UChicago News

Angela Olinto named dean of Physical Sciences Division

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 12:00 -0500

Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Olinto is a leading scholar in astroparticle physics and cosmology, focusing on understanding the origin of high-energy cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos. Her appointment as dean is effective July 1.

“Angela brings depth of University experience and scholarly expertise to this leadership role, making her an excellent choice as dean,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing her appointment.

Olinto’s research includes important contributions to the physics of quark stars, inflationary theory and cosmic magnetic fields. She currently leads NASA sub-orbital and space missions to discover the origins of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. This includes a NASA-funded balloon mission planned for 2022 that will use an ultra-sensitive telescope to detect cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from deep space.

“I am thrilled and humbled to be appointed to lead this historic and dynamic division, home to visionary scholars who constantly redefine the boundaries of the physical and mathematical sciences. I look forward to collaborating with faculty, students and staff to advance the important work of the division,” Olinto said.

Olinto joined the UChicago faculty in 1996 and served as chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from 2003 to 2006 and from 2012 to 2017. She is the leader of the POEMMA and EUSO space missions and a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, which are international projects designed to discover the origin of high-energy cosmic rays. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, was a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and serves on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Olinto’s awards and honors include the Chaire d'Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche in 2006, the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2015. Olinto received her undergraduate degree from Pontificia Universidade Catolica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and her doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Olinto succeeds Edward “Rocky” Kolb, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, whose work over the last five years enhanced the division’s historic strengths as a leading center of scientific discovery. Kolb will return to his full-time work on the faculty next month.

The selection of the new dean by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by the recommendations of an elected faculty committee chaired by Stuart A. Kurtz, professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Mary Lou Gorno appointed chair of Smart Museum Board

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 16:15 -0500

Mary Lou Gorno, a business executive and alumna of Chicago Booth who serves as vice chair of the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, has been appointed chair of the Smart Museum of Art’s Board of Governors.

Gorno, managing director of the executive search firm Ingenuity International, serves the University in a variety of capacities, including chair of the University of Chicago Phoenix Society, a trustee of Court Theatre and a director at NORC. She has been a member of UChicago’s Board of Trustees since 2004.

“Mary Lou Gorno brings to the Smart Museum Board of Governors a deep knowledge of the University of Chicago and extensive experience in leading organizations. I look forward to seeing momentum as the Smart Museum continues to grow with her board leadership, supporting the expanding role of the arts at the University,” President Robert J. Zimmer said.

Gorno’s two-year appointment as board chair is effective Sept. 1. The Smart Museum of Art is UChicago’s fine arts museum, home to thought-provoking exhibitions, a wide-ranging collection, and public programs that encourage the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice, both contemporaneously and across history.

"The arts have an important and growing role at the University of Chicago. I look forward to working with my fellow board members in support of Alison Gass and her dynamic team as the Smart Museum writes the future of university art museums," Gorno said.

Gorno succeeds Pamela Hoehn-Saric, MAT’81, who has served as chair of the Smart Museum Board since 2012. During that period, the Smart Museum celebrated its 40th anniversary, appointed Alison Gass as the Dana Feitler Director and launched the Feitler Center of Academic Inquiry. Hoehn-Saric will continue to serve as a member of the Smart Museum Board.

“I am thrilled to welcome Mary Lou to the board as chair-elect,” said Hoehn-Saric. “The Smart is on an exciting trajectory, and Mary Lou brings extensive experience and talent in board development and strategy, which will help Ali, the board and the staff realize Ali’s exciting vision for the museum.”

Gorno earned a bachelor’s degree in business and economics from Saint Mary’s College, a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and master’s degree in finance and accounting from UChicago’s Booth School of Business.

Gorno began her career in advertising, becoming a senior executive at the Leo Burnett Company where she worked with Walt Disney, Reebok and Procter & Gamble. She later moved to the executive search profession and currently leads the CEO and Board practice for Fortune 500, mid-cap and privately owned companies. As a board and CEO adviser, she specializes in organizational governance, succession planning and leadership issues.

In addition to her extensive involvement at the University, Gorno serves as vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, vice chair of the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic School Board and director of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

University to bestow five honorary degrees at Convocation

Tue, 29 May 2018 14:48 -0500

The University of Chicago will present honorary degrees to five distinguished scholars during the 531st Convocation on June 9.

The honorary degree recipients are Fabiola Gianotti, the director-general of CERN; Charles M. Lieber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor at Harvard University; Michael C.A. Macdonald, research associate in the faculty of Oriental Studies and the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford; Robert E. Ricklefs, the Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; and William S-Y. Wang, chair professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Fabiola Gianotti, an experimental particle physicist who led the search and characterization of the Higgs boson, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Gianotti led the 3,000-member ATLAS collaboration since its inception at CERN Laboratory to search for the Higgs boson, one of the most sought-after objects in scientific history. Her early career was devoted to the search for supersymmetric particles, which could provide stability to nature’s two very different fundamental energy scales—gravity and weak interaction.

Gianotti is a member of the Italian Academy of Sciences, a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She is the author or co-author of more than 500 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Her scientific and societal contributions have been recognized by prestigious honors, including the Special Fundamental Physics Prize of the Milner Foundation, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, the Medal of Honor of the Niels Bohr Institute of Copenhagen, and the honor of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’ordine al merito della Repubblica” by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

Charles M. Lieber, a groundbreaking scholar of nanoscience and nanomaterials, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Lieber has defined directions and demonstrated applications of nanomaterials in areas like electronics, computing and photonics, and has pioneered the interface of nanoelectronics with biology and medicine, including his current focus on brain science. He has originated new paradigms that have defined the rational growth, characterization and original applications of functional nanometer diameter wires and heterostructures, and provided seminal concepts central to the bottom-up paradigm of nanoscience.

Lieber’s work has been recognized by a number of awards, including two National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Awards, the MRS Von Hippel Award, the Willard Gibbs Medal and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He is also a fellow of the Materials Research Society and American Chemical Society, and honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. In addition, Lieber is co-editor of the journal Nano Letters, and serves on the editorial and advisory boards of a number of other journals. He has published over 395 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is the principal inventor on more than 40 patents.

Michael C.A. Macdonald, a leading expert in early language and civilization in the Arabian Peninsula, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Macdonald has improved knowledge of the languages, religions, cultures and history of ancient Arabia and neighboring areas, including the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, through his scholarship on the vast number of inscriptions on the Arabian peninsula that predate the language of the Quran. Macdonald created the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia, a database that collects more than 70,000 inscriptions, many of which were unearthed, edited and translated by Macdonald himself. He was instrumental in establishing the field of Ancient North Arabian studies as an academic field in its own right, and has been its foremost scholar for the past three decades. He has fundamentally enabled the work of scholars of Ancient North Arabia, and has contributed research and writing that has shaped and guided this field.

In addition to his many articles, Macdonald also wrote the book Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia (2009). Macdonald was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2016.

Robert E. Ricklefs, a leading figure in evolutionary ecology, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science.

Ricklefs has contributed fundamental research linking disease dynamics to macro-ecology, linking life-history evolution with macro-evolutionary patterns, and searching for commonalities in patterns of ecological communities across types of organisms and geographic areas. His research focused on history’s role in determining population densities and distributions on islands, at a time when other leading ecological researchers were emphasizing the importance of species interactions at local scales for shaping species distributions. Because of this, his work represents the modern foundation for the recent synthesis of local conditions and historical processes in shaping the composition of communities of organisms.

Ricklefs is the recipient of the 2015 Ramon Margalef Prize from the government of Catalonia, the 2011 Alfred Russel Wallace award from the International Biogeography Society and the 1999 President’s Award from the American Society of Naturalists, among other honors. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William S-Y. Wang, a pioneer in the study of language evolution and the emergence of new languages, will receive the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

Wang is an internationally renowned linguist whose scholarship and academic impact have spanned two continents across the Pacific Ocean. He has performed multidisciplinary research on the biological and evolutionary basis of language, as well as computational linguistics with a focus on the production and processing of language, the brain and computer interface, machine translation, and speech synthesis and recognition. He was one of the first to apply a combination of linguistics and acoustics to the problem of machine recognition of speech.

Wang is the founder and lead editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, which is the top publication in this field. He has had full professorial careers at the University of California, Berkeley; at the City University of Hong Kong; and at National Taiwan Normal University. His wide-ranging scholarship has been written in or translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Japanese.

Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, to receive Benton Medal

Thu, 24 May 2018 16:50 -0500

The University will award the Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service to Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. Baron will receive his honor at the University of Chicago’s 531st Convocation on June 9.

Baron is regarded as an influential leader in the field of investigative journalism, whose work reflects dedication to fact-based reporting around difficult or controversial issues, the responsibility to inform the public and the protection of freedom of the press. He is the 15th recipient of the Benton Medal, which recognizes people who have rendered distinguished public service in the field of education, including anyone who has contributed in a systematic and distinguished way to shaping minds and disseminating knowledge.

Baron oversees more than 800 journalists at The Washington Post. News organizations under his leadership have won 14 Pulitzer Prizes, including seven at The Post, six at The Boston Globe and one at The Miami Herald. In Boston, he launched an investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of clergy sexual abuse that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service and was portrayed in the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight. He also held top posts at The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Baron is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded the 2016 Hitchens Prize from the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, which is bestowed upon a journalist or author whose work “reflects a commitment to free expression, a depth of intellect and an unswerving pursuit of the truth, without regard to personal or professional consequence.”

Nominations for the Benton Medal are submitted by members of the faculty, evaluated by the Committee on Awards and Prizes and voted upon by the Council of the University Senate.

The University President extends an invitation to Benton nominees to receive their medals during Convocation. The nominees also are invited to give a public lecture or workshop the following academic year.

Philip Roth, award-winning author and UChicago alumnus, 1933-2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 15:19 -0500

Philip Roth, one of the iconic voices in American letters who credited his debut novella to a conversation he had while a University of Chicago graduate student, died May 22. He was 85 years old.

Over a career that spanned six decades, Roth, AM’55, received almost every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award and National Book Critics Circle prize. Other honors included the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal, as well as the Man Booker International Prize for his contributions to literature in English.

Roth received his master’s degree in English from UChicago in 1955 and taught in the College’s writing program from 1956-58.

In media interviews, Roth discussed the impact of his time at UChicago, where he took classes with former Dean of the Humanities Napier Wilt, became a protégé of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, and studied alongside noted writer and editor Ted Solotaroff.

In a 1983 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Roth said of Chicago: “I’ve never felt as close to any other city I’ve lived in,” in part because of the young talent he met at the University—“the competition, the ambition, the stimulation, the talk.”

Also in that interview Roth said he owed his debut novella Goodbye, Columbus to Richard Stern, the late Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature. Over hamburgers at a Hyde Park tavern in 1955, Roth told Stern of his middle-class upbringing in New Jersey. “Dick got a kick out of the stories. ‘Why don’t you write that down?’ he said. My head was so full of The Golden Bowl, I thought he was having me on. But when I went home, I did it.”

His talks with Stern, Roth said, “helped me to see that what was in front of my nose, though not as resounding as Conrad or as convoluted as James, qualified as fiction. That’s what I learned in Hyde Park, how to talk back to all those great books.”

Roth’s time at UChicago influenced his work in other ways as well. Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of several Roth novels, is a UChicago alumnus, while Roth described former Dean Wilt as his “greatest supporter.”

“I loved the University of Chicago,” he said in 2011 upon winning the Man Booker International Prize. “[It] was in a great city and had great faculty and it had very, very smart students.” Roth said Bellow’s writing had a deep influence on his work and experience of the city. “[Bellow’s novel] Augie March was my guide book, I read it like Fodor's guide to Chicago, y’know? Also it was so glamorous—it seemed to me, that I should be in this city that nourishes this guy.”

Roth’s debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960. He is perhaps best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, a comic novel that attracted both praise and controversy for its frank discussion of sexuality. His other novels include The Counterlife, for which he won the 1987 National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction; American Pastoral, for which he won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman for which he won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1994, 2001 and 2007, respectively.

Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan to join Booth faculty as University Professor

Mon, 21 May 2018 12:10 -0500

Influential economics scholar Sendhil Mullainathan will join the University of Chicago Booth School of Business faculty on July 1, 2018, where he has been appointed University Professor. He currently serves as the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Mullainathan’s research spans broad areas of economics: behavioral, labor, public economics and corporate finance, and most recently has focused on the intersection of machine learning and public policy. His seminal research includes topics ranging from the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth to showing that higher cigarette taxes make smokers happier.

“Sendhil is a phenomenal scholar, whose work has had great impact in a variety of fields,” said Madhav Rajan, dean of Chicago Booth and the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Accounting. “Sendhil’s history of collaboration across disciplines will strengthen ties among Booth’s research areas and deepen the school’s connections to the rest of the University.”

University Professors are selected for internationally recognized eminence in their fields as well as for their potential for high impact across the University. Mullainathan will become the 22nd person to hold a University Professorship, and the ninth active faculty member holding that title.

After completing his PhD in economics at Harvard in 1998, Mullainathan taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2004, when he moved to Harvard, where he is a professor of economics and affiliate of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“The University of Chicago has a grand tradition of defining new disciplines: the phrase ‘Chicago School of’ has its own resonance in many academic fields,” Mullainathan said.

“Today a new discipline is emerging at the intersection of human and machine intelligence. Algorithms are now capable of amazing feats, and fully harnessing their capacities requires integrating them equally with marvelous aspects of human cognition,” he added. “I’m excited to join Booth and be part of a team that will hopefully define another ‘Chicago School’ in this emerging discipline.”

Mullainathan has published more than 50 journal articles, including 14 papers in top economics journals. He recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for The New York Times. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation.

In 2012, Mullainathan was designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum; was labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine.

He helped co-found the non-profit organization ideas42, which applies behavioral science to positively change lives; and co-founded Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development. Mullainathan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Three UChicago faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

Wed, 02 May 2018 17:19 -0500

Three University of Chicago faculty members are among the 2018 members of the National Academy of Sciences, announced May 1: Profs. Joy Bergelson, Olaf Schneewind and Richard Thaler.

These scholars, studying microbiology, evolution and behavioral economics, were among the 84 new members and 21 foreign associates recognized by their peers for “their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Joy Bergelson is the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Research in her lab is best known for dispelling the long-held belief that arms-race dynamics typify the evolution of plant resistance to microbial pathogens in nature. An early researcher in research on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, particularly from an evolutionary and ecological perspective, Bergelson and her group completed the first experiments using genetically manipulated plants to disentangle the mechanisms driving observed evolutionary dynamics. They have also pioneered research at the interface of ecology and evolution, namely eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Through her international collaborations, Bergelson has been instrumental in developing genome-wide association mapping in Arabidopsis, providing resources to the community and ultimately leading to the 1001 Genomes project. She has received numerous other awards; she is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Science, a Packard Fellow, a Marshall Fellow, a Presidential Faculty Fellow and a Cheung Kong Scholar Honorary Professor.

Olaf Schneewind is the Louis Block Professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology. He is best known for his work discovering sortases—enzymes that assemble proteins in the envelope of Gram-positive bacteria. Without sortases and their surface protein substrates, bacteria (such as Staphylococcus aureus or its drug-resistant forms, known as MRSA) cannot cause disease or interact with their environment.

Investigation of sortase motif sequences has enabled Schneewind and his team to identify the surface proteins of any bacterial pathogen based on genome sequences and to study these molecules for their contributions to disease establishment and for vaccine development. These insights have allowed his team to find and study how S. aureus evades detection by the immune system and to create vaccines for safety and efficacy testing in humans.

Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One of the founders of the field of behavioral economics, Thaler studies the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. His pioneering work was honored in October 2017 when Thaler was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The author of the best-selling books Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015) and Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2008), Thaler is director of the Center for Decision Research and co-director of the Behavioral Economics Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Finance Association and the Econometrics Society, and a past president of the American Economic Association.

Established by an Act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Its scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1914, is today one of the premier international research journals.

Forrest Stuart book about L.A.’s Skid Row earns top honor from UChicago Press

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 13:50 -0500

The University of Chicago Press has awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize to Asst. Prof. Forrest Stuart for Down, Out & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row, the UChicago sociologist’s close-up look at the relationship between police and the poor living in Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

The Laing Prize is the Press’ top honor, awarded annually since 1963 to the UChicago faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.

“Publishing our faculty is a special privilege, and the Laing Prize is a wonderful opportunity to spotlight these vital works,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the UChicago Press. “Forrest Stuart’s Down, Out & Under Arrest is a deserving winner that fits neatly into the Press’ prestigious list of ethnographic studies that are both timely and timeless.”

