News

In a quiet UChicago garden, volunteers cultivate food and community

Kayla Davis — 07/30/2026 - 09:25am

In a small on-campus plot lined with benches, trees and a short fence to keep rabbits out, volunteers are busy planting a summer garden. Dill sprouts from one section, carrot tufts peek out from another. Someone kneels at the edge of a bed, patting the soil flat with both hands.

This is the work of Phoenix Farms, a student-run gardening and beekeeping organization, cultivated by volunteers from the wider University of Chicago community.

The registered student organization (RSO) has been quietly growing tomatoes, radishes, cucamelons and flowers between the Smart Museum of Art and the Young Memorial Building for over a decade. Many people who walk past the garden every day probably have no idea it’s there, or that they’re welcome to step in and help.

Faculty, staff and community members have all pitched in before, and the students who run the organization are always looking for more volunteers. The group takes its gardening seriously, but its leaders say the mission is more than just produce.

“It's to provide a space for people in the Chicago community to connect with the way that we grow our food and have some hands-on engagement with the land,” said Phoenix Farms co-president and co-head gardener Mira Tensuan-Eli, also known as the organization’s “Queen Bee.”

Roots in the community

Beyond the plot at the Smart Museum, Phoenix Farms also has a greenhouse on top of the Biological Sciences Learning Center, where seeds are started each spring, and beehives at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn, about a mile from campus.

A branch of the organization grows oyster mushrooms year-round using spent coffee grounds from campus cafés. What gets harvested goes to the students and other volunteers who grew it. There's no formal membership and no fee to participate.

Phoenix Farms began as two separate RSOs—Harper Hives, focused on beekeeping, and Avant Garden, focused on gardening—that merged around 2018. The mushroom-growing branch came later, born out of student curiosity about mycology.

Volunteers participate for a variety of reasons, from a desire to learn something new, to an interest in reigniting a childhood hobby.

“We get a lot of people who are like, ‘I gardened a lot when I was at home and I want to be able to reconnect with that,’” said Tensuan-Eli.

In addition to connecting with the land, Phoenix Farms gives volunteers the opportunity to connect with each other. They’ve hosted make-your-own pickle events, using produce they grew themselves, led foraging trips for volunteers, and enjoyed fresh sourdough at what they call “Brom” (Bread Prom).

Phoenix Farms regularly brings together other clubs for joint events. Their communal “Big Soup” —a tradition involving participants bringing in ingredients to cook a large soup together—in collaboration with the Phoenix Sustainability Initiative and the Environmental Justice Task Force is among the most popular. These partnerships tend to grow organically, shaped by the connections of whoever is leading the organizations at the time.

The bees—and the honey

Though Phoenix Farms’ hives recently relocated from the Charles M. Harper Center roof—giving the bees a break to settle into their new home before producing again—the honey has a fantastic reputation.

The campus linden trees, which bloom in late May and early June, are a big part of why.

“It's well-known that some of the best honey comes from the pollination of the linden trees,” said manager of campus environment Kathleen Golomb. The hives at First Presbyterian are close enough to campus that the bees forage freely across Hyde Park and Woodlawn to find them.

What helps too is the campus environment. UChicago’s campus—a recognized member of the American Public Garden Association since 1997—is dense with flowering trees and shrubs, and the University does not use broadcast herbicides or pesticides anywhere on grounds, only targeted spot treatment in specific cases. For bees, it's ideal foraging territory.

“It's incredibly helpful to our pollinators that they’re not being affected, and the honey is not being affected either,” Golomb said.

When honey production does start up again, Phoenix Farms sells it at student organization fairs on campus and at the Hyde Park Farmers Market.

Lending a hand

In the spring, summer and fall, when things are in bloom, Phoenix Farms’ garden is a quiet green space that anyone can sit in or stop by.

“Whenever people remember that we exist, they’re super happy about it,” said Tensuan-Eli. “‘There’s a garden and bees here?’ And it’s like, yeah. We’re here.”

Volunteer gardening sessions, or work days, happen on weekend mornings once the season kicks off in Spring Quarter—and anyone on campus is welcome, no sign-up or experience needed. To be notified about upcoming work days, added to the mailing list, or kept in the loop on when the bees will be producing, email incoming co-presidents Sadie Foer (sfoer@uchicago.edu) or Aubrey Barb (abarb@uchicago.edu).

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

IBM, UChicago demonstrate ‘quantum advantage,’ outperforming traditional computers with a quantum computer

07/29/2026 - 04:19pm

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced July 30 a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for “quantum advantage”—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations.

