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XENON experiment finds quietest neutrinos ever detected

Louise Lerner — 09/24/2026 - 09:29am

Buried deep in an Italian mountain, an experiment known as XENON has picked up the quietest signatures of neutrinos ever detected.

Originally designed to look for hints of the mysterious substance known as dark matter, the detector’s extraordinary sensitivity allowed it to capture a different target—the elusive particle known as the neutrino. Neutrinos are constantly flying off the surface of the sun, with a range of different energies. The XENON experiment was able to capture neutrinos traveling at extremely low energies, lower than anything previously detected.

“This opens up possibilities for new explorations of neutrinos and their behavior,” said Luca Grandi, professor of physics at the University of Chicago, who led the design and construction of the latest iteration of the XENON experiment, known as XENONnT.

Neutrinos, sometimes called “ghost particles,” are thought to hold the key to many questions about the universe. They are difficult to study, however, because they only rarely interact with the matter that makes up our world; experiments must painstakingly filter out all other background noise.

The finding shows that XENONnT has achieved such a low background, Grandi said, “that we are becoming an observatory for rare processes, which can contribute to multiple fields of particle physics.”

Extraordinary sensitivity

XENONnT is located 4,600 feet deep into the sedimentary rock of central Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, which shields it from stray cosmic rays or other phenomena that could interfere with the readings.

The experiment consists of detectors set into a large tank filled with six tons of pure xenon. Most particles are stopped by the mountain and thick walls—except for the most elusive particles, like dark matter or neutrinos. If one of these happens to bump into a xenon atom inside the tank, the detector picks up the shock waves from the collision. Every part of the setup is rigorously designed and fabricated with ultra-pure materials to reduce background noise so that these miniscule signatures can be detected.

This allowed XENONnT to capture signatures from solar neutrinos traveling with energies down to just 17 kilo electron-volts (keV)—far less than the energy of a flying mosquito.

Previously, other experiments could only detect solar neutrinos with much higher energies, around 200 keV.

“We are adding a large chunk of sensitivity to this field,” said Grandi. “It’s very cool that XENON was able to say something new about neutrinos, even though it is much smaller than most neutrino experiments.”

Grandi noted the data analyzed came from only the first phase of XENONnT. The detector has since been upgraded, and the forthcoming data should provide a further window on the results.

A busy week for xenon detectors

The day after the XENONnT announced its low-energy neutrino detection, a competitor experiment in South Dakota, known as the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, reported the detection of an anomalous interaction in their detector.

It’s possible this could be a signal from dark matter, but science must first rule out every possible mundane explanation, such as background noise produced by something else in the experiment.

"We are extremely well positioned," said Grandi, "to test the origin of this excess event, trying to distinguish between the hypothesis that such a high-energy interaction might be due to a dark matter particle interacting inelastically with xenon atoms, and the hypothesis that this is simply a yet-unexplained background that might be present in LZ but not in our detector."

The collaborations of both XENONnT and the LZ Dark Matter Experiment are also planning for the next-generation XLZD experiment, which aims to extend the search for dark matter to the highest sensitivities ever achieved.

XLZD could also measure low-energy solar neutrinos with exceptional precision, while opening new opportunities in neutrino physics and studies of other extremely rare processes.

“This observation of low-energy solar neutrinos demonstrates how advances driven by the search for dark matter are opening entirely new windows on the universe,” said Elena Aprile, professor at Columbia University and spokesperson of the XENON Collaboration. “It shows that technologies originally developed to observe some of the rarest interactions in nature are now enabling us to explore fundamental questions well beyond their original scientific goals.”

Citation: “First Measurement of Solar Neutrinos through Elastic Neutrino-Electron Scattering at the keV Scale.” XENON Collaboration, posted to arXiv Sept. 1, 2026.

Funding: National Science Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, German Ministry for Education and Research, Max Planck Gesellschaft, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Helmholtz Association, Dutch Research Council (NWO), Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia, Weizmann Institute of Science, Binational Science Foundation, Région des Pays de la Loire, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Kavli Foundation, JSPS Kakenhi, JST FOREST Program, and ERAN in Japan, Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Education of China, DIM-ACAV+ Région Ile-de-France and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.

Class of 2030, new students embark on UChicago experience

Colin Terrill — 09/23/2026 - 01:50pm

Editor's Note: Check back for frequent updates throughout Orientation Week.

In his remarks to new University of Chicago students, President Paul Alivisatos welcomed the Class of 2030 and incoming transfer students into a community "famous for its culture of contestation” and its intellectual rigor.

“You made a choice to take a path toward cultivating a life of the mind,” he said at the Sept. 23 welcome Convocation for incoming College students in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. “Here, we consider this to be the path for forming a Chicago Mind, a path that, for those who actively choose it … is filled with delight and joy.”

Students will be challenged at different points along the paths of their intellectual journeys, he said, especially as they learn and work with and without machines in the AI era.

Alivisatos urged the students to be “ethical, skeptical and ambitious” about technology, leveraging something even the most formidable AI agents do not have: agency.

"These are powerful tools that have already enabled stunning discoveries," Alivisatos said in his Orientation Week address. "But make no mistake: You are and will remain the true agents of human knowledge."

Students who honor that commitment, he said, will graduate with something the machines can't supply.

"When you leave this place, having chosen this path, you will have superpowers of the mind," Alivisatos said. "You will have cultivated a Chicago Mind."

Melina Hale, dean of the College, explained to the newest undergraduates how the College and the Core curriculum will prepare them to respond to the question of who they want to be when they grow up with an answer that isn’t defined by a profession.

“The Core will shape how you engage with the world and cultivate your own individual humanity,” she said. “It also reinforces our collective humanity, especially when diverse viewpoints are offered, argued and probed.”

UChicago Trustee Michele Kang, AB’83, and James Nondorf, vice president for enrollment and student advancement and dean of college admissions and financial aid, also delivered remarks to the Class of 2030. Upon the ceremony's conclusion, students were cheered on by family, friends and members of the UChicago community as they walked in the cherished traditional procession across the Main Quadrangles and through Cobb Gate on their way to take their class photo at Stagg Field.

Move-in, graduate Convocation ceremonies

New students officially embarked upon their UChicago journeys with the Sept. 22 start of Orientation Week.

Filled with traditions and activities, the week helps new undergraduate and graduate students get acclimated to campus as they prepare to begin their lives at UChicago.

On Tuesday, College students moved into campus dorms with help from their families and resident assistants. Also that morning, new students from UChicago’s graduate schools and divisions received their official introduction to the University and its guiding principles during welcome Convocations in Rockefeller Chapel.

For the first time, Ph.D. candidates and master's students each had their own ceremony to kick off the week's programming. These events featured remarks from President Paul Alivisatos and other UChicago leaders as well as an Aims of Graduate Education address from Prof. Adriana Z. Robertson, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law.

Other activities for new graduate students included an afternoon resource fair and info sessions as well as a welcome to international students. More information can be found at the UChicagoGRAD website.

Rounding out the week is the Aims of Education, a tradition dating to 1961, which will take place on Thursday, Sept. 24, with Prof. Kenneth Warren delivering this year’s address at Rockefeller Chapel. The address will be webcast on the College’s YouTube channel, beginning at 6:30 p.m. CT. Students will then gather inside their residence halls for small-group discussions with UChicago faculty.

Outside of these events, College Programming and Orientation has planned an extensive schedule of activities throughout the week. You can view the full schedule here.

—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago College website.

Study led by UChicago scientists finds atmosphere on the coldest lava world to date

Maureen Searcy — 09/23/2026 - 01:25pm

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can’t have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a group led by University of Chicago scientist Brandon Park Coy reports another: a rocky super-Earth 154 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Named HD 3167 b, this very hot “lava world” zips around its host star in just one Earth-day.

“What’s so surprising is that the closer a rocky planet orbits its star, the harder it should be to have an atmosphere, because it’s bombarded by stellar wind and gets more high-energy photons from the star. But it seems that many of these lava worlds do,” explained Edwin Kite, UChicago associate professor of geophysical sciences and co-author of the study. “These planets are too hot for life, but by studying them, we can say something about the processes that matter for other rocky worlds.”

In the Q&A below, Coy, a graduate student in Kite’s group and first author on the study, describes why atmospheres on so-called lava worlds matter, how they found this one, and next steps.

What was the goal of the survey that found this atmosphere-bearing exoplanet?

One of the driving questions that the James Webb Space Telescope is being used to answer is whether planets orbiting stars much smaller than the sun have atmospheres. It appears that most of those terrestrial planets don’t—they’re just bare rock.

But surprisingly, we’ve found evidence that the majority of lava worlds—similar in composition to Earth and Venus but much, much hotter—might have atmospheres. Five terrestrial planets found with atmospheres, including the one described in this study, have been ultra-hot.

This planet, however, is the coldest lava world found so far with evidence of an atmosphere. This is interesting because we’re trying to understand the temperature transition between planets with and without atmospheres.

The result is the first from a program led by Megan Weiner Mansfield, PhD’21, who’s now at the University of Maryland. The goal of the program, which is looking at 10 ultra-hot lava worlds, is to see if there’s a critical temperature over which you start seeing planets with atmospheres.

How can you tell if an exoplanet has an atmosphere?

Right now, directly looking at Earth-like planets for signs of life is out of reach. Instead, we can use the Webb telescope to detect light in the mid-infrared wavelength range to estimate the temperature of exoplanets, which can tell us if they might have atmospheres.

There are two primary ways that we study exoplanets. One is called transit, when the planet goes in front of the host star. Another called secondary eclipse, which is the method we used for this study, is when the planet passes behind its star, and we can measure how much light is lost. That difference tells us how much mid-infrared light comes from the planet itself, which essentially tells us how hot the planet is.

If a planet doesn’t have an atmosphere, its star-facing, day side should be as hot as theoretically possible based on how reflective its surface is and its distance from the star. But an atmosphere would help redistribute heat from the day side to the night side. We see this happen on Venus—there’s almost no difference in surface temperature between the day and night sides, or between the poles and the equator. If a planet has an atmosphere, it might also have clouds that reflect incoming starlight and cool the dayside. So if a planet’s day side is cooler than the maximum possible, it likely has an atmosphere.

The subject of this study, HD 3167 b, is noticeably cooler than its expected maximum, providing strong evidence that it has an atmosphere.

What do you think HD 3167 b’s atmosphere is made of?

These lava worlds are so-named because the surface facing their star is likely melted rock. We think that HD 3167 b might have a silicate-rich composition, with a similar mixture of minerals that make up Earth’s mantle. Before this study, we expected that any atmosphere on these ultra-hot planets would be composed of vaporized rock, but we’re starting to see evidence that some might have heavier gases like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, or water in their atmospheres.

The makeup of HD 3167 b’s atmosphere is still up in the air. That's one reason we’re so interested in getting new observations.

Why is this result important?

Because the four other lava worlds found to have atmospheres are in the ultra-hot regime, it raises questions about whether there’s a critical transition temperature when silicate atmospheres start becoming very thick. Is there a temperature where these planets form silicate cloud decks that might reflect incoming radiation to space and cool its day side? This relatively cooler planet helps us better characterize and nail down this transition.

Despite how inhospitable they are for life, we’re also interested in studying these kinds of planets because we think early Earth might have looked a lot like a lava world. We think that very early in the solar system’s history, when the terrestrial planets formed, they were extremely hot due to the energy from all of the planetesimal collisions. Earth had what’s known as a magma ocean stage with an entirely liquid surface. This result gives us a window into studying what conditions may have been like in Earth’s first couple of million years.

Citation: “Evidence for an Atmosphere on the Ultra-short-period Super-Earth HD 3167 b.” Brandon Park Coy et al, 2026, ApJL, 1005 L77.

Caption: Artist’s depiction of HD 3167 b, a super Earth exoplanet that orbits a K-type star. (Illustration courtesy of NASA)

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

Library of Congress awards John W. Kluge Prize to Martha C. Nussbaum

Nadia Alfadel Coloma — 09/22/2026 - 09:18am

The Library of Congress announced on Sept. 22 that Prof. Martha C. Nussbaum is the 2026 recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

Awarded every other year, the Kluge Prize “recognizes and celebrates work of the highest quality and greatest impact that advances understanding of the human experience.” Nominations are accepted from scholars and leaders around the globe.

Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, is globally recognized as one of the most influential philosophers and public intellectuals in the world, renown for her work in ancient classical thought, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy and the arts.

