UChicago News

Six entrepreneurs selected to develop innovative technologies at Argonne

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:36 -0500

Earlier this month, six scientists from across the country began a two-year program at Argonne National Laboratory dedicated to build their energy and science technologies into products. They are the second annual cohort for the Chain Reaction Innovations program, which provides an institutional home for the postdoctoral researchers to develop their innovative technologies.

Eighty-three innovators from 26 states applied to earn a spot at Argonne, a Department of Energy national laboratory managed by UChicago. The program provides the innovators an opportunity different from traditional entrepreneurial programs through access to the lab’s scientific expertise, world-class facilities and multi-institutional support.

Such support includes working with the Purdue Foundry at the University of Purdue and the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which help innovators to understand how to bridge the gap between benchtop ideas and the marketplace. The Polsky Center offers participants guidance on how to develop business strategies and attract investors and commercial partners.

“Argonne National Laboratory, as one of the nation’s leading energy science laboratories, and the University of Chicago, which operates Argonne on behalf of the Department of Energy and is home to the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, are particularly well-positioned to spur energy technology innovation,” said Eric Isaacs, executive vice president for research, innovation and the national laboratories at the University of Chicago. “The new cohort in Chain Reaction Innovations can draw from the expertise of these two institutions, and the city of Chicago’s entrepreneurial ecosystem for startups with a growing investor network and several of the nation’s top engineering schools.”

This cohort’s technologies focus on enhancing energy efficiency or sustainability and overcoming complex scientific challenges to improve quality of life.

Meet a few of our CRI entrepreneurs below or view them all on the CRI website.

Erika Boeing

Erika Boeing is passionate about helping the world become powered by renewable energy. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Accelerate Wind, a company that is working to revolutionize distributed wind energy by drastically lower the cost of small wind turbine technology.

While many buildings use solar panels as an alternative source of energy, few use wind turbines because they are far too expensive. Her company is looking to change this.

“Accelerate Wind uses a systems approach to overall wind turbine design,” she said. “This includes using a flywheel to reduce the required size of the generator and inverter, which reduces their cost. We also have design features which capture and translate high velocity wind currents into energy in a manner that makes the whole system more cost-effective.”

While in the Netherlands on a Fulbright Scholarship, she studied the interactions between how technology affects society and how society determines which technologies are adopted. “This bigger-picture understanding helps me to work on problems while taking into account a wide number of relevant perspectives, which is important for creating a successful business,” she said.

Chad Husko

Chicago native Chad Husko is working on creating a new class of lasers that can be miniaturized and put into photonic integrated circuits to improve performance and reliability.

“As an analogy, our mastery of shrinking electronics allowed us to take those giant 1970s supercomputers and put that into the form factor of a smart phone using integrated electronic circuits,” he said. “Right now, we’re going through a similar revolution of ‘photonics,’ or light-based technologies, and learning how combine the forces of light and electricity.”

Such integrated photonics are already being used in the cloud and in self-driving cars, but “this is just the beginning,” he said. “Plenty of unexpected applications await.”

His team is using Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials to develop the laser devices and its Materials Engineering Research Facility to scale the raw materials required to build the lasers from lab scale to industrial scale.

Veronika Stelmakh

For the next two years, Veronika Stelmakh will work with researchers and engineers at Argonne to further development of a power generator that could help save lives and enable exploration in remote areas.

Stelmakh is co-founder and CEO of Mesodyne, Inc. a company that is developing a thermophotovoltaic portable power generator that would weigh about 75 percent less than the batteries that would normally be required to provide the same amount of energy. This portable power generator would enable new capabilities in technological and human mobility and could be used by dismounted soldiers on the field, mountaineers scaling miles-high summits, emergency responders or even remote sensors that demand round-the-clock power.

Stelmakh, currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, will be working with Argonne energy systems section manager Doug Longman, whose expertise in engine combustion research is vital to Stelmakh’s own project.

“Having someone like Doug help us design our microcombustor will greatly advance our work,” she said. “Argonne, CRI in particular, is a perfect fit for us. There are very few programs where you have access to this level of knowledge, facilities and support.”

Meet the rest of the cohort on the CRI website.

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.

Land rising above the sea 2.4 billion years ago transformed Earth’s life, climate

Wed, 23 May 2018 12:20 -0500

Chemical signatures in shale rocks, a consolidated form of mud, point to an increased rate in the rise of land above the ocean 2.4 billion years ago—possibly triggering dramatic changes in climate and life.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers from six universities, including the University of Chicago, report that shales sampled from around the world contains archival-quality evidence of fleeting, almost imperceptible traces of rainwater that caused weathering of land as old as 3.5 billion years ago.

The exposure of new land to weathering may have set off a series of glacial episodes and atmospheric changes spawned by the Great Oxygenation Event, in which free oxygen filled the air, said University of Oregon geologist Ilya Bindeman, who led the study.

The evidence is from analyses of three oxygen isotopes, particularly the rare but stable oxygen-17, in multiple shale samples from every continent and spanning 3.7 billion years of Earth's history. Shale rocks are formed by the weathering of crust, so "they tell you a lot about the exposure to air, light and precipitation,” Bindeman said.

Notable changes in the ratios of oxygen-17 and 18 with more common oxygen-16 allowed researchers to read the chemical history in the rocks. In doing so, they were able to establish when the pattern of precipitation on continents switched from near-coastal to more inland, reflecting the transport of moisture over vast swaths of emerged lands as the continents rose above seawater and high-mountain ranges and plateaus were created.

“It is mind-boggling to think that we still find a record of something as evanescent as rainwater in rocks as old as 3.5 billion years old,” said co-author Nicolas Dauphas, head of the University of Chicago Origins Laboratory and professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and the Enrico Fermi Institute. “There are a number of challenges to applying this oxygen isotope proxy to ancient rocks, but our study shows that there was a clear change in the pattern of precipitation on continents at a time that coincided with the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere approximately 2.4 billion years ago.”