The collaboration said their system had performed computations beyond the reach of leading classical simulation methods, while providing trust that the computation returned accurate results.

In their new paper, the researchers showed that these two goals could be achieved by a novel construction of encoded quantum circuits—one of the largest demonstrations of logical quantum computing to date.

Building trust into quantum results

For years, researchers have used a benchmark known as random circuit sampling, or RCS, to test whether quantum computers could outperform classical systems.

In simple terms, RCS asks a quantum computer to generate patterns so complex that a classical computer cannot efficiently reproduce them.

The challenge has been verification: as the problem becomes harder, it becomes increasingly difficult and then infeasible to prove the quantum computer’s answer is correct, without making strong assumptions about the inner workings of the quantum computer.

In their experiment, researchers addressed this obstacle with a structured alternative to RCS. The team was able to prove that this alternative retains the same hardness criteria as RCS, but crucially, the new structure can be used to detect errors during the computation.

“Verification remains one of the biggest challenges in firmly establishing experimental quantum advantage,” said Bill Fefferman, associate professor of computer science at UChicago and co-author on the paper. “This experiment develops techniques to better characterize the fidelity of hard quantum states under noise, increasing confidence that the quantum computer is solving a computationally hard problem.”

Co-author Soumik Ghosh, a graduate student in Fefferman’s group at UChicago, added: “Beyond strengthening experimental validation, advances in verification have the potential to unlock practical applications for the next generation of quantum computers.”

In one of the world’s largest error correction demonstrations to date, the team successfully executed 70 logical qubits while shielding them from errors. They ran 2,415 logical two-qubit operations and 468 logical “T gates,” both metrics that quantify the complexity of a quantum circuit.

“We are now firmly in the quantum advantage era,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “We have demonstrated a quantum computation beyond the practical reach of classical computers that establishes, with statistical confidence, a lower bound on how faithfully it was executed. This milestone gives scientists, developers and businesses a new foundation for trusting quantum computers as they scale to problems far beyond what we can achieve classically.”

The IBM quantum computer took approximately 15 minutes to accomplish the task; the team showed many leading classical simulation approaches faced prohibitive runtimes.

More information is available at IBM’s site.

—Adapted from a press release first posted by IBM.

How UChicago students staged a wordless play with an Emmy-winning company

Colin Terrill — 07/29/2026 - 01:05pm

As the theater filled with music and sound effects, a dozen performers buzzed on stage operating puppets and displaying imagery on overhead projector screens while others either used silhouettes or themselves on screen to complete the scene.

The sold-out crowd in the University of Chicago’s Theater East was watching the first official performance of Dream Delivery Service, a play guided by Manual Cinema, an Emmy Award-winning production company. Three of the five founders are UChicago alumni, and the company’s distinctive style combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, and innovative sound and music.

The performance was a joint effort between Manual Cinema and UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) program, as part of its twice-a-year “pro show” course, which gives students hands-on experience with those from the industry. Even still, it was safe to say the surreal, wordless show was a first-time experience for the College performers. This included fourth-year student Nina Maxin, a business economics major who added a TAPS major late into her UChicago tenure. Having already performed in two other TAPS pro shows in the past, Maxin knew how much work would go into the production—but she was “surprised” to learn how deep its roots went at the University.

“Knowing that there are creatively driven alumni like them who have paved their own way devising performances at the intersection of film, puppetry and theater is really inspiring. The nature of their work as inherently collaborative, human to human, is encouraging to me as I head towards graduation,” she said.

The show only took a few months to go from storyboard to stage, but the seeds for the idea were planted at UChicago nearly two decades ago.

From the ‘life of the mind’ to live on stage

Manual Cinema was founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter. The group came from backgrounds in theater, visual arts and live music, but their paths could have been much different if it weren’t for the College.

Kauffman, Dir and Fornace are each alumni of UChicago and got their start in theater just as the TAPS program was being formed. Fornace originally intended to become a biology major but then shifted to English literature because she liked “immersing herself in the life of the literary mind” and she started performing shortly thereafter.

“There was a really robust theater club which was great because people were there to perform while still majoring in biology, economics and neuroscience,” Fornace said referring to her work with University Theater (UT). “But at the end of the day, we would all come together and spend hours and hours each week creating amazing productions.”

The idea that eventually became Manual Cinema came from Miller while working at the now-defunct Redmoon Theater in Chicago. She wanted to use an overhead projector as a major tool in a new piece. Dir, now a playwright but working at the time as a dramaturg, joined the production and they enlisted a local band headed by Kauffman and Vegter to score it for them. A 20-minute short piece came out of the effort, giving birth to the company.