A prolific author, Nussbaum has published 30 books, edited 27 books and written more than 500 articles. She has written extensively on the philosophy of emotions, feminism, social justice, animal rights, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and her “capabilities approach,” which offers a framework for assessing human well-being, focused on what human beings are effectively able to do and be. In recent years her writings have explored the intersection of law and opera, including The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom, published in April 2026 by Oxford University Press.

President Paul Alivisatos said of Nussbaum: “As one of our generation’s leading philosophers, Martha’s work has enabled her students and readers to engage the world more thoughtfully as they go about their lives. I am delighted she has been awarded the Kluge Prize, a well-deserved honor to recognize her lifetime of achievements.”

“Martha is so incredibly deserving of the Kluge Prize for her incredible contributions to the humanities and to knowledge more generally,” said Prof. Adam Chilton, dean of the Law School. “Her wide-ranging work has made important contributions to philosophy, classics, the arts, law and a wide range of other subjects. And she has been one of the most vocal defenders of the value of the humanities and liberal arts education.”

A member of the UChicago faculty since 1995, Nussbaum is appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the Law School and is an associate in the Classics Department, the Divinity School and the Political Science Department, and a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies.

She has received honorary degrees from more than 70 colleges and universities in the U.S. Canada, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. She has earned numerous other awards, including the 2022 Balzan Prize, “for her sustained contribution to a wide range of philosophical topics that together redefine our understanding of our ethical being;” the Holberg Prize in 2021 “for her groundbreaking contribution to research in philosophy, law and related fields;” the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in 2018; and the Kyoto Prize, Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences, in 2016.

This fall, a nonprofit organization in Bangladesh, the Banglar Pathshala Foundation, is hosting a study circle devoted to exploring Nussbaum’s decades-long scholarship as an intellectual tribute.

Prof. Deborah L. Nelson, dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities, said of Nussbaum: “Martha’s work represents the very best of the arts and humanities. Her writing and thinking, steeped in multiple fluencies, explore the complexities of the global and historical human condition. She has built a remarkable foundation for current and future generations of scholars to approach enduring and difficult questions of ethics, aesthetics, and being. And she has always brought that capacious and restless inquiry to her teaching, providing life-changing moments of intellectual formation for both undergraduate and graduate students.”

—Adapted from a story first published on the University of Chicago Law School website.

Who benefits from tariffs, according to research

Neil Weinberg — 09/18/2026 - 11:15am

Tariffs are usually debated as trade policy. But a study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business treats them as something else: a mechanism for redistributing wealth.

The tipping of the trade scale results in large monetary transfers from certain groups of workers to others, according to research led by Chicago Booth Prof. Rodrigo Adão.

Produced with Princeton University Asst. Prof. John Sturm Becko, and MIT professors Arnaud Costinot and Dave Donaldson, the study is grounded in the logic of quantifying who benefits financially, regardless of the reasons for the favoritism.

To understand the motivations behind such barriers, the researchers used United States data from 2017-19 as a base, broken down by each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They observed transactions involving 21 industries with tradable products—as well as the services sector, whose output is not subject to tariffs and therefore served as a benchmark.

“U.S. tariffs end up representing a transfer from those employed in services to those employed in tradable sectors,” Adão said. “The variation in tariffs across goods creates larger or smaller gains across workers employed in different tradable sectors.”

The researchers then estimated how these tariffs affected imported products. Those estimates became the basis of a theoretical model, which the study validated with real data. The model was able to replicate the actual effects of the Trump administration’s 2018 tariff policy changes.

A key premise of this analysis is that the changes observed in real imports between 2017 and 2019 resulted from policymakers’ desire to favor some constituencies over others rather than from fundamental changes in the U.S. economy.

The winning workers

“Society values transfers to some individuals much more than others,” Adão said. “It designs trade policy in a manner that income transfers to some individuals, primarily those in preferred sectors, have a much higher social value than others.”

Indeed, had the tariffs not redistributed wealth, individuals at the 90th, 95th and 99th percentiles of the researchers’ estimates would have received lower real earnings—down by $538, $1,727 and $2,861, respectively. Individuals at the 10th percentile, by contrast, would have made $621 more.

These differences were largely driven by discrepancies in the tariffs’ effects on specific sectors, as policymakers seemingly favored some over others. The data indicate that income in the apparel, metals and vehicles sectors was worth 140% more to policymakers than the U.S. average. Certain states came out ahead: incomes in Florida, Vermont and Wyoming were valued above the U.S. average, but only by 7%.

The study’s results are consistent with the theory that lobbying plays a significant role in driving U.S. trade protection, the researchers write, saying it explains about one-fifth of the overall variation in financial gains and losses from tariffs across sectors and regions.

However, individuals from swing states did not appear to receive significantly higher benefits, raising doubts about the theory that efforts to curry favor with politically potent voters is a big driver of U.S. tariff policy.

—A version of this article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth Review website.

UChicago launches new master’s degree in applied AI

09/17/2026 - 09:00am

The University of Chicago is launching its first degree program dedicated exclusively to AI.

The Master of Science in Applied Artificial Intelligence program, which will be offered through the Physical Sciences Division and the Data Science Institute, will welcome its inaugural cohort in autumn 2027.

The new degree was developed for a changing AI landscape. Designed for students who already possess a strong technical foundation, the full-time, nine-month program combines advanced AI study with hands-on application.

“As generative AI advances at an unprecedented pace and AI agents become increasingly prevalent, there is a growing need for practitioners who can move beyond foundational machine learning and deep learning expertise and take the next step into the frontier of applied AI,” said Senior Instructional Prof. Arnab Bose, the faculty director of the program.

“This program is designed to bridge that gap, equipping students with the conceptual knowledge and practical skills to harness the capabilities of foundational models and AI agents in real-world settings.”

Moving beyond the fundamentals

Students will complete four core courses spanning AI foundations and principles; advanced architectures and applications; AI security, safety and governance; and value creation and leadership with AI.

From there, students choose five electives organized across three focus areas: AI in practice, frontier AI and performance AI. Students take at least one elective from each area, ensuring exposure to different dimensions of AI while leaving room to tailor the remainder of the curriculum to their interests. Elective offerings include courses in multi-modal agents, production AI, quantum computation, biomedicine, asset management and an AI practicum.

Students will put AI into practice from the very start of the program, tackling real-world problems across their courses and building a professional portfolio that demonstrates what they can do.

“From the first day of class, students are solving real problems, not preparing to someday solve them,” Bose said. “The curriculum weaves together rigorous AI theory and hands-on application, so that every concept learned is grounded in practice and every project is informed by first principles.”

That approach is also informed by faculty whose backgrounds span academic research, entrepreneurship and the development and deployment of AI in industry.

Batu Gundogdu, associate clinical professor in the new master’s in applied artificial intelligence program, said employers increasingly need AI professionals who can do more than understand the underlying technology. They need practitioners who can translate a business need into an AI solution, anticipate what can go wrong, test and refine their work and ultimately deliver.

“Every course in the program is designed as a use-case application: students build a working solution to a real problem while the underlying theory is introduced along the way, so the science is learned in the context where it will be used,” Gundogdu said.

Part of a growing AI ecosystem at UChicago

The new degree launches amid significant investment in artificial intelligence across UChicago.

In 2026, the University announced the Mansueto Faculty of Mind and Machine Challenge, a nearly $200 million initiative to recruit, retain and support 20 leading scholars using AI and computational approaches across disciplines.

UChicago is also expanding interdisciplinary AI research and education across fields ranging from the physical and biological sciences to economics, medicine, law and the arts and humanities.

The new master’s program brings that momentum into a new professional graduate experience within the Data Science Institute, preparing students to contribute to a field that will continue to evolve long after they graduate.

Students will study in person at UChicago’s downtown campus, placing them close to employers and off-site experiences in a global business and technology hub.

The inaugural master’s in applied artificial intelligence cohort will begin in autumn 2027, with the application portal opening in September 2026.

Space in the inaugural cohort will be limited. Prospective students can learn more about the program at its first virtual information session on Sept. 22.

—This article originally appeared on the Data Science Institute website.

Fifth annual South Side Science Festival returns Oct. 3 with curiosity and fun

Paul Dailing — 09/16/2026 - 02:30pm

The kids’ minds are blown, University of Chicago graduate student Madhumitha Prakash said, when yellow and blue don’t make green.

Each year for the past three years, the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) immunoengineering Ph.D. student has run a science demonstration for children showing off the weird properties of nanoscale interactions. She combines the two colors and asks the children what they think will happen.

“Usually what the kids are going to expect is you put yellow and blue together, you're going to get green,” Prakash said. “But then we teach them how fluids at the microfluidic scale operate at laminar flow. If you want to make green, you have to introduce these really cool geometries that basically switch up the flow and make it a little bit more turbulent.”

Prakash is preparing to confound and intrigue hundreds of local students and their families at the fifth annual South Side Science Festival, hitting UChicago’s campus on Oct. 3. The 2026 event will feature more than 600 students, postdoctoral researchers, staff and faculty presenting 130 demonstrations and sharing their love of science with the South Side community.

“While this is an incredibly fun event for all of the scientists and volunteers who put it on, I think folks take even more pride in being able to share the joy of science with the South Side and broader Chicago community,” said chemistry Assoc. Prof. John Anderson, one of the faculty organizers. “Our goal is to make a welcoming and inclusive festival for everyone, including across all age groups and interest levels.”

The hands-on event brings together STEM units across the University. Robots dance near replicas of early hominids, live jellyfish appear alongside fossils that have been dead for 300 million years and fruit frozen with liquid nitrogen (courtesy of Anderson, also known as “Dr. DiNitrogen”) shatters near arts-and-crafts tables where children paint with electrically conductive ink.

The festival is free and open to all. Registration is optional, but requested.

“The South Side Science Festival brings to life the idea that science is for everyone, giving people a chance to experience being a scientist through hands-on, creative demos and activities connected to their daily lives,” said human genetics Assoc. Prof. Maanasa Raghavan, one of the faculty organizers. “I’m especially looking forward to seeing families explore the activities together and enjoy the lively atmosphere that makes the day feel like a true community festival!”

In addition to representing her lab at the festival, Prakash enjoys the process so much that for the last few years she and her partner—also a UChicago STEM graduate student—have created their own additional display, an interdisciplinary demonstration from an interdisciplinary couple.

“He does lipid nanoparticle work and I do a lot of microbiology work,” Prakash said. “A lot of the demos that we did were about concepts at the intersection of our respective expertise.”

While the festival is a repeat adventure for Prakash, this year’s event will be the first for UChicago PME Asst. Prof. Ruben Verresen. The theorist is designing an interactive virtual demonstration to teach “some of the weirdest aspects of quantum physics.”

“I remember as a kid the sense of awe I would feel when I would learn a new peculiar fact of the universe,” Verresen said. “Gaining such knowledge almost felt mystical, knowing it was a fundamental principle that for some unknown reasons had to be obeyed everywhere throughout the universe.”

UChicago PME Assistant Dean of Education and Outreach Laura Rico-Beck said spurring that love of science takes a “two-fold approach.” Events such as the South Side Science Festival, lab internships for Chicago high schoolers and the No Small Matter Molecular Engineering Fair bring students to UChicago, while off-campus partnerships bring STEM programming to local schools, museums and other community organizations.

“We want people to see that science is something they can be part of, and that it’s already woven into the places, questions and experiences that shape their lives,” Rico-Beck said. “We get to share the science we love with the community we call home, and learn from the curiosity and questions of our neighbors. It’s a wonderful opportunity to celebrate science together on the South Side.”

“Events like the South Side Science Festival celebrate the curiosity and creativity that exist across the South Side and beyond,” said UChicago PME Interim Dean Stuart Rowan. “It’s an opportunity to come together, share what we’re working on, learn from one another, and experience the excitement of science and engineering.”

Explore and register for the 2026 South Side Science Festival here.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago PME website.

Eighteen students selected as 2026-27 University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars

09/15/2026 - 10:00am

Eighteen rising leaders have been selected to the newest cohort of the University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars Program, which was announced Sept. 15.

Drawn from communities around the world and across Chicago, this year’s cohort includes students from the Booth School of Business, the Harris School of Public Policy, and the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. The scholars’ wide-ranging areas of interest span public health, education access and criminal justice reform.

The UChicago Obama Foundation Scholars program focuses on helping students expand their work in their communities while exploring models for leadership and social change. Its emphasis on building real-world skills is rooted in a curriculum intended to foster new relationships, with networking opportunities and personalized support that extend beyond graduation.

“The University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars arrive with great talent and deep understanding of the issues that are most important to their communities, along with a commitment to bringing the best ideas and evidence to bear to address them,” Provost Katherine Baicker said. “Working alongside our faculty and with organizations across Chicago, this year’s scholars will strengthen the ambitious work they have already begun. The University of Chicago is proud to partner with the Obama Foundation to support these rising leaders and their vital work.”