The measurements could help resolve previous arguments whether the emergence of land between 1.1 and 3.5 billion years ago was gradual or stepwise, scientists said. Based on his own previous modeling and other studies, Bindeman said, total landmass on the planet 2.4 billion years ago may have reached about two-thirds of what is observed today.

Chemical weathering on the newly emerged land would have begun to consume carbon dioxide and changed the climate.

“We still need to figure out how everything ties together, but this is a very exciting discovery that opens many avenues of research,” Dauphas said.

—A version of this article was originally published by the University of Oregon

Citation: “Rapid emergence of subaerial landmasses and onset of a modern hydrologic cycle 2.5 billion years ago.” Bindeman et al, Nature, May 23, 2018. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0131-1

Funding: National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NASA.

Smart Museum of Art expands perspectives with major reinstallation of its collection

Thu, 10 May 2018 11:45 -0500

The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art announced a major reinstallation of its collection and the launch of Expanding Narratives, a three-year, three-part collections and exhibitions series.

The new series combines loans from UChicago alumni and Chicago-area collectors with works from the Smart’s collection. It offers a means to examine the content and role of the Museum’s collection, and the ways in which the addition of new works, particularly works by women and artists of color, can shift and expand narrative possibilities.

On view until Dec. 30, 2018, Expanding Narratives: The Figure and the Ground is the first version of the series, and will look at the formal relationship between human figures and the background of a work, offering a more inclusive approach to the art historical canon by giving pride of place to artists like Sam Gilliam, Lee Krasner, Kerry James Marshall, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, Sylvia Sleigh, Kara Walker and Jack Whitten.

The exhibition will also incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives through the work of the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. Over the course of the exhibition, faculty from departments across the University will share interpretations of individual works, furthering the celebration of alternative voices and diverse points of view.

“As we look to the future, the Expanding Narratives series will offer a transparent platform for us to consider what constitutes a great university art museum collection in the 21st century,” said Alison Gass, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum.

(Photo by John Zich)

In preparation for the reinstallation, the Smart will be reconfigured by demolishing a long interior wall that has been in place for nearly 20 years. The new large, open space will offer opportunities to display large scale-works, and will ask visitors to consider themselves as a figure against the newly considered ground of the gallery.

“We don’t have the space to tell an encyclopedic history all at once,” Gass said. “But we can be flexible and build an exhibitions and collections program that positions us as a site of critical debate, reflective of the academic excellence and global impact of the University.”

“The Expanding Narratives series provides an opportunity to ask: How can we develop an inclusive collecting strategy that reflects and challenges the issues and questions shared by our community? How can we build a collection and program that sparks connections and dialogue?” said Michael Christiano, deputy director and curator of public practice.

The second chapter in the Expanding Narratives series will open in spring 2019 and will focus on how museums, collectors, scholars and artists are re-inscribing African-American artists and artists of the African Diaspora into the canon of art history.

The third and final chapter in 2020 will include an ambitious global history of art. The project will be installed chronologically with works from around the globe grouped together to examine critical points of intersection among people and cultures.

Along with the reinstallation, the Smart recently launched a new two-year fellowship to help expand the professional fields of art history and museum practice to include individuals from traditionally underrepresented populations.

In memoir, former President Hanna Holborn Gray reflects on groundbreaking career

Mon, 07 May 2018 15:45 -0500

Forty years ago, when Hanna Holborn Gray walked into the president’s office at the University of Chicago, she had a lot waiting for her.

In the late 1970s, universities were confronting a flagging economy, rising inflation fueled in part by an energy crisis that made campus costs soar and low levels of market performance that radically reduced the value of their endowments. Federal support was declining, and universities faced a crisis in graduate enrollments as cut backs reduced the number of academic positions for newly minted PhDs. UChicago was struggling with declines in undergraduate enrollment as well.

Over her 15 years as president, she steered the University through its troubles to improve both enrollment and its financial situation. Her tenure saw a revamping of the Core curriculum and graduation requirements, the establishment of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and of the Department of Computer Science, the creation of the science quadrangle and new science buildings (the John Crerar Library and the Kersten Physics Teaching Center), as well as large-scale renovations of Ida Noyes, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel and buildings on the Main Quadrangles.

Through it all, Gray writes in her new book, An Academic Life: A Memoir, she always strove to preserve the University’s essential spirit: “its powerful sense of mission, its uncompromising intellectual spirit, its insistence on intellectual freedom, its capacity for interdisciplinary discourse and scholarship, its exceptional students and the breadth and rigor of education they had on offer.”

An Academic Life details Gray’s time with the University as well as her journey—from the child of refugees from Nazi Germany to dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, to provost (and then acting president) at Yale, and finally president of UChicago, all “firsts” for women in American higher education.

It also paints a portrait of UChicago life and characters, including the anti-sports riots in the 1960s; a “distinguished law professor” she caught in the shrubbery peeking into her garage to see what kind of car she drove; and Prof. William H. McNeill’s repeated petitions for the University to purchase the Chicago Bears in order to conduct academic lectures at halftime.

Gray, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Early Modern European History, will speak about the memoir at a May 9 event in the Regenstein Library. The event, hosted by the Seminary Co-op and the University of Chicago Library Society, is free, but registration is required.

Valerie Jarrett named UChicago’s 2018 Class Day speaker

Thu, 03 May 2018 12:28 -0500

Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Obama and a distinguished senior fellow in the University of Chicago Law School, has been named the invited speaker for UChicago’s Class Day celebration.

A corporate executive and attorney respected for her leadership in public service, Jarrett will address the College’s graduating students and their families about the responsibilities of global citizenship. Her address is part of the Class Day event starting at 2 p.m. on Friday, June 8, in the Main Quadrangle. The gathering will include the presentation of College awards and speeches by students from the Class of 2018. Class Day began last year and is a celebration that kicks off Convocation weekend.