In his research, Stuart investigates how recent developments—specifically mass incarceration, zero-tolerance policing, digital social media and new forms of music—have reshaped the social fabric of disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 21st century.

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Laing Prize 2018

Stuart said that the book and his career in sociology were inspired by pioneering UChicago sociologist Gerald D. Suttles, who lived for three years on Chicago’s West Side in researching The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (1968).

“It was one of the first sociology books I ever read,” Stuart said of the work, which received the Laing Prize in 1970. “Suttles reinvigorated this tradition that UChicago established, which was about getting out of your office and getting intimately immersed within the community. That was actually my huge inspiration to go into sociology and do the work for Skid Row.”

In researching Down, Out & Under Arrest, Stuart lived in Skid Row in Los Angeles, long regarded as the “homeless capital of America.” His work has received rave reviews, and in 2017 was honored by the American Sociological Association as the best book in community and urban sociology.

Stuart is currently researching his second book, which looks at the intersections of poverty, culture, digital social media and hip-hop on Chicago’s South Side. His goal as a scholar is to recreate what Suttles did in the 1960s at UChicago, making the Department of Sociology the “epicenter” of up-close field work.

“You spend years every day following people and shadowing them, meeting their moms and their pastors, going to work and school with them,” Stuart said. “You can produce really original findings about how the world works with the shifts in how we communicate and how communities are tethered with the digital economy.”

Chicago Booth’s Douglas Diamond wins Onassis Prize in Finance

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 09:30 -0500

Prof. Douglas W. Diamond, one of the world's leading authorities on bank runs and liquidity crises who is considered the father of modern banking theory, has been awarded the 2018 Onassis Prize in Finance.

Awarded every three years, the Onassis Prize recognizes the world’s foremost academics in the fields of finance, international trade and shipping, to honor outstanding academic achievements that have had international significance. Nobel laureate and Chicago Booth scholar Eugene Fama won the inaugural prize in finance in 2009.

“I am delighted to receive the Onassis Prize,” said Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “After the recent financial crisis, policymakers and scholars have a renewed focus on the stability of financial institutions.”

Diamond changed the way people view banks through his pioneering research, which laid the groundwork for how central bankers, regulators, policymakers and academics approach modern finance. His research agenda for the past 30 years has been to explain what banks do, why they do it and the consequences of these arrangements.

Named after Aristotle Onassis who excelled in these three disciplines, each Onassis Prize is worth $200,000; they are sponsored by the Onassis Foundation and awarded jointly by Cass Business School London with the Onassis Foundation.

—This story first appeared on the Chicago Booth website.

Nipam Patel appointed director of the Marine Biological Laboratory

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 11:30 -0500

Nipam Patel, a leading scholar in modern evolutionary and developmental biology, has been appointed director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, an affiliate of the University of Chicago. In addition, Patel will be appointed as a faculty member at the University of Chicago.

Patel currently holds the William V. Power Endowed Chair in Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is professor and co-chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and professor in the Department of Integrative Biology. His appointment is effective Sept. 4.

Patel’s connections to the MBL and the University reach back two decades. For the past 17 years, he has taught the MBL Embryology course, having served as co-director from 2007 to 2011. Patel’s ties to UChicago include serving as a professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy from 1995 to 2003.

Patel studies the evolutionary changes that have brought about the diversity of life seen today. Over the course of his career, he has established a marine crustacean named Parhyale hawaiensis as a genetic model for understanding how diverse body plans develop and evolve. Patel’s significant scientific contributions complement a core focus of the MBL: discoveries emerging from the study of novel marine organisms, including research in comparative evolution and genomics, regenerative biology, neuroscience and sensory biology.

Prof. Nipam Patel established a marine crustacean, Parhyale hawaiensis, as a model system for studying the evolution and development of diverse body plans. (Image courtesy of Nipam Patel, MBL Embryology course 2017)

“From a pool of extraordinarily accomplished candidates, Nipam distinguished himself as particularly passionate about MBL’s rich history and even more so about its promising future,” said David Fithian, executive vice president of the University of Chicago, MBL trustee and co-chair of the search advisory committee. “He will be a compelling spokesperson for and determined leader of the MBL’s next chapter.”

“It is an incredible honor to have the opportunity to lead the MBL, an institution that has had a remarkable influence on my own career through the teaching and research opportunities it has provided me over almost 20 years,” Patel said. “I am excited to build upon the MBL’s extraordinary history to elevate it to even greater prominence, and to partner with the University of Chicago in this endeavor. I look forward to working with all the dedicated MBL scientists and staff, as well as all those who come to visit and share in the magic of the MBL.”

Patel grew up in El Paso, Texas and received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Princeton University and a PhD in biological sciences from Stanford University. He joined the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, where he has held the Schubert Endowed Chair, and serves as faculty curator at the Essig Museum of Entomology. Patel has served as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Genetics in Shizuoka, Japan. He began his career as a staff associate in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, Maryland.

Patel is the editor of the journal Development and serves on the editorial boards of eLife, EvoDevo, Developmental Biology, Development Genes and Evolution and Evolution and Development. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served on numerous advisory boards, including the board of directors of the Society for Developmental Biology.

Patel is a member of the MBL Education Committee, which provides strategic planning for more than 20 advanced research training courses and other educational programs at the MBL, including collaborative initiatives with UChicago.

Patel succeeds interim MBL co-directors Melina Hale, the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and in the College, and vice provost for academic initiatives at UChicago; and Neil Shubin, the Robert R. Bensley Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago.

The MBL in Woods Hole, Massachusetts is a leading international center for investigation in the biological and ecological sciences. Founded in 1888, the laboratory convenes scientists from institutions around the world to collaborate in its resident and visiting research centers and to teach in its education division. UChicago and the MBL formed an affiliation in 2013.

The selection of the new director by President Robert J. Zimmer was informed by a search advisory committee, which Fithian co-chaired along with Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, an investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

Robert H. Malott, trustee emeritus, 1926-2018

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 14:00 -0500

Trustee Emeritus Robert H. Malott, former chairman and chief executive officer of FMC Corporation, who served as vice chairman of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, died April 4. He was 91 years old.

Malott was elected a trustee of the University in 1976. He served as vice chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1988 to 1993, was elected a life trustee in 1993, and was named a trustee emeritus in 2007. Malott joined FMC in 1952 and was elected chief executive in 1971, moving the corporate headquarters to Chicago. He led FMC for two decades, retiring in 1991.

Malott’s civic leadership and philanthropic work ranged from higher education to scientific research to the arts. He served on the governing board of Argonne National Laboratory, which the University manages for the U.S. Department of Energy, and chairman of the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Malott was chairman of the board of the National Museum of Natural History and served on the boards of the Public Broadcasting Service, the National World War II Museum and the National Academy of Sciences. He was a life director of the Lyric Opera Company of Chicago and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Malott was born in Boston. His father, Deane W. Malott, became chancellor of the University of Kansas where his son enrolled at age 16, studying chemistry and playing basketball. Malott enlisted in the U.S. Navy a year later and served on an electronics repair ship stationed in San Francisco. After World War II, he returned to the University of Kansas to finish his bachelor's degree. He earned an MBA from Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and attended New York University Law School. Malott served as assistant to the dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration before joining FMC.

Malott is survived by his three children, Liza, Barb and Deane. Elizabeth “Ibby” Malott, his wife of 43 years, died in 2003. In keeping with UChicago board tradition, a memorial resolution in honor of Malott will be presented at the board meeting in May.

Two undergraduates recognized for academic excellence in STEM fields

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:01 -0500

Adel Rahman and Naomi Sweeting, third-years in the College, have been awarded Barry Goldwater Scholarships, awarded annually based on academic merit in natural sciences, mathematics, computer science and engineering.

The two students were nominated by the College and are among 211 scholars selected from a field of 1,280 applicants nationwide. The one- and two-year scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

“As future scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians, UChicago’s students have the drive and dedication to make a meaningful impact on their fields,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “We are proud that the Goldwater Foundation has recognized the work of Adel and Naomi, and we hope the award will give them the resources and encouragement to continue their academic pursuits.”

A physics and mathematics major, Rahman plans to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics and conduct research focused on geometric and topological aspects of gravitational, high-energy and condensed matter physics. After pursuing his doctoral studies, he would like to teach at the university level.

