University News

UChicago Crime Lab’s community violence intervention initiative honored at White House

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Vice President Kamala Harris joined community leaders from across the country Feb. 9 at the White House to honor the first graduates of the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy—a pioneering, six-month program that trains leaders to prevent and reduce gun violence in their communities.

In her remarks, Harris recognized the work of the Academy and its graduates, which include 31 leaders from 21 U.S. cities—many of which are from communities of color disproportionately harmed by the consequences of gun violence.

“The brilliance of this inaugural class and its leaders is the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make it real in a way that will be replicated around our country,” Harris said. “I congratulate everyone here and the graduates for all you have put into this and all you do for your communities.”

Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Assistant Attorney General Amy L. Solomon also provided remarks at the event, which was the culmination of a week of events focused on community violence awareness hosted by the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The efforts build upon President Biden’s Safer America Plan, which set forth an agenda to invest in public safety strategies including mental health services; victim services; and after-school, educational, and employment programs for youth.

Community violence intervention programs are an effective approach to preventing gun violence, with some behavioral science-informed CVI programs proven to reduce violence by close to 50%. The Biden-Harris Administration has stated that community violence intervention is one of the best practices to make Americans safer, and the CVILA, in particular, can serve as a model for other initiatives related to community violence reduction.

To address America’s critical public safety challenges, the work of saving lives falls primarily to community violence intervention organizations and police departments—two sectors which have historically lacked investment in human capital. In response, the Crime Lab established the Community Safety Leadership Academies—an initiative focused on bringing the leadership and management practices of community violence intervention and policing into the 21st century. These academies include the Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy and the Policing Leadership Academy.

“Today, we celebrate a milestone at the University of Chicago with the graduation of the first cohort from this Academy,” said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos. “We stand as the nation’s first university to spearhead such an initiative, directly translating our research into action to combat community violence nationwide. Our graduates are living proof that academic rigor and community leadership can converge to forge significant, life-saving change. This program is a proud example of our commitment to creating safer communities through scholarly excellence and practical application.”

The CVILA is the only management and leadership program in the country designed to help the next generation of leaders strengthen their programs and scale their impact. It offers emerging leaders hands-on training on staff management and retention, data use, violence prevention and reduction, and community engagement—ensuring community violence programs turn new funding into on-the-ground impact. As part of the program, students participated in immersive learning labs in Chicago, New York and Oakland that integrated their classroom experiences with community-based experiences.

“We celebrate the increased support for CVI from officials at all government levels, with a special thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration,” said CVILA Executive Director Chico Tillmon. “Today’s White House graduation, hosted by the new Office of Gun Violence Prevention, highlights the critical need to address the persistent safety gap in our country and enhance public safety in Black and Brown communities across the nation. Thanks to CVILA’s leadership education, our graduates are primed to implement sustainable CVI solutions, paving the way for healthy, thriving communities.”

The Community Safety Leadership Academies were launched with a leadership gift from Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel and founder of Griffin Catalyst; and a gift from Michael Sacks, chairman and chief executive officer of GCM Grosvenor. The CSLA is also supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Keegan Bonebrake, Bulls Community Assist Fund, and White Sox Community Fund, which are both funds of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation (support for the CVILA), Dalio Education, John DeBlasio/DeBlasio Family Foundation, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Matt Hinerfeld and Nora Jaskowiak, IMC, Ken O’Keefe, Motorola Solutions Foundation (support for the PLA), Neubauer Family Foundation, Options Clearing Corporation, RJ Melman and Lettuce Entertain You, Jeff and Maggie Shapack and Shapack Partners, and United Airlines.

The Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy’s graduation is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Crown Family Philanthropies, Everytown Community Safety Fund, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions, RJ Melman and Lettuce Entertain You, Steans Family Foundation, and United Airlines.

Learn more about the CVILA and its inaugural graduates at the Academy website.

—Adapted from a story first published on the Crime Lab website

Initial results from South Pole Telescope SPT-3G camera hint at future insights about our universe

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

For more than five years, scientists at the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica have been observing the sky with an upgraded camera. The extended gaze toward the cosmos is picking up remnant light from the universe's early formation. Now researchers have analyzed an initial batch of data, publishing details in the journal Physical Review D. The results from this limited dataset hint at even more powerful future insights about the nature of our universe.

Located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the telescope received a new camera in 2017 known as SPT-3G, which was constructed and now operated by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago.

Equipped with 16,000 detectors — 10 times more than its predecessor — the SPT-3G is central to multi-institutional research led in part by Argonne National Laboratory. The goal is to measure faint light known as the cosmic microwave background. The cosmic microwave background is the afterglow of the Big Bang, when the universe burst forth from a single point of energy nearly 14 billion years ago.

"The cosmic microwave background is a treasure map for cosmologists," said Zhaodi Pan (PhD’20), the paper's lead author and a Maria Goeppert Mayer fellow at Argonne. "Its minuscule variations in temperature and polarization provide a unique window into the universe’s infancy."

The paper in Physical Review D offers the first cosmic microwave background gravitational lensing measurements from the SPT-3G. Gravitational lensing happens when the universe's vast web of matter distorts the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, as it travels across space. If you were to place the curved base of a wine glass on the page of a book, the glass would warp your view of the words behind it. Similarly, matter in the telescope's line of sight forms a lens that bends the CMB light and our view of it. Albert Einstein described this warping in the fabric of space-time in his theory of general relativity.

Measurements of that distortion hold clues about the early universe and mysteries like dark matter, an invisible component of the cosmos. "Dark matter is tricky to detect, because it doesn't interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Currently, we can only observe it through gravitational interactions," Pan said.

Scientists have been studying the CMB ever since it was discovered in the 1960s, observing it through telescopes both on the ground and in space. Even though the newest analysis uses only a few months of SPT-3G data from 2018, the measurement of gravitational lensing is already competitive in the field.

"One of the really exciting parts of this study is that the result comes from what's essentially commissioning data from when we were just beginning observations with the SPT-3G — and the result is already great," said paper coauthor Amy Bender, a physicist at Argonne and the University of Chicago. "We've got five more years of data that we're working on analyzing now, so this just hints at what's to come."

The dry, stable atmosphere and remote location of the South Pole Telescope create as little interference as possible when hunting for CMB patterns. Still, data from the highly sensitive SPT-3G camera contains contamination from the atmosphere, as well as from our own galaxy and extragalactic sources. Analyzing even a few months of data from SPT-3G is an undertaking that lasts years, since researchers need to validate data, filter out noise, and interpret measurements. The team used a dedicated cluster (a group of computers) at the Argonne Laboratory Computing Resource Center to run some of the calculations for the research.

"We found that the observed lensing patterns in this study are well explained by general relativity," Pan said. "This suggests that our current understanding of gravity holds true for these large scales. The results also strengthen our existing understanding of how structures of matter formed in our universe."

SPT-3G lensing maps from additional years of data will also help in probing cosmic inflation, or the idea that the early universe underwent a fast exponential expansion. Cosmic inflation is "another cornerstone of cosmology," Pan noted, and scientists are hunting for signs of early gravitational waves and other direct evidence of this theory. The presence of gravitational lensing introduces interference with inflationary imprints, necessitating the removal of such contamination, which can be calculated using precise lensing measurements.

While some results from the new SPT-3G data will reinforce existing knowledge, others will raise new questions.

"Every time we add more data, we find more things that we don't understand," Bender said. "As you peel back layers of this onion, you learn more and more about your instrument and also about your scientific measurement of the sky."

So little is known about the universe's unseen components that any understanding gained is critical, Pan said: "The more we learn about the distribution of dark matter, the closer we get to understanding its nature and its role in forming the universe that we live in today."

Citation: “Measurement of gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background using SPT-3G 2018 data.” Z. Pan et al., Phys. Rev. D, December 12, 2023.

Funding: National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science High Energy Physics

—Adapted from an article published by Argonne National Laboratory.

Engineer designs molecules for our quantum future

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community. Read about the others here.

Wide is the spectrum of scientific inquiry, ranging from the philosophical—”What is information?”—to the banal — ”Where did I put that Allen wrench?”

For University of Chicago graduate student Chloe Washabaugh, there is joy to be found in all of it. A Ph.D. student in quantum engineering, Washabaugh fashions molecules into tiny quantum information processors, designing them to sense, send or store data—whatever the need.

As a molecular engineer and a collaborator with Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, Washabaugh gets to explore the nature of information, a puzzle that drew her to quantum research in the first place. What is information at its foundation? How is it expressed? How can we manipulate molecules to process it?

Washabaugh is contributing to what is expected to be one of the biggest scientific advances of the century: quantum information engineering. By encoding data in particular features of atom-scale matter, scientists are revolutionizing information technology. In the coming decades, quantum technologies are expected to push the bounds of what can be achieved in health care, finance and communication.

It’s a whole new way of managing digital information. Today’s technologies render information as binary code—0 or 1—which can be translated as “Is there an electron there, or is there not an electron there?” Washabaugh said. Quantum technologies, on the other hand, make fuller use of the electron.

“There’s so much more to what an electron can do than just exist or not exist,” she said. “And that’s quantum information. That’s using the degrees of freedom inherent in these quantum mechanical objects.”

A tailor for qubits

Washabaugh helps build custom molecules that can serve as qubits—carriers of quantum information.

In the family tree of qubit types, the molecular qubit is a relatively young branch, having been under development for only a decade or so. The newness of the research and the technology’s promising versatility made it an attractive pursuit for Washabaugh.

“The way molecular qubits are engineered allows lots of flexibility in how they can be used,” she said. “And their development is young enough that you don’t know what they’re going to be good at yet. That’s why I was excited to work on this.”

Her team’s qubits are composed of a central metal atom—”the qubit’s superstar,” as she calls it—connected to radiating branches made of atoms such as carbon or oxygen. The team adjusts the types and number of branches to tune the qubit’s performance for different uses.

“It’s kind of like being a Savile Row tailor: ‘We want this feature and that feature in order to explore this physics and that physics,’” Washabaugh said. “What molecules have better properties for, say, quantum sensing applications or quantum communication applications? In principle, we could design a qubit that’s tailor-made for any use.”

The group’s specialty is qubits that interact in the optical range of light, making them compatible for a broad range of applications in sensing and communication.

The effort is a true collaboration. Washabaugh and her colleagues are part of a UChicago group headed by David Awschalom, the director of Q-NEXT and the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering. That team joins forces with a lab at MIT headed by Prof. Danna Freedman, who is also part of Q-NEXT.

The two groups enjoy a yin-yang complementarity: Freedman’s group synthesizes the molecules, and Awschalom’s uses advanced techniques to probe the qubits and explore the underlying physics that drives their performance.

“It’s a really cool feedback loop between physicists, chemists and materials scientists to develop this molecular platform to build good qubits,” Washabaugh said.

From Bob the Builder to Chloe the Encoder

A childhood Halloween portended Washabaugh’s future as an engineer. As a three-year-old, she dressed up as Bob the Builder. The costume tracked with her grade-school love of technical projects, though she does remember as a middle schooler “crying and throwing basically a temper tantrum when I started to learn algebra. But once I figured it out, math started to make sense to me,” she said.

By the time she was a student at Cornell University, she knew she wanted to pursue something both practical and cerebral, working toward a degree in engineering physics. She credits her advisor, Prof. Gregory Fuchs, and Prof. Lena Kourkoutis for encouraging her pursuit of quantum information engineering.

“Lena was just wonderful, specifically bringing women into a very male-dominated field. I’m very grateful to her for that,” Washabaugh said.

In 2022, Washabaugh enrolled at the UChicago’s recently established Ph.D. program in quantum engineering.

“I wanted to come to Chicago because it was the next Silicon Valley for quantum information,” she said.

Since arriving at UChicago, Washabaugh has been busy not only encoding information as molecular qubits, but also helping build, from scratch, an experimental setup that will enable her group to examine a broader range of qubit types. The centerpiece: a broadband microscope.

“We’re specifically building this setup so we can handle a wide range of systems that we want to study. That’s important for the molecular qubit work because it’s so new,” she said.

Exciting the next generation of quantum researchers

A passionate advocate for science, Washabaugh is working to inspire diverse audiences to help build a quantum future.

She’s educated herself on public policy to be able to connect with decision makers who have the power to boost national support for quantum research. And she volunteers with UChicago’s STAGE Lab, which organizes interactive games that teach members of the community quantum physics concepts.

“STAGE creates quantum games that are accessible to everyone from little kids to octogenarians—video games and casino games like poker,” Washabaugh said. “I’ve had an absolute joy helping little kids understand or get their hands on some of the demos that represent things that we do in lab.”

The only requirement for understanding quantum information science is the willingness to learn, she says.

“Quantum information is not just for technically savvy,” Washabaugh said. “It’s also for the people who are just interested and may be looking deeper at ‘What is information?’ We need to include people who aren’t normally included in this type of work.”

And now is the time to become involved in what will likely be the one of the most consequential scientific moments in recent memory, she says.

“What really excites me about this field is that it’s new. It feels like a historic moment,” Washabaugh said. “We get to shape the growing field of quantum information to be the best — however you want to define ‘best’ — technological revolution that’s ever taken place.”

—Adapted from a story first published on the Argonne National Laboratory website.

A surprisingly simple model can explain how brain cells organize and connect

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

A new study by physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale describes how connectivity among neurons comes about through general principles of networking and self-organization, rather than the biological features of an individual organism.

The research, published in Nature Physics, accurately describes neuronal connectivity in a variety of model organisms and could apply to non-biological networks like social interactions as well.

“When you’re building simple models to explain biological data, you expect to get a good rough cut that fits some but not all scenarios,” said Stephanie Palmer, Associate Professor of Physics and Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago and senior author of the paper. “You don’t expect it to work as well when you dig into the minutiae, but when we did that here, it ended up explaining things in a way that was really satisfying.”

