers to hear them differently: “all men are created equal.”

What kind of state did the Declaration's signers actually want when they broke from the British?

Pincus: The Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration wanted an activist state. They deplored the recent abandonment by Britain’s Tory governments of a developmental approach to their colonies.

Prior to 1760, the year of George III’s accession to the Crown, American colonists believed that Britain had sought to promote the development of its North American colonies and appreciated that they formed the most dynamic part of the imperial economy.

After 1760, however, Britain’s governments sought to decrease the massive and growing sovereign debt by shifting more of the tax burden onto the colonists. In particular, they placed constraints on North American trade, limited migration into the colonies and prevented the reorientation of the North American economy.

The Committee of Five members were furious that George III had vetoed a series of colonial acts aimed at restricting the slave trade. In their view, the persistence of the slave trade encouraged a colonial economy that would concentrate wealth in the hands of the large planter and tend toward oligarchy. They wanted a government that would actively promote liberty and prosperity for the majority of the population.

The Declaration isn't law—and yet many treat it as if it’s part of the Constitution. What is its legal status, and why has it remained so central to American constitutional argument?

LaCroix: The Declaration isn’t part of the U.S. Constitution as a formal matter, given that the Declaration was written in 1776, well before the Constitution was written in 1787.

But the Declaration was very much viewed by the American revolutionaries as a constitutional document in the broader sense of a framing agreement that would make day-to-day governance possible. In fact, at the same time that the Continental Congress appointed the committee that drafted the Declaration, it created two other committees: one to develop a plan for forming foreign alliances, and one to draw up “the form of a confederation” with the Articles of Confederation, which were America’s first crack at a constitution.

Since then, the Declaration has become one of America’s founding documents, a category that also includes the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and perhaps also documents that predated the U.S. Constitution but were formative for its drafters, such as England’s Magna Carta (1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1689).

The Declaration was written to be circulated—printed, posted, read aloud. How did ordinary people actually encounter it in 1776?

Slauter: Congress voted on independence on July 2. Later that day, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to report that Congress had declared the colonies “FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES.” This short revolutionary notice appeared on the back page of the paper, sitting beside an advertisement offering a reward for the recapture of a Black man named Ishmael who escaped his enslaver and declared himself free and independent.

On July 4, 1776, John Dunlap became the first person to set the phrase “all Men are created equal” in type. As some of the authors of the Declaration of Independence stood in his Philadelphia printshop, the Irish-born printer used sheets of Dutch paper to craft a broadside for distribution in America and Europe. He selected upper-case letters imported from Britain for the document’s most important sentence: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.”

But likely many more people would have heard rather than read the Declaration. Its text was first proclaimed publicly from the State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on July 8. On July 9, George Washington ordered it to be read to the army in New York “with an audible voice.”

Even before those public proclamations, on July 6, the text appeared for the first time in a newspaper. On July 8, Dunlap put it on the front page of his own newspaper. By Aug. 2 the text had appeared in over 30 newspapers across the new states. In nearly two-thirds of those the egalitarian words of the Declaration sat by notices advertising the sale of human beings or rewards for the return of those who had emancipated themselves.

The iconic text many picture when they think of the Declaration, the words written on animal skin, was not signed until early August, after the news had reached ordinary people across the new nation.

How did “the pursuit of happiness” end up in the Declaration? What did it mean to Jefferson's contemporaries—and what does it mean now?

Slauter: These words could be found in several well-known texts. A half-century earlier a young Benjamin Franklin even set that exact phrase in type in a book about natural religion, and we know that John Adams read that book and that Thomas Jefferson owned it.

Some commentators have simply assumed that Jefferson intended this phrase to be a revision of the last part of John Locke’s phrase “lives, liberties, and estates.” But in truth Jefferson was working from another text, the draft version of a declaration of rights for Virginia principally written by George Mason and already circulating in Philadelphia newspapers when Jefferson was drafting the Declaration.

Mason placed “pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety” alongside “the Means of Acquiring and Possessing Property” in his list of natural rights. The phrase thus spoke beyond property.

In Jefferson’s version, I’d say “pursuit of happiness” stands in the Declaration’s short enumeration of natural rights as a placeholder for other important freedoms.

This includes the individual right of freedom of conscience, and as a seed for the collective right of revolution: the right “to alter or to abolish” an old government and replace it with a new one that better secures “Safety and Happiness.”