Since its inception in 2018, the UChicago Obama Foundation Scholars program has supported 219 leaders from 74 countries. This year’s cohort from UChicago is already working to make a difference, both here and abroad—from expanding HIV screening on Chicago’s South Side to improving access to surgical care in Ghana.

“We are proud to welcome the newest class of University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars,” said Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation. “Over the next year, they will sharpen their skills, expand their networks, and gain valuable insights and experiences to help expand opportunities for the organizations and communities they serve.”

Support for the UChicago Obama Foundation Scholars Program is being provided by BMO Harris Bank; Robert and Jane Clark; The Clayco Foundation; The Crown Family; The Harris Family Foundation; Rachel DeYoung Kohler and Mark S. Hoplamazian; The Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation; Charles Ashby Lewis and Penny Bender Sebring; The Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation; The Neubauer Family Foundation; and Susan Rustandy and Tandean Rustandy.

Read more about this year’s UChicago Obama Foundation Scholars below:

Booth School of Business

Sarah Assian — Chicago

Physician assistant, Cook County Health

Scaling sustainable, standardized HIV care infrastructure and advancing health equity by building cross-sector coalitions.

Vincent Buckman — Ghana

Former health care consultant, AArete

Improving access to timely surgical care in Ghana by strengthening collaboration between traditional health care providers, public health workers and hospitals.

Jared Jerrick — United States and Guyana

Former commissioned officer, U.S. Army

Fostering sustainable economic self-determination for youth in Guyana by establishing financial literacy programs and youth development hubs.

Jackson Montgomery — Chicago

Patient health advocate and research coordinator, UChicago Medical Center and the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination

Addressing public health diagnostic disparities on Chicago’s South Side by deploying innovative screening tools and establishing replicable citywide frameworks.

Ade Oparinu — Nigeria

Founder, PathShapers Africa

Empowering rural students in Nigeria through talent labs, extracurricular programs and incentive-driven tech programs.

Sanjeev Parameswaran — Chicago

Former senior consultant, AT&T

Building hiring pipelines into the corporate world to connect justice-impacted individuals with living-wage careers.

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Hailey Aldrich — Chicago

Survivor fund associate, The Network Advocating Against Domestic Violence

Preventing tenant displacement and advancing homeownership opportunities by championing community land trust models and bridging gaps between residents, advocacy and policy.

Mariah Cooley — Chicago

Program manager, UChicago Crime Lab

Reducing gun violence by training youth in conflict mediation and equipping community violence intervention leaders.

Alexia Estrada — Pasco, Washington

Former director of operations, Semillero de Ideas; co-founder, Cafe con Arte

Elevating agricultural professionals as key innovation leaders and creating culturally relevant mental health tools.

Anna Grant-Bolton — Evanston, Illinois

Outreach lead and steering committee organizer, Evanston Community Fridges

Bridging food distribution gaps in and around Chicago through mutual aid, grassroots community education and policy advocacy.

Joseph Mapp — Chicago

Director, Chicago Mayor’s Office of Reentry

Transforming the reentry process of formerly incarcerated people by establishing coordinated, gender-responsive public services to create pathways for dignity and opportunity.

Juliet Rowe — United States and United Kingdom

Director of development, OneGoal

Creating economic opportunities for young people by building sustainable cross-sector partnerships and scaling career expositions into regional workforce development infrastructures.

Harris School of Public Policy

Apollinaire Abi — Togo

Executive director, NawiriTech

Promoting evidence-based public policy across Africa by expanding data science training and establishing data partnerships with state agencies.

Jess Artis — Chicago

Founder, Home Wealth School

Advancing housing stability and preserving generational wealth for vulnerable communities through homeownership training and advocacy.

LeAaron Foley — Chicago

Regional head of government and community relations, Lime

Redesigning legacy transit and land-use systems by connecting private sector transit resources with community ideas and needs to build equitable urban policies across Chicago.

Kavita Rawat — India

Former senior project manager, Central Square Foundation

Tackling learning deficits among low-income primary students in India by integrating technology, teacher training and parent involvement through community hubs.

Bhavya Sharma — India

Former project lead, Integrated Leadership Forum Against Trafficking

Elevating survivor voices in anti-trafficking policy through a pioneering survivor-centric public policy model and AI-driven interventions for reintegration.

Booth School of Business and Harris School of Public Policy

Erica Choi — Chicago

Growth fellow, Fabric Health

Expanding social services to traditionally underserved families through tech-powered innovations and community-based solutions.

As World Cup referee, UChicago student tests Machiavelli’s vision of leadership

Chandler Calderon — 09/14/2026 - 12:50pm

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.

During this summer’s FIFA World Cup, Joe Dickerson was carefully tracking the action on-field from a booth in an enormous convention center in Dallas.

Dickerson was a video assistant referee (VAR) during the tournament, supporting the officiating crew on the field by reviewing incidents on a wall of screens. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

“When your decision can impact a whole nation’s psychological well-being for at least a short period of time, yeah, that’s a significant amount of pressure and responsibility,” he said.

A long-time soccer referee, Dickerson is now applying his expertise on the pitch to a whole new field: studying Machiavelli’s philosophy of leadership in the University of Chicago Graham School’s master of liberal arts program.

Dickerson became interested in Machiavelli’s provocative ideas through a class on the philosophy of leadership he took during a residential seminar in Hyde Park. These weeklong sessions give remote students like Dickerson a chance to explore campus and connect with each other.

He was captivated by how “appalling” Machiavelli’s vision of leadership in The Prince is—characterized by cruelty and manipulation. However, Dickerson became interested in what a less literal reading of the text might yield.

By showing that this leadership style leads to revolt and disorder in the long term, Dickerson believes, Machiavelli might actually be making the case against it.

Dickerson is using refereeing as a case study in his master’s thesis to tease out this nuance in Machiavelli’s writing. A referee could lead through fear and deceit, “and this might work in certain situations, it might work in the short term,” Dickerson said, “but I suspect it does not work in the long term.”

Taking Ralph Waldo Emerson to FIFA

Dickerson’s journey to the World Cup started early. He officiated his first soccer game at age 10, inspired by a coach who insisted the whole team train in the laws of the game. It was a great way to make a little money and learn responsibility—“something my parents definitely enjoyed that I was doing,” he said—so Dickerson stuck with it throughout his teens.

In college this work took a back seat to his involvement with the University of California, Davis, crew team and cycling. After finishing there, as he pursued a professional cycling career, he continued refereeing on the side to support himself and eventually became a full-time referee at the highest level. In 2017, he began officiating with Major League Soccer and, since 2023, has worked for FIFA. In 2025 he was named U.S. Soccer Male Referee of the Year.

As his career progressed, Dickerson developed some clear ideas about what makes a referee great. On one of the long flights required for his job, he began seriously trying to articulate them. Reflecting on the confidence and autonomy needed in refereeing, he was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which he had read in high school, and pulled up a copy on his computer. He spent the rest of the flight reading and taking notes.

After that, eager for a meaningful pursuit outside of refereeing, he dove into the study of philosophy and decided to return to school to gain a deeper understanding of the field.

He first took classes through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program before applying to the Graham School, where he was attracted to the balance between rigorous, personalized study and a flexible, affordable program.

“I could build my own personalized master’s experience,” he said.

The way students bring their diverse life experiences into the classroom is a key piece of what makes the Graham School’s master of liberal arts program so effective, said its director, Tim Murphy, AB’11, AM’14.

“Fascinating conversations” happen when you have “very intellectually curious, very intellectually serious people from those different perspectives in a room discussing big ideas,” Murphy said. “It’s kind of a magical dynamic.”

‘Refereeing through the lens of philosophy’

Dickerson has learned from experience that building trust on the field is crucial to managing players and coaches. This comes from a combination of body language, communication skills and empathy.

In a sport where the laws of the game leave a lot of room for interpretation, referees rely on what they call “football understanding,” an ability to take the broader context of the game into consideration when making calls.

“If you’re making decisions that don’t make sense to the players, to the coaches, to the commentators, to spectators, you have no ability to control the match, no matter how good you are at communicating with players,” he said.

Maintaining the level of intense focus that decision-making and player management requires is draining, he said, even more so than sprinting up and down the field for 90 minutes: “When I was working the Under-20 World Cup in Chile last year, after each match, I was lying on the locker room floor.”

In a way, he said, working in the VAR booth can be even more challenging, because when you’re on the field, people understand that there will be some level of human error; “but nobody accepts excuses for mistakes from the VAR, because how could you make a mistake when you’re looking at a video screen?” he said. On the field, he has the VAR as a safety net. “When I’m the VAR, I have no parachute.”

Despite the pressure, he got to have fun at the World Cup, too, attending six games and getting swept away by the fans’ enthusiasm and the surprises of the tournament.

“My expectations of how I would feel fell short of how massive the tournament is, how big of an impact every single incident has on entire countries,” he said. “Getting to experience that and seeing the cultures, especially some of these smaller countries that are there for the first time, was really incredible.”

It’s an experience he hopes to repeat in four years. When he steps on the field now, he does so as a philosopher.

“I can’t help but see some of the philosophy through the lens of refereeing and some of the refereeing through the lens of philosophy,” Dickerson said. “My studies have certainly broadened the way I think about how I interact with players, how I lead on the field, because at the end of the day, the best referee is undoubtedly the best leader.”

—A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall/26 University of Chicago Magazine.

With flowery name, new tool uncovers hidden genetic pathways that cause disease

Matt Wood — 09/11/2026 - 09:09am

One of the most important goals of studying genetics is to find genes that are involved with diseases.

The problem is that most diseases aren’t caused by a single gene or mutation. They’re the result of complex interactions among dozens—if not hundreds or thousands of genes—plus environmental factors, lifestyle and a host of other variables.

That flood of genes creates a needle-in-a-haystack problem of finding the most central drivers of disease that can be targeted with drugs.

But now, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Chicago and Columbia University developed a new computational tool—named DANDELION—that could make the challenge of finding genes most directly related to disease much easier. In a paper published in Cell, they showed how this tool was able to identify 21 genes related to asthma, most of which hadn’t been discovered by other methods.

The researchers also used both CRISPR gene-editing screens and mouse models to validate that these genes lead to asthma phenotypes and demonstrated that two of the genes are in the same pathway involved in fatty acid metabolism and protein palmitoylation, which hasn’t yet been studied for asthma.

A flowering network of genetic effects

The new was named in reference to the puffy heads of dandelion flowers once they go to seed. The puffball resembles an interconnected, branching network of genes, ultimately pointing to the center of the core disease genes.

In complex diseases like asthma, many genetic variants may contribute to disease by changing the expression of other genes in a cascading effect. This creates what’s called a gene regulatory network that ultimately drives the development of disease.

However, existing approaches such as genome-wide association studies focus on genes that are often in the periphery of the gene regulatory network, and only indirectly affect disease.

“All these existing tools assume that the actual disease genes are always going to be very close to the disease variants, but when you search for clues around that variant, you don’t always find much,” said UChicago Asst. Prof. Xuanyao Liu, the paper’s co-senior author who developed DANDELION.

“What’s unique about our method is that we believe the disease genes are not just next to the genetic variants. They’re embedded in this gene regulatory network, and the actual disease-driving gene is downstream of those associated variants, maybe on different chromosomes. So, they’re on the receiving end of a genetic effect that is very far away.”

Liu analyzed a large set of data from the human transcriptome and the UK Biobank, a repository of health and genetic data from more than 500,000 volunteers. She used DANDELION to search for core disease genes for asthma and found 21 candidates, 19 of which have not been discovered before using other tools.

Liu also showed the data to Marcelo Nóbrega, the Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Human Genetics at UChicago, who has developed experimental platforms to manipulate the expression of genes in human cell types that are relevant to asthma. These include epithelial cells from the lining of the airways, inflammatory cells and immune T cells.

At first, he was skeptical.

“[Liu] showed me a list of genes, and we didn’t recognize almost any of them,” Nóbrega said. “I thought that either this is going to be really cool and groundbreaking or it’s going to be wrong. But we had the experimental validation system running, so I thought, ‘Let’s test them all.’”

Direct, measurable impacts

Nóbrega’s team, led by postdoctoral researcher Isabella Salamone, conducted a series of experiments to test the effects of the genes predicted by DANDELION.

Surprisingly, most of the genes Liu identified had a direct, measurable impact on the function of asthma-related cell types, producing phenotypes that model those seen in asthma at a much higher rate than any other genes in the genome that they also tested.