Understanding how neurons connect

Neurons form an intricate web of connections between synapses to communicate and interact with each other. While the vast number of connections may seem random, networks of brain cells tend to be dominated by a small number of connections that are much stronger than most.

This “heavy-tailed” distribution of connections (so-called because of the way it looks when plotted on a graph) forms the backbone of circuitry that allows organisms to think, learn, communicate and move. Despite the importance of these strong connections, scientists were unsure if this heavy-tailed pattern arises because of biological processes specific to different organisms, or due to basic principles of network organization.

To answer these questions, Palmer and Christopher Lynn, Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University, and Caroline Holmes, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, analyzed connectomes, or maps of brain cell connections. The connectome data came from several different classic lab animals, including fruit flies, roundworms, marine worms and the mouse retina.

To understand how neurons form connections to one another, they developed a model based on Hebbian dynamics, a term coined by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949 that essentially says, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This means the more two neurons activate together, the stronger their connection becomes.

Across the board, the researchers found these Hebbian dynamics produce “heavy-tailed” connection strengths just like they saw in the different organisms. The results indicate that this kind of organization arises from general principles of networking, rather than something specific to the biology of fruit flies, mice, or worms.

The model also provided an unexpected explanation for another networking phenomenon called clustering, which describes the tendency of cells to link with other cells via connections they share. A good example of clustering occurs in social situations. If one person introduces a friend to a third person, those two people are more likely to become friends with them than if they met separately.

"These are mechanisms that everybody agrees are fundamentally going to happen in neuroscience,” Holmes said. “But we see here that if you treat the data carefully and quantitatively, it can give rise to all of these different effects in clustering and distributions, and then you see those things across all of these different organisms.”

Accounting for randomness

As Palmer pointed out, though, biology doesn’t always fit a neat and tidy explanation, and there is still plenty of randomness and noise involved in brain circuits. Neurons sometimes disconnect and rewire with each other — weak connections are pruned, and stronger connections can be formed elsewhere. This randomness provides a check on the kind of Hebbian organization the researchers found in this data, without which strong connections would grow to dominate the network.

The researchers tweaked their model to account for randomness, which improved its accuracy.

“Without that noise aspect, the model would fail,” Lynn said. “It wouldn’t produce anything that worked, which was surprising to us. It turns out you actually need to balance the Hebbian snowball effect with the randomness to get everything to look like real brains.”

Since these rules arise from general networking principles, the team hopes they can extend this work beyond the brain.

“That’s another cool aspect of this work: the way the science got done,” Palmer said. “The folks on this team have a huge diversity of knowledge, from theoretical physics and big data analysis to biochemical and evolutionary networks. We were focused on the brain here, but now we can talk about other types of networks in future work.”

Citation: “Heavy–tailed neuronal connectivity arises from Hebbian self–organization.” Lynn, Holmes, and Palmer, Nature Physics, Jan. 17, 2024.

Funding: National Science Foundation, James S. McDonnell Foundation, National Institutes of Health BRAIN initiative

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

Beyond the music: Folk Festival’s rich tradition at UChicago

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

For more than six decades, the University of Chicago Folk Festival has brought together an array of musicians and performers from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds—all united through a love for music, dance and cultural expression.

According to fourth-year student and Folklore Society co-president Nick Rommel, the campus tradition is a “a celebration of music and culture—one where our relationship with the music is close and personal, not where we are just consumers—which is missing in many aspects of our lives.”

Throughout its history, the festival has welcomed its share of famous performers, including the New Lost City Ramblers; Ralph and Carter Stanley, the titans of bluegrass; Elizabeth Cotten, the influential inventor of the famous “Cotten picking” bass style; and Willie Dixon, one of the most influential Chicago blues artists. A young performer named Bobby Zimmerman—now known as Bob Dylan—even visited the inaugural festival in 1961 but allegedly wasn’t deemed worthy of a spot in the musical lineup.

Now in its 64th year, the two-day 2024 festival will be held on Feb. 9-10. It will include free workshops during the day at Ida Noyes Hall, followed by ticketed concerts at Mandel Hall in the evenings. Tickets and a full schedule of events and musical performances are available on the Folk Festival website.

The festival’s beginnings

The Folk Festival debuted in 1961, when Hyde Park was a vibrant capital of folk culture. Then, folk music was seen by many as a symbol of a simpler, anti-consumerist past. College towns such as Hyde Park, with a large countercultural population disillusioned by the postwar industrial boom, saw folk music’s popularity spread like wildfire. Jam sessions were ubiquitous across campus, and the volunteer-run UChicago Folklore Society ballooned in size, becoming the largest student organization on campus.

With increased popularity came increased scrutiny among folk music’s most ardent fans. Mike Fleischer, president of the Folklore Society from 1961–62, was one such hardliner, and he was determined to protect what he saw as “authentic” folk music. Under Fleischer’s presidency, the society began planning for something unique in the folk music world: a festival focusing on authenticity and in direct opposition to the commercialized mega folk festivals then widely prevalent in the U.S., according to a 2023 article in the University of Chicago Magazine.

This commitment to authenticity, however, meant festival organizers had to take dramatic measures to gather enough performers for a full schedule. That meant combing through folk anthologies to find promising artists, where most artists were rural or working-class amateurs who would submit recordings to labels and never hear anything of their successes. Club representatives had to travel across the country to knock on the doors of often-obscure artists to convince them to perform in Chicago, with many even having to transport the performers to and from the festival themselves.

As journalist Mark Guarino wrote in his book, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival: “The artists were known by these students but forgotten by the people who had recorded them.” John Hurt was one example, a once-celebrated folk icon living in poverty toward the end of his life, but was warmly welcomed to UChicago as a performer, once more.

Rumored to be in attendance during the first-ever festival in 1961 was a then-unknown Woody Guthrie fanatic by the name of Bobby Zimmerman–now known as, Bob Dylan. While some dispute accounts of Dylan having attended the festival, jamming out with local musicians and performing on university radio shows, musician Mike Michaels, EX’61, recalls the famous musician sampling the festival’s scene before moving to New York and becoming the darling of commercial folk.

According to a 2018 UChicago Magazine article, sources said Dylan’s music at the time was forgettable, with the late UChicago history professor Moishe Postone remembering him as “just a bad Woody Guthrie imitator.” Paul Levy, AB’63, remembered Dylan playing for a student committee affiliated with the Folk Festival, likely vying for a spotlight in the Sunday afternoon hootenanny featuring “local Chicago folksingers.” Levy cast the deciding vote not to invite Dylan to play.

“It must have been that he showed up hungry and homeless. … I had the impression he was a completely lost soul,” Levy told the UChicago Magazine. As a consolation prize, Levy and his roommate agreed to let Dylan sleep in the cupboard of their 53rd Street apartment for a few days.

Deciding who fits the festival

Today, the festival remains among the most celebrated in the country. While still loyal to the cause of celebrating authentic folk music, the Folklore Society has loosened its definition of what constitutes “folk” over decades of increasing campus diversity and improved awareness of the history of Black culture. To them, the word “folk” has grown to encompass all generationally transferred traditional music, bringing immense cultural diversity to the Folk Festival, such as blues, electric blues, jazz, cajun traditions, and many international folk genres.

“There is no cut-and-dry definition, but we aim for musical traditions that predate the radio and TV,” Rommel said. “We want traditions that popped out of communities from the bottom-up, where instead of just listening to someone perform and buying their CD, people made their own music, their own traditions, and they had a personal relationship with the artists and with the music.”

During the Society’s weekly meetings, students and older community members—affectionately called “geezers”—debate what constitutes “folk” and who could be allowed into their festivals. They split planned festival content into seven slots, representing certain genres or musical styles, and spend seven weeks in the fall voting on one slot per week. Meetings are often filled with disagreement, debate and good-natured arguments over the meanings of music.

Anyone can participate in their meetings and join their listhost. While most are undergraduate and graduate students, meetings also see many Hyde Park community members, suburban alumni and other folk fans. UChicago staff and faculty have a history of involvement in the Society, notably Starkey Duncan, the late professor of psychology and the main force behind the Folk Festival in the 2000s.

Last year’s event, the first to be in-person after several years of virtual programming, saw a peak of 800 people in attendance. Festival organizers are confident that they can build on that success this year, by offering free workshops in which patrons can learn to play the fiddle, harmonica, and the hurdy-gurdy; or explore how to do quilting, crocheting, change ringing, shanty singing, and more.

More than just a concert

The obscure artists who the festival organizers passionately recruited were often happy to teach eager students the ins and outs of folk music, which helped lead to the Folk Festival’s modern-day format. At night, Mandel Hall is filled with the sounds of melody, but during the day, musicians, dancers and artists hold workshops at Ida Noyes Hall to teach attendees about their passions.

Rommel’s favorites are the dancing workshops, where people can “drop by, learn a few steps, and become part of this beautiful amoeba of dancing.” This year’s attendees will be able to learn a variety of dance styles, such as Klezmer, Morris, Scandinavian, Barn, Balkan, Scottish, Belly and Renaissance dancing.

Perhaps most importantly, the Folk Festival showcases a vibrant mosaic of culture, like a microcosm of the larger UChicago community. It’s a reminder of that which unites us and allows us to bridge cultural divides: a love for art, a willingness to learn about other traditions and a respect for the universal language of music. Often, musicians will invite other artists they meet backstage to perform with them, spontaneously merging and evolving different cultural traditions in front of the crowd. People often break into dances in the hall, communicating in unspoken words.

These moments of connection often resonate with festival-goers, and it is one reason why the festival remains a Hyde Park cultural staple.

“People see the Folk Festival as a close and connected community, which is missing from a lot of aspects of our lives,” Rommel added. “That’s why we’re growing every year.”

For more information, visit the Folk Festival website.

Explore how astrophysicists see the universe with free public talks at UChicago

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Astrophysics is a tricky business. Even the closest stars are trillions of miles away, too far to explore them up close any time soon. So astronomers and physicists have to rely on observations they can make from earth. To do this, every night, and day, a wide array of observatories all over the world are catching the light from distant galaxies, radio waves from the early universe and even ripples in space-time itself.

A series of free public talks will explore how these telescopes work and how we can use them to learn about the universe. Hosted by astrophysicist and postdoctoral researcher Christoph Welling, the series runs every Saturday morning at 11 a.m. from March 23 to May 11.

Welling will discuss modern observatories and what the light they detect can tell us about the objects it came from—as well as new types of observatories that detect other “messengers,” like cosmic rays, neutrinos or gravitational waves.

Sponsored by the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Arthur Holly Compton Lectures honor the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who led the pioneering 1942 UChicago experiment that produced the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. The series has been running since 1976 in order to make accessible the remarkable recent developments in physical science to the public. Videos from past lectures are available at the Enrico Fermi Institute site.

The free talks are located at the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Avenue, in room 106. Learn more here.

UChicago symposium connects diverse firms and decision-makers

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Tight circles and closed ranks have long kept diverse businesses sidelined from contract opportunities with large corporations, nonprofits and universities. A common refrain from decision-makers often was: “We can’t find any women or minorities to consider for this project.”

To address the issue, the University of Chicago founded the Professional Services Symposium 15 years ago to connect diverse talent across the city with officials at UChicago. Led by the University’s Office of Business Diversity, the annual symposium has helped more than 100 minority- and women-owned firms win project contracts with UChicago and earn over $200 million across the spectrum of professional services. The symposium also inspired the first Business Diversity Institute event this year at UChicago.

This year’s symposium, held in November, provided 30 minority- and woman-owned suppliers with opportunities to meet with leadership at UChicago, the Medical Center, and the Obama Foundation through scheduled appointments on campus, as well as a reception and fireside chat.

Nadia Quarles, assistant vice president in the Office of Business Diversity, said this year’s symposium included firms representing legal, money management, communications, information technology, human resources, architecture and engineering industries. It reflected the breadth of opportunities at the symposium for both business and officials.

“This symposium was created 15 years ago because of the lack of exposure the University had to the enormous amount of minority- and women-owned business talent in these high-margin industries. People are used to working with who’ve they have known for a very long time. Oftentimes, those long-standing relationships aren’t with minority-owned businesses,” said Quarles, who has led the symposium since its inception. “Over the years, the symposium has broken down those barriers, and the relationships that result are mutually beneficial. We get the best talent in the marketplace while helping minority- and women-owned business enterprises grow to scale.”

In a video message at this year’s event, President Paul Alivisatos talked about UChicago’s commitment to business diversity.

“This event is just one great example of the results that can be achieved when we collaborate closely with minority- and women-owned businesses,” Alivisatos said. “This symposium is not just a singular event but rather the most visible facet of our enduring dedication to business diversity. It shapes how we conduct business and cultivate relationships with our partners throughout the year. The spirit we bring to our efforts extends further. Even when we engage with majority-owned businesses, we encourage them to embrace diversity by utilizing diverse teams on University projects.”

Closing the country’s “disparity gaps”

During the symposium, Quarles led a conversation with Martin Cabrera Jr., founder and CEO of Cabrera Capital Markets and Cabrera Capital Partners; and John Palfrey, president of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a wide-ranging discussion, the two executives offered their insights on being a diverse business and being the leader of a grant-making body that also procures diverse services, respectively.

Cabrera shared challenges and successes leading to his Latino-owned firms achieving billions in investments since its founding. He discussed how opportunities for diverse businesses are sometimes purposely thwarted and how talented, diverse businesses deserve more representation in areas such as professional services.

“We have to be unapologetic about creating wealth. That’s what we need in our country, to really close the disparity gaps in our country and giving those opportunities—whether it’s in private equity or real estate or institutional money management; that’s what’s really key,” Cabrera said. “When you have some of those minority firms competing at those levels, that’s when you see the true wealth creation.”