“We are delighted that Valerie Jarrett will join the College in celebrating this year’s graduating class,” said John W. Boyer, dean of the College and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History. “Our graduates are intellectual leaders whose knowledge and analytical skills equip them to address the world’s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Valerie Jarrett’s distinguished career and viewpoints will provide extraordinary perspective on the global role of scholarly leaders.”

The longest-serving senior adviser to President Obama, Jarrett oversaw the White House Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. She also chaired the White House Council on Women and Girls and co-chaired the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.

Before joining the Obama administration, Jarrett was the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development and management company. She also served under Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley and has held numerous board positions, including vice chairman of the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees.

“I am honored to be selected as the Class Day speaker at the University of Chicago,” Jarrett said. “I am incredibly optimistic about our future because of the talent in the Class of 2018 and am excited to share in their celebration of this momentous occasion.”

UChicago Medicine begins Level 1 adult trauma care

Tue, 01 May 2018 16:55 -0500

The University of Chicago Medicine began providing adult trauma care on May 1, with the first patient being brought by ambulance at noon, signaling the official activation of its Level 1 Adult Trauma Center.

The beginning of adult trauma services comes as UChicago Medicine is being recognized for high-quality medical care in many areas. In the last two weeks, UChicago Medicine also announced it had earned its 13th sequential “A” rating in patient safety from industry watchdog Leapfrog Group and that it achieved Magnet Recognition status—the gold standard for nursing excellence and high-quality patient care, from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

“The events of the past seven days are testimony to the tremendous strides UChicago Medicine has made over the past several years to be a stronger academic health system for its community, patients and their families,” said Kenneth S. Polonsky, dean and executive vice president of medical affairs at UChicago. “We thank each and every one of our faculty and staff for their hard work in getting this organization to this point.”

The program adds to UChicago Medicine’s pediatric trauma and burn services, providing the community a comprehensive system of care to treat the full range of trauma injuries in patients of all ages.

“Today represents the culmination of years of advocacy, planning and partnership,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement. “I commend the community members, advocates, University of Chicago and their health care partners for working together in a coordinated, collaborative effort to ensure equity in essential medical services and that the highest quality health care is in close reach of every resident of Chicago.”

Since announcing plans to become a Level 1 Adult Trauma Center in December 2015, UChicago Medicine staff have logged thousands of hours preparing to provide care to trauma patients. It has hired additional employees, including 18 experienced trauma professionals from around the country. Interdisciplinary teams have been developing wraparound services to support trauma patients and their families, and newly crafted internal policies and procedures tweak everything from laboratory testing protocols to blood bank operations.

“All three of these achievements are further validation of our efforts to improve quality, safety and service to our patients, faculty and staff collaboration, and employee and community engagement," said Sharon O’Keefe, president of the medical center.

—This story first appeared on the UChicago Medicine website.

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei to screen, discuss new film April 29 at UChicago

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 15:15 -0500

The Logan Center for the Arts will host renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei on Sunday, April 29 for a Q&A and screening of Human Flow, his new documentary on the global refugee crisis.

Captured over the course of a year in 23 countries, Human Flow follows the stories of the more than 65 million people who have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II.

Reservations for the screening are sold out, but the live Q&A with Ai Weiwei will be streamed here beginning at 4 p.m. CDT. Both the screening and Q&A are part of a nationwide simulcast.

The event is presented by UChicago Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional support provided by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Following the screening, the audience will have a chance to learn more about local, national, and international immigrant and refugee organizations, including Refugee One, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and the Heartland Alliance.

Learn more about Human Flow and Ai Weiwei here.

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.

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.

Jeanne Gang discusses ‘mining the city’ for inspiration about architecture and design

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 10:31 -0500

For architect Jeanne Gang, the materials that compose the built environment are as important to her as the final design.

Speaking April 10 at UChicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, Gang recalled visiting a ruin on St. John’s several years ago that served as inspiration: Although its craggy stone walls seemed unremarkable at first, Gang later discovered that they were made up of the skeletons of harvested coral and brick shards that were likely used as ballast on slave ships.

“The question is: Are all materials tainted with history, or can they be redeemed in some way?” Gang asked in her address, the first of three Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures, in which the University highlights individuals making fundamental contributions to the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Jeanne Gang, "Material World", Lecture 1 of 3, 04.10.18

Video of Jeanne Gang, "Material World", Lecture 1 of 3, 04.10.18

Jeanne Gang, "Material World", Lecture 1 of 3

Gang is best known for combining elements of ecological systems into her designs—from the 82-story Aqua Tower (2010) in downtown Chicago, which resembles a landscape of hills and valleys; to the Ford Calumet Environmental Center (2008), which used the nest-making process of birds for inspiration.

“I’ve always been sensitive to materials in architecture, seeing the choice of them and the deployment of them on equal footing with the building’s function, its form, its technologies,” Gang added. “The issue of where materials come from, the resources they consume, where they end up, and the way they make people feel, are all central to my thoughts about architecture.”

In three talks entitled “Mining the City,” Gang will explore various elements of the built environment. She framed the first discussion around the ubiquitous three Rs of environmentalism—reduce, reuse, recycle—as starting points for “reusing physical resources rather than starting from complete scratch.”

In a wide-ranging discussion, Gang explored architecture and design from the growth of mass consumerism by the American public in the post-war 1950s, up to modern innovations for making better use of space through concepts like tiny houses and micro apartments.

Gang shared concepts for current and past projects, including the conversion of a former coal-burning power plant into a modern student union at Beloit College, to a network of flexible live-and-work units in the former factory town of suburban Cicero.

Pioneering architectural vision

Gang was introduced to a crowd April 10 by Christine Mehring, chair of the Department of Art History at UChicago, who recognized Gang as one of a handful of successful female architects in the history of architecture. Mehring praised Gang’s efforts to bring more diverse perspectives to the profession during a celebrated career.

“In little over a decade, Jeanne has built an international reputation for advancing and intertwining the social, elemental and formal possibilities of architecture and design in the 21st century,” Mehring said.