When Salamone looked more closely, she saw that two genes had opposite effects. Knocking out one gene called SLC27A3 protected against the effects of asthma in both epithelial and T cells, while knocking out another gene, SCD, contributed to disease. Looking at the effects of mutations of these genes in a large human cohort of almost half a million people, they found that mutations in SLC27A3 are protective of asthma, supporting their findings in their cellular phenotyping screens.

“We saw this really striking pattern,” Salamone said. “When we dug into patient data that had been collected by other labs, we saw the same pattern repeat itself.”

Intriguingly, both SLC27A3 and SCD are involved in the same biochemical pathway for fatty acid metabolism. To understand how this might be linked to asthma, they turned to chemical biologist Hening Lin, the James and Karen Frank Family Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at UChicago. Lin is a world-leading expert on the process, especially its role in the addition of a long-chain fatty acyl group to proteins that regulate protein activity.

Lin helped them confirm that both genes are involved in palmitoylation, and that reducing palmitoylation by knocking out SLC27A3 causes lung epithelial cells to dampen several immune-related and inflammatory processes.

“We know many immune signaling pathways are regulated by palmitoylation, but I am still amazed by the finding that disrupting a lipid metabolic protein, SLC27A3, could offer protection in asthma models at least in part via affecting protein palmitoylation,” Lin said.

Finally, to test whether these genetic, biochemical and cellular findings ultimately translate into asthma susceptibility, Salamone developed mice in which SLC27A3 or SCD were inactivated. They found that SLC27A3 knock-out mice are protected against allergy-induced lung inflammation, while SCD knock-out mice are more prone to lung inflammation compared to control mice. This demonstrated the new pathway the team uncovered is indeed capable of changing susceptibility to asthma.

A powerful, interdisciplinary collaboration

Liu said she is encouraged by this initial success and looks forward to testing it with other diseases like inflammatory bowel disease or Type 2 diabetes. Historically, one of the limitations of drug development has been finding the true protein targets for treatment. DANDELION has the potential to overcome this challenge by identifying new and more effective drug targets.

“We're really excited about this direction because for these diseases, [genome-wide association studies] have identified tons of signal, but we still don't know the actual disease-driving genes that we can target for therapies,” Liu said. “I think our collaboration has been really powerful because we closed the gap at both the computational level and the experimental level.”

Nóbrega emphasized the importance of this collaboration as well, especially the advantage of being able to confirm their findings with a leading expert such as Lin.

“None of this would have come to fruition if any one of us were working on this alone,” he said. “We would have three papers buried in separate journals and virtually nobody would know how to put these stories back together. So, the power of having this complementary expertise across the division is really important.”

The study, “Trans-regulatory gene mapping prioritizes disease drivers in asthma,” was primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health. Additional authors include Peixin Tian from the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, China; Zining Qi, Jiaqi Zhao, Li Zhang, Qilong Tan, Jinghui Li, Alexis G. Thornburg, Noboru J. Sakabe, Mark Minogue, Zachary T. Weber, Bohao Chen, Cezary Ciszewski, Xin He, Hardik Shah and Carole Ober from UChicago; Ashley N. Michael and Donata Vercelli from the University of Arizona; and co-senior author Zhonghua Liu from Columbia.

—This story originally appeared on the UChicago Biological Sciences Division website.

Kenneth Warren to deliver Aims of Education speech to Class of 2030

Colin Terrill — 09/10/2026 - 12:14pm

For many, “uncertainty” has become an era-defining word.

Rapid technological advances, shifting global landscape and even an unclear picture of what happens after college graduation has led to a feeling that the future is one big, looming question.

In his upcoming Aims of Education address, Prof. Kenneth Warren won’t attempt to provide all the answers—but he will try to help incoming students feel more empowered to press on even in the face of that doubt.

“I think there is a more pervasive sense of uncertainty that all students face nowadays,” said Warren. “However, I see that as a call to action for students to come to the defense of the education that they will receive here over the next four years and truly make the most of their UChicago journey.”

This year’s address, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 24 in Rockefeller Chapel, will be webcasted on the UChicago College’s YouTube channel and website.

When Warren steps up to the lectern, it will mark nearly 20 years since his first Aims of Education address in 2007. While he knows he couldn’t give the same speech today that he did then, Warren views it as an opportunity to show how the mission of the University has never wavered in the face of change.

“A UChicago education has always put importance on a familiarity with various areas of intellectual activity no matter what you want to specialize in,” he said. “That still stands true today even as students deal with the clashing of artificial intelligence and traditional learning and curiosity.”

Warren began his UChicago tenure in 1991 and is currently the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English and Literature and associate chair of the department of English in the College. He has authored or edited several publications focusing on American and African American literature from the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th century and received the Quantrell Award, believed to be the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, in 2005.

While being asked to deliver the Aims address by Dean Melina Hale for the second time “drove home how old he is getting and how long he’s been at UChicago,” the recognition was still not lost on him.

“It’s always an honor and a special opportunity to address the newest incoming class that will develop their minds in the College over the next four years,” he said

Warren knows that uncertainty and threats facing the idea of a liberal education are nothing new—the Aims of Education address started in 1961 as a response to these factors, after all—the defense against them will always be the same.

“Many of the talks presented in this series have responded to the various attacks on the attempt to achieve this liberality of mind through reading books and learning science,” he said. “Perhaps unavoidably, I will be addressing how even though these challenges have evolved, there still is an importance to understand and know how scholars, writers and thinkers from all disciplines approach the world.”

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago College website.

UChicago launches $300 million initiative for students from rural areas and small towns

Katelyn Yoshimoto — 09/09/2026 - 06:06am

The University of Chicago on Sept. 9 announced the launch of a long-term initiative to expand college and career opportunities for students from rural and small-town communities across the United States.

The Trott Center for Excellence in Rural America is anchored by a $100 million gift from Trott Family Philanthropies, the foundation of Trustee Byron Trott, AB'81, MBA'82, and Tina Trott. In addition to the Trotts’ investment, the initiative will include funds raised from new gifts across the UChicago community, as well as funds the University will commit to this important priority, combining for a total of $300 million to support students from rural and small-town America.

This reinforces UChicago’s commitment to access through its prestigious Odyssey Scholarship Program and distinctive educational environment, which brings together students and scholars with diverse perspectives.

“We are deeply grateful to Byron and Tina Trott for this special gift. The University of Chicago has long believed that our academic excellence goes hand in hand with expanding opportunity to intellectually rigorous and curious students from every community,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “The Trott Center reflects our commitment not only to enrolling talented rural students, but to equipping them with the academic support, networks and experiences needed for them to thrive academically and become leaders in all areas of civil society and parts of the country.”

The Trott Center will expand financial aid and serve as a coordinating hub for academic preparation, student development and career pathway programming. It will support students from small towns and rural communities with early outreach and advising for college that will continue through and after graduation, preparing them with the skills and experiences needed for career success.

“There is extraordinary undiscovered talent in rural America. Too often, young people simply are not aware of the opportunities available to them or prepared to pursue them,” said Trott. “We want to help change that. Over the last eight years, we have learned a great deal about how to connect with these students earlier, prepare them for what comes next and open doors that might otherwise remain out of reach. The Trott Center is about taking those lessons further and giving more young people the chance to reach their full potential with a world-class education and career opportunities.”

Expanding access and strengthening career pathways

Students from rural communities graduate from high school at rates comparable to their metropolitan peers, yet are less likely to enroll in and graduate from leading residential four-year colleges and universities.

This gift will fund early outreach and academic preparation programs in rural high schools, as well as expand financial aid for students from rural areas and small towns at UChicago. Financial aid for these students, and all UChicago undergraduates, is loan-free.

Recognizing that access alone does not ensure long-term success, the Trott Center will expand academic support and services, mentorship, leadership development and career support at UChicago. It will create structured internships and experiential learning opportunities to develop the professional skills, networks and experiences needed for careers, graduate study, entrepreneurship and public service.

Building on a national commitment to rural opportunity

The Trott Center builds upon work that began in 2018, when Trott asked UChicago leaders how many rural and small-town students attended the College. That question helped catalyze a broader effort to expand rural opportunity, with measurable results—first-year enrollment of students from small towns and rural areas at UChicago has grown 160% in the past decade.

“The University of Chicago changed the trajectory of my life, and Tina and I want more young people from rural communities to have that same opportunity,” said Trott. “What is powerful about this effort is that it does not stop at opening the door to college. It helps students build the skills, relationships and pathways to careers that can change their lives and strengthen communities across the country.”

Trott’s BDT & MSD Partners supported the founding of rootEd Alliance in 2018, which has embedded dedicated college and career advisors in 340 rural high schools across six states to expand postsecondary access and economic opportunity. In 2019, he helped establish the Emerging Rural Leaders program at UChicago, a week-long summer enrichment program for rising high school juniors and seniors on campus in Hyde Park.

In 2023, he made a $20 million gift to launch the STARS College Network, a coalition of colleges and universities committed to expanding rural access and support, housed at UChicago. In 2024, an additional $50 million gift enabled STARS to expand to 32 member institutions. Through this gift, STARS will expand members, advising and programming across the network.

Strengthening communities and the national workforce

Trott’s gift builds upon his longstanding commitment to increasing opportunities and access for students in rural America, inspired by the ways in which his UChicago experience transformed his own journey, which began in small-town Union, Missouri.

His philanthropy has aimed to level the playing field for students living outside the nation’s major metro areas and to create more opportunities for rural students. He has also helped encourage an approach that reaches students early, stays with them throughout and beyond college, and removes a wide array of disparate obstacles that can put rural and small-town students at a disadvantage.

As the Trott Center grows, the University of Chicago aims to deepen partnerships with secondary educators, employers and peer institutions to expand pathways from rural communities to leadership roles across the country. By broadening access and preparation, the initiative seeks to advance individual economic mobility while strengthening the long-term vitality of rural communities and the national workforce.

—Learn more about how you can support the work of the Trott Center.

New study shows reward can spread through complex memory networks

Tori Lee — 09/04/2026 - 02:01pm

Dinner last Friday was a hoot. Wine and conversation flowed; dishes were perfectly seasoned. The reward center of your brain lit up like the Fourth of July.

This week you have a decision to make: where to eat? The choices are infinite. Remembering last week’s raving success, you quickly make a reservation at a restaurant owned by the same chef.

Studies show that rewards—food, social events, money—spread through our memories, creating a mental treasure map of associations. These associations help us decide whether a new choice might lead to something good.

But how many mental steps can a reward travel? Your brain might associate the same chef with a great night out, but what about the same neighborhood? Or the song that was playing on the ride over?

In a new study published Aug. 8 in Cognition, psychologists at the University of Chicago looked at how many jumps a reward can travel in our memory.

Turns out, pretty far.

“The idea that reward spreads through memory is not a new one,” said Asst. Prof. Akram Bakkour, who led the study alongside first author and UChicago graduate student Seoyoung Lee. “But we show that reward can spread through relatively complex memory structures more so than previously thought.”

Mental gymnastics

To test how far a reward can travel, researchers first built a map.

At each point of the map, Lee and Bakkour placed a colorful disc (think pogs if you’re a ‘90s kid) with a unique pattern. Each disc was connected to two others, creating a web-like network—an approximation of how memories get grouped and associated in our minds. Some were more tightly grouped in a “community,” while others maintained only a single, weaker connection.

With the map now built, it was time to test if people could remember it.

Importantly, participants never saw the whole network. Instead, they were shown linked discs either in pairs or one at a time as they were “walked” through the map at random.

“We've really blown up the complexity of this problem,” said Bakkour, whose lab’s mission is to understand how memory supports decision making.

After viewing about 1,000 sequences of images on their screens, participants were quizzed on what they thought the map looked like. Researchers asked them to group images in a way that made sense to them, then draw lines between them.

The maps they remembered weren’t perfect, but participants picked up on a key detail—the clustered “communities” of images.

“They're very bad at the line drawing, and they're only somewhat good at grouping them,” Bakkour explained. “But we do have evidence that they group items that are within the community. That's our main measure of learning.”

Reward unlocked

With the mental map now locked in, it was time to introduce the reward.

In another experiment, researchers deemed one random disc “the reward,” demarcated with a green dollar sign. After viewing the patterned discs one at a time, participants were asked to choose which ones were most likely to lead to a reward.

What researchers expected was that participants would choose the colorful discs within the same community as the reward. Likewise, they guessed that the further from the reward a disc was, the less likely participants would choose to associate it with the reward.

Their hypothesis was confirmed, with one major caveat.