“As a theorist, my work is somewhat disconnected from the real world, so it's easy to worry that people outside my field might not understand or care about what I am doing,” said Rahman. “Knowing that the Goldwater committee sees value in my research and aspirations has helped reaffirm my desire to keep pursuing my goals.”

Rahman is currently conducting research focused on general relativity. Under the guidance of Prof. Robert Wald, he is attempting to understand if, and if so, how, incoming gravitational radiation might alter the structure of a black hole and what consequences such an alteration might have. Rahman first developed an interest in general relativity when he took an introductory course on the subject from Wald. “I found the theory, in particular its elegant weaving of concrete physical ideas with high-powered mathematical machinery, to be both fascinating and profound.”

Rahman also has been engaged in a research project in mathematical hydrodynamics. Outside of the classroom, Rahman is a member of the Ransom Notes a cappella group and has served as a tutor for the Harper Tutors Program and the Department of Physics’ Bridge Program.

Sweeting is a mathematics major and history minor who plans to study number theory in graduate school. After earning a doctorate in theoretical math, Sweeting would like to teach at the university level.

Sweeting developed a love for math at a young age, and her interests were solidified through participation in math competitions at the middle school and high school level.

“I’ve always been fascinated by open problems—even ones that I knew were completely unapproachable,” said Sweeting. “I am amazed that with all the brilliance that has gone into mathematics for centuries and all the problems that have been solved, there are still simple mathematical questions that no one can answer. The thought of one day solving some of them myself has always been irresistible to me.”

Last summer, she completed an independent reading project about geometric measure theory and served as a teaching assistant at UChicago’s NSF Research Grant Summer Bootcamp, in which she planned curriculum and supervised student lectures. This summer, Sweeting will study number theory and arithmetic geometry at Emory University.

“I find number theory fascinating because it combines very concrete questions—many open problems could be understood by middle school students—with diverse and sophisticated methods drawn from very abstract areas of math.”

When she’s not engaged in math, Sweeting is a member of UChicago’s College Bowl team. She also participated in the European Civilization in Paris study abroad program.

Rahman and Sweeting were supported throughout their application process by the College Center for Scholarly Advancement, which supports undergraduates and College alumni through the highly competitive application processes for prestigious national scholarships and fellowships.

Fifteen UChicago faculty elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 16:00 -0500

Fifteen faculty members at the University of Chicago have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.

UChicago has the most newly elected faculty members among universities and colleges. The scholars join a class of 213 individuals, announced April 18, which features world leaders, innovators and artists. This year’s class also includes President Barack Obama, a former scholar at the University of Chicago Law School; and seven UChicago alumni, including Carla Hayden, AM’77, PhD’87, the Librarian of Congress.

The newly elected UChicago faculty members include:

Fernando Alvarez, the William C. Norby Professor in Economics and the College, is a macroeconomist whose research focuses on dynamic general equilibrium models applied to asset pricing, holdings of liquid assets, nominal rigidities, international trade, and labor market search and insurance. During his tenure at UChicago, he was a visiting research scholar at the Enaudi Institute of Economics and Finance in Rome, the research departments at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Minneapolis and Philadelphia; the European Central Bank and the Central Bank of Argentina. Alvarez has received numerous recognitions for his research, including fellowships and or grants from the European Central Bank, European Research Council, N.S.F., the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Tinker Foundation, Bank of France Foundation and the Organization of American States.

Katherine Baicker is dean of the Harris School of Public Policy and the Emmett Dedmon Professor. A leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy, Baicker is one of the leaders of a research program investigating the effects of insurance coverage on health care and health. Her research has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. From 2005-2007, she served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English Language and Literature. Her work focuses on the aesthetics and affects of intimate relations in the United States from the 19th century to the present, stretching across formal and informal modes of attachment, social belonging and citizenship. Berlant is the author of Cruel Optimism (2011), which received the 2012 Rene Wellek Award from the American Comparative Literature Association; The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997); and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (1991).

Bill Brown, senior adviser to the Provost for arts and the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, teaches in the Department of English, the Department of Visual Arts and the College. His research—at the intersection of literary, visual and material cultures—has tracked how objects form and transform human subjects, and, most recently, how the arts can contribute to social theory.

Laurie Butler is a professor of chemistry with the James Frank Institute. She investigates fundamental inter- and intramolecular forces that drive the courses of chemical reactions, integrating our understanding of quantum mechanics into chemistry. Among other applications, her current work has implications for our models of atmospheric and combustion chemistry. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Cathy J. Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science, is a leading scholar on race and politics. She is the principal researcher on the Black Youth Project and the GenForward Survey. She has served as the deputy provost for graduate education, chair of the Political Science department and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Politics. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997).

Heinrich Jaeger is the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute. His laboratory studies the investigation of materials under conditions far from equilibrium, especially to design new classes of smart materials. A focus of Jaeger’s work are granular materials, which are large aggregates of particles in far-from-equilibrium configurations, that exhibit properties intermediate between those of ordinary solids and liquids – which could lead to everything from soft robotic systems that can change shape to new forms of architectural structures that are fully recyclable. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and is currently a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Matthew T. Kapstein is the Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Divinity School. He specializes in the history of Buddhist philosophy in India and Tibet, as well as the cultural history of Tibetan Buddhism more generally. He has published more than a dozen books and numerous articles, including a translation of an 11th-century philosophical allegory in the acclaimed Clay Sanskrit Series, The Rise of Wisdom Moon (New York 2009). Kapstein is also director of Tibetan Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris.

Robert L. Kendrick is professor in the Department of Music. He works largely in early-modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, traditional Mediterranean polyphony, music and commemoration, and the visual arts. His most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (2014).

Susan Levine is the Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor in Education and Society, director of the UChicago Science of Learning Center, co-director of the Center for Early Childhood Research and chair of the Department of Psychology. She is also a member of the Department of Comparative Development and the Committee on Education. Her research focuses on language and cognitive development in children, especially mathematics and spatial learning, as well as how early childhood experiences and injuries to the brain relate to developmental trajectories. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Jacqueline Stewart is professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College, and director of UChicago’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Her research and teaching consider the intersections of race and American cinema, particularly the history and preservation of African American film. She is the director of the South Side Home Movie Project, an archival and community engagement initiative that collects, digitizes, researches and exhibits home movies shot by South Side residents. She is the author of Migrating to the Movies (2005) and co-editor of L.A. Rebellion (2015), and curator of Cinema 53, a film series at the historic Harper Theater in Hyde Park.

Jessica Stockholder is the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Visual Arts. She works at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Her work has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SITE Santa Fe, and the Venice Biennale, and her work is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received numerous grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Melody Swartz is the William B. Ogden Professor of Molecular Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research. Her research focuses on how the lymphatic system affects and participates in the immune system—particularly its role in cancer – using engineering tools and approaches. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and her other honors include the Wendy Chaite Leadership Award in Lymphatic Research and the Wenner Prize from the Swiss Cancer League.

Andrei Tokmakoff is the Henry J. Gale Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry with the James Franck Institute. He studies the chemistry of water, and molecular dynamics of biophysical processes such as protein folding and DNA hybridization. His lab uses advanced spectroscopy to visualize how molecular structure changes with time to study these problems. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and has received the American Physical Society’s Ernest Plyler Prize, among others.

Linda Waite is the Lucy Flower Professor in Urban Sociology and senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, sexuality and social well-being. Her current research focuses on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, which she directs. This study examines the links between social connectivity and health at older ages, and has at its heart a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of older adults. She is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health.

The UChicago alumni elected to the Academy this year include: John R. Bowen, AM’77, PhD’84; Richard V. Kadison, AM’47, PhD’50; Laurie Patton, AM’86, PhD’91; David Reichman, AB’92; Christopher A. Walsh, PhD’83, MD’85; and Birgitta K. Whaley, SM’82, PhD’84.

Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:44 -0500

Editor’s note: Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living. In the award, the play is described as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals.” The play appeared Off-Broadway in 2017 and was called ‘immensely haunting’ by The New York Times.

The Polish-born Majok spoke with UChicago News in 2014 about another of her works, a comedy entitled Ironbound that appeared at the Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as her experience as a performer and playwright while at the University. The original story appears below:

Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound” is the story of the relationship between Darja, a struggling Polish immigrant, and three very different men. The play, she says, was inspired by the work of Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek.