Cabrera cited Robert Smith, founder and CEO of the investment firm Vista Equity Partners, as an example. “He’s done extremely well, one of the best private equity firms in the country—actually in the world. He just happens to be black,” he said. “So there are examples out there. Firms just need to be given the opportunity.”

Palfrey discussed demographic shifts in the United States and how racial minorities are now becoming the majority. “It’s true today in Chicago that we are majority-minority, in the sense that 31 percent is Latino, 29 percent is black and 7 percent is Asian,” he said. “We’re already there in Chicago. This is not 2060. We’re leaving a huge amount of talent on the table if we’re not hiring and contracting that way.”

Also during her conversation, Quarles presented the John W. Rogers Jr. Business Diversity Impact Award to Courtney Davis Curtis, assistant vice president for risk management and resilience planning. The annual award recognizes a UChicago leader who has demonstrated a commitment to hiring minority- and women-owned professional services firms.

“It was a real opportunity”

Participants in the symposium said having the undivided attention of leaders in charge of upcoming projects and contracts is game-changing for businesses.

In her meeting, Nicole Johnson-Scales, CEO of NJS Consulting Group, presented her team’s capabilities in the area of human resources, including executive training and coaching. She also asked about future possibilities of being tapped to work with UChicago leaders.

“As an entrepreneur, you're always looking for opportunities to grow your business,” Johnson-Scales said. “To have the opportunity to present to key decision-makers through this forum is both extremely unique and valuable.”

The event made a positive impression on Chris Melvin, managing member at Chicago River Capital. He had an audience with leaders looking to work with money management firms. The meeting was so fluid that Melvin’s team had to deviate from their planned approach, which he said was a welcome change.

“They brought all the decision-makers into a room, and they focused on us,” Melvin said. “We didn’t adhere to the presentation because we were busy answering questions because they were truly engaged,” he said. “I felt like it was a real opportunity. I felt that it wasn’t check-the-box.”

UChicago, UChicago Medicine and City Colleges of Chicago announce health care education partnership in Washington Park

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

The University of Chicago and UChicago Medicine joined City Colleges of Chicago on March 5 to announce plans for a joint project that would create new jobs and establish health care career pathways for South Side residents. The multifaceted project would be built on currently underutilized land on Garfield Boulevard, a historic Washington Park corridor.

The project, which has been guided by community input, includes two related elements. On a vacant parcel of land owned by the University of Chicago, UChicago Medicine plans to build a new facility that consolidates its existing clinical labs, modernizes their operations and maximizes lab test efficiency to ensure best-in-class care.

In the second part of the project, directly west of the proposed UChicago Medicine lab facility, City Colleges of Chicago would build a new learning center for Malcolm X College. The new facility would be built on land owned by the Chicago Transit Authority, immediately east of the Garfield Green Line station.

The connected projects would provide an on-ramp and clear pathway to careers in the health sciences for South Side residents, accelerating their ability to secure in-demand positions that pay well, are available at UChicago Medicine and other South Side hospitals, and are accessible with a one- to two-year degree. Together, the facilities would support approximately 600 jobs, including 200 newly created positions at UChicago Medicine. The Malcolm X College Learning Center in Washington Park will serve up to 800 students and establish the first clinical lab technician program in Chicago.

“The University of Chicago is thrilled to embark on this undertaking, in partnership with the City Colleges and our neighbors in Washington Park,” said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos. “Together, we will not only help address the immense unmet demand for health care professionals throughout the region, but through our efforts to educate, train, and employ individuals from our local communities, we are investing in the creation of a more robust service network that will elevate the collective health and wealth of us all.”

“As an academic health system, UChicago Medicine is committed to educating the next generation of health care workers,” said Mark Anderson, University of Chicago Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs. “Our plans in Washington Park will train and empower a more diverse workforce and support the growing clinical needs of our medical campus. We are proud to collaborate with City Colleges and look forward to working together to improve the lives of residents across Chicago’s South Side.”

The proposed Malcolm X Learning Center is part of a broader City Colleges plan to support more South Side residents interested in pursuing health care careers. City Colleges also will bring a full nursing pathway to Kennedy-King College in Englewood, which will include an associate degree in nursing and a licensed practical nursing program operated by Malcolm X College at KKC, and a basic nursing assistant program and general education courses operated by Kennedy-King College.

“We are thrilled to expand access to City Colleges’ quality, affordable health care education and provide connections to in-demand health care careers for residents of the South Side,” said Chancellor Juan Salgado, City Colleges of Chicago. “Working with our partners at UChicago and UChicago Medicine, together we will create new economic opportunities and support healthy communities.”

“This health care pipeline expansion builds on a successful and strong relationship between City Colleges, the University of Chicago and UChicago Medicine that is already placing our students into upwardly mobile careers,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson. “I applaud the partnership and the investment on our great South Side that this project represents.”

Meeting local student and employer needs

The project will help meet the significant and growing demand from local employers who have contended with a shortage of qualified candidates for clinical lab technician roles in recent years. UChicago Medicine often struggles to hire qualified candidates for its clinical lab tech positions, with positions remaining vacant longer than other healthcare roles. The scarcity of qualified candidates is even greater for South Side safety net hospitals.

Each year, there are approximately 500 job openings for medical laboratory positions in Chicago, 1,000 in Illinois, and 25,000 across the country.

Earning an associate degree in a clinical lab tech program qualifies graduates for positions ranging in pay from $42,000 to $80,000—salaries that more than double the current median income of residents living within a half a mile of the Washington Park site. Salaries increase to $85,000 or more with a bachelor’s degree.

The proximity to UChicago Medicine’s clinical labs will create experiential learning opportunities for Malcolm X College students and job prospects for future graduates. Students enrolled in the clinical lab tech program, for example, will get real-world experience through a clinical rotation at UChicago Medicine.

The Malcolm X College Learning Center would include classrooms, dry labs, office space, and retail space at the street level, as well as support approximately 50 full-time and part-time employees.

The UChicago Medicine facility would support 550 jobs—including approximately 200 new positions—and help the hospital add critical lab capacity to meet the expanded diagnostic needs of a new cancer pavilion, expected to open in 2027.

Strengthening partnerships and pathways

The connected projects would build on a strong, existing partnership between UChicago Medicine and Malcolm X College. In 2016, UChicago Medicine partnered with Malcolm X College as founding members of the Chicagoland Healthcare Workforce Collaborative (CHWC), a consortium of leading health care employers, educators, funders and community-based organizations working together to address shared workforce challenges and meet the health care industry’s evolving needs. Over the past seven years, the collaboration has driven the development of several career pathway and pipeline programs between UChicago Medicine and Malcolm X College.

Additionally, each year UChicago Medicine hosts an average of 65 Malcolm X College students on its campus through clinical and non-clinical internships, practicums, and apprenticeships; engages more than 100 students through career development events; and hires an average of 120 graduates.

Investing in a more vibrant Washington Park

The facilities proposed by UChicago and City Colleges will add a significant daytime population to the neighborhood that will support existing and new retail and restaurants on Garfield Boulevard and contribute to community vitality. Each of the facilities will include new ground floor retail space to provide opportunities for local businesses and serve residents, employees, and students, as well as other foot traffic stemming from the Garfield Green Line station. The project also includes a parking structure for students and employees.

Washington Park has suffered significant disinvestment and population loss over the past several decades. In 2021, Washington Park’s unemployment and poverty rates stood at 21 percent and 47 percent, respectively, compared with 10 and 17 percent citywide. Additionally, approximately 40 percent of land in Washington Park is currently vacant (66 of 164 total acres).

The new investments will complement UChicago’s previous Washington Park revitalization efforts, promoting growth at a critical transit point and potentially sparking additional assets in the area that align with community priorities.

Over the course of the past decade, UChicago has worked with Washington Park residents to reactivate several vacant spaces along East Garfield Boulevard from South Prairie Avenue to South Martin Luther King Drive in an effort to transform the block into a cultural destination. The proposed project would rise along that same stretch, just across Garfield.

Community assets UChicago has added during that time include the renovated Arts Incubator, the new Green Line Performing Arts Center, the historic Green Line station which now houses a retail space for South Side creative entrepreneurs, and, most recently, the Arts Lawn, which turned underutilized, vacant land into green space to be used for arts and culture-based programming and performances.

Guided by community input

In addition to a robust, ongoing community engagement process, UChicago and City Colleges looked to community plans Washington Park residents have contributed to over the past 15 years—such as the 2009 Washington Park Quality of Life Plan and the 2014 Green Health Neighborhoods plan—to guide initial project concepts. Residents prioritized workforce development opportunities, new jobs, revitalization of the Garfield corridor, additional retail establishments on key corridors, and utilization of Green Line stations for new development. The plans also welcomed additional partnerships with nearby employers and higher education institutions, especially those leading to stable, well-paid careers for residents. Current plans reflect each of those priorities.

The institutions’ community engagement process, to date, has included a Feb. 28 community meeting with Washington Park residents hosted by Alderman Pat Dowell and conversations with more than 20 Washington Park community leaders and elected officials.

Regular meetings will be held to share updates and seek community input on the project as it develops. In the coming months, additional information will be shared, including a more detailed site plan, initial renderings, and early thinking on the ground floor retail space. The next community meeting focused on the Washington Park facilities will be held in mid to late April.

The University and UChicago Medicine are intentional about creating opportunities for Chicago residents and minority and women business enterprise (M/WBE)-certified companies through construction and renovation projects. UChicago Medicine’s Washington Park facility will meet construction diversity goals of 35 percent minority-owned contractors and 6 percent women-owned contractors, with 30 percent of hours from minority journey workers and apprentices and 40 percent of hours from minority laborers. The City Colleges of Chicago project will meet its board-approved goals of 35 percent minority-owned contractors and 7 percent women-owned contractors.

—Adapted from a story that first published on the Office of Civic Engagement website.

Submit your images from UChicago research to 2024 Science as Art contest

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

In the course of scientific research, beautiful images can appear in simulations, under microscopes or in photography. They can offer a window into the process of scientific research to the public, as well as inspiring a moment to step back and consider the beauty of the world.

University Communications invites all members of the UChicago community to submit images from their scientific research for the third year of the Science as Art contest. (See the winning entries from 2022 and 2023.)

The winner will receive $300 and a framed print of the winning image. A “fan favorite,” judged by the public on UChicago’s social media feeds, will also receive $150. The images will be displayed on the UChicago main website, the UChicago Intranet, social media and in exhibitions.

Requirements: The images must be the result of research affiliated with the University of Chicago. They must be original images created by the submitters. The images must not be created using A.I. image generation tools, and must not be derived from patient data or samples.

Any commonly used image format is acceptable (though TIFFs are preferred). It should be the largest possible resolution. Multiple submissions are allowed.

The deadline to enter is Tuesday, March 26.

To submit an image to the contest, click here.

Questions? Send inquiries to contest@uchicago.edu.

New tool created by UChicago Data Science Institute sheds light on palm oil production

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Palm oil is used in a plethora of household products, from food items like packaged pastries and chips to cosmetics and soaps or even biofuels. But most palm oil is produced on mono-crop plantations, grown on huge tracts of land that were once tropical rainforests and other biodiverse ecosystems.

Mapping the links between palm oil mills, multinational corporations, and future deforestation risk is a difficult data science problem to solve, but the University of Chicago Data Science Institute and Inclusive Development International (IDI) have created a new tool to help fill gaps in understanding the problem.

The DSI and the IDI, with support from the 11th Hour Project, launched a new tool called PalmWatch on Feb. 22. Using rigorous data science and advanced, low-cost data visualization methods, PalmWatch traces palm oil supplies from the ground level, where the environmental and social impacts of palm oil cultivation occur, to the consumer brands that use the oil in their products.

“This launch of the PalmWatch tool has been a long time coming,” said David Uminsky, executive director of the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. “This has all the hallmarks of a great data science problem.”

“I’m very excited that this dashboard will be owned by local communities and nonprofits working in the space,” said Launa Greer, a software engineer at the DSI. “Previously, investigating the effects of palm oil supply chains was a laborious process; now groups will have analytics at their fingertips.”

Connecting data sources

In an effort to increase transparency, multinational brands do currently report the palm oil mills from which they source their material. However, creating a repository that sorts and organizes mills across the world requires collecting and standardizing this information. And even with this information, it takes additional computational methods to understand how each mill impacts local deforestation risks.

The PalmWatch project began as part of the Data Science Clinic, an experiential project-based course where students work as data scientists under the supervision of DSI staff and faculty.

To build the tool, DSI’s 11th Hour Project, led by Open Spatial Lab technical lead Dylan Halpern, first had to scrape public disclosures from thirteen multinational consumer brands that show which mills these brands source from.

This information then had to be standardized, with the palm oil mills geolocated on a searchable map. The data scientists also had to collect information about the mills, such as which companies own and operate them, which consumer brands they are affiliated with, and their RSPO certification status (a metric measuring sustainability of palm oil production).

Collecting the information was a challenge, said Greer. “Disclosures were typically located on obscure corners of the websites and difficult to scrape for information due to wildly-varying PDF layouts,” she said. “We hope that making a clean, consolidated, and machine readable dataset of mills available to the public will accelerate similar supply-chain research efforts.”

Built with future-proofing in mind

Making sure that PalmWatch would be cheap to maintain and easy to update was a vital part of the process to ensure the website will continue to be a useful investigative tool. PalmWatch was built to not require heavy computation that can add up in costs to web hosts over time.

“Ongoing funding for community-centered data science projects is not always guaranteed, so it’s important to architect software that is cheap to own in the long term,” said DSI’s Open Spatial Lab technical lead Dylan Halpern. “It’s tragic to see fantastic software engineering and community-engaged data science fade away from public view due simply to a server bill.”

Full data files are available for public download. “We realized early on that palm oil production impacts each part of the world in a unique way; we integrated a collaborative content management system so that local advocates can add critical context, news, legal briefings, and other local knowledge to PalmWatch at every level—mill, country, consumer brand, and everything in between,” said Halpern.