Participants chose discs nearest the reward, even several steps away, but only based on their memory of the map, not the actual map. And their memories weren’t always accurate.

“It's an interesting little twist,” Bakkour said. “We know memory is not perfect; there are distortions that get inserted. Our argument is that there is a spread of reward that is graded, but based on what's in their mind, not what we taught them.”

The research team notes that if participants learned the map over a longer period of time, or even slept between sessions, their recall might improve. But even in 40-minute sessions, people were able to build a linking chain of memories leading them to treasure.

According to Bakkour, this is even more proof of how amazing our memories are. In unfamiliar situations, our minds can leap between memories and generalizations to help us navigate infinite possibilities.

“We can’t experience everything in the world,” Bakkour said. “But having this intricate, complex memory system allows us to reminisce and imagine the future in service of making the best decisions.”

Citation: Lee, S., & Bakkour, A. (2026). Reward selectively preserves relational structure in memory. Cognition, 277, 106673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106673

UChicago-led team builds AI data filter for CERN's particle collider

Miranda Redenbaugh — 09/04/2026 - 09:30am

Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider sends protons crashing together at extraordinary speeds, allowing scientists to study the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that shape the universe.

Those collisions help researchers investigate questions ranging from the behavior of subatomic particles to the possibility of new physics beyond what is currently known. But the machine creates a practical problem as well as a scientific opportunity: It produces far more collisions than researchers can possibly save.

That challenge is at the heart of award-winning research from a UChicago-headed team that explored how AI can help the collider experiments make faster, smarter decisions about which collision data to keep, while staying within the strict limits of a real scientific instrument. Led by computer scientists Asst. Prof. Yuxin Chen and Ph.D. student Zixin Ding—whose work received a best paper award at the ICML 2026 Workshop on AI for Physics—the project is part of a broader collaboration with Prof. David Miller from the Department of Physics, and colleagues from the University of Michigan and Fermilab.

“Making these decisions well, often with incomplete information and staggering operational constraints, can mean the difference between a Nobel-Prize-winning discovery and just another day at the office,” said Miller.

“Thankfully, we can work together with scientists studying complex computational approaches to exactly these kinds of problems in other contexts to develop novel and exciting ways to overcome these challenges and bring sophisticated solutions to bear for the discoveries therefore will not miss.”

Their findings show the increasing collaboration between AI and physics—and of how computer science methods can be shaped by real-world scientific constraints.

The race to keep the right data

At the Large Hadron Collider, collisions happen at a staggering rate.

“The trigger system decides, in real time, which collisions to keep and which to throw away forever, and a discarded collision is gone for good,” Chen said.

The trigger system is essentially a rapid filtering mechanism. It uses preset thresholds to decide whether a collision looks interesting enough to store for later study. If the threshold is too loose, the system saves too much and overwhelms storage and readout capacity. If it is too strict, it may reject rare events that could lead to important discoveries.

Traditionally, those thresholds are set by experts and adjusted by hand. But collider conditions shift over time. Beam intensity changes, background patterns drift and a setting that worked well at the start of a run may no longer be ideal hours later. The researchers asked whether that process could become more adaptive—something Miller described as a self-driving trigger.

“By building a system that can learn and adapt to the experimental conditions, we can not only optimize our instruments more effectively and efficiently,” he said, “we can also allow the scientists to focus on the broader questions about why and what our experiments should be measuring to make the next big discovery.”

A computer science approach to a physics problem

That question brought a distinctly computer science perspective into a physics setting.

Rather than treating the trigger as a fixed control problem, the researchers framed it as a sequential decision-making task, a common idea in artificial intelligence. Instead of responding only to whether the event rate has moved above or below a target, the system looks at recent conditions and tries to learn what kind of change has taken place.

As Ding explained, the goal was not just to react to drift, but to understand it: “The policy can then diagnose why the rate drifted, not simply react to the fact that it drifted.”

That distinction mattered because the Large Hadron Collider is not an environment where an artificial intelligence system can afford to be loosely right. Storage and readout capacities are hard physical limits.

If the trigger accepts too much background data, valuable bandwidth is lost and the detector can effectively go blind for brief periods. In that setting, a method that performs well on average but breaks the rules too often is not merely imperfect, it is unusable.

That requirement shaped the team’s main technical insight. Existing reinforcement learning methods often work by comparing a group of possible actions and favoring the ones that seem best. But Chen and his collaborators found that when conditions shifted, those candidate actions could all be poor choices. In those moments, the system risked learning from actions that were unacceptable to begin with.

Their solution was a method called Group-Filtered Policy Optimization. The logic is simple: before deciding which action is best, first determine which actions are safe enough to consider.

In tests on simulated data and on real collision data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, the method improved how often the trigger stayed within its target operating range while also preserving more of the unusual events physicists care about.

Just as importantly, the system transferred from simulation to real collision data without needing extra fine-tuning during deployment, a hurdle that often trips up artificial intelligence systems in high-stakes settings.

For Chen, that result helped explain why the paper resonated.

“The community has learned to discount RL results that live in simulation,” he said.

A broader collaboration with wider implications

The paper also builds on an ongoing line of interdisciplinary research.

An earlier project from the same collaboration led by Michigan Ph.D. student Shaghayegh Emami received a Poster Award on Innovative Result at the Fast Machine Learning for Science Conference in 2024. That work helped lay the foundation for the newer paper by showing how adaptive methods could help trigger systems respond to changing conditions.

The implications may extend well beyond particle physics. The researchers point to similar threshold-based problems in areas such as fraud detection, network security and industrial monitoring, where systems must adapt to changing conditions while operating under strict limits on time, attention or capacity.

For now, the team sees the work as a way of giving scientists better tools, not replacing human judgment.

The decisions about what kinds of physics matter most still belong to researchers. But if artificial intelligence can help a system adapt more intelligently in real time, it may help ensure that fewer important events slip away unseen.

—This story originally appeared on the UChicago Department of Computer Science website.

South Pole Telescope releases clearest map ever of matter in the distant universe

Louise Lerner — 09/03/2026 - 09:50am

The earliest light in the universe, known as the cosmic microwave background, has been traveling since the dawn of the universe over 14 billion years ago.

A group of scientists from 30 institutions has released the sharpest and clearest map ever made of the mass in the universe, created by measuring how this ancient light was bent as it traveled.

The data came from the South Pole Telescope, which takes advantage of the extraordinarily clear skies of Antarctica to record the cosmic microwave background. Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy and run by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago, the telescope is located at the NSF Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

“This is the deepest map of the universe we have so far—it’s like taking a photograph with very low background noise exposure,” said Yuuki Omori, research scientist at UChicago and lead author of the paper, which was released Sept. 1 on arXiv.

The results offer a new perspective on ongoing questions in cosmology, such as the structure of the universe and how it evolved.

“What an amazing thing to be able to see all the mass in the universe,” said John Carlstrom, the Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UChicago and the South Pole Telescope project director. “We are entering the new era of cosmology promised by these instruments.”

Testing open questions

The cosmic microwave background, sometimes called the “afterglow of the Big Bang,” has been traveling across the universe since it was created. It can tell scientists about the beginning of the universe, but it can also tell us about later epochs, thanks to a happy quirk of gravity.

The light of the cosmic microwave background travels steadily, except if it is bent ever so slightly by the enormous gravitational pull of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies.

By carefully cataloguing this effect, known as gravitational lensing, scientists can reconstruct a map of all the matter between us and where this light was emitted.

“It’s like cartography—we are making a literal map of the universe,” said Omori.

The latest mass map made from the South Pole Telescope data is the most sensitive measurement of the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background to date, and enables a number of tests of open cosmological questions.

One of the key measurements is how “clumpy” the universe is—that is, where and how matter is lumped together. This tells scientists about how the universe grew over time and opens a window into the relatively mysterious middle years of the history of the universe.

“Scientists want to tell a coherent story that can explain everything about the universe,” said Omori. “We have a pretty good story about the beginning of the universe and a pretty good one about today, but less about the middle years.”

Those years weren’t uneventful, either; that’s when stars and galaxies began to form in earnest, and much of the structure in the universe today can be traced back there.

When combined with data from the Dark Energy Survey, the new South Pole Telescope results are the best yet at narrowing down how the structure of the universe was formed over time.

“This provides a window to the younger state of the universe that we have few other ways to see,” said Wai Ling Kimmy Wu, assistant professor at Caltech and co-author on the study.

Scientists can also compare this map to other measurements of the cosmic microwave background, in case some unknown factor is causing an error in one experiment. The new data agrees very well with other microwave background experiments such as the Planck satellite and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope—which boosts scientists’ confidence in the results.

The data can also be compared to a different measurement known as baryon acoustic oscillations, which can be used to measure the expansion of the universe over time; this comparison can help find potential holes in our current best models of the universe.

All the mass in the universe

The new data is also a step on the road towards two major goals for the South Pole Telescope.

First, the scientists hope that the cosmic microwave background data could someday reveal new insights about neutrinos—the fundamental but mysterious particles that zip through us all the time but barely ever touch us.

“By weighing all of the mass in the universe and studying the structure, we can probe the effects neutrinos had on the growth of structure,” said Wu. “It’s a unique probe of neutrinos, and could even give us a way to measure the mass of neutrinos very precisely.”

Second, the results are also progress towards an ambitious milestone: being able to detect the ripples in gravity from the Big Bang itself.

Known as “primordial gravitational waves,” these ripples date from the first nanoseconds of the existence of the universe, and they could provide the first concrete experimental measurement of cosmic inflation. They could also perhaps point the way towards a longstanding puzzle in physics: reconciling the laws of gravity with the laws of quantum mechanics.

To find these waves, the South Pole Telescope’s data will be used to clean data from the BICEP experiment, also funded by the National Science Foundation and located at the South Pole.

“Essentially, our map can be used to reduce the noise they see and locate the true signal,” said Omori.

The collaboration is working on analyzing a larger set of six years’ worth of data from the South Pole Telescope 3G project, which will make progress on both fronts.

“Any grand unified theory of the universe would have to predict what this signal looks like,” said UChicago research professor Tom Crawford, deputy director of the South Pole Telescope. “Our next upgrade will be even more powerful—so we’ll have an even better shot at detecting this signal. It’s an exciting time.”

Citation: "SPT-3G D1: Quadratic-Estimator CMB Lensing Reconstruction and Cosmology." Omori et al, published to arXiv Sept. 1, 2026.

What to read during America’s 250th anniversary

Victoria-Grace Leconte — 09/02/2026 - 11:30am

Since its founding in 1776, the United States has transformed as a country and a society. The University of Chicago Press has published books on nearly every phase of that national journey, from the colonial economy to modern arguments over liberalism.

“The University of Chicago Press is proud of its legacy of publishing books that deeply inform our understanding of America’s founding and the ideas that continue to shape our country,” said Garrett Kiely, director of the UChicago Press. “These publications are emblematic of our mission to provide a home for engaged, rigorous scholarship and books that can reach a wide audience of smart, curious readers.”

As the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the Press has helped curate seven titles that examine the context of the country’s founding—and what it set in motion.

The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution

Eric Slauter

The founding of the United States after the American Revolution was so monumental in scope that the key actors considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. Recognizing the artificial nature of the state, these early politicians believed the culture of a people should inform the development of their governing rules and bodies. UChicago Assoc. Prof. Eric Slauter explores these central ideas in this extensive and novel account of the origins and meanings of the U.S. Constitution. Slauter uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, highlights the voices of ordinary people, and considers how the artifice of the state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery.

The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age

Thomas Paine; edited with a foreword by Edward G. Gray

Paine was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. More than just a founding father, he was a verbal bomb-thrower, a rationalist and a rebel. In his influential pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. The Daily Thomas Paine offers a year’s worth of pithy and provocative quotes from this quintessentially American figure.

Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves

Marie Jenkins Schwartz

In the households of the founding fathers from Virginia, slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era. American icons such as Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually. Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the first ladies’ slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the first ladies and their slaves.

Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662

Evan Haefeli

The U.S. has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated.

Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism

Emma Hart

While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs and homes of 17th- and 18th-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. This is the history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America

Amir Alexander

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young U.S. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one.

Liberty’s Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs.

Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism

Deirdre McCloskey

The revered public intellectual makes an essential argument for the political preconditions of a liberal society. She argues the case for liberalism as our best hope, and provides an essential vision of the political conditions necessary for its survival.

McCloskey prescribes a liberalism built around liberty from the bottom up: “equality before the law and equality of political and economic permissions,” lightly administered. The state, she argues, is increasingly the source of our discontents—an illiberal institution, hindered by a quixotic fixation on pursuing equality of wealth or opportunity. McCloskey shows that statism in pursuit of a chimerical general will, even when well-intentioned, leads to tyranny.