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2018 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures

The founding principal of Studio Gang, an international architecture and urban design practice based in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, Gang was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, which recognized her as “an architect challenging the aesthetic and technical possibilities of the art form in a wide range of structures.” Locally, her projects include the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo (2010), Northerly Island (2015) and closer to UChicago, the Campus North Residential Commons (2016).

Most recently, Gang also was named one of seven designers selected by the curatorial team for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, for which the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are serving as commissioners.

Gang’s next Berlin Lecture is April 17, a talk entitled “The Uneven City,” which will followed by her final talk on April 24, “Mutualism in the Anthropocene.” Both will begin at 6 p.m. in the Performance Hall at the Logan Center.

Big Brains podcast premieres with what ancient fish reveal about humans

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 12:45 -0500

Editor’s note: Big Brains is a new University of Chicago podcast in which some of the pioneering minds on campus discuss their groundbreaking ideas and the stories behind them.

University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin said he’ll never forget the day in 2004 when he unearthed the discovery of a lifetime.

After spending six years in the Arctic searching for a fossil that could be a missing link between sea and land animals, Shubin finally found himself eye-to-eye with the 375-million-year-old creature that would come to be known as Tiktaalik roseae.

“I had staring at me the skull of a creature that looked part fish, part land-living animal,” Shubin said. “What made it even better is that as we pulled that skeleton out, we started to see other parts of the body. We started to see its fins, and its fin had arm bones and wrist bones inside. We started to see its body, and it looked like it had both lungs and gills.”

Shubin, the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, has shared his groundbreaking research with a wide audience, from his best-selling 2008 book Your Inner Fish, and as host of an Emmy Award-winning PBS series of the same name.

On the debut episode of Big Brains, Shubin sat down to discuss his discovery of Tiktaalik, what it meant for the understanding of human evolution and how it has impacted the future of genetic research.

Most recently, Shubin’s research has taken him to Antarctica, where he will return later this year to search for more ancient fossils. The thrill of the hunt continues to excite him, Shubin said.

“Questions are never-ending, and a life of discovery is a life of surprises,” Shubin said.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play. New episodes will be available Monday mornings through the Spring Quarter. Big Brains is the newest podcast on the UChicago Podcast Network.

A $10 million grant will support Crime Lab collaboration for police innovation

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 17:20 -0500

A $10 million grant from philanthropist Ken Griffin will support a transformative new initiative to reduce violent crime in Chicago, through a collaboration with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Police Department and the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

The grant to the University of Chicago will strengthen violence prevention efforts by the city of Chicago and Chicago police by ensuring officers have the tools and support they need to more effectively fight violent crime and build community trust. It will accelerate proven programs, advance technology and data analytics, provide officer training and support, and launch an innovation fund to help make Chicago a safer place to live and work. The grant builds on the city of Chicago’s comprehensive effort to promote effective and equitable policing and complements the work of city agencies and community partners implementing the city’s public safety strategy.

The University of Chicago is committed to advancing urban research with the potential to make a lasting impact in addressing society’s greatest challenges. Since the University launched the Crime Lab in 2008, the initiative has partnered with community organizations across the country to design, rigorously test and scale programs with the greatest potential to improve lives. These efforts include programs such as Choose to Change’s trauma-informed mentoring and therapy for Chicago youth, and the recently launched READI Chicago initiative, which provides intensive transitional jobs and wraparound supports for those at the center of Chicago’s violence. This new grant to support police innovation complements these other efforts to improve academic outcomes for youth, enhance income opportunities for those living in communities most impacted by violence and reduce the harms of the criminal justice system.

“This incredibly generous donation will help us deliver on our comprehensive public safety strategy by expanding training, technology and trust between police and residents,” said Emanuel. “This is another demonstration of how civic innovation, academia and philanthropy can come together to create meaningful and lasting impact for the city we all love. The impact of Ken’s donation will be felt for generations to come.”

The grant will support the Chicago Police Department and the Crime Lab’s joint efforts to leverage data analysis, community input and technology resources to improve public safety in four key ways: sustaining the Crime Lab’s support of the strategic decision support centers, advancing the use of data analytics within the police department, strengthening training and other supports to frontline officers, and leveraging research and technical expertise to support a safer Chicago in every neighborhood.

“As a community, we are unified in our desire for Chicago to be a safer place to live and work. No child, anywhere, should be afraid to walk to school or play outside. A safer Chicago attracts more families and better jobs, and provides a better quality of life for all,” said Ken Griffin. “I am proud to support the University of Chicago Crime Lab, whose programs have had a powerful impact on reducing violent crime. I hope this initiative inspires other leaders to join the important efforts by many to make our city safer for everyone.”

“The Crime Lab was created with the explicit goal of trying to make our city safer and more equitable for all who live here,” said Roseanna Ander, founding executive director of Crime Lab. “This generous grant will further our efforts to use data and evidence to drive progress, building on our decade of partnership with city agencies and community-based organizations across Chicago. We are proud to work with Ken Griffin and the department to further these efforts to reduce violence, to promote community engagement and trust, and to enhance opportunities for all Chicagoans.”

The new initiative complements and augments efforts to reduce violent crime in Chicago since 2016, when the city experienced a substantial increase in homicides. That includes work by partners at Chicago CRED, the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities, and the Chicago Sports Alliance. Announced in December 2017, the alliance is a collaboration between the Crime Lab and the five largest Chicago professional sports teams (Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox), who collectively donated a total of $1 million in grants to address violence in the city.

Strengthening and expanding strategic decision support centers

In early 2017, the Chicago Police Department, in close collaboration with the Crime Lab, launched the first strategic decision support centers. The SDSCs bring together a suite of technology resources, including gunshot detection systems, digital cameras and software that highlights areas in communities that are at the highest risk of violence. District commanders use these resources to monitor crime developments in real-time; develop localized crime reduction strategies to meet the needs of, and with input from, the community; and then adjust activities to prevent crime more effectively.