At the start they acted like a newly formed band, performing wherever they could—bars, windows and park district facilities—just to make a name for themselves. Eventually a feature-length work took off which allowed them to tour the country and enter the international touring market, making it a full-time venture for the five.

Their pieces can be seen on television, in movie theaters and even in the newly opened Obama Presidential Center. But there was always a desire to return home.

A Unique Collaboration

Each section of the TAPS pro shows features a different scripted work, with students taught and mentored by local artists. Last fall, that featured a performance of Happy Birthday Mars Rover with Chicago director Helen Young.

When they enroll in a pro show course, each student picks a track to focus on during the production and performance process. Some decide that they want to act, others assist the costume designer or help direct.

Brianna Parry, TAPS production manager, said this year became the perfect time to pair with a group that had such strong ties to the College.

“Honestly, it’s something that we’ve always wanted to do but there was never a company that made sense before,” she said. “The relationship that Manual Cinema has with the University allowed this unique moment in the TAPS landscape to form.”

Within that relationship, Parry noted that Manual Cinema had one advantage that almost no other outside production could have if they were offered a residency at the University.

“The members in Manual ‘speak’ UChicago to a degree that many of our visiting artists don’t because they already know about the student experience,” she said. “They know these students are already overscheduled and overcommitted, but they have the type of mindset that they will always make room for one more thing if they find true interest in it.”

Fornace agreed and jumped at the chance to return to the place that she believes is responsible for her ending up with a career in theater.

“It was wild to be back after almost 20 years and to be talking with students about their thoughts, ideas and concerns as they go through the same educational experience that we did.”

The piece TAPS worked on with Manual Cinema was brand-new and in a style that had never been done before in the history of the program.

This allowed the committee to give students an experience that was completely unique while giving Manual Cinema a type of freedom they hardly are afforded anymore. Fornace said this allowed them to be more experimental while working in the academic setting.

Delivering a dream

Storyboards were offered to students at the first class of the quarter which presented the challenge that was being put in front of them—a work with no words that would require them to use paper puppets and hundreds of slides on projectors to convey a story to each audience member.

Throughout the piece, students would be asked to be in constant motion. Whether they were opening or closing a projector to display the image on the screen, bringing a puppet to life or tossing a prop to one of their castmates across the stage, the process forced individuals to work as one.

“This type of work really required a lot of trust and sense of confidence in College students, especially in working with puppets which most had never experienced before, within just eight short weeks,” Maxin said, adding that the learning curve was steep.

“We just had to keep going, to keep learning from each mistake or altering the choreography to make things a little bit easier to manage together. However, in the end the process became fun and rewarding. Each smooth execution of a sequence felt invigorating.”

True to its title, the piece is a dreamy, hour-long, three-part story that transports the audience to an alien planet, through the ups and downs of a dating app and back in time to a Middle Ages monastery where comical, mischievous characters lurked.

With a critical look at AI and technology, the play’s themes draw inspiration from the works of film director Alfred Hitchcock and television shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror.Each of the five shows, including a preview on Thursday, sold out. Fornace said the process took her back to when she was discovering storytelling for the first time.

“Each crew was working as separate units throughout most of the process, but when the costumes came in and the lights turned on during the last few weeks, everything just blossomed,” she said. “All of this acting and storytelling that I had not seen before all happened at once and it reminded me of when we all started working together for the first time 15 years ago.”

Manual Cinema plans on taking Dream Delivery Service and adapting it into one of the stories that they will perform while on tour. Fornace isn’t sure what will stay and what will be cut,but assured that the version seen in Theater East will be one of a kind.

For TAPS and UChicago, the partnership proved to be a success for all involved–which might lead to other distinctive opportunities in the future.

“We spent such a long time putting the whole production together and I believe that we experienced something truly special,” said Maxin. “I can only hope that future classes get to do something as transformative as this was for me for years to come.

—This story was originally published on the University of Chicago College website.

What to know about cyclospora, the parasite behind this summer’s outbreak

David Zhang — 07/29/2026 - 09:42am

This summer's outbreak of the cyclospora parasite is on track to be the worst on record, with more recorded cases in the past few months than in all last year combined.

Though linked to fresh produce such as iceberg lettuce—prompting recalls of some salad greens, herbs and berries—investigators have struggled to pin down a source. The outbreak has sickened thousands of Americans, often with intense gastrointestinal symptoms.

To better understand cyclospora and its health risks, we asked UChicago Medicine physician Asst. Prof. David Zhang, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease; and the UChicago Medicine Medical Group urgent care medical director, Joseph Newberg*.