The development team has future plans for additional updates, including a data pipeline github, a disclosure contribution guide, and plans to offer hands-on training to social impact organizations and journalists who want to dig deeper into specific data questions.

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

In event at UChicago, Courtney B. Vance urges Black men to seek mental health care

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Drawing upon his own personal experiences of losing his father and godson to suicide, actor Courtney B. Vance recently spoke at University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice about the importance of mental health and wellness among Black men.

As the keynote speaker for the 2024 African American Alumni Committee Symposium, Vance discussed his life and a book he-coauthored, “The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power,” which explores suicide among Black men. The broader event focused on how to break down barriers, deconstruct cultural stigmas, and improve equity and access to Black men’s mental health and wellness.

“We're very good at suffering,” Vance said. “And we’ll stay there to suffer through whatever, because it's too much work to actually get some help. But you just have to get ready for the journey for yourself, because it’s about us. It's about finding your way to you.”

The Feb. 17 event began with remarks by Waldo E. Johnson Jr., UChicago’s vice provost for diversity and inclusion and professor at the Crown Family School. Johnson spoke to the lived experiences of Black men with respect to their struggle toward sustaining good mental health.

Johnson said that Vance’s book was “in conversation with the symposium’s focus on the intersectionality of identity, which links the social complexities inherent in reconciling the unique challenges posed when embracing race, gender, sexuality, and other, which are often contested identities among Black adolescent and adult men.” He pointed to his own research that has shown toxic masculinity exerts a heavy toll on the healthy development of Black male identity.

Throughout his talk, Vance spoke from a place of experience, not expertise. “First of all, I’m the poster child for not knowing what to do,” he said. “That’s why we wrote the book, because people shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Janelle R. Goodwill, an assistant professor at the Crown Family School and a scholar who examines suicide within the African American community, explained that “The Invisible Ache” was written to speak directly to Black men who might be experiencing some challenges with their mental health.

Co-authored with Dr. Robin Smith, Vance’s book opens with the lives and then suicides of Vance’s father and godson, then moves into Vance’s experience with beginning therapy at age 30.

“I was raised in a household where we were about God and achievement,” Vance said. “That's how we dealt with things.” But when his father died, his mother insisted he and his sister seek out a therapist — as she eventually would.

Vance said it took him seeing seven or eight different therapists before he found the right fit. He expected to work with someone similar to him — perhaps someone who looked like him, had the same religion — but instead found the kindness he needed in a female Jewish therapist, “Dr. K.”

“When I met Dr. K—when I shook her hand—I knew I was home,” he said. “I sat down and I started talking a mile a minute and I talked for 20 minutes straight without breathing. And Dr. K said: ‘Courtney, you don't have to tell me everything today.’ I started to realize that this is my time, and this is my space.”

Vance described his journey with therapy, which also included setting aside his preconceived notions of what being a husband meant and the expectations he put on his partner. When he focused on what he could do for his family, his wife did the same. Now, he said, they now almost compete to support the other person: “Once you start to do for other people, they turn around and say, ‘What can I do for you?’”

The keynote address ended with Vance reading an excerpt from the book: “I want to let those in so much emotional pain that they're contemplating taking their own lives know that we've all had moments of utter despair,” he read. “But if they just hold on, if they go to a therapist, see a doctor about medication, talk to a friend, call up a religious leader, they can get through it…. or just have the opportunity to sit and gaze at one more sunset, they will be glad they did.”

—Adapted from a story that first appeared on the Crown Family School website.

The doctor ushering in a new era of cancer research and care at UChicago

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Outsmarting cancer is a long game, says Prof. Kunle Odunsi. The director of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center has devoted his career in gynecologic oncology to doing just that.

Arriving in 2021, Odunsi was drawn to UChicago by the potential to join forces with partners, including Argonne National Laboratory and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, that can bring powerful tools and expertise to the effort against cancer. Resources like artificial intelligence and molecular engineering, Odunsi believes, will be crucial to the next important breakthroughs, whether those prove to be novel forms of cellular therapy that boost the immune system, effective drugs identified with the help of artificial intelligence, new vaccines—or all of the above.

In 2027, Odunsi and his colleagues will gain a valuable tool in their work: a 575,000-square-foot pavilion dedicated to cancer treatment and research. The first facility of its kind in Illinois, the pavilion will bring all of the University’s cancer researchers and caregivers together in one location. For patients it will provide seamless care, with in-house technology for diagnosis and personalized therapies, support services such as stress reduction and nutritional care, and dedicated space for patients to participate in the latest clinical trials.

Odunsi first studied medicine in his native Nigeria before completing residencies at the University of Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital and at Yale New Haven Hospital, and a research fellowship at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. His comments have been edited and condensed.

How did cancer care and research become your life’s work?

As a medical student in Nigeria, I was deeply touched by the resilience of cancer patients and their families, and wanted to do something to help. In addition, I had a few family members succumb to this deadly disease.

What I found during my training and as a junior faculty member was that more than 70 percent of patients will initially respond to treatment. I would sit down with those patients and tell them there’s no evidence of disease. Sometimes they’d hug me. But at the back of my mind, I was plagued by the question of whether this cancer was going to come back, because we know there’s about a 70 percent chance of relapse, typically within 12 to 18 months.

That became one of the driving forces for me initially. I began to ask several questions: How can we extend remission rates in ovarian cancer patients? Can we use the immune system to prevent relapse of cancer, similar to how we use vaccines for seasonal flu, when a patient is in remission? If so, what are potential targets on cancer cells that could be recognized by the immune system that we can use to construct such vaccines?

My group spent years trying to identify ideal targets that can be recognized by the immune system. The ideal target would be a molecule that is present on the cancer cell—for instance, a protein or an enzyme—but not in other normal tissue, to prevent side effects. And it must have the potential to elicit a response by the immune system.

We were fortunate to identify a few of these types of targets and started to develop vaccines that we tested in preclinical models and in clinical trials. We demonstrated that while we could elicit immune responses to the cancer vaccines, and saw extended remission rates in some patients, overall they were not sufficient to control tumor progression.

Next, we started learning a lot of other things about how the cancer fights back, and how the tumor environment is hostile to our vaccine-induced immune cells. That led us to ask new questions about how to counteract some of the negative feedback. Our work got to the point where we recognized the need to generate large numbers of immune cells for attacking tumors, so we can overwhelm any negative feedback. We embarked on a program of generating engineered T cells for the treatment of ovarian cancer patients.

What made you want to come to UChicago?

I came to a point in my career when I was looking for an institution where I could be part of the next major breakthrough in cancer research and care.

I believe that institution is the University of Chicago. As I looked at UChicago, I saw an opportunity to leverage the intellectual firepower of a world-class university for advancing cancer research and care. Examples include access to Argonne, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the Physical Sciences Division, where we can work with chemists, physicists, and experts in a number of other disciplines. I felt that the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center is an environment where we can develop a bold vision that would truly make impactful breakthroughs that will have broad benefit for humanity—as well as educate the next generation of the cancer workforce. I believe we have all the ingredients within the University of Chicago ecosystem to be able to accomplish this vision.

What are the tactics for pursuing that vision?

One of the first things we did after my arrival was to conduct a strategic planning exercise. We carefully identified our strengths and opportunities where we can make the most impact. One example is in cancer drug discovery and development. We are identifying new cancer targets and discovering new drugs at an accelerated pace thanks to our collaboration with Argonne. With Argonne’s capabilities in supercomputation and artificial intelligence, we are able to probe billions of compounds to the limits of chemical space and identify the best ones to advance toward clinical development. This program cuts across multiple disciplines that include the Department of Chemistry and PME.

Another approach is in the area of cellular therapies. Several investigators in the Biological Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering are working together to ask, How can we engineer super-immune cells that can go in and destroy the tumor target, as well as resist counterattack by the cancer? First-generation cell therapies have been successful for treating liquid tumors [tumors affecting the blood, bone marrow, or lymphatic system] like lymphoma and leukemia. There are significant challenges with solid tumors such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer. We’re trying to overcome those limitations with innovative engineering strategies.

How are you collaborating with other areas of the University?

One major priority for the center is cancer health disparities.

In our own area on the South Side of Chicago, you see significantly higher rates of mortality from cancer than in the overall U.S. population. Some of the challenges here include the social determinants of health and issues of access to care and nutrition. These facts compel us to think of novel ways to collaborate with the Social Sciences Division, the Harris School of Public Policy, the Department of Economics and Chicago Booth. We have documented health disparities, but what are the critical gaps in knowledge about them that will then allow us potentially to influence policy?

All of these interactions and collaborations have led us to create a new Center to Eliminate Cancer Inequity, or CinEQUITY.

Is immunotherapy the future of cancer treatment?

Immunotherapy has been revolutionary for cancer patients. I believe we are still at the beginning of the immunotherapy revolution, as we continue to make new discoveries about how the immune system interacts with cancer. Basically, it has been shown that the immune system can recognize and destroy cancers. The next question is, How do you maximally leverage that information? We’ve come a long way. Many kinds of immunotherapy are now approved by the FDA and have become part of standard care. Probably most well known is the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors. These inhibitors are able to unleash the immune system, especially the preexisting spontaneous immune reaction to the cancer. This therapy has been approved for many types of cancers, including lung, liver, kidney, bladder and cervical.

Another form of immunotherapy that is likely to become part of standard care is cellular immunotherapy. This is advancing rapidly, mostly because of our increased understanding of the biology of critical immune cells such as T cells and NK [natural killer] cells in our body. Can we generate large numbers of tumor-specific cells and give them back to the patient, and how can we properly reengineer them to be much more effective?

Another avenue of immunotherapy is cancer vaccines. I anticipate that in the future we will have both therapeutic vaccines as well as vaccines for immunoprevention. There are still no approved therapeutic vaccines against cancer, but there are preventive vaccines, such as the HPV vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus infection, which in turn decreases the chance of developing cervical cancer.

Who will be treated in the pavilion, and what will be different about their care?

We envision this will become a destination for care of some of the most difficult cancer cases—patients who can greatly benefit from the expertise and the technology—from our local community as well as from other parts of the country and probably the world.

One of the things we challenged ourselves with during planning was to ask: What will cancer care be like in 10 or 20 or 30 years? We unleashed our imagination in the areas of technology, research and how to provide the best patient experience. Research and innovation are embedded everywhere in the pavilion—from when a patient makes the first contact and throughout that patient’s journey. It’s in the DNA of this building. Patients can expect to have access to the latest and best care and to innovative clinical trials.

Cancer diagnosis is one of the most challenging periods for patients and their families, so the pavilion is designed to provide maximum support as they navigate the cancer journey. And let’s not forget that this new building is part of a hub-and-spoke model with our network of facilities throughout the area. Everything that happens in those places will be coordinated with the central hub, so patients at all locations can expect the same level of care.

—This story is adapted from one that appeared in the Winter 2024 University of Chicago Magazine.

What role does the gut microbiome play in why more women develop Alzheimer’s disease?

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, almost two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s dementia are women. While some of this discrepancy can be attributed to women living longer than men on average, researchers believe other factors play a role as well.

A pair of new studies from the University of Chicago explore differences in the development of Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in male and female mice. One study found gender differences in the response to a recently approved Alzheimer’s drug; the other examines the impact of estrogen, a reproductive hormone, on two hallmark symptoms of the disease.

The results suggest that estrogen likely plays a role in the formation of Alzheimer’s, in some combination with the gut microbiome, but the details remain to be understood.

The researchers hope, however, that the research provides clues that could someday help develop treatments.

Clues pointing to the microbiome

Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by plaques—clumps of the protein known as amyloid beta—that accumulate in the brain, as well as inflammation of certain immune cells called microglia. In order to better understand the disease and how it works, researchers run tests using mice that have been engineered to develop these Alzheimers markers.

Researchers have suspected that the gut microbiome plays some role in Alzheimer’s, but it is not fully understood. In 2019, a research team led by Sangram Sisodia, the Thomas A. Reynolds Sr. Family Professor of Neurobiology at UChicago, found when they treated mice with antibiotics to wipe out the gut microbiome, the male mice went on to develop fewer markers of Alzheimer’s disease—but surprisingly, the same was not true for female mice.

A new study, published in Scientific Reports, investigated these differences more directly. Working with the UChicago Microbiome Center, postdoctoral scholar and first author of the study Piyali Saha wanted to investigate why the female mice did not exhibit reductions in Alzheimer’s after being treated with antibiotics.

Saha wondered if levels of circulating estrogen might be the reason. She treated Alzheimer’s-prone mice with antibiotics and saw that estrogen levels increased threefold in the female mice.

She then conducted a second set of experiments in which she removed the ovaries of female mice when they were just a few weeks old, in effect stopping estrogen production. This procedure reduced markers of Alzheimer’s.

In a third experiment, she gave ovary-less mice estradiol in their drinking water to restore estrogen levels. When she did, the Alzheimer’s markers increased.

The composition of the gut microbiome varied significantly among the mice undergoing ovarectomies, those later receiving estradiol, and the control groups.

“That came out of the blue; I had no idea that manipulating estrogen levels was going to change things that dramatically,” Sisodia said. “Estrogen seems to be the driver of the changes we see in Alzheimer’s pathology, but we also know the microbiome is changing. So, there's this crosstalk between the two.”

The finding may counter longstanding practices of using hormone replacement therapy to restore estrogen levels in postmenopausal women to help prevent cognitive decline—a strategy also brought into question by recent epidemiological studies. For example, a large-scale study of more than 20,000 women in Denmark from 2000 to 2018 showed that women who took estrogen replacement therapy had a higher risk of Alzheimer’s and other dementias than those who did not receive this treatment.

“This evidence would suggest that estrogen replacement therapy is not the right thing to do,” Sisodia said. “We see in the current study that estrogen levels always have an impact on amyloid deposition. If you take away the source of estrogen in mice at a very early stage, amyloid deposition goes away. It’s pretty remarkable.”