The weaving together of technology, analytical processes, leadership and robust community engagement is showing dramatic results with the 7th District, or Englewood, seeing a 67 percent decrease in shootings compared to 2016 and the 25th District, or Grand Central, already seeing a 40 percent reduction in shootings compared to 2017. Since their launch, the Crime Lab has embedded data analysts in the SDSCs to provide analytic support, develop processes for using data to guide decision-making and to identify opportunities for collaboration with community partners. The data from Crime Lab analysts supports Chicago officers as they develop localized crime reduction strategies using data analysis, human intelligence and input from the community. These efforts are tailored to meet the unique needs of each community, with community concerns incorporated into the district's daily planning process. A significant portion of the grant will support the Crime Lab’s continued collaboration with Chicago police in the SDSC program through 2019.

Advancing the use technology and tools to drive data analytics

The effective use of technology is at the heart of effective modern policing. The donation will expand the Chicago police’s collaboration with the Crime Lab to grow the department’s analytical framework, prioritizing data gathering, analysis and improved display of police’s core crime management system, CompStat, as well as improving the flow of information delivered and shared between police headquarters and districts. This grant will support the enhancement of the analytics framework within the police department in order to better integrate and share data across the department and improve the data management systems used to fight crime and enhance community interactions.

Supporting officers’ professional development and wellness

The Chicago Police Department is currently in the process of working with the Crime Lab to design a system to identify when and how to extend officers additional support if needed. The donation will fund the development of a comprehensive set of supports and services for front-line Chicago officers, such as training and mental health resources, that prioritize the needs of the officers and the residents of the neighborhoods where they work. Drawing on national best practices and the expertise of executive staff from police departments across the country, this work will identify, implement and evaluate robust services and supports for the officers that need them most.

Crime Lab Innovation Fund

This collaboration between the Crime Lab and the Chicago Police Department will aim to develop evidence to improve the Chicago police’s work as well as its relationship with the community. Building off recent experience, Chicago police and Crime Lab will use part of this grant to continue to collaborate on a series of innovative initiatives, including leveraging national expertise to assist and advise the department and help bring police operations set the standard for national best practices. The Crime Lab will work with the police department as a research partner that will include developing rapid response evaluations of questions in the field and designing long-term intervention tests that will ensure the police department and the Crime Lab are well positioned to benefit from emerging trends and new technology in community safety.

The Chicago Police Department is currently expanding its smart policing strategy to the 25th District and the department doubles the number of districts utilizing predictive strategies in 2018 to 13 of Chicago’s 22 districts. In the 25th District, a station-based Strategic Decision Support Center has been installed along with gunshot detection technology and additional crime cameras, to support police in preventing, combating and responding to violent crime. Year-to-date, across the police districts that have implemented an SDSC since at least January, the number of shooting victims has decreased by 41 percent, outpacing reductions citywide.

Scholars in law and economics debate impact of new interest rate benchmark

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 16:50 -0500

The Federal Reserve Bank this week began publishing a new interest rate benchmark that underpins trillions of dollars in financial products, from mortgages to car loans. With the potential expiration in 2021 of LIBOR, the ubiquitous benchmark that has been a mainstay for nearly 50 years, focus is shifting to creating new—and hopefully better—benchmarks that will meet the needs of the financial community while reducing the opportunity for manipulation.

The University of Chicago Law School and the American Financial Exchange recently convened leading figures in law and economics and international finance to discuss how the new benchmark will affect rate-setting by banks, mortgage lenders, credit cards companies and other financial institutions—and the impact on hundreds of millions of consumers. The topic is of special importance to scholars of law and economics—a field born at the University of Chicago Law School that has transformed nearly every area of law.

“Our faculty is known for asking fundamental and important questions,” said Thomas J. Miles, dean of the Law School. “This conference is an example of that because it asks fundamental and important questions about our financial system: Namely, what is the true cost of money? Who should determine that cost? And how should they determine it?”

The Law School’s Coase-Sandor Institute of Law and Economics co-sponsored the April 3 symposium to begin a discussion on the transition to LIBOR alternatives being introduced. SOFR, the Secured Overnight Financial Rate designed by the Alternative Reference Rate Committee, is an overnight secured lending rate based on the U.S. Treasury repurchase agreement market; it was published by the New York Fed for the first time on April 3. Ameribor, created by the American Financial Exchange, reflects the borrowing costs of US small-and mid-sized banks using a 30-day rolling average of the weighted average daily volume in the AFX overnight unsecured market. Two years ago when AFX started, it was trading $5 million and $10 million a day with six participating banks. Today, it has 83 member institutions and has traded as much as $780 million in a single day.

“With contracts tied to LIBOR that are valued at hundreds of trillions of dollars, practitioners need to prepare for this change in the reference rate to minimize its disruption to the financial markets and ensure an orderly transition," said Richard Sandor, CEO of AFX and the Aaron Director Lecturer in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. “We need to understand what the potential transition to SOFR and Ameribor means.”

While dissatisfaction with LIBOR has been linked to scandals of manipulation that surfaced during the financial crisis, the main impetus for change is LIBOR’s instability and lack of underlying transactions, according to David Bowman, special adviser to the Federal Reserve Board and the conference’s keynote speaker.

“LIBOR is based on markets that are not robust. That means you have to rely on the expert judgment of the panel banks, and most of them on most days don’t report a value of LIBOR that is based on any transactions from that day. Rather, they base their submissions on their expert judgement of what they could have borrowed at that day,” Bowman explained.

Recently two banks left the US dollar panel, and others are questioning their willingness to continue to participate, raising the specter that LIBOR may not exist past 2021.

The impact would be enormous. About $200 trillion worth of financial contracts are written on LIBOR, of which 95 percent are derivatives and about $10 trillion are cash products. None of these contracts include language to deal with the end of LIBOR.

David Bowman, special adviser to the Federal Reserve Board and the conference’s keynote speaker, presents at the symposium. (Images courtesy of Kathryn Haviland)

“So if LIBOR stopped today, a bunch of really terrible things would happen based on existing contract language, seriously threatening U.S. and global financial stability,” Bowman said. “It’s not an allegiance to LIBOR itself, but rather how intertwined LIBOR is in a host of legacy trades; unwinding them will be difficult."