Political parties as we know them didn't exist at the founding. How did they come about, and how did they reshape the system the founders built?

Hansen: Political divisions, James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, are “sown in the nature of man.”

Madison and the other designers of the Constitution tried everything they could to mitigate their effects. The “parties” that emerged within a decade were elite coalitions supporting and opposing President John Adams. There were also such factions during George Washington’s presidency, but it was not as divisive. These early coalitions weren’t parties as we think of them today, organizations that nominate and support slates of candidates for office.

That function emerged from supporters and opponents of President Andrew Jackson, his supporters becoming the Democratic Party and his opponents the National Republicans and shortly the Whigs. The first national nominating conventions chose candidates in the 1832 election.

The main reason for their appearance was the extension of suffrage beyond a narrow elite to include almost all adult White males, the first “mass suffrage” in the world, as noted above. Mass suffrage necessitated mass mobilization of voters, hence the organization of enduring organizations dedicated to electing their candidates.

Set against other events such as England’s Glorious Revolution or the French Revolution, what was distinctive about the American Revolution and its founding document? Why didn’t we see the reinstatement of monarchy in some form here?

Pincus: Revolutions in general come about when the old regime decides for whatever reason—geopolitical weakness, or comparative economic underdevelopment—to modernize the state. This makes it possible for their critics to agree on the need for reform but reject the specific proposals put forward by the government. The decision by the old regime to modernize left conservatives, those who would defend the old regime, with no place to turn. In the case of Britain in the late 18th century, George III and his Tory ministers had decided the best way to pay down the sovereign debt was to transform the imperial state into one that compelled the colonies to pay for the cost of wars that had been fought to protect the colonies.

This new desire to tax the colonies and restrict their foreign trade provoked uprisings across the empire—in Ireland, in South Asia, in Britain itself, as well as in North America. The patriots, as the opponents of this new Tory program for the imperial state were called, were victorious only in North America and in Ireland because the Tory government marshaled its resources to defend India and Britain.

Patriots across the empire wanted to limit the power of the Crown, insisting the king and his government needed to be constrained by laws. Because George III, in the view of the North American colonists, had broken through the norms that limited the power of the executive, they designed a government that would have more formal limits on that power. The president, or executive, that the Americans created was intended to be more formally delimited than the English king.

Meanwhile, patriots in Britain agitated for radical parliamentary reform. Patriots in Ireland insisted on legislative, judicial and political independence of the Irish Parliament.

The American Constitution’s creation of the presidency was of a piece with these reforms. What was distinctive about the American Revolution was not its corpus of ideas—these were shared by patriots across the British Empire—but rather the patriots’ victory against the Tory government of then-Prime Minister Frederick North. The American Revolution needs to be understood as part of a pan-imperial program for radical state reform in the form of limiting the power of the executive so as to create a government that would serve the interests of the people, understood as a mass public of consumers.

How did most Americans identify themselves when the country was founded—as citizens of individual states, or of the United States? How has that changed in the intervening years?

LaCroix: If we could go back in time to the 1760s and '70s in Boston or Charleston, we would find a lot of people referring to themselves as “British North Americans” and invoking the “rights of Englishmen”—especially when they were challenging, say, the power of Parliament to legislate for the colonies, rather than allowing the local colonial assemblies to regulate.

In the early 19th century, there was a lot of discussion of what American-ness meant, including many, many orations and essays on topics like “American literature” and “American government,” sometimes celebratory and sometimes a little anxious. Of course, state affiliation was always important; Jefferson, for example, put the law of states other than Virginia in the category of “Foreign Law” when cataloguing his library.

In the period between the Founding and the Civil War, how did Americans invoke the Declaration—and who got to claim it?

LaCroix: Different generations have emphasized different parts of the Declaration that seem responsive to the issues of their specific moment. In the beginning, the most important aspects of the Declaration were the “bill of particulars”—the colonists’ complaints against King George III—and the announcement that the U.S. was stepping onto the world stage as its own independent nation. In the early 19th century, the “all men are created equal” idea increasingly entered public discourse in the context of debates about democracy and extending the vote (to all White men, rather than only property holders), and the entrenchment and expansion of slavery.

In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln called for Americans to embrace both the Declaration and the Constitution as the “political religion of the nation.” Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass invoked the Declaration’s equality principle to challenge slavery’s defenders, and to rebut proslavery uses of the Constitution. Most famously, in his Gettysburg Address of 1863, Lincoln used the Declaration as the starting point for American history in order to recommit his war-weary listeners to the nation’s dedication to “the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Scholars sometimes refer to the period after the Civil War as a “second founding” of the nation. How did the first founding compare to that second founding?