Sisodia stressed that there is still a lot to learn about the chain of events that leads from estrogen levels to changes in the gut microbiome and changes in amyloid deposition. It could be that estrogen affects the composition and abundance of certain types of bacteria, which in turn changes the metabolites and enzymes they produce that further impact brain function. Timing also matters, because once symptoms of Alzheimer’s become apparent, it is far too late to reverse the damage.

Shutting down estrogen production completely in women isn’t a solution, but the clues from these studies hint at possible intermediate steps.

“If we can identify some target molecules that are involved in this biological cascade of estrogen metabolism, maybe we can develop some sort of medicine to mitigate the effects,” Sisodia said. “I think that's potentially a great therapeutic avenue, at least for 50% of the population.”

A pharmaceutical puzzle

In the second paper, published in Molecular Neurodegeneration, Sisodia and his colleagues tested the effects of a new drug called sodium oligomannate, or GV-971, on the formation of amyloid deposits and neuroinflammation. Originally derived from brown seaweed by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceuticals, the compound has undergone Phase III clinical trial testing in China and is now clinically approved for patients with Alzheimer’s.

When Sisodia and his team tested GV-971 on mice prone to Alzheimer’s, they saw a significant drop in amyloid deposits, even at the lowest doses, and a reduction in inflammatory markers in the microglia—but again, these changes were only observed in male animals. They also noted significant changes in the composition and abundance of several types of gut bacteria in male mice, but fewer changes in the microbiome of female mice.

Sisodia said further studies are needed to understand the links between GV-971, the microbiome, amyloid deposition and inflammation—either by introducing or removing these key bacteria and analyzing the effects of the metabolites they produce.

“How do those pathways interact? And how does that lead to the changes in brain function? That's all yet to be determined,” he said.

Citations:

1. “Sodium oligomannate alters gut microbiota, reduces cerebral amyloidosis, and reactive microglia in a sex-specific manner,” Bosch et al, Molecular Degeneration, Feb. 17, 2024.

Funding: National Institute of Aging, the Open Philanthropy Project and Good Ventures Foundation, Bright Focus Research Fellowship, Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship award, Shanghai Green Valley Pharmaceuticals, Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, Luminescence Foundation.

2. “Early modulation of the gut microbiome by female sex hormones alters amyloid pathology and microglial function,” Saha et al, Scientific Reports, Jan. 21, 2024.

Funding: Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, the Open Philanthropy Project and Good Ventures Foundation, the Luminescence Foundation, Safadi Program for Excellence in Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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

UChicago’s Court Theatre breathes new life into ‘Antigone’

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Since 2019, the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre has been on a fateful journey. As part of their mission to continually bring classic theatre to modern audiences, the Court set out to reimagine a tragic tale performed for over 2,000 years—Sophocles's Oedipus Trilogy.

Their adaption of the three-play cycle began with “Oedipus Rex.” In 2023, “The Gospel at Colonus” set the story of Oedipus’s redemption to a soul-stirring gospel soundtrack. On Feb. 2, Court opened “Antigone,” the final installment of their epic retelling.

“Antigone” centers on the daughter/sister of Oedipus. As the play opens, the eponymous heroine is in mourning. Antigone’s brothers are dead—murdered by each other’s hand in a civil war. Her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, has declared one of them a traitor. Directly defying his decree, Antigone buries her brother and incites a tragic chain of events.

Trace the journeys of Oedipus and Antigone from ancient Greece, to Court’s stage, to a UChicago classroom.

Oedipus Rex

“Oedipus Rex” tells the story of a Greek king haunted by a prophecy. Despite efforts to avoid an oracle’s foretelling that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus ultimately discovers he has already fulfilled his cursed fate.

The play was written by the Greek writer Sophocles around 429 B.C.E. “Rex,” and each subsequent production in the trilogy, used translations by Nicolas Rudall, Court’s founding artistic director. Rudall also taught classics for 40 years at UChicago and was known for his approachable, stage-friendly translations.

“The trilogy began with ‘Oedipus Rex’ and with Nick Rudall,” said Charles Newell, Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre. “His translation, love of ancient Greek narrative, and belief in the classics’ modern relevance were the bedrock of this project.”

The Gospel at Colonus

In “The Gospel at Colonus,” a blinded Oedipus wanders in exile. His trek takes him to the village of Colonus where he seeks redemption, healing and a final resting place.

First staged in 1983 by creators Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, “Gospel” is a musical adaptation of Sophocles’s “Oedipus at Colonus” situated in the Black Pentecostal tradition. Court’s reprisal, staged during the 40th anniversary year of the original production, added elements of Chicago’s own gospel history.

In the summer of 2023, Court was invited to remount the critically acclaimed reprisal at L.A.’s Getty Villa.

Antigone

The final play of Court’s trilogy, “Antigone” takes place in the aftermath of a civil war. First staged in 441 B.C.E., the play’s characters wrestle with the ethics and consequences of Antigone’s choice to defy authority.

“I’ve been in many instances throughout my life where I was being done wrong, but was scared to say something because of the repercussions,” said Ariana Burks, who reprises her role as Antigone’s sister Ismene.

“What I love about the story of Antigone is that—without a doubt, with no hesitation—Antigone knew what was right, and she knew what she needed to do for her family, despite what was going to happen to her.”

“the sister’s”

The art on the show’s playbills pulls inspiration from the relationship between Antigone and Ismene. Painted by Savannah E. Bowman, AB’23, “the sister’s” captures the love and tension between the two characters.

“My piece characterizes the general tragedy in the family and both sisters facing their fates: Antigone being condemned to death for disobedience and Ismene being left to mourn her,” said Bowman. “I feel like my piece could be representative of that snapshot, in which they’re both realizing that tragedy.”

From stage to classroom

In “Antigone and the Making of Theater,” taught by UChicago Prof. Sarah Nooter, students attended rehearsals and performances of the play at Court. They were also visited by actors Aeriel Williams, Ariana Burks, Timothy Edward Kane and set designer John Culbert.

“Each encounter, engagement, and conversation has immeasurably deepened their engagement in this play, in theater itself, and in theater as a way of life,” Nooter said.

As part of their assignments, students were tasked with their own adaptations and stagings of the play.

“This class has been built around the idea that an ancient text is resuscitated—brought back to life—each time it is translated, adapted, theorized, staged, performed,” said Nooter. “To be able to demonstrate this through the production of ‘Antigone’ at the Court Theatre has been nothing less than transformative.”

Director’s cut

The class will also be visited by “Antigone” director Gabrielle Randle-Bent, who also served as dramaturg for the Oedipus Trilogy.

“We rarely choose ‘Antigone’—it chooses its moment,” Randle-Bent said. “So the question then becomes, ‘What is it about now that means that we need Antigone?’ It feels really right for right now, and that urgency is incredibly exciting to me as a director, as a scholar, and as a person in our world at this moment.”

—This story contains material which first appeared on Court Theatre’s website.

—“Antigone” will run until March 2. Tickets are now on sale.

Illinois governor proposes $500M for quantum technologies in new budget

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is asking state legislators for half a billion dollars for quantum technologies in the proposed budget he released Wednesday—the latest show of support for a regional quantum ecosystem that has attracted millions of dollars in corporate and government investment in recent years and is emerging as a central driver of U.S. leadership in the field.

In an interview with Axios, Pritzker said his proposal includes $200 million for a cryogenic facility needed to keep quantum computing systems cool and $100 million for the development of a quantum campus.

"We already were establishing ourselves as a leading hub for quantum development—now we have the opportunity to take it a big step further," Pritzker told the outlet.

The University of Chicago has assembled a world-class group of scientists and engineers who are leading the quantum revolution. In addition to cutting-edge faculty in engineering, physics and chemistry, UChicago offers one of the nation's first doctoral programs in quantum science and engineering through the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

The governor’s announcement comes as a coalition led by the UChicago-based Chicago Quantum Exchange competes for up to $70 million in federal funding during the second phase of a federal initiative aimed at supercharging innovation economies that have the potential to become global leaders in a critical technology within a decade. The Bloch Tech Hub, the cross-sector coalition led by the Chicago Quantum Exchange, earned the region a designation as a U.S. Regional Innovation and Technology Hub for quantum technologies in the first phase of the program last year. That selection was announced in October by the  White House and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA).

While based at UChicago, the Chicago Quantum Exchange is anchored by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Northwestern University and includes more than 40 corporate, international, nonprofit, and regional partners. It has played a key role in fostering the cross-sector partnerships that are at the center of the region’s growing strength in the field.

Recent funding has included $280 million in federal funding as part of the 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act and a combined $150 million from IBM and Google to the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo last year for two separate plans to advance quantum computing.

“The University of Chicago is deeply committed to research in quantum science and technology research, and we are enthusiastic about our partnerships with the remarkable research universities and national laboratories as we form the world’s premiere quantum technology community,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “Governor Pritzker has been fostering the innovation environment in Illinois, and today’s announcement will uplift these efforts.  The advancement of quantum technologies with these extraordinary investments will lead to equally extraordinary advances for the state and for the nation as a whole.”

The Chicago region is home to some of the world’s leading experts in quantum information science; a broad and well-distributed industry base; a vibrant startup culture that includes Duality, the nation’s first quantum startup accelerator; four of the 10 National Quantum Initiative Act research centers; and infrastructure that includes a 124-mile quantum network that is one of the nation’s longest.

“Government investment is key to the growing strength of the Chicago region’s quantum ecosystem, which has been at the heart of advancing research, building a future quantum workforce, and driving the quantum economy,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “Quantum technologies have the potential to bring advances that will strengthen U.S. economic and national security, making this support important not only for the region but for the nation.”

–Adapted from an article that first appeared on the Chicago Quantum Exchange website.

Learning the habits of the “Mind”

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

For more than 90 years, the Core curriculum at the University of Chicago has formed the basis for undergraduate students’ academic journey through the College. Yet the Core’s transformative impact goes far beyond what students learn in the classrooms; rather, it teaches them and reinforces new learning habits.

To complete the Core, students take classes across seven academic disciplines, including a “sequence” of three courses in the social sciences. One such sequence, known as “Mind,” explores, in essence, how the human mind works.

“Everybody thinks they know their own mind,” said Anne Henly, a senior instructional professor who has taught the Mind for more than 20 years. “They have ideas about things that motivate other people, or why other people act the way they do. ‘Mind’ is a course that systematically explores how minds work, why our minds work the way they do, how we can investigate how minds work, and how we can understand our own mind and other people's minds.”

As director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Psychology and chair of the course, Henly is passionate about the sequence’s material, which explores the mind through multiple lenses including biological mechanisms and social context. She’s also seen the impact it’s had on her students.

“I love watching the growth of the students—in their skills, interests and understanding of how minds work, over an entire year,” she said. “Many of them begin the sequence grounded in their own beliefs, but over time they learn to develop an understanding of how to challenge and question those beliefs, and to write about them impartially.”

Students said they are grateful for not only what they learned about the complexities of the human mind, but also for how the course helped them expand their own minds’ capacities for analytical and creative thought.

Maddie Yoo, a third-year student studying math and economics, said she came into the course feeling self-conscious about her ability to study the social sciences.

“A big thing I learned was how not only to read between the lines of these studies and take away the main idea, but also how to extend upon them and ask questions about how these studies could have implications towards other phenomena,” she said.

The assigned readings in Mind are not particularly long, but they are highly technical, challenging students to understand the arguments the authors are making—and in the process learn a new set of skills apart from the course.

“There’s a set of writing and thinking skills that students develop, as well as the ability to separate one’s ideas from those of others, and synthesize them,” Henly said. “How do you put a diverse set of ideas into dialogue with one another, integrate them to realize an important underlying generalization, and then support your argument with evidence?”

Third-year student Emily Kang, a biological sciences major on a pre-med track, said Henly pushed her to think deeper about the topics she was studying. She recalls learning how hormones called glucocorticoids, involved in the regulation of stress, had both psychological and physiological phenomena.

Kang said the course has helped her see the human body, medicine and the world around her in a more comprehensive way.

“The course is really about laying out how minds are not only products of social circumstances and cultures that we're in, but also that they are embedded in us as biological material beings,” Henly said. “Our mental states and processes are implemented by the biological wetware of which we are made.”

Both Yoo and Kang credit the course for helping improve their academic writing.

“I can see the way I read papers and articles differently and assess arguments now [compared to last school year],” Yoo said. “I’m able to ask really deep questions that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to, having not taken the Mind sequence.”

—Adapted from a story that was first published on the College website.

UChicago scholar premieres documentary on racial health disparities

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

In the United States, Black newborns are 2.5 times more likely to die than white newborns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality rate for Black mothers (and Black Americans in general) skyrocketed. UChicago Prof. Micere Keels recognized the gap between what research tell us and the media discourse.

“In every major health event, there are racial health disparities because there are core, underlying drivers in access to resources that allow us to recover when we get sick,” said Keels, who studies system inequities in UChicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development. “Yes, COVID matters. But if we keep talking about just this moment, we’re going to be back here again.”

Not interested in writing another paper fated to a shelf, Keels was driven to pick up a new educational tool—documentary filmmaking.

“The Fight for Black Lives” explores racial health disparities in the U.S. through personal stories of Black women who were pregnant during the first year of the pandemic, along with experts across the healthcare field. The film also shines a light on how Reconstruction-era policies still affect health outcomes today.

Directed by Keels, the documentary premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this February. The film will also screen on Feb. 23 at the Social Justice Now Film Festival.

Keels is also partnering with public health departments to screen the documentary for policymakers and community members, the first of which will be in Fairfax County.

In the following edited Q&A, Keels delves into her inspiration, process and hopes for the film.

What drove you to make a documentary?