Yet, there is good news. About 92 percent of these legacy trades will roll off before 2021, and importantly—starting now—much of the risk related to LIBOR can be reduced immediately if better contract language is written into new trades, providing an economically sensible alternative if LIBOR stops functioning.

“If you write that into contracts now, you will take care of the bulk of your risk, and it would be fairly free,” Bowman said.

While ARRC has considered a number of reference rates as alternatives to LIBOR, it selected SOFR because it has become the most robust. Currently, the average notional daily volume of repo trades captured by SOFR is about $900 billion, compared with, $75 billion in the overnight Fed Funds market and $13 billion in US Treasury Bills.

“The Fed is not saying there can’t be a variety of reference rates, or that everyone has to trade SOFR, or that LIBOR can’t continue," Bowman continued. But if you want something to replace LIBOR potentially, it has to be the most robust rate you can find; it has to support $200 trillion: SOFR can do that.”

Randall Kroszner, the Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School and a former governor of the Federal Reserve System, sees value in using different benchmarks for different situations.

“If you can use a benchmark based on transactions, you reduce the potential for bias. But if it is valuable to have a benchmark without many underlying transactions, you make the trade-off and see how the market develops. After all, LIBOR has stayed with us for a long time, despite its potential for bias,” Kroszner said. “As we think about the transition from LIBOR, we have to consider whether we want to mandate a move in a particular direction or let some spontaneous market forces develop such as the creation of the Ameribor reference rate, which was developed by Richard [Sandor] and his colleagues at AFX for small and medium-sized banks. It may not be the right benchmark for all contracts, but it could work for a certain set. ”

Kroszner suggested there could be a benchmark competition as institutions seek out different options for different circumstances: secured versus unsecured, robust versus limited. In the future, it could be very important to have multiple benchmarks so if something does change, it will make the transition easier and give regulators more flexibility to consider different alternatives.

The legal implications around the transition are large and uncertain, regardless of the benchmark that is chosen, according to Eric Posner, the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. So a few scenarios can be considered.

“The first is, if everybody depends on LIBOR, is there any way to keep it going? Another possibility is to calculate LIBOR in a different way,” Posner said.

Most important, however, is the language in the contract.

“Dr. Bowman encouraged people—as they enter new contracts—to have a fallback with a different reference rate. If that’s the case, the courts will enforce the new term. However, it may be difficult to decide on the fallback rate. You want something that is an economic equivalent to LIBOR, but if you get it wrong, there will be a problem,” Posner explained.

Without a fallback term, it is likely the legacy contract would be upheld as frustrated and the contract would be terminated, with terms possibly being netted out. And there is always the potential, although unlikely, that the court could rewrite the contract.

“What to do about this? It’s important as people design benchmarks that they consider the long-term risks. And people who use them in contracts should think about including fallbacks and safeguards, despite the risks they create. In addition, people who establish benchmarks should be aware of the potential liability,” Posner added.

“We also have to think more about whether a regulatory agency should play a more active role in not only helping to establish benchmarks in the first place, but also in managing them as we go forward.“

An archived livestream of the conference is available here.

New podcast to tell stories behind transformative ideas at UChicago

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 15:30 -0500

A world-renowned classical composer whose music is performed more than almost any other living composer. One of the leading experts on health care expansion whose research is revealing the true impact of health insurance. A paleontologist who discovered an actual evolutionary missing link.

They are just a few of the pioneering scholars featured in a new UChicago podcast called Big Brains, which will tell the stories behind some of the most groundbreaking ideas by scholars at the University of Chicago.

Big Brains will debut April 16 with a conversation featuring evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin, whose revolutionary 2006 discovery of a 375-million-year-old fossil called Tiktaalik roseae provided a missing link in the evolution of animals from sea to land. Future guests will include composer Augusta Read Thomas and health care policy expert Katherine Baicker, among many more.

Hosted by Paul M. Rand, vice president of communications at UChicago, the podcast is part of the UChicago Podcast Network, which launched this year with a series Knowledge Applied. The podcast’s first season, focused on urban research, was ranked in the top higher education podcasts on Apple Podcasts and was featured as one of RadioPublic’s new shows.

“Since I arrived on campus, I’ve marveled at the discoveries and insights happening here that are changing our world for the better,” Rand said. “I think listeners will be excited to learn more about these big ideas and the people behind them.”

New episodes of Big Brains will appear Mondays through the Spring Quarter. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.

UChicago Medicine gets approval to be Level 1 adult trauma center

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 11:50 -0500

The Illinois Department of Public Health has approved the University of Chicago Medicine to be a Level 1 adult trauma center, clearing the final regulatory hurdle for the academic health system to launch the critical service on May 1.

UChicago Medicine’s adult trauma program, which will officially begin at 8 a.m. May 1, will include violence recovery and wraparound services designed to help trauma patients successfully transition back into the community, including outpatient psychiatric, behavioral health and social recovery care.

The adult trauma center designation comes on the heels of IDPH’s visit April 3 to UChicago Medicine’s main Hyde Park campus to review the facility and program as part of the application process.

“This is a momentous occasion for our institution and for the South Side, as we expand critical services to our neighbors,” said Selwyn Rogers Jr., chief of trauma and acute care surgery and director of the trauma center. “With this new IDPH adult-trauma designation, UChicago Medicine can offer integrated trauma care, as we build upon services provided by our existing Level 1 pediatric trauma program and the Burn and Complex Wound Center.”

The University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital has been a designated Level 1 pediatric trauma center since 1990.

A trauma center designation means a hospital as a whole has the resources and staffing needed to provide comprehensive, specialized care for patients who suffer a traumatic injury from such causes as motor vehicle crashes, gunshot wounds, burns and falls. The state requires Level 1 trauma care providers to have critical resources and specialists available 24/7. Emergency departments are the primary entry point for trauma patients, who must be stabilized in specialized trauma bays before being moved to other areas of a hospital for additional medical care.