It’s also a comedy.

Despite its weighty subject matter, the last thing Majok wants is “for the audience to sit there for the next hour and a half thinking this is just drama. You have to give them permission to laugh.”

“Ironbound” emerged as Majok was preparing to marry her then-fiancé and reflecting on “who has the privilege to marry for love.” Both Majok and her husband grew up poor and chose to pursue careers in the arts. Majok says they feared they would never have economic security. “We know how hard it is to get out of a cycle of poverty.”

She began to reflect on the romantic choices made by her mother—like Darja, a working-class immigrant from Poland.

“She would make what ended up being the wrong decisions for all the right reasons, trying to do the best thing that she could for her children and for herself,” Majok explains.

Around the same time, Majok was reading Zizek’s Violence during long commutes between a residency and teaching position at a theater in New Jersey and Connecticut, where her fiancé was in graduate school. “What I took away from that is that capitalism makes us treat each other as commodities,” she says. “‘What can you do for me, what can I do for you’ doesn’t exactly equal love.”

With Zizek’s writing, her mother’s experience, and her own impending marriage all simmering in her head, Majok dashed off the first draft of “Ironbound” in just a week. The play follows Darja over 22 years, depicting her at different points in her three marriages and showing her fierce struggle to survive and provide security for her son.

After two workshop productions, she submitted “Ironbound” to Steppenwolf at the suggestion of the company’s literary manager, who had mentored Majok during an internship after college.

“Part of our deal was that if I came to Chicago, I had to bring him Polish food, so I just brought him three pounds of kielbasa and some pierogi. Hopefully he liked it. I haven’t heard back from him, so maybe it was too much,” Majok jokes.

Becoming a playwright was never Majok’s plan, although she always showed a flair for writing. She didn’t see her first play until high school, when she won $45 playing pool and decided to treat herself to a production of “Cabaret” on Broadway.

As a University of Chicago undergraduate, she tried out for a play and fell in love with the strong bonds she created with her castmates. “I loved the communities that you form—these little ridiculous, inside joke-y families,” she says.

Her love of theater flourished as she studied with David Bevington and Nick Rudall at UChicago. She delved into playwriting during a quarter studying abroad in Paris.

She describes her first play as “the 22-year-old play that you write about your family. It was a super dark and ungenerous and emo play.” University Theater ultimately produced the piece, and Majok decided she wanted to make playwriting a career.

“It’s the thing that I found challenging and exciting and I felt it had worth,” she explains. “Leaving some sort of permanence was attractive.”

Supported by a fellowship from the Merage Foundation for the American Dream, Majok spent the first two years after graduating from UChicago immersing herself in the theater community by watching, studying, reading and writing as many plays as she could. She went on to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

Over time, she says, she’s worked to make her plays funnier and less self-serious than her earlier efforts, and to write rich, complex female characters. “Women with strong appetites and flaws—I would like to see these women on stage, and if I were an actor, I would want to play these women who go after something hungrily,” she says.

Her next project focuses on the women and families that continued to live near Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster, despite the risks to their health and safety.

Even when tackling the weighty topic of Chernobyl, Majok’s darkly comedic sensibility still shines through. “It’s a musical,” she says.

Four faculty members receive Guggenheim fellowships

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:40 -0500

Four UChicago faculty members and a visiting faculty member have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships: Alain Bresson, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Classics; Lenore A. Grenoble, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics; Srikanth Reddy, associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature; and David Schutter, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Annie Dorsen, visiting assistant professor of practice in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, also was honored.

Chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, the four UChicago faculty are among 173 Guggenheim Fellowship winners who will receive financial support to pursue a variety of projects, from endangered languages to the invention of money.

A scholar of the ancient economy, Bresson is the author of “The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy,” which won the 2017 James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association.

Bresson will use his Guggenheim prize, which he said came to him “as a wonderful surprise,” to work on a new book about the specific form taken by money in the ancient Greek world, with a central focus on the question of why the ancient Greeks “invented” coinage.

“The Greeks and the Lydians are famous for having invented a new means of payment, an instrument that we still have in our pockets in our daily life: coinage,” Bresson said. “But a frequent confusion is the idea that the Greeks invented money. Of course they did not. Their contribution was to give to money a political form. I have explored these questions in almost twenty articles which, hopefully, will constitute the foundation for the book I plan to write.”

Grenoble has been studying language endangerment for the last 20 years, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Guggenheim award will go towards supporting Grenoble’s research project on the relationship between language and well-being among Arctic Indigenous peoples in the face of rapidly changing social and environmental conditions, including urbanization and climate change.

“Linguists estimate that 50-90 percent of the world’s languages will be lost over the course of the next century due to a process called language shift, whereby speakers cease to use their mother tongue in favor of another language,” Grenoble said. “Receiving the Guggenheim is both recognition and validation of the importance of the project that I am working on.”

Reddy is a poet and scholar and currently serves as the interim director for creative writing & poetics. The author of two books of poetry, Reddy’s writing on contemporary poetry has appeared in various publications including The New York Times and The New Republic.

The award meant a great deal to Reddy, who says he sees it as a sign of “encouragement to pursue my creative inclinations, no matter how eccentric or foolhardy.”

Reddy will use the award to complete a new book of poetry, titled “Underworld Lit.” The poem, built from fragments of lecture notes from an imaginary college humanities course, will weave together a disparate range of subjects including academic satire and a journey through versions of the underworld from various cultures.

“Needless to say, it’s a very UChicago poem,” Reddy said.

Schutter is a visual artist who specializes in painting and drawing and his work often draws on historical works in these disciplines.

A former recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, Schutter has had exhibitions around the world, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Gemaeldegalerie Berlin, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Palazzo Poli, and most recently in the Frans Hals Museum and documenta 14.

Schutter will be working on a new project on Thomas Eakins, the late 19th-century American realist painter, utilizing Eakins’ archives at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The archives contain letters, studies, anatomical models and oil sketches—things of that sort that I’ll be using for an upcoming project,” Schutter said.

Dorsen is a director and writer whose work explores the intersection of mathematical algorithms and live performance. Her projects have appeared throughout the U.S. and Europe, and she is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange.

Dorsen, in the second year of an initial three-year appointment with TAPS, called the Guggenheim “an enormous honor” and will put the prize toward a new theater project.

“I’m working on a new theater project, as yet untitled, that has to do with forms of online social life, the kinds of virtual communities that we are constructing, and the ways of being together that the internet makes possible—for good or for ill,” Dorsen said. “The piece is part of my ongoing interest in how the technological tools we create end up re-creating us in all kinds of unforeseen ways.”

Two UChicago scientists win fellowships fostering ‘blue-sky’ research

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 17:10 -0500

Two University of Chicago scientists have earned fellowships through the U.S. Department of Defense that support innovative, “blue-sky” research at the limits of today’s technology.

Profs. David Freedman and Supratik Guha are among the 11 scientists and engineers chosen for the 2018 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship program—awarded every year to conduct foundational research in fields including quantum information science, neuroscience, nanoscience, novel engineered materials, applied mathematics and statistics.

A professor of neurobiology, Freedman studies the mechanisms by which brains process and adapt to their environments. Guha, a professor in UChicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and director of the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory, studies new materials and devices for electronics, sensing and energy. The awards are typically $3 million over five years.

Freedman’s lab works to decode how neurons process and react to their environments. They saw an opportunity to use that expertise to help artificial neural networks, which still struggle with tasks that the brain is incredibly good at—like taking knowledge from previous situations and applying it to new ones. His project will seek to deepen our understanding of the ways the brain generalize knowledge, and explore how to transfer it to artificial neural networks.

“For this proposal, we put our heads together to look at the most ambitious questions we could explore,” Freedman said. “We’re thrilled to have the flexibility to pursue the theoretical limits of what we can do in this area.”

Guha’s project studies the science behind new ways of creating single-crystal semiconductor thin films. This is relevant to a key limitation of processing for electronics like solar cells and microprocessors today: The crystalline semiconductor layers that make them up must be laid on top of a high-quality crystalline wafer.

“We’re very pleased with this award, which gives us the freedom to focus on long-term, fundamental semiconductor materials science with a strong high-risk, high-payoff component,” said Guha. “The ability to create single crystal layers without the need for an atomically matched underlying wafer will revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing.”