I'd been looking at racial, ethnic and socio-economic disparities in child and adolescent outcomes. Health really wasn't a focus of my research. I knew that it mattered because you need health to take advantage of school and employment opportunities. But then the pandemic came along. It was COVID that pushed me to say: Okay, instead of writing a paper around health inequalities, let me do something very different.

I had already been on this path of trying to learn other forms of narrative communication, but still sharing the science. I think a documentary is a great way of sharing information that can get more access and traction with the general public.

Why did you choose to focus on infant and maternal health?

The racial disparity gap in maternal and infant health is fairly large.

One of the experts in the documentary says: Pregnancy is not a disease. Pregnancy is not a health problem. So, if you're seeing poor health outcomes among pregnant people and infants, it's that our system is not set up for their well-being. It's a vulnerable time, so if we are under stress, if we're not getting access to proper nutrition and care, if we are exposed to environmental toxins, and if our healthcare system is not set up to support us, then you are going to see these poor outcomes.

What’s something in the film that you think would surprise people?

The documentary came after I taught a class on racial health disparities in the fall of 2020. Working with those students gave me insight into how the general public was thinking about COVID, as if there was something unique about this moment.

One powerful thing for students is when I put up slides that have the information, but not the date. There's one that seems like it could be from today, but it’s actually from 1920. That really shifts their perspective when I can say: these disparities in health have not changed for over 100 years. All Americans are healthier and have improved, but our racial and ethnic and socio-economic gaps have not.

How did you choose who you wanted to see and hear from in the film?

This was a joyous opportunity to center and represent Black voices in telling this Black experience story. It stood out to me that, even when other documentaries were about issues of inequality, the experts often are white. It gave me the freedom to say, I'm going to just make sure all of my experts are Black.

We featured five Black women who had instances of medical and healthcare system mistreatment while pregnant during the pandemic. The context around their stories is provided by 13 Black female experts who not only understand the issue through a personal lens, but they are the leaders in their field on this topic. They bring not only a scientific understanding, but also a commitment to changing these outcomes.

What are you hoping someone takes away from the film?

For Black people in the U.S., my hope is that we continue shifting our language of self-blame. We often use the language of engaging in better health behaviors, which is important, but does your environment, your access to health care, support your efforts?

White and Black population differences in the U.S. are not because of a difference in the desire to engage in healthy behaviors. They are due to the extent to which you must circumvent many challenges in order to attain and maintain health.

Also, we can all have a critical lens on access to care. One woman featured in the film became a doula (Ed. note: a professional who provides support to expectant parents) to help other women. But it wasn’t until then that she realized, “Wait, why didn't anybody offer these services to me as I was going through this process?” She started asking her family members: ‘Have you ever heard of a doula? Have you ever heard of this resource?’ It's those critical conversations that I want people to be having.

What advice would you give to fellow academics interested in making a documentary about their research?

Increasingly, in this world of academic and institutional mistrust, we're going to have to be our own translators to directly reach the people that we want to impact. You have a lot of the tools in your toolbox already—qualitative and quantitative data gathering, critical analysis, etc.

It’s a whole new way of communicating, but I think investing in this skill is absolutely worth it if we want to move policy, move practice and create change out there in the world.

Profs. John MacAloon and Martha Nussbaum to receive 2024 Norman Maclean Faculty Award

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Profs. John J. MacAloon and Martha C. Nussbaum are the recipients of this year’s Norman Maclean Faculty Award, which honors their extraordinary contributions to teaching and student life within the University of Chicago community.

Established in 1997, the awards are named in honor of Prof. Norman Maclean, PhD’40, the critically acclaimed author of A River Runs Through It, who taught at UChicago for 40 years. The awards are presented by the Alumni Association and the Alumni Board, which have also recognized nine other recipients of the 2024 Alumni Awards for their professional achievements and service on behalf of the University.

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

John J. MacAloon is a professor emeritus in the Division of the Social Sciences and the College and director emeritus of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. An anthropologist and historian, he has focused on cultural performance theory and the modern Olympic movement and Olympic Games. A pioneer of global Olympic studies and international team ethnography who has advised many Olympic organizations, he was awarded the Olympic Order for his scholarship, diplomacy and activism. His books include This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games and Bearing Light: Flame Relays and the Struggle for the Olympic Movement.

MacAloon, AM’74, PhD’80, came to UChicago in 1969 as a doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought. In 1974 he began teaching Self, Culture and Society and taught in the Social Sciences Core throughout his nearly five decades as a College faculty member, winning a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and editing the book General Education in the Social Sciences: Centennial Reflections on the College of the University of Chicago. In 1990 he took over as director of MAPSS and led the transformation of that program into one of national significance in graduate education, influencing a generation of beginning graduate students through his teaching in the MAPSS core course, Perspectives in Social Science Analysis.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Law School and Department of Philosophy, and she is an associate member of the classics department, political science department and the Divinity School. A leading scholar and public intellectual, she writes about ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and the nature of the emotions. Her more than 25 books include The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, and Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Her most recent book is Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility.

Nussbaum has taught at the University of Chicago since 1995 and won the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2002. She has won numerous other prizes and awards, including the 2016 Kyoto Prize, the 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, the 2017 Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 2021 Holberg Prize, the 2022 Balzan Prize, and the 2022 Order of Lincoln from the State of Illinois. She has received 66 honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad.

Two Nobel laureates among recipients of UChicago’s 2024 Alumni Awards

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Nobel Prize laureates Andrea Ghez and Claudia Goldin are among the recipients of the 2024 Alumni Awards, announced Feb. 19 by the University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board.

Ghez, LAB’83, and Goldin, AM’69, PhD’72, will be presented the Alumni Medal—one of the highest alumni honors awarded by the University. Dating to 1941, the award recognizes exceptional career achievement, and Ghez and Goldin are being honored this year for their field-defining research in the fields of physics and economics, respectively. Ghez shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for her groundbreaking work on supermassive black holes; while in 2023, Goldin was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for her work on the drivers of gender differences in the labor market.

In addition to the Alumni Medal, this year’s honors will include the Alumni Service Award, the Young Alumni Service Award, the Early Career Achievement Award and the Professional Achievement Award. Profs. John J. Macaloon and Martha C. Nussbaum also will be honored as this year’s Norman Maclean Faculty Award recipients.

Learn more about this year’s honorees, who will be presented their awards during Alumni Weekend on May 16-19:

Alumni Medal

Andrea Ghez, LAB’83, is the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics at UCLA. One of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and head of UCLA’s Galactic Center Group, she is best known for her groundbreaking work on the center of our galaxy, which has led to the best evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes. She has received the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Bakerian Medal from the Royal Society of London, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Ghez is committed to communicating science to the public and inspiring young girls to get involved in science. Her work has been featured in many public outlets, including a TED Talk, Nova’s “Monster of the Milky Way,” Discovery’s “Swallowed by a Black Hole,” and at the Griffith Observatory.

Claudia Goldin, AM’69, PhD’72, is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-director of the Gender in the Economy working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. An economic historian and labor economist, Goldin has researched the history of women’s quest for career and family, coeducation in higher education, the impact of the birth control pill on women’s career and marriage decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates, and the new life cycle of women’s employment. She has written and edited several books, most recently Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity.

Goldin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society. She received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2016, and in 2009 SOLE awarded her the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime achievements in the field of labor economics. She received the 2019 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award and the 2020 Nemmers Prize, both in economics.

Alumni Service Award

Wendy Gonzalez, AB’08, has been a committed and involved alum since her graduation. She served as the class council chair for the Class of 2008 and as the reunion chair for her fifth, 10th, and 15th reunions, leading her class to win the coveted Green Gargoyle Award for their fifth reunion. She has been a class correspondent for the University of Chicago Magazine since 2008 and has cochaired five Participate Chicago and Phoenixphest events in San Francisco. Over the years, Gonzalez has supported the next generation of alumni by sharing her professional experience with students as a panelist at events like Taking the Next Step and Backpack to Briefcase, interviewing prospective students, and connecting with current students or recent graduates to discuss their career paths. She was also active in a variety of on-campus activities while a student and was honored with the Howell Murray Alumni Association Award for her service.

Gonzalez has worked at Google for more than 15 years. She is a board member of several nonprofit and community organizations, including the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, Manhattan Community Board 4, Greenwich House and AmpleHarvest.org.

Young Alumni Service Award

Hind Omer Hassan, MBA’19, has served on the board of the Chicago Booth Black Alumni Association, including serving as chair of CBAA’s annual Reconnect brunch. In its first year back after the pandemic, the brunch brought together over 100 Black alumni. In the following year, Hassan helped to increase attendance by more than 50 percent. During her time at Chicago Booth, she was an active member of the Graduate Business Council, a cochair of the African American MBA Association, and an admissions fellow.

Hassan is a manager in the global private equity practice at Salesforce, where she fosters strategic alliances with leading private equity firms. Prior to receiving her MBA, she worked for Citigroup, Standard Chartered Private Equity and global enterprises in Dubai.

Early Career Achievement Award

Arjun Kapoor, AB’19, is a partner of crossover fund Kinetic Partners, where he leads the firm’s investments in enterprise software businesses across public and private equities. Prior to joining Kinetic, Kapoor worked across the tactical opportunities and growth equity funds at the Blackstone Group, where he helped lead investments in several software companies, including Snowflake, Vectra AI, Cvent and Diligent Software. While a student, he founded Scala Computing, where he served as CEO for three years. Since its inception in 2015, Scala’s technology has been adopted by many of the largest hyperscalers in the world, and the business has secured strategic partnerships with Cadence, Keysight Technologies and Amazon Web Services.

At UChicago, Kapoor was a recipient of the Stamps and Presidential Scholarships. Kapoor currently serves on the boards of Scala Computing and Kura Labs, a nonprofit providing free vocational training in the software development methodology DevOps to underprivileged youth in New York City. For his commitment to volunteer work and service, he also received the Congressional Award Gold Medal.

Rebecca Shi, AB’08, is the founding executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, a bipartisan coalition of 1,200 CEOs, retired CEOs, the donor class, employers and business associations across the country. ABIC’s mission is immigration reform to grow the economy, create jobs and keep families together as well as delivering business support to hard-hitting national, state, and local campaigns that benefit the undocumented. ABIC understands the necessity of Right-Left coalitions and alliances to achieve concrete victories, which have included winning driver’s licenses, in-state tuition, health care equity, and access to justice for immigrants across red, purple, and blue states, as well as inclusive Paycheck Protection Program and small business community navigator recovery programs in Washington.

Shi immigrated from China when she was 10 years old and graduated from the University of Chicago with high honors as selected graduation speaker. She has worked as a leader and organizer in the immigrant rights movement for 12 years, in part because her mother had a final deportation order for 19 years. She was honored as one of the 2013 “20 in Their 20s” by Crain’s Chicago Business and as an Asian American community leader in 2021 by the City of Chicago. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Texas Tribune, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune and Politico, among other publications. She has testified before Congress on immigration multiple times.

Professional Achievement Award

Clifford Ko, AB’87, SM’89, MD’91, is vice chair of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he is also chief of colorectal surgery and the Robert and Kelly Day Professor of Surgery. Ko is a leading expert in the implementation and study of health care quality and improvement. He oversees surgical quality improvement programs used in more than 4,000 hospitals in 15 countries to evaluate and improve patient care across a variety of areas, including cancer, diabetes, and emergency medicine. His research investigates interventions to improve outcomes related to health care disparities, rural care, safety net settings, and other areas. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed studies, 25 book chapters, and two books. Ko lectures worldwide, sits on several national and international advisory committees, and has consulted with ministries of health to improve quality of care.

Since 2007, Ko has been director of quality (Division of Research and Optimal Patient Care) at the American College of Surgeons. Embodying the UChicago idea of growing knowledge from more to more, he is undertaking a part-time Ph.D. program at the University of Cambridge.

Lisa Lucas, AB’01, is the senior vice president and publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books at Penguin Random House. Previously, Lucas was the executive director of the National Book Foundation for five years. Before that, she served as the publisher of Guernica, a nonprofit, online magazine focusing on writing that explores the intersection of art and politics with an international and diverse focus. She has also served as director of education at the Tribeca Film Institute, on the development team at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and as a consultant for the Sundance Institute, San Francisco Film Society, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and Reel Works Teen Filmmaking.

Lucas is an active member of the Alumni Club of New York City and volunteered for the Alumni Careers Network while she was in the College. She also serves on the literary council of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Teresa A. Sullivan, AM’72, PhD’75, is president emerita of the University of Virginia, where she is also University Professor. A demographer and sociologist with eclectic interests, Sullivan has written about the labor force, immigration, consumer bankruptcy and the U.S. Census. She has previously held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. The author or coauthor of seven books and more than 100 articles and chapters, she has won five awards for teaching and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She shared the 1990 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association and the 2000 Writing Award of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers with her coauthors on two books on consumer bankruptcy. Most recently, she chaired the National Academies panel to evaluate the quality of the 2020 U.S. Census.

Sullivan has combined administrative posts—often as the first woman to hold them—with her teaching and research interests. Among other positions, she served as vice president and graduate dean at the University of Texas and then executive vice chancellor for academic affairs of the University of Texas System. She was provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan before joining the University of Virginia.

UChicago scientists invent ultra-thin, minimally-invasive pacemaker controlled by light

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Sometimes our bodies need a boost. Millions of Americans rely on pacemakers—small devices that regulate the electrical impulses of the heart in order to keep it beating smoothly. But to reduce complications, researchers would like to make these devices even smaller and less intrusive.

A team of researchers with the University of Chicago has developed a wireless device, powered by light, that can be implanted to regulate cardiovascular or neural activity in the body. The featherlight membranes, thinner than a human hair, can be inserted with minimally invasive surgery and contain no moving parts.

Published Feb. 21 in Nature, the results could help reduce complications in heart surgery and offer new horizons for future devices.