—Book descriptions adapted from the University of Chicago Press.

Madhav Rajan reappointed as dean of UChicago’s Booth School of Business

Ashley Jost — 09/01/2026 - 11:15am

Madhav Rajan has been reappointed for a third term as the Steven S. Wymer Dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker announced.

The George Pratt Shultz Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting, Rajan has overseen a period marked by growth across every area of the school’s mission since joining Chicago Booth in 2017: growing its faculty, launching new academic programs and attracting transformative philanthropic support.

“For nearly a decade, Madhav has led with purpose and a clear sense of what makes Booth distinct,” Alivisatos said. “A third deanship term reflects the sustained confidence we have in Madhav’s stewardship of Booth.”

Rajan has invested in Booth at every level. Faculty recruitment and retention have been a consistent priority, including the launch of Booth’s network of research centers, which support scholarship by bringing faculty from different disciplines together. He also expanded Booth’s reach across the University through the Business Economics track of the Economics major in the undergraduate College. The school launched its first new degree programs in nearly 90 years, the Master in Management and Master in Finance, which welcomed their inaugural cohorts in 2024. He has also vastly increased scholarship funding, making a Booth education accessible to a much broader range of students.

“At every turn, Madhav’s leadership has made Booth stronger,” Baicker said. “He has recruited and retained exceptional faculty, put the school on extraordinarily strong footing, and taken smart risks on new ideas. We are thrilled to have Madhav continue serving as dean, and know that our whole community will benefit from his leadership and vision.”

To ensure Booth’s long-term financial success, Rajan has cultivated deep relationships with alumni and friends who share his ambitions for the school, securing a $100 million gift to endow the Stevens Doctoral Program, a $60 million gift to support the Asness and Liew Master in Finance Program, and a $100 million gift to endow the Sokolov Executive MBA Program. These commitments reflect the confidence Booth’s alumni and friends have in the School’s trajectory, and have helped grow Booth’s endowment from $702 million to over $2 billion during the past decade.

In addition to his work at Booth, Rajan took on an expanded University-wide role in 2025 as chief global strategist, providing oversight for UChicago Global and the institution’s international strategy for its campuses abroad.

“Nine years ago, I arrived at a school with a storied tradition of rigorous, evidence-based thinking and a mission to apply it to the defining questions of our time,” Rajan said. “Partnering with our faculty, staff, students and alumni to turn that combination into work that has lasting impact has been the great honor of my career. I am excited to build on that energy to further broaden and deepen the school’s impact across the globe.”

New method swaps single atom in a molecule to speed drug discovery

Louise Lerner — 08/31/2026 - 11:00am

Swapping out one letter in a word can entirely change its meaning. Similarly, swapping one atom in a molecule can completely change its identity.

A group of chemists with the University of Chicago has shown a new way to make a single-atom edit to a molecule, without changing any of its other components. The innovative method can be used to make a family of molecules known as pyrroles that includes many widely used medicines—and is significantly simpler, faster and more cost-effective than previous processes.

The inventors hope the method could help speed up the process of discovering new drugs.

“There are a lot of pyrroles that have never been made before, or have been made but are very expensive,” said chemist and graduate student Abigail Bracken, co-first author of the paper published Aug. 19 in Nature. “We hope this opens up possibilities for both research and drug discovery.”

Making useful molecules

Pyrroles are one of those things that most people haven’t heard about, but that quietly make life on Earth possible. For example, pyrroles form the basis of the heme that lets our blood carry oxygen and the chlorophyll that lets plants photosynthesize.

But they can be very difficult to synthesize in the laboratory, which limits how much experimentation can be done with them.

However, pyrroles have a set of molecules that are near-twins: another family of very common molecules called isoxazoles, whose makeups are almost identical except for a single atom. Where pyrroles have a carbon atom, isoxazoles have an oxygen atom. And they are much, much easier to make in the laboratory.

“For example, for one of the molecules we made, the isoxazole version costs $11 per gram, but the pyrrole version of that molecule is $2,000 per gram,” said chemist and graduate student Alexa Lawrie, also a co-first author on the paper.

Bracken and Lawrie are members of the laboratory of Prof. Mark Levin, which specializes in finding ways to make big changes to molecules more easily—an approach they call “skeletal editing.” Normally, if you’d like to make a new molecule, you have to start from scratch; the Levin lab designs techniques that allow scientists to quickly swap atoms in and out of existing molecules.

The team set out to see if they could find a way to directly turn isoxazoles directly into pyrroles, by swapping just a single atom.

After rigorous trial and error, they discovered a technique that significantly cuts the number of required steps and shortens the process to just one to two days. Unlike previous methods, the new process can also be completed in the same flask from start to finish.

The key turned out to be using a substitution reaction to attach a specific group of atoms containing three carbons—known as a propargyl group—to the ring, and then cutting the ring and replacing the oxygen atom with one of the new carbon atoms.

Expanding the scope

The find could be extremely useful for pharmaceutical scientists looking to develop new drugs, the team said.

“This means you can very quickly make a number of different pyrroles to test, which previously would have been time-consuming and expensive,” said Lawrie.

It’s also helpful for tests to determine which parts of molecules perform different actions, which is key knowledge for designing better drugs.

“If you can keep the ring the same and only change out one atom at a time, that could be very helpful for exploring how a drug works and which parts carry out which actions,” explained Bracken.

Members of the team plan to continue to expand the chemistry, they said.

“This method doesn’t work on every single variation, so it would be really interesting to expand the scope of the reaction,” said Lawrie.

Citation: “Synthesis of pyrroles from isoxazoles by an O-to-C skeletal edit.” Bracken, Lawrie, Romita and Levin, Nature, Aug. 19, 2026.

Funding: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program, UChicago Quad Scholars Program, Beckman Scholars Program.

Health care spending gap between high- and low-income Americans widens, study finds

Devon McPhee — 08/28/2026 - 12:00pm

A new study led by a University of Chicago researcher finds health care spending in the United States has increasingly diverged between high- and low-income Americans over the past two decades.

The analysis shows that through 2023, spending has grown faster for high-income Americans, particularly in outpatient care and prescription drugs. This gap may signal growing differences in access to and use of health care across income groups.

The research, published in the journal Health Affairs, builds on earlier work that documented similar income-based differences in health care spending extending back to the 1960s. That prior research found spending gaps narrowed for several decades before beginning to widen again in the early 2000s, the last years included in that study.

The new study uses the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a government-run national survey of health care spending that includes both health care costs paid by individuals and their insurers, to extend the analysis through 2023.

“We were really curious about what had happened more recently,” said UChicago Asst. Prof. Betsy Q. Cliff, a co-author of the study. “We had seen earlier work showing increasing differences in spending and we wanted to know whether that continued and whether major policy changes, like the Affordable Care Act, had shifted those patterns.”

A marked difference in spending patterns

To better understand where spending patterns were diverging, the researchers examined four major categories of health care spending: inpatient care, outpatient services, prescription drugs and emergency department care.

They specifically compared spending among individuals in the lowest 20% of each year’s income distribution to individuals in the highest 20% of incomes. They found that much of the growing gap between high- and low-income Americans was driven by outpatient services and prescription drug spending, while spending on inpatient and emergency care remained comparatively similar across income groups.

Because outpatient visits and prescription medications often involve more routine, ongoing and discretionary forms of care than hospitalizations or emergency treatment, the findings may point to differences in how people access and use health care rather than simply differences in medical need.

The differences in spending also likely reflect two reinforcing trends: higher-income people use more services and pay more for each service used than those in the lowest income group.

“Spending trends reflect some mix of price differences and utilization differences among income groups,” Cliff said. “Medicaid pays lower reimbursement rates than commercial insurance, and that gap has been growing over time. But if it were purely prices, you wouldn’t see any divergence over age 65—when nearly everyone has Medicare—and we do. That suggests utilization differences are part of what’s driving this.”

Researchers also found the Affordable Care Act played a role in shaping spending patterns in the early part of the study period. After 2014, when Medicaid expansion and insurance marketplace reforms increased coverage for lower-income Americans, the gap between income groups narrowed.

However, that narrowing did not persist. From 2018 to 2023, spending growth slowed or declined among lower-income Americans while continuing to rise among higher-income groups. The findings suggest that broader structural forces—including pricing differences, reimbursement policies and changes in how care is used—may continue to shape disparities even after coverage expands.

Implications for health equity

Researchers say the growing gap raises concerns about whether lower-income Americans are receiving comparable levels of care and whether affordability constraints are limiting access to valuable health services.

“If people are increasingly unable to access care, you end up with a health care system that only serves higher-income individuals,” Cliff said. “That is the worry, and it’s something we need more research to understand.”

The findings also suggest that overall spending trends can obscure important differences across income groups.

While health care spending growth has slowed nationally since the early 2000s, which is generally viewed as a positive development, diverging spending among income groups suggests that these overall trends may mask increasing concentration of spending in higher-income individuals.

Next, the researchers aim to better understand what is driving the divergence in spending, particularly the balance between price effects and utilization patterns.

“We really need to look under the hood and better understand what’s driving these patterns,” Cliff said.

Future work will also examine how different categories of care—such as preventive services, chronic disease management and specialty care—contribute to spending differences, and what those patterns mean for long-term health outcomes.

Understanding those mechanisms, Cliff said, will be essential to determining whether the trends reflect differences in how people are choosing to spend their income or emerging disparities in access to essential health care.

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

Inside Mindworks, where museum visitors become research subjects

Justin Curto — 08/27/2026 - 11:05am

As a University of Chicago behavioral scientist studying social cognition, Nicholas Epley conducts many studies that require two strangers to have a conversation. But those studies are far from simple.

“It’s a hard thing to do out in the world with real people,” said Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and a Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow. “You need a place with lots of people coming through at once so you can get two random strangers together to talk.”

Mindworks, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in July, has become that place for Epley, as well as a hub for dozens of other Chicago Booth School of Business researchers’ work. Operated in downtown Chicago by the Roman Family Center for Decision Research (CDR), for which Epley also serves as faculty director, Mindworks is both a discovery center and lab.

Visitors from all over the world can explore behavioral science concepts through free interactive exhibits, then participate in real studies by Booth researchers, earning points that can be redeemed for Mindworks merchandise.

Nearly 85,000 people have visited Mindworks since it opened in July 2021. They’ve come from all 50 states and more than 80 countries. More than 38,000 of those visitors participated in research, helping to complete 219 studies. Findings from these studies have been published in leading academic journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research.

In addition, Mindworks has established itself as an important part of Chicago’s larger cultural community. The center has collaborated with local institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Color Factory Chicago, WBEZ, and, most recently, the Goodman Theatre’s Theater of the Mind—an immersive theatrical experience cocreated by Talking Heads singer David Byrne inspired by neuroscience.

“Mindworks began as a new enterprise integrating behavioral science and lots of other facets: art, design and hospitality,” says Amy Boonstra, AB’91, executive director of the Roman Family CDR.

Mindworks celebrated its anniversary with a week of programming from July 22-26, including a talk, exclusive prizes and even a birthday party complete with cupcakes. It was one of Mindworks’ busiest weeks ever, with more than 650 visitors.

Solving a behavioral science research problem

Most university psychology and behavioral science programs, including Booth’s, have on-campus labs, but subjects for studies primarily tend to be students. So Epley has spent his career trying to figure out how to find subject pools that are more diverse and representative of the country and the world.

“The central challenge for all behavioral scientists doing research is you need people to be in your experiments, and you need a lot of them,” Epley said. “You don’t really want to build a science of human behavior from a few undergrads.”

Around 2007, Epley spearheaded a collaboration with the nearby Griffin Museum of Science and Industry to involve visitors in experiments as an educational experience. Later, Booth also opened a downtown behavioral science lab, in addition to its on-campus one.

The studies at the museum became extremely popular, while the downtown lab, in a high-rise office building, struggled to attract the wider public. That made Epley begin to conceive of Mindworks: a space that could draw participants by offering both the educational engagement of a museum and a convenient downtown location.

Once Epley became faculty director of the Roman Family CDR in 2017, the plan for Mindworks was put into motion.

PIMCO CEO and UChicago trustee Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87, was excited to support the research and offered funding. Then, Epley and Boonstra, who joined the center in 2018, started touring downtown sites and eventually leased their location: a high-traffic storefront on Michigan Avenue across from the Art Institute. Boonstra later contracted award-winning architects Krueck Sexton Partners to bring a unique space to life.