What is cyclospora, and how is it different from what most people associate with food poisoning?

Cyclospora is a parasite, not a bacteria or virus.

Unlike norovirus, a stomach virus that spreads easily, cyclosporiasis (the illness resulting from cyclospora infection) isn’t contagious. It comes from eating affected food.

Cyclospora is harder to eradicate than viruses and bacteria, which are more likely to be naturally flushed out by diarrhea.

What are the common symptoms of cyclosporiasis?

After entering the body, cyclospora lodges in the small intestine and causes watery diarrhea and these other symptoms:

Loss of appetite
Abdominal cramping and bloating
Fatigue
Low-grade fever
Increased flatulence

How does public health track an outbreak like this, and what makes cyclospora so hard to trace?

Typically, the lab will report positive results and provide this information to the health department, which will initially conduct detailed interviews with the patients involved. They will ask about travel, food intake, restaurant visits, potlucks etc.

But it’s more difficult to identify the source of infections the longer the incubation period, and with cyclospora, it can be up to two weeks—it can be hard to remember what you ate weeks ago. Beyond that, the food system is very complex and includes many potential areas of contamination, including the farms and distribution networks, the various suppliers and retailers that make tracing this difficult, very laborious. Lastly, multiple outbreaks can happen at the same time from different sources and can stretch public health agencies even further.

However, since we know cyclospora thrives in certain climates and conditions, it is typically a summer illness. Certain vegetation is more likely to be the carrier, so they can usually narrow it down. The later in the outbreak the health department is notified, the greater the chance that the affected foods have made it into our groceries or restaurants, and the higher the numbers climb.

With no confirmed source, what should people do about fresh produce?

With no single food to avoid, it comes down to a few habits. Cooking is the most reliable step, as heating to at least 158 degrees Fahrenheit will kill cyclospora.

Washing alone won’t fully remove the parasite, but it is still important. Wash your produce thoroughly, rubbing items under cold water, using a colander for delicate produce and a scrub brush for root vegetables. Prevent cross-contamination by keeping produce separate from raw meat and cleaning cutting boards, knives and surfaces before and after food prep.

Be aware of recalls issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other health officials: outbreaks have been linked to fresh produce including bagged salads, leafy greens, berries and herbs. And as always with food, keep your hands clean. Scrub with soap and water for at least 20 seconds before preparing food and before eating.

How long does cyclosporiasis last and how is it treated?

Symptoms usually start about two to 14 days after exposure and can persist for several weeks.

Most healthy patients will recover without antibiotics, but cyclosporiasis can sometimes cause complications such as dehydration, reactive arthritis, malnutrition or gallbladder inflammation.

UChicago Medicine can test for cyclospora. Positive results are reported to the public health department to help manage outbreaks.

What should you do if you have symptoms of cyclosporiasis? And when should you see a doctor?

It depends on how severe the diarrhea is. If you’re otherwise healthy and able to keep down fluids and electrolytes, it is best to let your body naturally flush out the cause. Make sure to drink plenty of water or an electrolyte drink to stay hydrated.

If your diarrhea lasts longer than two or three days, or you have more than six bowel movements per day, contact your healthcare provider for further guidance.

Seek medical care if you have severe diarrhea lasting more than two or three days, or if you can’t hold down food or liquids. UChicago Medicine offers walk-in and virtual urgent care across Chicagoland.

If you have recently traveled outside the United States, you should see a doctor. Anyone experiencing lightheadedness, shortness of breath, or weakness when standing should seek medical attention immediately.

Immunocompromised individuals and those with kidney problems face a higher risk of complications and should consult a doctor if diarrhea lasts more than a day or two.

What should you eat and drink if you have symptoms?

Hydration is key. Make sure you’re drinking water and electrolyte solutions to prevent dehydration.

When you do eat, stick to bland foods like white rice and clear soup broth, which are gentle on the body. Avoid heavy, greasy or sugary foods, as they may worsen symptoms.

Eat slowly, as consuming too much too fast will only keep things moving through your system.

You may consider taking Imodium (loperamide) to help slow diarrhea, but do not use it if your stool is bloody or black, or if you have a fever.

*Joseph Newberg, MD, is the Medical Director of Urgent Care for UChicago Medicine Medical Group and a UChicago Medicine Medical Group provider. UChicago Medicine Medical Group comprises UCM Medical Group, Inc., f/k/a UCM Care Network Medical Group, Inc., and UCM Medical Group Sub, LLC f/k/a Primary Healthcare Associates, S.C. UChicago Medicine Medical Group providers are not employees or agents of the University of Chicago Medical Center, the University of Chicago, UChicago Medicine Ingalls Memorial, UChicago Medicine Medical Group - Homewood, UChicago Medicine Dearborn Station or UChicago Medicine River East.