“The early experiments have been very successful, and we’re really hopeful about the future for this translational technology,” said Pengju Li, a graduate student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and first author on the paper.

‘A new frontier’

The laboratory of Prof. Bozhi Tian has been developing devices for years that can use technology similar to solar cells to stimulate the body. Photovoltaics are attractive for this purpose because they do not have moving parts or wires that can break down or become intrusive—especially useful in delicate tissues like the heart. And instead of a battery, researchers simply implant a tiny optic fiber alongside to provide power.

But for the best results, the scientists had to tweak the system to work for biological purposes, rather than how solar cells are usually designed.

“In a solar cell, you want to collect as much sunlight as possible and move that energy along the cell no matter what part of the panel is struck,” explained Li. “But for this application, you want to be able to shine a light at a very localized area and activate only that one area.”

For example, a common heart therapy is known as cardiac resynchronization therapy, where different parts of the heart are brought back into sync with precisely timed charges. In current therapies, that’s achieved with wires, which can have their own complications.

Li and the team set out to create a photovoltaic material that would only activate exactly where the light struck.

The eventual design they settled on has two layers of a silicon material known as P-type, which respond to light by creating electrical charge. The top layer has many tiny holes—a condition known as nanoporosity—which boost the electrical performance and concentrate electricity without allowing it to spread.

The result is a miniscule, flexible membrane, which can be inserted into the body via a tiny tube along with an optic fiber—a minimally invasive surgery. The optic fiber lights up in a precise pattern, which the membrane picks up and turns into electrical impulses.

The membrane is just a single micrometer thin—about 100 times smaller than the finest human hair—and a few centimeters square. It weighs less than one fiftieth of a gram; significantly less than current state-of-the-art pacemakers, which weigh at least five grams. “The more lightweight a device is, the more comfortable it typically is for patients,” said Li.

This particular version of the device is meant for temporary use. Instead of another invasive surgery to remove the pacemaker, it simply dissolves over time into a nontoxic compound known as silicic acid. However, the researchers said that the devices could be engineered to last to different desired lifespans, depending on how long the heart stimulation is desired.

“This advancement is a game-changer in cardiac resynchronization therapy,” said Narutoshi Hibino, professor of surgery at the University of Chicago Medicine and co-corresponding author on the study. “We're at the cusp of a new frontier where bioelectronics can seamlessly integrate with the body's natural functions.”

Light use

Though the first trials were conducted with heart tissue, the team said the approach could be used for neuromodulation as well—stimulating nerves in movement disorders like Parkinson’s, for example, or to treat chronic pain or other disorders. Li coined the term ‘photoelectroceuticals’ for the field.

Tian said the day when they first tried the pacemaker in trials with pig hearts, which are very similar to those of humans, remains vivid in his memory. “I remember that day because it worked in the very first trial,” he said. “It's both a miraculous achievement and a reward for our extensive efforts.”

A screening method developed by Li to map the photoelectrochemical output of various silicon-based materials could also have uses elsewhere, Tian pointed out, such as in fields like new battery technologies, catalysts, or photovoltaic cells.

The research team is currently working with the UChicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to commercialize the device.

The other UChicago authors on the paper were Jing Zhang, Hidenori Hayashi, Jiping Yue, Wen Li, Chuanwang Yang, Changxu Sun, Jiuyun Shi, and Judah Huberman-Shlaes. The research made us of the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Electron Microscopy Service of the University of Illinois Chicago Research Resources Center.

Citation: “Monolithic silicon for high spatiotemporal translational photostimulation.” Li et al, Nature, Feb. 21, 2024.

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

Five UChicago scholars awarded prestigious Sloan Fellowships in 2024

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

Five University of Chicago scholars have earned prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, which recognize early-career scholars’ potential to make substantial contributions to their fields. The 2024 Sloan fellows from UChicago include Wilma A. Bainbridge, Kilian Huber, Yuehaw Khoo, Chong Liu and Sunyoung Park.

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. This year’s winners, announced Feb. 20, will receive two-year fellowships in the amount of $75,000 to further their innovative research.

Learn more about this year’s winners:

Wilma A. Bainbridge is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

Her research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of perception and memory, looking at how certain items are intrinsically more memorable than others.

She finds that there are certain images—photographs and even faces—that are remembered by most people, and some that are globally forgotten.

In her Brain Bridge Lab, she uses behavioral experiments, computer vision, machine learning, online studies, and functional MRI to understand what makes an item intrinsically memorable, and how the brain processes these items differently.

She also explores the visual content of memories, using drawings and functional MRI to decode memory content.

She received her B.A. in cognitive science from Yale University and her Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She then completed postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health before coming to UChicago in 2020.

Killian Huber is an associate professor of economics at the Booth School of Business.

Huber studies the interaction between the financial sector and the real economy as well as the propagation of shocks across different parts of the economy.

In his research, he has analyzed how the structure and health of banks affects firm growth, how firms react to interest rate and asset price fluctuations, how connections between different industries and regions shape macroeconomic growth, and how discriminatory ideologies harm firms.

He received a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.

Additionally, he earned a master of research in economics, a master of science in economics, and a bachelor of science in economics from the London School of Economics.

Prior to joining Booth, Huber was the Saieh Family Fellow in Macroeconomics at the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago.

Yuehaw Khoo is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics.

He is also a member of the Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics and a Data Sciences Institute-affiliated scholar.

He works on developing computational and data-driven techniques for problems in physical and biological sciences.

In particular, he develops methods for many-body physics, protein structure determination from NMR spectroscopy, and Cryo-EM.

He is interested in techniques based on convex and non-convex optimization, and tensor-network and neural-network methods.

He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Physics at Princeton University and bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia.

Prior to joining UChicago, he was a postdoc at Stanford University.

Chong Liu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Molecular Engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Her research focuses on design and synthesis of materials as well as development of electrochemical and optical tools to address the challenges in water-energy nexus. This includes resource extraction from water systems, separation in liquid and gas phases, and catalysis.

Her group studies phenomena that span enormous length scales from molecular interaction to mass transport.

The Liu Group’s work aims to develop advanced characterization tools to understand and correlate the materials microscopic properties to macroscopic performance.

Liu has received the Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program award and has been named a 2023 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar.

She received her PhD in materials science and engineering at Stanford University in 2015 and her BS in chemistry from Fudan University. From 2015 to 2018, Liu was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

She joined the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in 2018.

Sunyoung Park is an assistant professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

As a geophysicist, her goal is to understand the Earth’s dynamics by examining earthquake processes and the Earth’s internal structure.

Her research covers a wide range of topics in seismology and geodesy, including earthquake rupture, deep (~600-km) earthquakes, the Earth's shallow and deep viscoelastic structure, and seismic hazard assessment.

She focuses on the development of novel analytical and experimental approaches, which includes utilizing 3D printing for the first time to build physical models of the Earth for performing seismic experiments.

Park received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her undergraduate degree from Seoul National University. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology before joining the UChicago faculty in 2021.

A UChicago composer finds inspiration in Rome

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

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

Each morning Baldwin Giang wakes up, walks to the window and looks out over Janiculum Hill, the highest point in Rome. Though his day will surely involve composing music, the University of Chicago graduate student isn’t interested in staying locked inside a studio when the city is at his fingertips.

“Rome is really exciting because it's the kind of place where you can be constantly surprised if you open yourself up to it,” Giang said.

A P.h.D. student in the Department of Music, Giang is a composer, pianist and multimedia artist. He composes for many types of ensembles: small and orchestral, vocal and electronic. His work has been described by UChicago composer Prof. Augusta Read Thomas (Giang’s dissertation advisor) as a marriage of “an adventurous mind with incredibly tight craft.”

In 2023, Giang was awarded the nationally competitive Samuel Barber Rome Prize, granting him a year of “time and space to think and work” at the American Academy in Rome. Fellows work across disciplines ranging from design to ancient studies to visual arts.

While in Italy, Giang is composing several projects, including one inspired by the novel “Call Me by Your Name.” But his time is equally spent on using the fellowship’s other opportunities to inform his practice: creative shop talks with his cohort, community events and the freedom to explore.

“For me, the special part of coming here is being around these other fellows and getting to engage with the city of Rome,” Giang said.

When in Rome

Typically, Giang bookends his day composing in his studio. However, in the afternoons and evenings he’s often out exploring the city and meeting people. An art gallery visit can lead to an invitation to a performance; a conversation at a party can lead to a future collaboration.

Mealtimes at the Academy are especially important—not only for the garden-fresh food, but also to spend time as a cohort. Dinners are two-hour affairs, Giang says, where plates of hand-made pasta and conversation circulate freely. It’s these moments where fellows can dive deep and seek opportunities for collaboration.

One such project is a commission for the New York ensemble loadbang. Though he composes for voice, Giang doesn’t write lyrics. This provided the perfect opportunity to collaborate with another fellow: noted novelist Katie Kitamura.

“Reading Katie’s text lights up the words in a certain way, but then when I add my music, it lights it up in a totally different way,” Giang said. “That's the kind of collaboration that the Academy really tries to foster—people engaging each other from different disciplines and stepping outside of their comfort zone.”

San Clemente Syndrome

Giang is also drawing inspiration from Rome’s architecture, composing a piece inspired by the Basilica San Clemente. Above ground, the church is a medieval Catholic basilica, but one layer down reveals its 4th-century predecessor. Below that sits the house of a Roman nobleman, a Mithraic temple and, even lower, catacombs.

Giang was inspired to seek out the historic building because of its role in the novel “Call Me by Your Name” (2007). Written by André Aciman (a past Rome Prize winner), the queer coming-of-age story follows narrator Elio who becomes increasingly infatuated with Oliver, a graduate student spending the summer with Elio's family at their Italian villa.

The two visit Rome on a romantic getaway. While attending a book party, Elio listens to a poet read “The San Clemente Syndrome.”

“Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations,” writes Aciman.

The pair visit the church and Elio realizes that—like how each church layer forms the foundation for the next—his future relationships will build upon his memories of Oliver.

When Giang finally visited San Clemente in person, he was struck by the differences in lighting on each level. “When you go down to the lowest level, if you look upwards, the shafts of light penetrate all the levels above,” Giang said. “So, you look through history.”

This observation inspired him to seek out architects and designers that pass through the Academy, like lighting designer and Rome Prize fellow David Weeks. Giang has taken several groups of them to the Basilica San Clemente; each one has offered something to help reorient his compositional process.

As a result, Giang decided to develop a lighting program that synchronizes with the music. For Giang, it’s the first time he’s worked with programmed lighting; for his architect and designer colleagues, it's often the first time they are thinking about the relationship between architecture and music.

Giang was initially drawn to the church’s more recent queer connotations, especially in light of the increasingly anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric of Italy’s right-wing government. Current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has openly opposed same-sex marriage, surrogacy and adoption.

“It felt really important to me to do something that was openly queer as a way to engage with this issue in Italy, and find people who this piece could support,” Giang said.

The piece was commissioned by the Brussels-based Extended Music Collective, whose mission Giang felt aligned perfectly with the project’s concept. “When I start a piece, I think very carefully about who the commissioner is as well as what kinds of communities and audiences that commissioner is trying to engage with,” Giang said.

For Giang, the audience is as much a collaborative partner as the musicians; he sometimes even revises a piece based on post-performance feedback.

“Music can be really abstract. We're sending frequencies out into the air that hit your eardrums,” Giang said. “The meaning comes from how an audience chooses to interpret it as well as the social context of work. All of that is something that I think the composer needs to take into account.”

Learning about robots and college readiness

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

On a hot morning this past summer, a sleepy John Crerar Library starts to rouse as Chicago Public Schools rising seniors arrived for a college-level robot programming course on the University of Chicago’s campus.

On the first floor is the Computer Science Instructional Laboratory, with computer stations and classrooms. The lab doesn’t officially open until 10, but early-arriving students cajole a building manager into unlocking the glass doors a few minutes before the hour.

The students have traveled to the Hyde Park campus from all over the city. They’re Collegiate Scholars, enrolled in a program started by the Office of Civic Engagement in 2003 to help academically talented, intellectually curious CPS students prepare for and succeed at selective four-year colleges. The Collegiate Scholars Program admits 50 rising sophomores each May. Over the next three years, they take summer courses like this one—many taught by UChicago faculty—and have access to dozens of workshops and activities during the school year. These range on academic subjects, college exploration and readiness, leadership, community service and more.

The classroom for this course is organized into a three-by-three grid of tables, each holding a ClicBot robot kit the size of a large shoebox. ClicBot, which retails for about $450, is an educational coding robot. Its modular parts—“brain,” joints, wheels, grasper, and so on—can be clicked together in hundreds of different configurations. ClicBot is the beating—sometimes talking, sometimes rolling—heart of Introduction to Robot Programming and Design, a course with little traditional instruction but much problem-solving in small groups.

That hands-on ethic, says instructor Sarah Sebo, is key to what the course wants to give students: their first exposure to programming and robotics plus the confidence, excitement, and sheer fun of seeing a ClicBot do what they programmed it to do. Sebo, an assistant professor of computer science who studies the psychology of human-robot interactions, is one of nine UChicago faculty members who taught Collegiate Scholars last summer. Three doctoral students from Sebo’s lab group are coteaching the course with her, including teaching assistant Alex Wuqi Zhang.

Zhang, in a navy-and-green checked hoodie, sweat shorts, socks and slides, spends the first few minutes talking the class through a PowerPoint about end-user programming interfaces, a bit of context for the day’s ClicBot programming challenges.

The soon-to-be seniors listening to Zhang have a lot on their minds this summer, said Abel Ochoa, executive director of college readiness and access in the Office of Civic Engagement, who leads the Collegiate Scholars Program. In addition to this class, each student is enrolled in a social sciences course and two college readiness courses: Writing for College and College Countdown.