At UChicago Medicine, faculty and staff from about two dozen departments, sections and work units have been preparing to launch adult trauma services since May 2016, when a state regulatory board approved the health system’s proposal to expand critical services to the community. The three-part plan involved redeveloping Bernard Mitchell Hospital as a dedicated cancer care facility, which allows the addition of 188 much-needed inpatient beds; relocating and building a bigger adult emergency department, which opened in late December; and offering adult trauma care.

“This IDPH approval could not have been accomplished without the hard work and support of the entire organization,” said Sharon O’Keefe, president of the medical center. “In less than two years since state approval of our proposed plan, our faculty and staff have done a tremendous amount of work and collaboration to open a state-of-the-art adult ED and then be ready to launch adult trauma care.”

The South Side has not had a hospital designated as a Level 1 adult trauma center for 27 years. The now-closed Michael Reese Hospital discontinued its trauma care in 1991, and what was then called the University of Chicago Hospital offered adult trauma service from 1986 until 1988.

“This is a true victory for the community,” said Candace Henley, a local health activist who is the co-chair of UChicago Medicine’s Community Advisory Council. “Community voices played a vital role shaping the hospital’s plan to increase access to critical services and meet the growing needs of its neighbors and patients.”

With UChicago Medicine’s launch of adult trauma services on May 1, Chicago will have five Level 1 adult trauma centers within city limits and four Level 1 pediatric trauma centers.

“Our new adult trauma program represents a significant investment for the South Side,” O’Keefe said. “We will be collaborating with Region 11 trauma directors and the Chicago Fire Department’s EMS teams to be a part of the city’s system of trauma care.”

Podcast: Smart sensors capture pulse of Chicago

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 09:45 -0500

Editor’s note: Knowledge Applied is a podcast from the University of Chicago. Each episode will take listeners inside the research of UChicago scholars helping reshape everyday life. The first season of Knowledge Applied will feature researchers tackling some of the biggest questions facing cities today.

Imagine a health monitor for the city, but instead of measuring heart rate or daily steps, this device measures everything from air quality to vehicle traffic.

The idea may sound like science fiction, but it’s becoming a reality for cities like Chicago through the Array of Things project, a collaborative effort between scientists, universities, local government and community members to collect real-time data on the city.

The project, based out of Argonne National Laboratory, is led by Charlie Catlett, director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data at UChicago and Argonne. Catlett is aiming to install 500 sensor nodes around Chicago and eventually setup a network around the world “to improve living and working in the city.”

“We talked to people in the city of Chicago to understand what their challenges are,” Catlett said. “And we found from talking with them and from our own work there’s a lot of data that’s missing, that should be able to be measured, and that requires data analytics, it requires data integration infrastructure and it requires a measurement strategy.”

On this episode of Knowledge Applied, we visit with Carlett at his lab at Argonne to see how the sensors are designed, learn more about their sophisticated measuring capabilities, and discuss the future of “smart cities.”

Subscribe, rate and review Knowledge Applied on iTunes and Stitcher. New episodes appear Mondays.

Podcast: The fight against hunger in hospitals

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 11:23 -0500

Editor’s note: Knowledge Applied is a podcast from the University of Chicago. Each episode will take listeners inside the research of UChicago scholars helping reshape everyday life. The first season of Knowledge Applied will feature researchers tackling some of the biggest questions facing cities today.

For parents and caregivers, taking care of a sick child in the hospital is a nightmare. But for many families, they also must contend with the specter of hunger.

Prof. Stacy Lindau leads a program to help combat hunger called Feed1st. With six food pantries located throughout Comer Children’s Hospital, it is serving a profound solution in the fight against a condition known as “food insecurity.”

“Food insecurity is a technical term, and it means that an individual over a period of time can’t reasonably rely on access to basic nutritional sources or meet their nutritional needs in socially acceptable ways,” said Lindau, a physician and professor at Pritzker School of Medicine in the Departments of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Medicine-Geriatrics.

Although one in five U.S. households with children are food insecure, Lindau had no idea how rampant the problem was in hospitals until she was approached by a chaplain who witnessed families going hungry at the bedside of their sick child.

On this episode of Knowledge Applied, Lindau shares how she decided to address what she called a “real humanitarian need,” the benefits of food pantries, both for families as well as hospital staff, and how the program is providing critical data for future research.

Subscribe, rate and review Knowledge Applied on iTunes and Stitcher.

UChicago makes venture investment into popular Chicago food market

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 17:30 -0500

Foxtrot, the popular food and alcohol delivery service with four storefront locations in Chicago, is the fourth recipient of a venture investment from the UChicago Startup Investment Program. The company has received $450,000 from the University of Chicago as part of their $6 million Series A round, which is led by Fifth Wall.

Foxtrot joins ExplORer Surgical, Tovala and Ascent Technologies in receiving an investment from the University of Chicago through an initiative in which the University co-invests alongside established venture funds in startups led by UChicago faculty, staff, students and alumni. The University has set aside $25 million from its endowment to invest in startups raising early funding rounds.

Michael LaVitola, MBA’14, founded Foxtrot while in his first year at Chicago Booth. What started as a delivery service for fine food and alcohol has grown to four storefronts in popular neighborhoods across Chicago. When Foxtrot launched in 2013, the company had a mobile application that delivered a curated selection of items, often tailored for those entertaining—from craft beer, to fine cheese, to specialty ice cream. Two years later, Foxtrot opened their first brick-and-mortar location in Lincoln Park, and quickly followed with a space in the West Loop.

While going from mobile app to physical location might seem out of order, Foxtrot’s expansion to physical locations has allowed the company to expand their customer base while letting users interact with the products, while also serving as a distribution center. For their third location, Foxtrot also entered into a partnership with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream chain, featuring a “scoop shop” as part of their space on Armitage.