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago Medicine website.

GLP-1 drugs may hold few benefits beyond physical health, study finds

07/28/2026 - 10:45am

GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic have transformed the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, helping millions of patients better control their blood sugar while reducing cardiovascular risk and, for many, promoting substantial weight loss.

But do those health improvements also translate into better mental health, stronger relationships or greater success at work?

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy economist Robert Kaestner and coauthor Cuiping Schiman suggests the answer is more nuanced than popular narratives might imply. Studying adults with diabetes, the researchers found little evidence that taking GLP-1 medications led to measurable changes in mental health, self-rated health, employment or marital status.

“We know these drugs improve health outcomes, and there’s been a great deal of research documenting those benefits,” said Kaestner, a research professor. “What hadn’t really been examined was whether those improvements extended into other parts of people’s lives.”

The question has growing policy significance as insurers and government programs weigh the costs and benefits of expanding access to GLP-1 medications. While the drugs’ medical value is well established, less is known about whether they generate broader social and economic benefits that could strengthen the case for coverage.

To explore that question, Kaestner and Schiman analyzed more than a decade of data from the nationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, focusing on adults with diabetes between 2012 and 2023. Rather than simply comparing people who happened to take GLP-1 medications with those who did not, the researchers followed the same individuals over time, examining whether their circumstances changed after they began taking the drugs.

They looked for changes in several measures of wellbeing, including symptoms of depression and psychological distress, self-rated health, employment and marital status. Initial comparisons suggested GLP-1 users differed from non-users on some measures, including employment and marriage.

But those differences largely disappeared once the researchers tracked the same people over time, suggesting the apparent gaps reflected differences between the people taking the medications rather than changes caused by the drugs themselves.

The researchers reached similar conclusions whether they examined people after about one year of GLP-1 use or over a longer, two-year period. Across both analyses, they found little evidence that the medications produced meaningful changes in the broader outcomes they studied.

That does not mean the drugs have no effects beyond physical health, Kaestner cautioned. Rather, it suggests those effects may be more subtle—or harder to measure—than many people assume.

“We measured outcomes like whether someone became employed or unemployed, whether they got married or divorced, and standard indicators of mental health,” he said. “Those are important measures, but they don’t necessarily capture changes in self-esteem, relationship quality, or other day-to-day experiences.”

The findings also should not be interpreted as diminishing the medications’ medical value. Instead, Kaestner said, they suggest that the most clearly measurable benefits for adults with diabetes remain the ones already established through clinical research: better glycemic control, weight loss and improvements in physical health.

As GLP-1 medications continue to expand beyond diabetes treatment and become increasingly common for weight management, Kaestner believes more research will be needed to understand whether their broader social effects become more apparent in other populations or over longer periods of time.

“This is still a very new area of research,” he said. “As use continues to grow, understanding these broader consequences will become increasingly important for patients, clinicians and policymakers alike.”

—This article originally appeared on the Harris School website.

How AI is starting to explain stock-price moves

Matt Robinson — 07/27/2026 - 12:48pm

To explain the stock market’s reaction to earnings results, investors and other market participants have a standard tool that has been around for decades: the earnings surprise.

This measure, which compares reported earnings per share against analysts’ consensus earnings-per-share forecasts, indicates how much a company beat or missed analyst predictions.

Its intuitive nature has made it the primary go-to for describing post-announcement stock movements, even though the metric alone explains only about 5% of same-day stock moves. Adding in the rest of what researchers have learned over the years pushes that figure only a little higher.

However, new research by Ralph S.J. Koijen and Bradford Levy of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggests that AI can both significantly lift this percentage and help us understand why stock prices move the way that they do. The researchers find that the best AI models explained about 17% of same-day stock moves.

This performance boost was in part attributable to the models “learning” how to predict the moves. AI then recorded its insights into digital notebooks that humans could read and learn from.

Koijen, a distinguished service professor, and Levy, an assistant professor, conducted a live test rather than a simulation using past data. This eliminated the possibility of lookahead bias, which can creep in when a model has access to information that wasn’t known or available for the time period being studied. Their testing involved three frontier models and covered nearly 2,000 earnings announcements made in late 2025 by companies across a range of industries.

The AI models’ approach produced written explanations that could be read and analyzed, suggesting the models seemed to pick up on details in the earnings calls that were not captured solely by the numbers shared.