LaCroix: It’s important to remember that the whole category of “founding” can really only be applied after the fact, and that designating any period as a “founding” invites debate about when it began and ended. The three “Reconstruction amendments,” as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are known, fundamentally reshaped American constitutional structure and rights. And they also changed the text of the Constitution itself, which is both important on its own terms and also obvious to anyone who reads the Constitution.

But as I argue in my book The Interbellum Constitution, Americans of the early 19th century, living between the first and second foundings, had their own distinct understanding of what the Constitution was and what the founding had meant, even though they didn’t change the literal text of the Constitution. So while I think both the 1770s-80s and the 1860s-70s count as “founding” moments, we shouldn’t assume that outside of those moments, everything just stayed the same—or that the only source of constitutional meaning is the text of the document.

Looking across 250 years, when did American participation in democracy surge—and what drew people in?

Hansen: There are many ways to participate in a democracy. From the outset, the First Amendment enumerated four essential “process rights.”

These are “freedom of speech [and] of the press” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Much of the story of American democracy has been the exercise of rights other than the right to vote, particularly through the organization of associations: political parties, civic groups, lobbying groups, trade associations, labor unions, social movements and so forth.

Americans had a genius for coming together in private associations, Alexis de Tocqueville argued, calling it the “mother science” of democracy in America. And it was these rights that the American people used to extend access to the right we all identify as the sine qua non of democracy, the right to vote. The Constitution did not guarantee a right to vote, leaving it to the states to confer the franchise. It was closely limited in the first decades of the republic to property holders and taxpayers.

The restrictions fell away as new states and the original 13 competed for settlers and for the political support of the merchants, mechanics, farmers and laborers whose cooperation was essential to the development of the country. But the franchise was also hard-won by the efforts of associations dedicated to egalitarian principles, such as the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s suffrage movement.

Competition may push AI firms to favor speed over safety, new study finds

06/29/2026 - 09:45am

As AI systems become increasingly powerful, policymakers around the world are grappling with a difficult question: How can society encourage innovation—and the now-plausible race to truly intelligent AI—while managing potentially catastrophic risks?

A new working paper by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Wioletta Dziuda of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy suggests the answer may depend as much on economics as on technology.

With co-author Mattias Polborn of Vanderbilt University, the researchers developed a model of competition among firms racing to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), systems that could perform a wide range of cognitive tasks at or beyond human levels.

Their analysis focuses on a central trade-off facing industry and policymakers: resources devoted to moving faster are resources that cannot be devoted to making advanced AI systems safer.

“We started by thinking about market structure,” said Bueno de Mesquita, who is dean and Sydney Stein Professor at Harris. “Should there be one firm? Should there be many firms? Eventually, the paper became more broadly about understanding the incentives driving safety and speed, and what policy levers governments might use to shape those incentives.”

The model begins with two assumptions. First, firms believe there is enormous value in being first to achieve AGI. Second, while AGI could generate tremendous benefits, many researchers and industry leaders also acknowledge the possibility, however uncertain, of catastrophic, existential outcomes if advanced systems are developed or deployed unsafely.

One of the paper's central findings is that a high degree of competition can make the race to AGI riskier. As more firms enter the market, each firm devotes a larger share of its resources toward speed and a smaller share toward safety. The result is faster development and a higher probability of harmful outcomes.

“The more firms you have, the riskier the race becomes as the firms try to outpace one another,” said Dziuda, an associate professor at Harris who also serves as deputy dean for faculty and research.

“Our model challenges the assumption that more competition necessarily produces better outcomes. While competition often benefits consumers and spurs innovation, we show that in a race where being first carries enormous rewards, competition can also create incentives to cut corners on safety.”

In effect, the paper describes a classic collective-action problem. Individual firms may prefer a slower and safer race, but competitive pressure makes it difficult for any one company to slow down on its own.

The researchers find that firms can sometimes benefit from credible commitments to slower, safer development. If one company can convincingly commit to investing more in safety and moving more cautiously, competitors should respond by slowing down as well. The result is a safer race overall—and one that can leave all participants better off.