The fellowships aim to foster long-term relationships between the Department of Defense and university researchers—two groups whose paths don’t always cross regularly, Freedman said, so they’re looking forward to new connections.

The fellowships named for Vannevar Bush, who directed wartime scientific research and development during World War II. After the war, he authored a key report calling for expanding government funding in science and technology, calling basic research “the pacemaker of technological progress.”

Amanda Woodward named dean of the Division of the Social Sciences

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 11:00 -0500

Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Woodward, a leading scholar in the social development of infants and young children, has been serving as interim dean of the Division since July 2017. Her appointment as dean of the Division is effective April 4.

“Amanda has provided vital leadership, sustaining the momentum of the Division of the Social Sciences. We are confident that she will be an excellent leader for the Division in the years to come,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing her appointment.

Woodward in her research has pioneered the development of experimental methods to investigate social cognition in infants and young children. Her work has produced fundamental insights into infants’ social understanding and the processes that support conceptual development early in life. Her current research includes investigating the effects of culture and community in shaping children’s social learning strategies and the neural processes involved in early social-cognitive development.

“It is an honor to lead such an extraordinary community of scholars. I look forward to working together in many areas of research and an array of educational endeavors with faculty, students and staff to advance the social sciences at the University,” Woodward said.

Woodward has been a member of the University faculty since 1993. She was a founding member of the Center for Early Childhood Research and has served as director of the Infant Learning and Development Laboratory as well as chair of the Department of Psychology and deputy dean of faculty affairs for the Division.

Woodward was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. Her research has been recognized by such awards as the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research, the American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless Award for an Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology and the John Merck Scholars Award. Woodward received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and her doctoral degree from Stanford University.

Woodward succeeds David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, History, and Romance Languages, who serves as executive vice provost at the University.

The selection of the new dean by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by the recommendations of an elected faculty committee chaired by Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor in the Department of History and the College.

Moishe Postone, leading interpreter of Marx and scholar of European intellectual history, 1942-2018

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 12:30 -0500

Prof. Moishe Postone, a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century European intellectual history and one of the world’s leading interpreters of Karl Marx, passed away on March 19. He was 75.

Part of the University of Chicago faculty for more than three decades, Postone, SB’63, AM’67, taught generations of undergraduates through the Core sequence on Self, Culture and Society. The Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and the College, he was also a faculty member in the Center for Jewish Studies and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Postone was called one of the most important commentators of Marx to come out of the “New Left” generation of the late 1960s. A scholar focused on capitalism, modern anti-Semitism and questions around memory and identity in postwar Germany, his 1993 opus Time, Labor and Social Domination is still widely read, debated and discussed in the field.

“Moishe Postone’s scholarship on Marx’s critique of political economy had a transformational impact on the field of late-20th-century Marxist studies,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College. “He was an ideal scholar-teacher and critical intellectual in the great Chicago tradition of liberal education, and his impact will long be felt on the intellectual personalities and personal lives of the thousands of students who had the privilege to work with him.”

Postone said his first awakening to the world of social thought came as a UChicago undergraduate, when he was exposed to the works of Marx as a biochemistry student. As a grad student, Postone participated in a 1969 student sit-in at the University’s Administration Building; in its aftermath, he led one of two student study groups seeking to understand the historical moment through social theory. After receiving his PhD from the Goethe-Universität in Germany, Postone returned to Chicago, working with the Center for Transcultural Studies before joining the University of Chicago as an instructor in 1987, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

“As a scholar, teacher, advisor, mentor and colleague, his service to the University and to many disciplines—history, sociology, political science, Jewish studies and Germanic languages and literatures, to name but a few—is a remarkable testament to a career of service to peers and students alike,” said Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and interim dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UChicago.

Postone’s research revolved around a reinterpretation of Marx and his theories of labor. His work sought to place Marx’s work in context with the great social upheavals of the 20th century, and how the succeeding generations had interpreted it. He was also particularly interested in understanding 20th-century anti-Semitism through the lens of capitalism and its reactionary social movements, such as the rise of national socialism that preceded the Holocaust.

His impact will long be felt on the intellectual personalities and personal lives of the thousands of students who had the privilege to work with him.” Dean John W. Boyer on Prof. Moishe Postone

“Moishe Postone was an internationally recognized historian and practitioner of critical theory; his reinterpretations of Marx’s thinking—both in his published work and in his graduate colloquia—were insightful and influential,” said Prof. Emilio Kourí, who chairs UChicago’s Department of History. “A gifted teacher, he trained generations of scholars in European intellectual history.”

For more nearly three decades, Postone also chaired the Core sequence on Self, Culture and Society—one of the four general education social science tracks that undergraduates are required to take at the University of Chicago. “His leadership of that course played a very influential role in the modern history of the College,” Boyer said. “Moishe was a remarkable, charismatic teacher who believed deeply in the fundamental importance of Chicago’s traditions of general education.”

In 1999 he won a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. “I do not want students writing papers just for me, their teacher, but to take responsibility for communicating what they think,” he told the University of Chicago Chronicle at the time.

He continued to teach, write and organize as he battled cancer; in 2016, Postone delivered the Vienna Prize Lecture at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, and delivered a keynote address on right-wing populism at the Vienna Humanities Festival this past autumn.

A University memorial service is being planned for the spring.

Peter Freund, particle physicist and fiction writer, 1936-2018

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 10:11 -0500

“Physicists do not live in an ivory tower; they are not spared the ravages of history,” wrote Prof. Peter Freund upon his retirement at the University of Chicago in 2002, following a half-century career in supersymmetry and string theory.

Freund knew. Born into a Romanian Jewish family during a tumultuous era in Europe, he narrowly avoided the Holocaust and later a Communist firing squad before escaping the country. He eventually became a professor at the University of Chicago, studying particle physics. But even as he picked at the fabric holding the universe together, he was thinking about art, beauty and the forces of history.

Freund, who later wrote fiction and nonfiction that explored the themes of morality, fate, beauty, war and oppression that had impacted his life, died March 6. He was 81.

Freund was born in 1936 in Timișoara, Romania to a wealthy Jewish family; his mother was an opera singer, his father a doctor. Even as other Jews were executed or sent to concentration camps during World War II, their community survived by bribing officials. But the Soviet rule that followed proved dangerous too. In 1956, Freund joined a demonstration that ended with him and other students lined up against a wall with Communist tanks pointed at them. Somehow the order to fire never came, and the students escaped.

Shortly after, the family fled to Austria, and Freund got his PhD in physics at the University of Vienna. In 1965, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

His wide-ranging work in theoretical physics had a strong mathematical flavor. “He was frequently an early contributor in fields and theories that later rose to prominence,” said Jeff Harvey, the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor of Physics. “He had good taste.”

These included supersymmetry and string theory, including a branch that tied string theory with a mathematical concept called p-adic numbers, as well as a concept called AdS/CFT correspondence, which relates quantum models of particles with quantum models of gravity.

“Peter had an appreciation for beauty and elegance that guided him as much in theoretical physics as it did in the arts,” said Prof. Emil Martinec, who heads UChicago’s Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics and was assigned the office next to Freund’s when he first arrived at the University in 1987. “In the search for organizing principles of particle physics, this good taste is extremely helpful.”

Freund wrote two well-regarded physics texts, Introduction to Supersymmetry (1986) and Superstrings (1988), and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

He had long been regarded as the departmental storyteller, and he had been writing his own stories for three decades before he began publishing them in 2007. His first book was a work collecting stories about the famous physicists of the 20th century called A Passion for Discovery; his fiction includes Tales in a Minor Key, West of West End and Belonging.

He told UChicago News in 2008 that he saw many parallels between science and literature: most papers in physics are short stories, in which concepts, rather than human characters, undergo adventures. “In the end, they emerge changed, occasionally with new concepts being introduced and promises that we will return to them, which is like what they call a sequel or a spinoff in Hollywood.”

His fiction was just another medium, friends said; his musical tastes ran from opera to Metallica, and he occasionally sang as a baritone for the Evanston-based Light Opera Works.

He is survived by his wife Lucy, two daughters and five grandchildren. A memorial service at the University is planned for the spring.

John T. Cacioppo, pioneer and founder of the field of social neuroscience, 1951-2018

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 10:17 -0600

Prof. John T. Cacioppo, a pioneer and founder of the field of social neuroscience whose research on loneliness helped to transform psychology and neuroscience, died unexpectedly and peacefully at home on March 5. He was 66.