“When you ask the crazy question, ‘Can we do X?’ the answer isn’t always yes, but it’s almost always, ‘Let’s try,’” Epley said. “The notion that you could have a space on Michigan Avenue wouldn’t enter into people’s thoughts at other places. But at Booth, we were willing to ask and were able to find support for it.”

Expanding the possibilities of research

An early challenge of Mindworks was illustrating abstract behavioral science concepts in an engaging way. The Roman Family CDR staff worked with the design firm Pentagram to develop exhibits that would be interactive—for instance, showing the overconfidence effect through a display of pegs plotted on a board.

Those exhibits act as a natural feeder to Mindworks’ studies.

“People are learning, and it’s interactive, and they’re energized from it,” Boonstra said. “They say, ‘I want to contribute to behavioral science. How would I do that?’ We can tell them, ‘Well, we’ve got five different studies you can participate in.’”

The studies conducted at Mindworks have varied widely. Some, like Epley’s, only require two strangers to have a conversation, while others involve technology such as virtual reality goggles or robots. A common thread is that they need to be conducted in person.

One of Epley’s studies from Mindworks explored the impact of active listening in conversation using pairs of strangers. One participant, the storyteller, was instructed to tell either a boring or an interesting story, while another, the listener, was instructed to either listen as normal or to actively engage through their body language and responses.

“The listeners, when they took an interest in what the person had to say, actually made the boring story every bit as enjoyable as the interesting story,” Epley said. The design was simple, but he says Mindworks made it possible to recruit the pairs of strangers required for the study.

Ph.D. student Roman Gallardo, AM’26, studies intergroup relations, focusing specifically on stigmatized groups. Before Booth, he’d only conducted studies online, so he was excited when the opportunity came to strengthen his research through Mindworks.

He’s now running a Mindworks study alongside Jane L. Risen, the H. G. B. Alexander Professor of Behavioral Science, on conversations about gender inequality.

“Intergroup inequality a topic that people want to avoid,” Gallardo said. “So I wondered, if people did have these conversations, how would they go? How would they differ depending on the genders of the speakers?”

The study has pairs of strangers discuss gender inequality and analyzes how they felt about the conversation before and after it took place. Gallardo believes conducting the study in-person, and allowing participants to connect face-to-face, is yielding more authentic conversations than having participants converse over a video call.

“I don’t think I would have been able to pursue this research if I didn’t have Mindworks,” Gallardo said. “We really wanted this in-person sample.”

As Mindworks embarks on its next five years, Epley and Boonstra want to continue focusing on engaging with the community and supporting unique research. The past year was the center’s busiest yet, with nearly 20,000 visitors. They’re also retaining repeat participants through Club Mindworks, a free membership program offering enhanced rewards and exclusive events.

They recently tapped into the group to find subjects for a longitudinal study, where participants will need to return to Mindworks twice. They hope to leverage the club for similar studies in the future.

“Five years in, I still feel like we are on the runway and picking up speed,” Epley said.

—This article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth website.

Five new members elected to UChicago’s Board of Trustees

08/26/2026 - 10:00am

The University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees has elected five new members: Wei Cai, AM’95, MBA’95; David Foley; Stephanie Rada Zocco, AB’88; Imran Siddiqui, AB’96, AM’96; and Konstantin Sokolov, MBA’05. They began their five-year terms in May 2026.

“We are pleased to welcome Wei, David, Stephanie, Imran and Konstantin to the Board,” said David M. Rubenstein, JD’73, chair of the Board of Trustees. “Their distinguished leadership and commitment will help guide the University through this pivotal moment as it embarks on the Chicago Minds campaign.”

“This is a remarkable group of individuals,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “I am grateful for their dedication to the University and look forward to all that we, along with their colleagues on the Board, will accomplish together.”

Wei Cai recently retired as a partner and global vice chairman of investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, where he also served as co-head of China and co-head of China investment banking.

Prior to Goldman Sachs, Cai served as vice chairman of Asia Investment Banking and co-head of China at UBS, and as managing director and head of Asia General Industrials at Morgan Stanley. He was previously a managing director at FountainVest Partners, a China-based private equity fund.

Cai is a member of the Campaign Cabinet and has been an active member of the Chicago Booth Council since 2019 and the Harris School Council since 2024. He also served on the Harris Council from 2014 to 2023.

He received an LLB from Fudan University in 1988, an AM in public policy from the Harris School in 1995 and an MBA from Chicago Booth in 1995.

David Foley is a senior managing director and global head of Blackstone Energy Transition Partners, responsible for overseeing Blackstone’s private equity investment activities in the energy sector on a global basis.

Since joining Blackstone in 1995, Foley has built the energy practice and played an integral role in each of the firm’s energy-related private equity investments. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors for several Blackstone-owned companies, including Accel International, Advanced Cooling Technologies, Kinetik, Sediver, Viridon and Western LNG. Prior to Blackstone, Foley worked at AEA Investors and as a management consultant at Monitor Deloitte.

Foley, alongside his wife Vicki, has chaired the College Parents Council since 2021. He also serves as chair of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate & Sustainable Growth Advisory Council and chair of the Columbia University Medical Center Ophthalmology Board of Advisors.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Northwestern University in 1989 and his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1995. Foley is the parent of a UChicago alum and current student.

Stephanie Rada Zocco is the co-founder and co-president of The Rada Zocco Foundation, a philanthropic foundation dedicated to advancing education, scientific research, culture, the arts and nature conservation.

Her professional expertise is in international trade issues, with a particular focus on intellectual property rights and trade in services. She was the founder and president of the Geneva Business Roundtable, a business advisory group on global trade.

Additionally, she has previously worked with the World Trade Organization, the European Union (Parliament and Commission), and the Executive Office of the President of the United States. She also serves on the board of the Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation and is a founding family member of HeritagePlus Advisory in Geneva, Switzerland.

For over three decades, Rada Zocco has been a committed alumni leader in the UChicago community. She currently serves on the College Advisory Council and the Chicago Booth Global Leaders Group. She is a former president of the University of Chicago Alumni Board of Governors.

She received her bachelor’s degree from UChicago in 1988 and a master’s degree from the University of Virginia.

Imran Siddiqui is the chief executive officer of Talcott Financial Group, an international life insurance provider, and a director on the Talcott Financial Group board.

Since Siddiqui joined Talcott, the company has grown its assets under management to over $135 billion. Under his leadership, Talcott has reinsured over $65 billion of liabilities from leading life insurance and annuity providers in the United States and Japan and the company launched a new retail business focused on the U.S. retirement market in 2026. He was previously a senior partner at Apollo Global Management and held senior positions at Oak Hill Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs.

Siddiqui has served on both the College Advisory Council and the Law School Advisory Council.

He received two degrees from the University of Chicago: a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in international relations, both in 1996; and a JD from Harvard Law School in 2002. Siddiqui is the parent of two current UChicago College students.

Konstantin Sokolov is the founder and chairman of the board of IJS Investments, a Chicago-based private equity firm focused on critical infrastructure, technology and financial services.

He is the founding chairman of the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund, a U.S. nonprofit organization mobilizing capital across the South Caucasus and Central Asia. He also serves on the boards of the Munich Security Conference Foundation and the American Friends of the Munich Security Conference.

Throughout his career, Sokolov has advised governments and major companies, led public listings on major stock exchanges, and overseen restructuring projects for central banks and sovereign wealth funds. He is the chairman of the Northern Pillar Energy Consortium and Pelagos Data Centres.

Sokolov is a member of the Council on Chicago Booth and the Chicago Booth and Polsky Center Private Equity Council. He received his master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from St. Petersburg State University in 1997 and an executive MBA from Chicago Booth in 2005.

Quantum Leap Challenge Institute renewed for $37.5 million as NSF invests in quantum sensing for biology

08/25/2026 - 10:15am

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced Aug. 25 that it has renewed the Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering with a $37.5 million, five-year investment to advance quantum sensing technologies that can reveal biological processes difficult or impossible to observe with conventional tools.

The Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering (or NSF QuBBE) was first established in 2021. Led by the University of Chicago in partnership with Chicago State University, the University of Illinois Chicago, Harvard University and other collaborators, the institute brings together quantum scientists, engineers, chemists, biologists, and physicians.

The renewal will move NSF QuBBE into its next phase: advancing quantum sensing from proof-of-principle measurements toward robust tools for investigating biological systems. It will also continue to develop a ‘quantum workforce,’ creating pathways into quantum science and technology.

At UChicago, the effort spans the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Physical Sciences Division, Biological Sciences Division and UChicago Medicine.

“Quantum sensing has reached a point where it can begin to address real biological questions,” said Greg Engel, director of NSF QuBBE, chair of the Department of Chemistry, and professor at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “The next challenge is to make these tools reliable, adaptable, and useful in the complex environments where biology actually happens. This renewal allows us to take that step.”

From quantum experiments to biological tools

Quantum sensors use properties of quantum systems to make extraordinarily precise measurements. In biology, they could provide new ways to observe molecular and nanoscopic cellular processes that are difficult to access using conventional techniques.

During its first phase, NSF QuBBE supported advances across quantum sensing and biology, including genetically encodable qubits, nanodiamond sensors capable of detecting cellular activity, advances in high-field nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance, and novel approaches to using entanglement for biosensing.

For example, research led by UChicago Assoc. Prof. Peter Maurer and Liew Family Prof. David Awschalom—both NSF QuBBE co-principal investigators and their collaborators—demonstrated that fluorescent proteins can function as spin qubits, opening the possibility of quantum sensors that can be genetically expressed directly within cells.

The scientific convergence fostered through NSF QuBBE has also helped catalyze new efforts to move quantum sensing toward biomedical applications, including the formation of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine, housed at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in collaboration with UChicago Medicine and the Biological Sciences Division. The Center is advancing the development and adoption of quantum technologies for medicine and training physicians and physician-scientists to work at the intersection of quantum science and healthcare.

"For more than four decades, NSF has been laying the foundational groundwork of research and discovery that is powering today's modern quantum computing, sensing and communication," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "It's time for focused activities to leverage that base of knowledge to drive us even farther forward to the benefit of all Americans. The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are a next step for us in understanding the quantum world we live in."

Four research areas

In the coming years, NSF QuBBE will drive advances in four interconnected research areas: developing novel quantum nanoprobes for biological sensing; exploring entanglement and squeezed sensing; advancing in vivo measurement with quantum sensors; and accelerating the adoption of quantum sensing across biology and medicine.

Researchers will pursue approaches ranging from improving nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to developing protein-based quantum sensors that can operate within biological systems, while investigating how entanglement, advanced imaging, theory, and computation could enable new ways of measuring biological activity.

“The opportunity in this next phase is to integrate the quantum sensor and the biological question from the beginning,” said Allison Squires, deputy director and co-principal investigator of NSF QuBBE and Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. “Rather than developing a technology in isolation and then looking for an application, we can design these tools for implementation in the complex biological environments where we ultimately want them to work.”

Building Chicago's quantum workforce

During NSF QuBBE's first phase, the Institute partnered with Chicago State University to establish the Quantum Institute, including Q-Cert, a one-year post-baccalaureate Quantum Science Certification program. In its next phase, NSF QuBBE plans to expand that model, including the launch of a quantum master's program at Chicago State and further integration of undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. training.

The work will complement Chicage State’s new Quantum Education, Science and Technology Center, CQuEST, which is the university’s center for innovation in quantum science and microelectronics, connecting education, research and workforce development as Chicago's quantum ecosystem grows.

“Building the future of quantum science requires us to build pathways for students to see themselves as part of it,” said Valerie Goss, NSF QuBBE co-principal investigator and workforce development lead at Chicago State University. “Through our partnership with NSF QuBBE, we are creating opportunities for students to gain the knowledge, research experience and connections they need to participate in this rapidly developing field.”

NSF QuBBE will also expand its Quantum Academy, led by UIC Professor Minjung Ryu, which engages Chicago-area high school students and teachers in quantum science through hands-on learning, research experiences, and teacher professional development.

Establishing quantum sensing for biology as a field

The renewed Institute will work to make quantum sensing technologies more accessible to researchers in biology and medicine, expanding infrastructure and user capabilities while bringing biologists, physicians, and other potential users directly into the development and testing of new technologies.

“NSF’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes were created to ask ambitious questions that require an interdisciplinary lens,” said Engel, who is also co-director of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine and a professor in the James Franck Institute and Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at UChicago. “NSF QuBBE is built around one of those questions: can quantum measurement change what we are able to see, understand, and ultimately control in biology and medicine? This renewal gives us the opportunity to create an impactful body of work that provides an answer to that important question.”

—This story was originally published on the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering website.