Some of those details were included in forward guidance given by executives and management commentary, while others were revealed through the way in which speakers discussed results in the call, such as the language used.

Many of the models’ insights were ones that seasoned financial professionals may find intuitive, such as that good news was often already reflected in a stock price. Instead of overreacting to strong results, the models treated those as an expected baseline. Record profits or 20% growth were not enough to move a stock.

Koijen and Levy expect these human-readable explanations can give researchers looking to understand what drives price moves more specific hypotheses to test. And as models advance and become more powerful, the explanations they generate could potentially be applied to smaller, cheaper models with similar results, suggesting a path to scaling these systems at lower cost.

These results are early, the researchers said, adding that most of the variation in stock moves following earnings releases remains unexplained.

So they have launched a competition, sponsored by the trading firm Optiver, and are inviting anyone to submit their own model that predicts how prices respond to earnings-call information. Models can be submitted through explainingmarkets.ai, which contains the contest’s rules.

Koijen said that forecasting these market movements is a “surprisingly challenging task” for people, even those armed with AI.

“Decades of research can explain just 8% of the variation,” he said. “We show that we can lift this to 20%, but there’s still a lot of room to go.”

—This article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth Review website.

New method boosts crop yield and drought resistance using plants' own genes

Louise Lerner — 07/24/2026 - 10:29am

The way to make a plant grow more may be to take something away.

Trimming a section off a plant gene raised rice harvests up to 25% in new tests by University of Chicago scientists, with better tolerance for drought and heat.

The research builds on a striking finding five years ago, when the group showed that they could insert a gene into plants like rice or potatoes that resulted in a substantial increase in crop yield—but it required using an animal gene in a plant. He and his lab wanted to find a way to create a similar effect, using only genes that come from plants themselves.

The new study, published July 23 in Nature Genetics, lays out the path to do just that. It also reveals a new wrinkle in our understanding of the way that plants regulate their genes.

“My hope is that we are laying a scientific foundation for a new strategy to develop plants that not only offer higher yields, but are resilient to a variety of stresses, from drought to heat to salt,” said He, who is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

The root of the question

He’s lab specializes in understanding the fundamental ways that living things grow. Genetics is extraordinarily complex; three-quarters of a century after the discovery of DNA itself, humans are still untangling the ways that organisms get from DNA to what we see before us.

In 2011, He’s lab made a surprising discovery. They found that RNA—long thought to simply be a middleman between DNA instructions and protein makers—actually had a much more substantial role in which genes get expressed, by placing and removing markers.

That led to the lab’s huge finding in 2021, when the team inserted a common gene from animals known as FTO into plants. This turned out to loosen the RNA-associated reins that restrict plant growth, so plants with this gene grew larger crops and sent out longer roots—making them more resistant to drought.

But He wanted to find a way to do the same thing without inserting a foreign gene, which would be less concerning to consumers worried about genetically modified organisms. Nature often evolves multiple ways to do the same task, so the scientists hoped to find a mechanism in plants themselves that does the same thing.

They did—but it took years of research, and a new wrinkle in our understanding of genetics.

Intrinsic disorder

Virtually all life forms make proteins that carry out the basic functions of cells, such as processing nutrients, carrying signals and removing waste.

But a substantial chunk of the proteins most animals make are called intrinsically disordered regions. Instead of a “typical” protein, which assembles itself into a 3-D structure, these proteins instead exist as flexible segments. At first, scientists thought these segments simply served as links for larger proteins or unimportant tails to proteins, but they have come to understand these intrinsically disordered regions have a much larger and more active role in what happens in a cell.

He and his team encountered these regions during their search for a way to boost growth in plant cells.

Plants don’t have a direct equivalent of the FTO gene found in mammals, but they do have variants of another gene with a similar function, known as ALKBH5; the plant versions are ALKBH9 and ALKBH10.

While trying to understand how these variants worked, the scientists discovered that the intrinsically disordered regions restrict these plant proteins from acting on the packaged DNA in the cell, known as the chromatin.

But if the scientists removed the intrinsically disordered region from the end (known as the C-terminus) of ALKBH9 or 10, they found it instead would spread out around the cell and perform a similar function as the mammal gene FTO—affecting the chromatin and removing the brakes on growth.

The group tested the strategy in rice plants and saw boosts in yield of about 20 to 25%, as well as increased stress resistance.

Removing the C-terminus is a relatively small change. “We show that the growth benefit can be gained by simply expressing the plant’s own ALKBH9 or 10 with deletion of the C-terminus segments,” He said.