Cacioppo was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and served as director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and chair of the Social Psychology Program. He is survived by his beloved wife, Stephanie, director of the brain dynamics laboratory at the University; and two children, Anthony and Christina.

“John’s passing is a profound loss for the field, the University, and the many, many colleagues, students and friends who knew him and learned from his myriad of contributions,” said Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and interim dean of the Division of Social Sciences. “His influence across psychology, social neuroscience and health science was enormous, not only as a scientist but as an advocate for science. His legacy cannot be overstated.”

Cacioppo’s colleagues and family said he will be remembered as a truth seeker, creative genius, brilliant scientist, innovator, colleague, teacher, mentor, leader, father and husband.

“There are so few people of whom we can truly say, ‘He was one of a kind,’ but of John it was painfully, obviously true,” said Daniel Gilbert, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

“His influence across psychology, social neuroscience and health science was enormous, not only as a scientist but as an advocate for science.”Prof. Amanda Woodward

Social neuroscience as a distinct field of study was first coined by Cacioppo and colleagues at Ohio State University in 1992. The interdisciplinary field that Cacioppo developed focused on human and animal investigations of the multi-level interactions between neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic/genomic mechanisms underlying social structures and processes. While most research in neuroscience focused on the individual, the new discipline examined the associations between social and neural development and evolution from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

“John's work embodied everything we strive for: tackling the most important questions with all the tools available, no matter how big the challenge,” said former colleague Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at the California Institute of Technology.

‘Visionary research’

Born June 12, 1951 in Marshall, Texas, Cacioppo received his PhD in psychology from the Ohio State University in 1977. He began his career at the University of Notre Dame before returning to Ohio State in 1989. He joined the University of Chicago’s faculty in 1999.

“John Cacioppo conducted visionary research that made groundbreaking contributions to psychology and other fields in the social and biological sciences,” said Susan Levine, the Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor in Education and Society and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. “As a colleague, he played a leading role in our graduate program in Social Psychology and was a dedicated undergraduate teacher regularly teaching Fundamentals of Psychology, which introduces many students to the field. He will be greatly missed.”

Cacioppo began his research by exploring what happens to the brain when social connections are absent. For two decades he studied social fitness, resilience and the effects of loneliness, showing the negative impacts social isolation has not only on mental health but physical health.

“The purpose of loneliness is like the purpose of hunger,” Cacioppo said in a 2017 interview with The Atlantic. “Hunger takes care of your physical body. Loneliness takes care of your social body, which you also need to survive and prosper. We’re a social species.”

In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, he had emphasized that human beings thrive best when not only receiving, but also giving, affection: “One of the things that we have learned is that avoiding loneliness is not about ‘getting,’ not about being a recipient. Despite what economists say, that is not how we are designed. We need mutual aid and protection.”

John and Stephanie Cacioppo (Photo by Joe Sterbenc)

Cacioppo met his wife, Asst. Prof. Stephanie Cacioppo, at a scientific conference in Shanghai, and they married in 2011. Friends and colleagues said the two set an inspiring example of true love and how to love deeply in a marriage.

Stephanie Cacioppo’s academic specialty is love and its benefits. She joined the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, and the two shared an office and a desk, maintaining a partnership in life and in research. Their romance was featured in a recent “Modern Love” column in The New York Times, which emphasized Stephanie Cacioppo’s research finding that love brings with it physical and mental benefits, such as thinking better and healing faster. She called their marriage “the perfect meeting of the study of loneliness with the study of love.”

Stephanie Cacioppo said she is devastated by her husband’s passing and described their seven years of marriage as “the best years of my life.” She said she will be forever bonded to him by love, truth and science.

“My husband was my everything. He was the smartest and the kindest person I have ever met. He was, he is and he will remain the love of my life; my intellectual hero, my inspiration, and my role model in life and science,” Stephanie Cacioppo said. “His legacy will live on through his seminal work, our forever lasting love and through all of us whose minds had the privilege of his influence.”

‘Impossible to replace’

Over a celebrated career, John Cacioppo made several breakthroughs and authored more than 500 articles and books, including Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connections (2008).

“John Cacioppo has been more influential on my thinking than anyone else. He will be truly impossible to replace,” said Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.

Cacioppo was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served on numerous advisory panels, including the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science as an appointee by President Obama, and was elected as a fellow to 19 scientific societies. He also served as the president of several societies and was the founding faculty director of the Brain Academy and the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago, a program that helped to promote the careers of faculty by advancing their ideas with funding agencies.

“This is a terrible loss for all of us,” said Eric Isaacs, UChicago's executive vice president for research, innovation and national laboratories. “John was a wonderful and caring person and an incredible leader in science and scholarship. There are very few who have had such a significant influence by helping to create a new field of study. Social neuroscience continues to be of growing importance to science and society. John leaves a remarkable legacy.”

“His legacy will live on through his seminal work, our forever lasting love and through all of us whose minds had the privilege of his influence.”Stephanie Cacioppo

Cacioppo’s innovative lines of inquiry and his substantive findings received wide recognition, including the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2015), the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (2016), and the Career Achievement Award from the Chicago Society for Neuroscience (2016).

“Put simply, John is one of those once-in-a-generation psychologists whose impact is felt broadly and deeply within the field. He is a creative genius whose cumulative accomplishments are so inseparable from the field that it is hard to imagine contemporary psychology without him,” said longtime collaborator Richard E. Petty, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University.

In 2017, Cacioppo was honored with the Phoenix Prize, the Division of the Social Sciences’ highest honor, for his exceptional work which shaped the direction of research and inquiry around the world. Cacioppo was only the fifth faculty member to receive the prize, which was established in 1994.

In May, Cacioppo was to receive the prestigious William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Sciences for a lifetime of “significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.”

As director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, Cacioppo led investigations to better understand the functions of the brain and nervous system and their implications for human cognition, behavior, health and societies.

A University memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. March 28 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. In lieu of flowers, please consider a gift to a fund supporting Prof. Cacioppo’s work and legacy. For more information, contact Blake Davis at (773) 702-7175 or blake2@uchicago.edu.

Yesomi Umolu, exhibitions curator at Logan Center, named artistic director of next Chicago Architecture Biennial

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:03 -0600

Yesomi Umolu, exhibitions curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, will serve as the artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019 edition, the Biennial and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced on March 6.

With a background in architectural design and curatorial studies, Umolu focuses her work on global contemporary art and spatial practices. Her recent projects—including the exhibitions Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts, The Land Grant: Forest Law, and The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal—have explored the politics of the built environment. A Chicago-based curator and writer, Umolu is a visiting lecturer, critic and speaker at a number of international universities and institutions.

“I am honored to be invited to serve as artistic director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial,” said Umolu. “Having my roots in the field of architecture, spatial questions have always been an important consideration of my work with contemporary artists, architects and urbanists from across the world. I am excited to embark on the journey of engaging the city of Chicago and it publics, as well as visitors to Chicago from across the country and around the world, in these conversations.”

Jack Guthman, chairman of the Biennial, said Umolu’s “broad curatorial experience makes her ideally suited to build upon the critical acclaim accorded to our 2015 and 2017 Biennials by our dual constituencies—the architecture profession worldwide, as well as Chicagoans and visitors to our city.”

In the coming months, Umolu will formalize and convene an international curatorial team of creative practitioners with strong knowledge of visual arts, architecture and design practices globally. The members of the curatorial team will be announced this spring. Umolu’s vision for the next Chicago Architecture Biennial features the exploration of emerging practices and global locations that are developing new approaches to architecture, urbanism and spatial practice. Through this process, she will use the Biennial as a forum to explore creative responses to shifting spatial conditions at local, regional and international levels.

“Yesomi is a visionary curator with strong roots in Chicago, and she will work tirelessly to cultivate an incredible cultural, educational and economic event for the city,” said Emanuel. “With Yesomi at the helm, the third Chicago Architecture Biennial is sure to secure its reputation as the most innovative architectural, art and design showcase of its kind.”

“We are delighted by Yesomi Umolu’s appointment as the next artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The appointment further testifies to the curatorial imagination and dexterity she has demonstrated so well at the Logan Center for the Arts,” said Daniel Diermeier, provost of the University of Chicago. “By consistently showcasing the best in architectural innovation—in a city renowned for its architectural achievements—the Biennial advances the conversation about the potential impact of design. That conversation is playing an increasing role at the University of Chicago, and it is vital, of course, to the future of Chicago’s South Side, as to cities around the world.”