What ancient trade tells us about globalization

Sarah Steimer — 08/24/2026 - 02:15pm

Indian Ocean imports shaped many lives across the ancient world.

In Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade, Jeremy A. Simmons, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, goes beyond the mechanics of long-distance travel or the economics of trade to offer a new perspective on Indian Ocean commerce.

The book refocuses a historical lens on the commodities involved and the resulting patterns of their consumption, and what Simmons ponders as the consequences of objects in motion.

“[Long-distance trade] conjures up the imagination of the Silk Road or ports that are teeming with traders and exotic goods,” Simmons said. “There's this initial attraction to it by both readers and scholars: We become enamored of this, but at the same time, that magic flattens some of the dynamics. We fixate on the lines crossing the Indian Ocean rather than the actual, tangible change that occurs as a result of these connections.”

To look beyond trade routes and connectivity, Simmons explored what he calls the lingering consequence of traded goods in new environments. For example, he points to pepper in the Roman Empire. This, he says, was not just about luxurious consumption, but about a “desire centered around sensuous qualities that not only prompts [pepper’s] importation but transforms the culture at large as a result.”

Much of Simmons’s research on the topic, which began with his dissertation at Columbia University, involved combing both textual and material archives.

Spending time in India, the Mediterranean and the United Kingdom, he dug through Indian Ocean trade items in collections and storehouses to gain a tangible understanding of the objects. Whereas many scholars might find a Roman coin in India and make note of the emperor pictured to ascertain when it was made, Simmons—in his physical examination of the coin—might find it to be a high-quality imitation that was made there, which tells a very different story.

This reading between the lines—or between the materials—informed much of the book. As Simmons explains it, he let the commodities guide his study. For example, spices in the Mediterranean world suggested a sensuous course, in which these objects were smelled and ingested.

“I think a history of the senses enabled me to think about these goods as greater than commodity—they, in fact, were experiential,” Simmons said.

In his study of ancient texts, Simmons found them to be more nuanced than they’re often perceived. He argues ancient testimonies are frequently read at face value, and their work is mined for facts. A literary perspective, however, can uncover more complex insights. Simmons uses Pliny the Elder as an example: It can be easy to assume that the ancient author is dealing in truths, but there are rhetorical flourishes and jokes that suggest his critiques of luxury goods may be his way of wrestling with this new, more global world.

Following that, Simmons references a story in which someone in hiding is literally sniffed out by his executioners because he is wearing perfume—what was then a new luxury commodity in the Roman Empire. Pliny implies this act makes that individual deserving of death.

But rather than read this passage simply as Pliny moralizing against this commodity, Simmons pushes further at what perfume symbolized at the time: its role in dressing the dead in Roman society.

“This trope, as you start following it, occurs everywhere,” Simmons said. “It's a pretty common satirical quip that people make. ‘Oh, he smells like a couple of funerals.’”

Sea of Treasures asks scholars and readers to reconsider the ways we’ve long approached the history of this trade route and its impacts. Simmons urges readers to think of the Indian Ocean on its own terms and not just for what it does for the Roman empire.

“By not engaging only with traditional source material for Roman history, but also looking at the Sanskrit material, the Indic inscriptions and the archeology in the subcontinent, too, [I was] trying to bring different parts of this interconnected world into a more balanced dialog,” he said. “This was an important takeaway for me: You have to look at it from multiple perspectives.”

Along this same vein, he notes that much of the ancient historical record is written by an elite population: People who have the privilege to make arguments about society at large, and who might also have more anxieties about it. Meanwhile, there are those at the margins who are also affected—but whose voices aren’t as readily found.

So while it may appear that a book on ancient luxury items only deals with a small, select segment of the population, these commodities and small-scale practices actually reverberate into a wider socio-cultural world.

As he worked on the book, Simmons said that he saw echoes of this ancient world in modern life. Then, as now, a more globalized economy can spark fears of the new, as well as deeper questions of identity. There’s a larger human story that’s told in Sea of Treasures, he says, one that speaks to the joys and woes of an interconnected world.

“Everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone wants to feel attractive,” Simmons said. “Everyone wants to have an allure or charisma that these sensuous, new, almost numinous commodities can cater to. ‘Luxury’ collapses all this.”

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

Researchers clear hurdle toward ‘EKG for a single cell’

Paul Dailing — 08/21/2026 - 10:15am

Inserting a diamond-based quantum sensor into a living cell can obtain previously unseen levels of detail about how life works and how diseases form.

“Think of it as an EKG for a single cell, a way to capture everything happening inside at once, in real time,” said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Aaron Esser-Kahn. “We routinely monitor vital signs in people—heart rate, breathing, temperature—but until now, there simply hasn’t been an equivalent way to take a cell’s vitals.”

An interdisciplinary research team from UChicago PME and the University of Iowa, originally aimed at making diamond-based quantum biosensors less toxic, less inflammatory and overall easier on cells, unexpectedly revealed new insights that overturned a major assumption limiting the sensors' effectiveness.

“We found a missing piece of the puzzle,” said Uri Zvi, PhD’25, first author of the paper published in Advanced Materials.

When inserted into living cells, diamond-based biosensors experience energy level shifts called “zero-field splitting” (ZFS), which reduce the sensors’ effectiveness. It had always been assumed that these shifts were the diamond reacting to the cell’s temperature.

“ZFS of qubits in diamond is known to be impacted by temperature. So when people observed ZFS shifts they assumed that these were caused by local temperature changes, i.e., caused by cellular activities,” said UChicago PME Assoc. Prof. Peter Maurer, co-corresponding author of the new work along with Esser-Kahn and University of Iowa Asst. Prof. Denis Candido.

Instead, they discovered the diamond’s surface was causing the shifts. This greater understanding can be harnessed to get even more detailed readings of cells, Maurer said, adding the new paper made two major advancements.

“First, it resolves a longstanding discussion around the origin of observed shifts in qubit resonances in diamond nanoparticles,” he said. “Second, we showed that the observed qubit resonance shifts can be connected to cellular processes and could be an interesting proxy for probing cellular activity."

Following the clues

A previous interdisciplinary breakthrough both led to this mystery and gave the team the tools to crack it.

Last year, Zvi, immunoengineer Esser-Kahn, quantum engineer Maurer and theoretical physicist Candido collaborated on a new shell-encased biosensor inspired by the technology used in quantum dot LED television sets.

They found that coating a sensor in silica, intended only to make the diamond easier on the cell, also created a vastly more stable sensor. Their subsequent investigation found two things that Zvi said led directly to this new work.

First, the coating was dispersing electrons from the diamond’s center, inadvertently closing traps that had been causing spin noise. That was the reason for the increased performance, Zvi said. Second, this electron loss was flipping the charge of just the inside of the diamond from negative to positive.

“The moment we saw that, we started thinking, ‘Hey, this is a stark change,’” Zvi said.

This opened the possibility that electric field effects were more impactful than previously thought, causing them to revise their theory. But the coated sensor also gave them the ability to test this experimentally. They could control for surface effects.

The cell’s temperature would be the same whether the sensor was coated or not, so if temperature were causing the ZFS shifts, both sensors would see them. Instead, they found the silica coating was suppressing the ZFS shifts. The surface was to blame.

But there was a surprise in store for the team.

‘Unexplained and puzzling’

Even though their technique suppressed the ZFS shifts, the team was measuring massive, sudden temperature change within the cell—up to 5 degrees Celsius over 30 minutes.

“I am far from an expert in biology, but a sudden cellular temperature variation of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius is very unexpected," Candido joked. “As a theorist, I always love it when experimentalists have unexplained and puzzling data, so it was very exciting!”

While the current research indicates that temperature was not responsible for the observed ZFS shifts, that conclusion stands in stark contrast to much of the previous literature. Earlier studies had interpreted similar shifts as evidence of intracellular temperature changes of 1 to 10 degrees, Zvi said.

This caused Zvi and Candido to go back to the theoretical drawing board. Not only did they find the true culprit behind the ZFS shifts, they also found an important way to distinguish between the variations of temperature and the electric field signal.

Future researchers can harness this to make more accurate temperature readings of cells and better biosensors to understand life itself.

“You can think about being able to follow whether a T cell is becoming a regulatory T cell or a killer T cell, whether a cell becomes a cancer cell or just a healthy cell,” Zvi said. “There is an entire new world to explore, and entirely new ways to explore it.”

Citation: "Probing Cellular Activity Via Charge-Sensitive Quantum Nanoprobes," Zvi et al, Advanced Materials, February 4, 2026.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago PME website.

Why humor can look a lot like deception

Chandler A. Calderon — 08/19/2026 - 12:15pm

Pinocchio is bullshitting.

Not wanting to reveal his friend’s location, but also not wanting to trigger the telltale sign that he’s lying, the Shrek the Third character talks in circles to avoid telling an angry Prince Charming where his rival, the ogre Shrek, is.

“Well, uh, I don’t know where he’s not,” the would-be boy begins.

Then he really begins to dazzle: “On the contrary, I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably do or do not know where he should probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he isn’t.”

The linguistic gymnastics continue until one of the Three Little Pigs gets so annoyed that he blurts out what Shrek is up to.

With this scene, projected on three screens at the front of a Harper Memorial Library classroom, Jason Riggle kicked off a lecture for their linguistics course “The Language of Deception and Humor.”

It turns out that humor and deception are two sides of the same coin, Riggle argued in the Autumn Quarter course, and both have a lot to tell us about how we make meaning and interact with others. Students explored how the two modes interact in literature, philosophy, popular culture, developmental science and more.

On one level, “almost all humor involves some kind of deception, involves some kind of trickery, some kind of misdirection,” said Riggle, an associate professor of linguistics who uses they/them pronouns. “So you might say humor is a flavor of deception, but that would be really reductive.”

To start with the obvious, humor is intensely prosocial.

“We delight in messing with each other, in being messed with by other brains,” they said. And when someone gets a joke, it shows shared understanding. “Humor is this sort of magic flash that reveals the insides of other people’s minds.”

Children develop the ability to tell jokes relatively young, Riggle explained in a class on cognitive development. By age 4, most children begin to move from a sense of humor that relies on deviations from expected norms, such as a caregiver making a funny face or using a common item in a silly way, to humor that takes into account shared knowledge and assumptions.

Riggle told students a joke they heard from their young child: “Why do sharks swim in salt water? Because pepper water makes them sneeze!”

It’s a fairly sophisticated joke, Riggle said, one that relies on a couple of analogical leaps. The joke teller must know that the audience thinks of salt and pepper as a pair, that the existence of salt water could imply pepper water exists, and that pepper makes you sneeze. As children gain this awareness of what other people know and how they think, they also learn how to lie.

Deception, too, can be prosocial, Riggle argued in another class session. Hence our wealth of terms for almost-lies. Since calling someone a liar is such a serious social judgment, we are careful to distinguish between kinds of deception that might not convey the same level of betrayal as a lie: white lie, innocent misunderstanding, noble lie, trolling, prank, bluff, ploy, dupe. We might not consider someone who engages in these a liar.

Riggle said some research has even shown that people tend to find those who lie for prosocial reasons—for example, telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings—as more honest rather than less.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

And certainly not in the middle of a linguistics class. But there it was, the famous Monty Python sketch, serving as an example of how a tragic topic becomes fodder for a joke. Humor, like horror, Riggle said, can allow audiences to process fear or anxiety by twisting expectations in an entertaining way.

“It’s a good class to teach, because it gives you all the dopamine, getting to laugh,” Riggle said.

The Shrek the Third scene and the Monty Python sketch were among many short videos students were asked to consider. To tease apart nuances between humor and almost-humor, students analyzed jokes that could easily go sideways.

An example of this involved a contest organized by a restaurant manager in 2001: The server who sold the most beer in a month would win a Toyota.

The winner didn’t receive a car, but rather a “toy Yoda.” It turned out the contest had been announced on April Fools’ Day. Was this funny? Not for the winning waitress, who decided to sue—her case was settled out of court.

The course took a more sober tone in the final weeks of the quarter, diving into ways that humor feeds into persuasion, misinformation and contagious deception.

“Humor is the magic key that opens up people’s defenses and allows you to get at what they really think,” Riggle said, making it a potential tool for manipulation.

But Riggle was not above a little manipulation themself, it turned out. They revealed in one class session filled with comedy clips and memes that research has shown people absorb more from lectures that involve humor than those that don’t, even if slides used in a lecture are out of order.

This suggests that after experiencing humor, the mind is better able to draw connections. Students glanced around, amused that they might have been tricked into learning something.

—This article originally appeared in the Spring/26 University of Chicago Magazine.