In other words, being the firm that brings about catastrophe is bad for business, but the negative consequences affect everyone, whether your firm did it or not.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the model suggests there may be circumstances in which firms continue racing even when the expected value of achieving AGI has become negative.

“Why would they still race?” Dziuda asked. “Because other firms are racing. If a catastrophic outcome occurs, whether they're in the market or not, they're affected anyway. So, they may as well participate and hope to be the one that wins."

That dynamic helps explain a conundrum that has emerged in recent years in which some leaders of AI companies have publicly warned about the risks of advanced AI—including with calls for stronger regulation—while also investing billions of dollars to develop such technology.

“These findings offer a new way to think about public calls for AI regulation,” Bueno de Mesquita said. “Calls for industry-wide rules need not be interpreted solely as acts of public-minded restraint. In some circumstances, firms may support regulation because common constraints reduce pressure to sacrifice safety in order to keep pace with rivals.”

The paper examines several policy interventions that have become central to debates about AI governance, including restrictions on computing resources, industry consolidation, public investment and government participation in AI development.

The authors find the effects of these policies are often complex and interconnected.

For example, many proposals focus on limiting access to computing power or other key inputs. But the researchers’ model suggests resource restrictions are not always helpful. In some market situations, especially one where there are fewer players, providing firms with additional resources may actually improve safety outcomes by allowing developers to devote more resources to safety alongside capability development.

“We discovered that the answer isn't always to tax or restrict resources,” Dziuda explained, “it can be a combination of policies that seek to limit the number of competitors and then offer support so that they have room to pursue both safety and new capability.”

The working paper also finds merit in publicly supported AI development. A government-sponsored AI project designed to prioritize safety rather than speed could improve overall outcomes by providing a safer pathway to innovation while encouraging private competitors to behave more cautiously. Switzerland is now advancing a similar model.

—This article originally appeared on the Harris website.

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

06/26/2026 - 11:49am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also shared words of encouragement.

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the Polsky Center website.

Distinctive brand names pay off for wine producers, study finds

Eric Berkman — 06/24/2026 - 10:25am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fundamental question in trademark law

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

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

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

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

A statistical test on the Bordeaux wine market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legal implications

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago Law website

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

Maureen Searcy — 06/23/2026 - 10:09am

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

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

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

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

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

“Physics is what physicists do”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A uniting force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Lerner — 06/18/2026 - 10:00pm

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

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

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

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

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

The study is published in Science on June 18.

Traveling to the core and back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broadest seismic event on record

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nutrient in breast milk helps boosts immune system development in mice

Matt Wood — 06/18/2026 - 12:23pm

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

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

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

Long-term immune imprinting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A question that has huge health impact’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nadya Mason appointed as UChicago’s vice president for research

06/17/2026 - 04:30pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kuta — 06/16/2026 - 10:15am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A noneconomic motive for favoring tariffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to read during summer 2026

06/16/2026 - 09:00am

Looking for your next summer read? Look no further.

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

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

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

—Prof. Wei Wei

“Funes the Memorious” from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

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

—Prof. Fernando Alvarez

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

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

—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert

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

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

—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

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

—Assoc. Prof. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Want more recs? See recommendations from previous years.

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

Matt Wood — 06/15/2026 - 01:15pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evictions, closings disrupt cohesion and resilience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amber Rose — 06/12/2026 - 10:45am

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

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

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

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

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

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

A particular question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrate Juneteenth 2026 at UChicago in the community

06/10/2026 - 02:41pm

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

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

Saturday, June 13

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

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

Friday, June 19

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

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

Saturday, June 20

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

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

Monday, June 22

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

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

Thursday, June 25

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

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

Saturday, June 27

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

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

Monday, June 29

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

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

Sunday, July 12 to Sunday, August 2

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

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

Saturday, July 25

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

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

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

Sarah Steimer — 06/09/2026 - 03:18pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A beautiful writer’

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

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

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

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

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

A naturally eloquent teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How ‘turning away’ from suffering makes us deeply human

Tori Lee — 06/09/2026 - 12:40pm

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

Why are they covering their faces? He wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there's so much variety within that category.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what way?

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

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

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

UChicago appoints Jake Silverman as Director of Athletics and Recreation

06/08/2026 - 02:02pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Haffner — 06/06/2026 - 02:30pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawing from Lincoln’s example

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embracing the uncertain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honoring faculty excellence

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

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

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

‘Democracy imbues each of us with honor’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colin Terrill — 06/05/2026 - 05:45pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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