Umolu was selected by a committee comprised of Chicago Architecture Biennial board members, as well as past artistic directors, who considered candidates from around the world and from a variety of disciplines. Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial artistic directors, said: “Umolu’s curatorial practice, which boldly, yet elegantly, traverses the fields of art and architecture, makes her uniquely situated for success in this role. The Biennial is a complex and multifaceted platform for exploring both the history and present-day challenges in the field, and we eagerly await the outcomes of Umolu’s curatorial inquiry and exploration.”

Now in its third edition, the Biennial will return Sept. 19, 2019 and run through Jan. 5, 2020.

Following a successful partnership in 2017, the opening of the 2019 edition will align with EXPO CHICAGO, the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, and the main site of the Biennial will once again be the Chicago Cultural Center.

—Adapted from a Chicago Architecture Biennial news release.

Steven Collins, world-renowned scholar of Buddhism, 1951-2018

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:52 -0600

Prof. Steven Collins, a world-renowned scholar of Buddhism and its associated Pali language, passed away from natural causes Feb. 15, while leading a seminar in New Zealand. He was 66.

The Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities, Collins chaired the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations several times since joining the UChicago faculty in 1991. He was also associate faculty in the Divinity School.

Whitney Cox, associate professor and chair of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, said Collins was one of his generation’s most distinguished historians of premodern Southern Asia.

“He was perhaps the single most sheerly intelligent person I’ve ever known, a great citizen of the University, and a wise and compassionate teacher and friend,” Cox said. He described Collins as a “doting husband, father and grandfather, an obsessive Miles Davis and John Coltrane fan, and a lifelong supporter of Tottenham Hotspur F.C. soccer.”

Collins was the author of several books on Buddhist studies. His thesis became the basis for his first book, Selfless Persons. He later examined the makings of Buddhist civilization—an idea he explored in Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative. Most recently he was writing about civilization, wisdom and practices of the self.

Daniel Arnold, associate professor of the philosophy of religions in UChicago’s Divinity School, said he had a “transformative encounter” with Collins’ Selfless Persons as a graduate student. He later became Collins’ colleague and counted him a friend.

“I will miss many things after his tragically untimely passing,” Arnold said. “May all who of us who learned from his exemplary intellectual engagement strive to continue bringing something of this lost clarity of thought to a world badly in need of it.”

Collins is survived by his wife, Claude Grangier, senior lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures at UChicago; as well as three children and three grandchildren.

Two UChicago faculty members win Sloan research fellowships

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 12:35 -0600

University of Chicago chemist Timothy Berkelbach and neurobiologist Mark Sheffield have been awarded Sloan research fellowships.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gives the awards annually to early-career scholars identified as the promising scientific researchers working today in the United States and Canada. This year's 126 winners will receive $65,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research.

Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists, and fellows are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars on the basis of a candidate’s independent research accomplishments, creativity and potential.

Tim Berkelbach, a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, is a theoretical chemist who studies the electronic and optical properties of nanoscale materials. His group adapts computational models written for tens of atoms and scales them up to work for sets of hundreds or thousands—which you need to model materials for applications in solar energy, catalysis and manufacturing, chemical sensing and electronics.

“It’s an honor to be selected, especially alongside such an amazing lineup of people who have been recognized as Sloan fellows over the years,” Berkelbach said.

He joined the University in 2016.

Asst. Prof. Mark Sheffield studies memory—how memories are formed, retrieved and altered over time. Recent advances now let scientists identify, monitor and manipulate the neurons involved in a specific memory; his lab uses imaging and optogenetics to track how individual and groups of neurons in the hippocampus (the center of emotion and memory) interact.

“We know quite a lot about memory at a psychological level, but our understanding of the neurobiology that underlies memory function lags far behind,” Sheffield said. “We’re very excited, with the help of the Sloan fellowship, to move forward with these experiments, which we hope will provide insight for the development of treatments for memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s and PTSD.”

He joined the University in 2017.

Lorraine Daston honored for research on the history of science

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 12:24 -0600

Lorraine Daston, a visiting professor in UChicago’s John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the Department of History, has been awarded the Dan David Prize for her achievements in the research of the history of science.

The annual award, which includes a $1 million prize, recognizes scholars for innovative and interdisciplinary research in technological, scientific, social or cultural fields covering the past, present and future. Daston said she was in “disbelief but delighted beyond measure” to be recognized.

“It is grand that the history of science, always a small, interstitial discipline lodged between the natural and social sciences and the humanities, has been recognized for its essential contributions to the understanding of the past,” Daston said.

Daston arrived at UChicago in 1992 and said she fell in love with the “intellectual earnestness” of the University, as well as the unique nature of the Committee on Social Thought, to which she returns to teach each year. Since 1995, she has directed the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and she now divides her time between Berlin and Chicago. She has written on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early-modern science, and the history of scientific objectivity.

Robert B. Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy and the College, commended Daston, calling her “one of the most influential and widely respected historians in the world today.”

“Professor Daston is the embodiment of the interdisciplinarity that the Committee and indeed the University have tried to foster,” Pippin said. “Her role in introducing our graduate students to the various relations between the sciences and the humanities has been absolutely indispensable, and her generosity with students is legendary.”

Daston said she is looking forward to putting the prize toward “many happy hours in various dusty archives” as she continues her research. Laureates also donate 10 percent of their prize to postgraduates in their respective field to foster a new generation of scholars. Daston will share her prize with a student at MIT and another at the University of Cambridge.

The Dan David Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. Past winners have included UChicago Prof. James Heckman, novelist Margaret Atwood and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Two UChicago mathematicians awarded one of field’s top prizes

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 12:23 -0600

University of Chicago mathematicians Alexander Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld have been awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize for Mathematics “for their groundbreaking work in algebraic geometry, representation theory and mathematical physics.”

Awarded by the Israeli Wolf Foundation, the prize honors the greatest achievements every year in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, physics, medicine and the arts. The award for each subject area carries a $100,000 prize.

“It is a great pleasure to see such deserving people recognized with this prestigious prize,” said Prof. Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb, dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences. “Their work in algebraic geometry is truly remarkable.”

Beilinson, the David and Mary Winton Green University Professor, and Drinfeld, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor, specialize in algebraic geometry, which uses abstract algebra to solve questions of geometry. Frequent collaborators, their association dates back to 1975, when they were both students of Yuri Manin at Moscow State University.

Several mathematical techniques and conjectures bear their names, including the Beilinson Conjectures, cited as a guiding influence in number theory and algebraic geometry; and the Drinfeld module, which Drinfeld used in 1974 to prove parts of the Langlands program.

“The Geometric Langlands Program is a far-reaching network of conjectures, and sometimes theorems, connecting number theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory and mathematical physics in unexpected and illuminating ways,” said Prof. Kevin Corlette, who chairs the Department of Mathematics. “It is wonderful to see Profs. Beilinson and Drinfeld recognized for their work, which has been fundamental to the development of this subject.”

In addition to his proof of a case of the Langlands conjecture, Drinfeld is also known for his work in representation theory, mathematical physics and quantum group theory. In 1990 he was awarded the Fields Medal, often described as the mathematics counterpart to the Nobel Prize, awarded only once every four years to a mathematician under 40. He is a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Beilinson specializes in geometric representation theory and mathematical physics. His honors include the Ostrowski Prize and the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize.

Both Beilinson and Drinfeld joined the University of Chicago in 1998. They frequently work together—they co-authored a 2004 textbook called Chiral Algebras, one of the most prominent texts on the subject—and they jointly run a seminar called the “Geometric Langlands Seminar,” which runs Mondays from 4:30 p.m. “until both the speaker and the participants are regularly exhausted,” according to a 2006 collection of mathematics articles titled Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory.

Drinfeld called the Wolf Prize “a great honor.” “We’re in good company,” Beilinson added. “To receive a prize together with Paul McCartney—who would think it would happen?” (McCartney received the Wolf Prize in Music this year.)

The Wolf Foundation was established by the German–born inventor, diplomat and philanthropist Ricardo Wolf; he later served as Fidel Castro’s ambassador to Israel, where he lived until his death in 1981. The prizes will be awarded by Israeli president Reuven Rivlin at a May ceremony in Jerusalem.