Like the three other recipients of the UChicago Startup Investment Program, LaVitola grew Foxtrot through the Polsky Center’s Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge.

“I came up with the idea of what became Foxtrot during my first year at Booth, but it was just an idea that I was kicking around,” said LaVitola. “I thought the New Venture Challenge would force us to get into the mix, and dedicate time to work on this plan. We were super early—all we had was a PowerPoint, though it was a good-looking PowerPoint.”

By the end of the three-month class, LaVitola had a technical cofounder to build the mobile app, a distributor to get the items and a delivery partner—the main ingredients needed to make Foxtrot a real company.

The Polsky Center’s support of Foxtrot didn’t end with the New Venture Challenge, or with LaVitola’s graduation from Chicago Booth. “Since I graduated, the Polsky Center has been extremely helpful. With things like introductions to venture firms or executives in the space or others who have been further along in the startup space, we’ve gotten a lot of our early traction through the Polsky Center network, which makes it a great place to always come back to,” said LaVitola.

Foxtrot plans to use their recent funding to grow their physical presence, with plans to finish building out Chicago and hopes to be in a new market by the end of the year. LaVitola owes much of this recent funding, which will also allow the company to grow their team from their very lean five employees, to the UChicago Startup Investment Program.

“The UChicago Startup Investment Program is a huge signal to the market. When I was out raising this round, having that commitment from the University that wasn’t a check tied to a competition but was a real investment that went through diligence from the Investment Office, sent a hugely positive signal.”

—This article originally appeared on the Polsky Center website

PODCAST: How trees make people happier and healthier

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 09:00 -0500

Subscribe to Knowledge Applied on iTunes and Stitcher.

It’s no surprise that a little nature can go a long way in making people feel better. But the research of UChicago environmental psychologist Marc Berman shows that adding trees to a city can have a significant impact on a person’s health and happiness.

Berman leads the Environmental Neuroscience Lab at UChicago, and his findings have shown that even just looking at pictures of nature or hearing nature sounds can have positive cognitive effects.

“And the question is: Why?” said Berman, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. “Is it because its restoring attention, so there’s some psychological benefit that’s translating to a physical benefit? Is it because the air is cleaner? Is it because having trees on the street make your neighborhood nicer and people are more encouraged to exercise? We don’t know the answer to those things–yet.”

Berman was recently recognized for his research with the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions by the Association for Psychological Science, awarded annually to “the most creative and promising investigators who embody the future of psychological science.”

On this episode of Knowledge Applied, Berman shares how he measured the effect that trees have on the residents of Toronto, talks about how his lab is mapping brains interacting with nature and discusses a new app which will help people living in cities find their own urban nature experiences.

Subscribe, rate and review Knowledge Applied on iTunes and Stitcher.

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.

UChicago activities at Yerkes Observatory to end in 2018

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 14:30 -0600

The University of Chicago has announced plans to wind down its activities at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., over the next six months and to formally cease on-site operations by Oct. 1, 2018.

The upcoming summer season will therefore be the final season of University activities at Yerkes. The University is announcing the plans well in advance in order to engage with Yerkes staff and nearby communities, including the village of Williams Bay, in considering long-term plans for the property.

Despite its important history, the Yerkes facility and its instrumentation no longer contribute directly to the research mission of the University of Chicago, which has made major investments in the Magellan and Giant Magellan telescopes in Chile. Yerkes has continued to make important contributions through its education and outreach programs, and that work, which remains important to the University, will now relocate to the Hyde Park campus.

“Science at Yerkes in the 20th century led to key discoveries and advances in the field of astronomy, when the observatory helped build the foundation for modern astrophysics,” said Edward (Rocky) Kolb, dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and a professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. “It is an important part of the history of the University, and we hope it will become, in some form, a valuable resource to the surrounding community and visitors to the Lake Geneva area.”

Since the observatory was established by the University in 1897, it has been the home of groundbreaking work by scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Edwin Hubble and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The facility was the home of UChicago’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from the time it opened until it began relocating to Hyde Park in the 1960s. In recent decades, the University’s research in observational astronomy has shifted to using facilities located all over the globe and in space.

The University and staff at Yerkes will honor existing commitments for events at the facility scheduled before Oct. 1, and will accept new bookings on a case-by-case basis.

“Unfortunately, operating Yerkes no longer makes sense for the University from a programmatic or cost standpoint. Drawing to a close our operations there is the first step in a collaborative process to determine the ultimate disposition of the buildings and property,” said David Fithian, executive vice president of the University. “We currently have no specific plans nor have we approached any potential buyers.”

Derek Douglas, vice president for civic engagement and external affairs, will represent the University in discussing options with the leadership of Williams Bay and its residents starting this month.

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.

PODCAST: How to reduce the U.S. prison population by nearly half

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 09:20 -0600

Editor’s note: Knowledge Applied is a new podcast from the University of Chicago News Office. Each of its five episodes will take listeners inside the research of UChicago scholars helping reshape everyday life while tackling some of the biggest questions facing cities today.

Matt Epperson, associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration, has seen the failures of mass incarceration first hand. For more than two decades, Epperson worked with incarcerated individuals as a social worker, including six years in a county jail in Michigan.

Epperson calls the revolving door of mass incarceration returning individuals to jail “the definition of insanity,” especially for individuals suffering from mental illness and drug addiction who failed to receive the help they truly needed.

“The vast majority of folks I worked with in the jail needed something else than incarceration,” Epperson said.

Epperson, along with a colleague from Washington University in St. Louis, leads the Smart Decarceration Initiative, a program utilizing the field of social work to apply policy and behavioral interventions to sustainably reduce the incarcerated population by nearly half.

On the inaugural episode of Knowledge Applied, Epperson discusses the history of mass incarceration, the challenges facing Smart Decarceration, and the social and political changes that have occurred over the last decade that may make this the ideal time to begin shrinking the U.S. prison population.

Subscribe to Knowledge Applied on iTunes and Stitcher. New episodes will be available Monday mornings.