“This strategy promoted plant growth and improved rice yield, pointing to a new way of reprogramming chromatin dynamics to boost agricultural productivity using engineered plant proteins” said Liudan Jiang, the first author of the study.

“In principle, we could just perform base-editing of the plant genome to remove the C-terminus of the plant’s intrinsic ALKBH9 or 10,” said He. “That is, we’re not introducing foreign genes, just changing one or a few base pairs in a plant’s existing genome.”

The group is still working to untangle precisely how this change promotes growth and makes the plants so much more resilient to stresses. They are also testing the strategy in other crops, because the ALKBH9 or 10 genes appear in many plants.

Additional authors on the study were Long Zhao, Jiangbo Wei, Bochen Jiang, Yu Xiao, Fan Yang, and Xiaolin Zeng.

Citation: “Intrinsically disordered regions restrain genomic targeting of RNA and histone demethylases in mammals and plants.” Nature Genetics, July 23, 2026.

Funding: The Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation, Gates Foundation Ag One, Harborview Foundation, Unorthodox Philanthropy.

UChicago Prof. Yu Deng receives Fields Medal, highest honor in mathematics

Maureen Searcy — 07/23/2026 - 11:00am

University of Chicago mathematics Prof. Yu Deng has received the Fields Medal for his contributions toward placing the laws of physics on a rigorous mathematical foundation.

The Fields Medal, announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, is awarded every four years to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. In the absence of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, the Fields Medal is regarded as the highest professional honor a mathematician can attain.

“On behalf of the whole University of Chicago community, I offer warm congratulations to Professor Deng. Today he is receiving the highest recognition for the rigor and significance of his contributions to mathematics,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “In his work, we see a scholar who has pursued fundamental questions to great depths and illuminated new understanding in the process. He has solved a problem that puzzled generations of scholars and in so doing, he is a true exemplar of what dedication to knowledge creation can achieve. We are proud of his accomplishments and that he is a member of our community of scholars.”

Deng was honored for addressing one of a famous set of problems laid out more than 125 years ago, at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, by German mathematician and philosopher David Hilbert. These problems have since become benchmarks of progress in the field.

Specifically, Deng and his collaborators cracked a longstanding problem within the overarching effort to mathematically connect the equations governing the motion of gases from the smallest to the largest scales.

The award also recognizes Deng’s research on the equations that govern wave dynamics that laid the foundation for this historic result.

“Yu’s beautiful and original work resolves a fundamental problem in mathematical physics that goes back to Hilbert more than a century ago,” said Frank Calegari, professor and chair of UChicago’s Mathematics Department. “It also introduces powerful new methods that will shape future research. This is a landmark achievement.”

Deng is the 11th current or former UChicago mathematician to become a Fields Medalist.

"This is a great honor for me—an important recognition for my works with collaborators and for the field that I am representing," said Deng.

A pattern of problem-solving

Deng’s mathematical roots run deep. He grew up in Shenzhen, China, where his computer programmer father would take him hiking, giving him little questions in combinatorics—the branch of mathematics focused on counting—to solve along the way.

In his youth, Deng displayed a gift for problem-solving, excelling in both math competitions and tournaments of Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game played with black and white stones on a grid. Deng said he entertained the idea of becoming a professional Go player before devoting himself to academia.

In 2006, at 16 years old, he represented China at the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a gold medal. “At that time, I realized, okay, so maybe I do have some talent in math,” said Deng.

The following year, he was admitted to Peking University, later transferring to MIT, where he became a Putnam Fellow in the 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Deng earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 2011, followed by a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2015. He joined UChicago in 2024.

The breakthrough that earned Deng the Fields Medal, however, had unexpected beginnings. While he was spending a semester at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics in 2021, a thought came to him while in a Korean fried chicken stall in Providence, Rhode Island.

Deng wasn’t thinking about a new project, but in a moment of chicken-fueled insight, he hit on an idea: a way to solve complex problems by breaking them into smaller, more manageable pieces. This laid the foundation for his eventual resolution to Hilbert’s sixth problem—a challenge to ground physics in rigorous mathematics.

A way to understand nature

Deng works on analysis of partial differential equations, or PDEs, as a way of understanding nature.

A differential equation describes how something evolves: an ordinary differential equation might describe how a falling object speeds up due to gravity, but a partial differential equation handles questions with more than one dimension, such as how temperature spreads across both space and time.

Deng’s work involves PDEs connected to probability.

“There is a lot of randomness in this world,” he said, “and we need a mathematical way to capture it.”