For these 90 minutes, the students, in teams of two or three, are fixed squarely on their bright white ClicBots—specifically on programming them to act according to the wishes of another small group they’ve been paired with. The groups have swapped forms indicating how they want the bot to behave: its rolling speed (1–10), whether it makes eye contact (Y/N), and its disposition (empathetic or sarcastic).

At table 1, students Scott, Logan, and Anaya decide on a speed of 4. They emphatically reject eye contact (“too freaky”) and just as decisively opt for a sarcastic robot. They hand their form to table 2 behind them and get to work, first constructing their ClicBot according to Zhang’s instructions. “There we go,” Logan says. “We made a robot.” It looks like a long-tailed dachshund on wheels. “Does anyone want to program it?”

All three take turns, using tablets and a visual coding language called Blockly, which allows them to drag and drop robot commands. Blockly simplifies their task but still immerses them in programming problems and logic. They’re working through the program when from behind them comes a whir and a voice: “How’s your day, Logan?”

All turn in shocked laughter: “You did not make it say that!” Table 2’s ClicBot has rolled toward table 1, stopped, and asked the question with the help of the voice recorder in its “brain.” ClicBot’s brain component also has a light that gives the effect of eyes, and true to table 1’s specifications, this bot is dark—no eye contact desired, none given. Scott moves the robot to his group’s table for the full demonstration. When it asks about his day, he’s supposed to touch the top of the brain if it’s going well and touch the side if it’s not. At first nothing happens when he touches the top, so he rubs it for a few seconds. The ClicBot responds with a sad sound—the sarcastic opposite of what you’d expect. The day’s challenge met, both groups clap. Applause and laughter ripple across the whole room as robots wheel around and interact with their delighted users.

Programming challenges like this one occupy the course’s first four weeks. In the last two weeks, the established groups team up on a final project: programming a ClicBot, in any way they choose, to address a societal problem. Several groups program their bots to check in on their users’ mental health—an issue that’s front and center for the high schoolers and their friends. One group makes theirs perform as a guide dog for the visually impaired, sensing obstacles and alerting the user. On presentation day it doesn’t work flawlessly, but the ambition and execution are still impressive.

For those students who go on to pursue a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in college next fall, Introduction to Robot Programming and Design will give them valuable experience. For those who go another way, Sebo believes, their ClicBot experience still stands to pay off.

“We’ll only have more artificial intelligence systems and robots in our lives moving forward,” she says. “AI can seem scary or unknown.” Having “even a tiny taste” of how robots really work will better equip the students to be informed citizens of that future world.

Behind Collegiate Scholars

Collegiate Scholars was launched in part as a response to studies by the University’s Consortium on Chicago School Research showing that many Chicago Public Schools students were not applying to colleges that matched their ability and potential. The program aims to build confidence and ambition, and has had striking results. For the Class of 2023, all Collegiate Scholars who completed the program were admitted to a four-year college or university; 57 percent were admitted to highly selective institutions, including Stanford, Yale, and UChicago. The scholars collectively were granted $7.1 million in financial aid.

Students apply to be Collegiate Scholars during their freshman year of high school. On average, 300 students complete applications for each year’s 50 available spots. Admitted students “have begun to demonstrate academic curiosity,” Ochoa says; they are typically in the top 15 to 20 percent of their classes but can do better with the resources the program offers, including college-level courses like Sebo’s.

The program looks for students who are underrepresented, which can mean any of several things: no parent or guardian has a four-year college degree; students come from a single-parent household; their background is Latino or African American; or they come from a low-income household.

Some Collegiate Scholars don’t fit those criteria, Ochoa adds, “because another value that we try to provide students with is diversity”—the opportunity to be with students from backgrounds different from their own.

—This story is adapted from one that appeared in the Fall 2023 University of Chicago Magazine.

UChicago student volunteers foster creativity and belonging at South Side school

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

University of Chicago student Alli Marney-Bell was surprised to discover a unique tool for connecting with autistic students while volunteering on the South Side of Chicago: the expressive power of music.

At City Elementary, a K-8 school focused on empowering diverse learners in the Kenwood neighborhood, Marney-Bell noticed how music helped kids thrive and grow.

She was particularly excited to see one of her minimally verbal students express himself through sharing favorite songs, improvising in musical groups and composing with software.

“He was very hesitant to raise his hand, answer questions or share his work,” said Marney-Bell, a fourth-year student in the College. “It was amazing to see him come out of his shell—and to see the music work to get him excited about learning and collaborating. It was a different avenue to talk about how emotions can be expressed with children who have autism. Honestly, I feel like it led to a greater appreciation of music for me.”

Marney-Bell was one of 33 UChicago student volunteers to teach this year at City Elementary, which focuses on fostering a positive environment for children who are neurodiverse—with diagnoses including autism, ADHD or learning disabilities that make traditional classroom environments overwhelming or anxiety-provoking.

Leveraging the unique passions of College and graduate students, and their expertise in fields from music to medicine, UChicago’s nearly decade-long partnership with City Elementary has generated a series of programs and classes which rethink and revitalize how neurodiverse kids experience elementary school classrooms.

“I think it’s been a key for UChicago students to have the opportunity to not only understand neurodiversity, but also do something positive with it. Being part of these kids’ lives in a really meaningful way, I see them coming back happy and talking about how this was the best part of their week,” said Christopher Flint, Head of School at City Elementary.

A new take on neurodiverse education

UChicago’s eight partner programs with City Elementary allow student volunteers to foster creativity and belonging for neurodiverse students who often feel left out in conventional classroom settings.

The Music Sociality program, led by Jennifer Iverson—an associate professor in the Department of Music and board chair of City Elementary—leverages collaborative and discussion-based activities to improve social skills in a fun and welcoming environment.

“Music as a practice is inherently very communal. There’s so much nonverbal communication, so much collaboration involved throughout the practice,” said Alejandro Cueto, a graduate student in the Department of Music and teacher in the program. “I think teaching in that context with students who are on the spectrum is a cool way to work on social skills in a space where these students are really enthusiastic.”

For Iverson, discussing musical tastes or collaborating on a song can be perfect ways for autistic children who struggle with turn-taking to practice reciprocal communication and listening.

“What happens if you don’t like something that your friend does? And how can you express your own opinion, but in a way that still demonstrates kindness for your friend? How can you engage in some position-taking and ask a curious question? These are the complex negotiations that happen when we’re in a musical scenario,” said Iverson.

Another UChicago partner program called Med-ucate makes navigating physical and mental health fun and engaging for neurodiverse children.

“We wanted the kids to be able to know the basics about their bodies so that they can learn how to take care of themselves physically and mentally, in terms of health,” said Simi Goliani, a third-year UChicago student who co-founded the program.

Exercises like calming techniques in stressful situations or locating local health resources are designed to foster independence for neurodiverse children, who are more likely to face barriers to improving their health.

“When we look at the data, it shows that [neurodiverse] individuals aren’t going to the doctor as much, and have poorer health outcomes than neurotypical individuals, because of a lack of access,” said Flint. “I think this program can help them understand and take more ownership and advocacy over their own health, which is fantastic.”

City Elementary’s other UChicago-led partnerships explore activities from dog clubs and philosophical discussions to drawing maps of the human brain. They allow student volunteers to share their passions in activities that are concrete, hands-on, and adapted to the emotional needs and interests of neurodiverse and autistic kids.

Cultivating first-hand knowledge

The University’s collaborations with City Elementary also provide on-the-ground knowledge of neurodiversity for UChicago students and future professionals in fields ranging from education to medicine to law.

“We’re training these UChicago students to become adults who are more sensitive to the kinds of access adjustments and environmental adjustments that will make the world a friendlier place for neurodiverse people,” said Iverson.

Through teaching and continuous feedback from City Elementary instructors, UChicago students develop best practices including avoiding noise and distraction, and developing the ability to meet students where their interests lie.

“When working with neurodiverse kids in particular, I think UChicago students learn how to be patient, how to put the student’s needs first and how to avoid coming at them too rigidly with their own plan,” said student volunteer and Med-ucate director Simi Goliani.

City Elementary also works with third- and fourth-year UChicago Medicine students, who complete community rotations as part of their medical training. Through tutoring about nutrition and health, they develop knowledge to help navigate interactions with future patients.

“They’re going to be urologists and they’re going to be general practitioners, and one day they’re going to get a neurodivergent individual that comes to their practice and they’re going to remember City,” said Flint. “And they can say: ‘I have a touchpoint to interact and help support this individual and their family in a way that I probably wouldn’t if I didn’t have this experience.’”

Knowledge and first-hand experience from the program even led one UChicago student, initially studying finance, to change her entire career trajectory.

“I’m now going to apply to law school to immerse myself in disability law, special education law, and family law to see how this issue affects families and what resources can be provided,” said Cristina Gaudio, AB’23, SB’23, who volunteered with City last year. “The program ended up changing my career in a way that I completely didn’t expect.”

Meeting unique needs

Teaching at City Elementary also allows UChicago students to impact young learners as part of a close-knit social support network.

With a 4:1 staff-to-student ratio, City offers individualized guidance to ensure progress and a sense of belonging for each student. The school aims to make that model increasingly accessible. Around 25% of students at City Elementary benefit from scholarship. In addition, the University’s Diverse Learners Tuition Portability Benefit provides assistance for UChicago faculty and their children. However, City is looking to expand the support it provides to families.

“It’s really at the top of our priorities as a board—to promote the growth of the school in a way that’s not just about who can pay to access, but about what kind of a student is a good fit for City,” said Iverson.

The distinctive focus of City and UChicago student volunteers on the individual social needs and interests of each student has been felt among City Elementary families, many of whom faced inaccessible environments and rejections before finding a school offering tailored programs, flexibility and social support.

Sherley Chavarria, a City Elementary parent, noted the difference that the new environment made for her child. “He isn’t nearly as anxious or resistant to go to school…as he enters the building, he does so confidently. At home, he shares stories about what he’s learning,” she said.

The opportunity to impact kids in the community and foster meaningful and authentic interactions is also a key motivator for the student volunteers.

“I can confidently say of all the extracurricular things I’ve done, and I’ve tried everything, this is my favorite because I like the people,” said Maxwell Kay, a student volunteer who directs City’s partnership with UChicago Access. “So much of school is abstract, but when you get to go somewhere and see that some kid has benefited from the effort you put in that day, that’s the most rewarding thing in the world.”

Click here to learn about City Elementary’s partnerships with UChicago.

Neubauer Collegium announces 8 new projects for 2024-25

2024-03-09T03:39:05-05:00

The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has selected eight new research projects for 2024-25.

Each year, the Neubauer Collegium selects a diverse range of UChicago faculty-led research projects that require collaboration across disciplines. This year’s projects will pose vital questions about complex challenges and test promising new ways to address them.

“These new faculty research projects bring together an extraordinary range of scholars from across the University and around the world,” said Tara Zahra, the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium. “They reflect the creativity and originality of our faculty, as they seek new approaches to research that transcend disciplinary and institutional divides.”

Learn more about this year’s projects, which will launch July 1:

The Arts Labs project will create six independent, but linked, initiatives that will shape and support a culture of experimentation and critical analysis around arts research on campus. The labs will create space for individuals to develop creative projects while fostering dialogue among scholars and arts professionals about the opportunities and challenges of artistic research.
The Case of the Human project aims to identify a more holistic understanding of the term “human.” Medical and humanistic understandings of human health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. Researchers will seek an understanding of the concept that is neither primarily medical nor humanistic.
Recent international interest in dyes extracted from plants and insects in Mexico is putting pressure on the local communities that manage these precious, culturally significant resources. The Diversity of Color project will facilitate local efforts to study the organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation and ongoing use. The international research team will draw on insights from the fields of medicine, anthropology, art history, and nutritional science, along with the experiences of Mexican artists and artisans.
Hidden Abodes of the “Great Acceleration” is an interdisciplinary collaboration that will bring noted sociologist Jason Moore to campus as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow during the 2025–26 academic year. The research team will develop a new theoretical framework to investigate the veiled historical and geographical dynamics that have intensified global energy and resource use since World War II.
Since August 2022 nearly 20,000 asylum seekers from the southern border have been transported from Texas and Florida to Chicago. The Imagining a Sanctuary City project will employ ethnographic research, legal case study, and oral history to record and analyze the experiences of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants as well as volunteers, city workers and activists across Chicago.
How have writers represented the experience of migration throughout history? The Migrations in Literature project—an ambitious collaboration that draws from political science, geography, English, classics, comparative literature, area studies and the digital humanities–will study texts about migration from antiquity to the present. By examining this vast archive, the team will learn what is shared and what is distinctive about efforts to represent migration across genres, time, and space.
Long before Hispania became part of the Roman Empire, a trans-continental network of merchants and settlers forged economic and cultural connections across the Iberian Peninsula. The Negotiating Identities, Constructing Territories project will advance recent scholarship in this area by shifting the focus from colonial relations to the interactions that led to hybrid cultures, new territorial formations and resilient environmental practices.
Less than 1 percent of translated literature in the United States comes from South Asia—a region that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s languages. The SummerSALT project will address this gap by organizing a first-of-its-kind convening for writers and translators working with South Asian languages. A series of workshops will enable scholars to study of the impact of authors’ participation in the process of translating their works, and will help foster a global network of professionals devoted to translating South Asian literature into English.

To learn more about the research projects, please visit the Neubauer Collegium website.

The Conversation: Pidgeon Pagonis and the Fight for Intersex Rights

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Free Will Astrology

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Life Is Beautiful

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Editor’s Letter: May 2017

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Free Will Astrology

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Free Will Astrology

2017-05-24T07:14:38-04:00

Free Will Astrology

2017-05-24T07:14:38-04:00

Free Will Astrology

2017-05-24T07:14:38-04:00

Life Is Beautiful

2017-05-24T07:14:38-04:00

Editor’s Letter

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