Prior to turning his attention to Hilbert’s sixth, Deng’s focus was using PDEs to study wave turbulence, looking at how energy spreads through systems of waves, like those found on the surface of the ocean or waves in quantum systems. This work proved to be vital to his award-winning breakthrough.

His goal was to mathematically prove that energy spreads predictably, despite the tendency of waves to influence each other, shaping and changing future activity.

Statistical predictions work by averaging across large numbers to determine what is typical. This can only work if the elements work independently. When waves build relationships with other waves, they are no longer acting alone, and it is not possible to determine how a typical wave behaves; you can’t make predictions if you don’t know what typically happens.

Deng and his collaborator Zaher Hani, a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, accounted for those behavior-changing interactions by constructing a mathematical ledger that could capture every possible pattern.

These patterns range from interactions where waves meet and then continue on their separate ways, to encounters that form such a strong, behavior-affecting relationship that a feedback loop forms.

For extremely short time periods, the most strongly correlated, disruptive interactions were negligible, and the predictability of wave turbulence mathematically held.

However, with more time comes more frequent and complex interactions, and more opportunity to forge shared histories. The team needed a way to prove that the math held over longer periods.

It was in that chicken stall that a thought occurred to Deng: “What if we try to divide long time intervals into short time intervals?”

That is, what if they could cut up those interaction histories into shorter, more manageable segments?

Deng and Hani developed an algorithm that cuts up the complex patterns. The segments, representing smaller periods of time along the interaction record, still add up, but the entries are now small enough to manage statistically.

What their results showed was that even over long time periods, the impact of those coupled interactions is negligible; averaging is possible; and statistical predictability holds.

Bolstered by this success, Deng set his sights on a new—yet very old—problem to solve.

Hilbert’s challenge

One mission often associated with Hilbert’s sixth problem is bridging the equations describing the behavior of gases at the smallest, middle, and largest scales.

The motion of individual gas particles is described by Newtonian mechanics. The likelihood of finding particles in certain places at certain speeds is described by the Boltzmann equation. The behavior of gas as a continuous medium is described by the Navier-Stokes equations.

The ultimate goal is to show that each set of equations logically leads to the next. The link between the middle and largest scales had already been established. But the link between the smallest to the middle scales, Newtonian to Boltzmann equations, was still elusive.

Ludwig Boltzmann believed his equation, developed in 1872, followed from Newton’s laws, but only if the particles don’t collide repeatedly—they must move independently.

Proving that assumption mathematically was the challenge. In 1975, mathematician Oscar Lanford showed this proof, but only for very short time periods. Over longer periods of time, particles have more opportunities to collide more than once. There needed to be a way to analyze an impossibly large number of collision patterns.

Deng and Hani realized that their research on wave turbulence could translate to particle collisions where repeated interactions build shared histories that threaten a particle’s independence. This makes it harder to statistically predict the behavior of the group at the middle scale from the motion of its individual members at the smallest scale.

At a conference in 2023, Deng and Hani met Xiao Ma, a recent graduate from Princeton who studied under Deng’s former advisor, Alexandru Ionescu.

“We realized that he's very good in these fields,” said Deng, “so we invited him into the project.”

Particles behave very differently than waves, so the trio had to incorporate those differences, but they were able to use the same approach: a ledger to record every possible collision history—whether a particle pair had collided once or 100 times, for instance—and a cutting algorithm to break down the most complex histories into manageable pieces.

They started with an easier scenario: gas in an infinite amount of space, where particles have room to disperse and eventually stop colliding all together. They then moved on to gases in a box, where the particles are increasingly more likely to re-collide, creating more complicated patterns.

They found that, while particle re-collisions happen, especially inside a bounded box where particles have plenty of opportunity to meet repeatedly, the impact of re-collisions on the overall independence of the system was negligible.

Deng and his team mathematically proved Boltzmann’s assumption and completed the chain. Hilbert’s sixth problem, at least in this specific case, was resolved, and a new methodology for analyzing complex interactions was introduced. Deng, Hani, and Ma revealed their proof in 2025.

As for what’s next: “There are many things I am interested in,” said, Deng, “including long-time propagation of randomness in PDEs, and general critical problems in statistical physics.”

In addition to the 2026 Fields Medal, Deng has received the Gold Medal of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Award, and the Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics from the American Mathematical Society. He has also received a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an ICBS Frontiers of Science Award, an MCA (Mathematical Council of the Americas) Prize, an Oberwolfach Prize, and an Antonio Ambrosetti Medal.

“Yu’s extraordinary achievement adds to the University’s and the Division’s long tradition of innovative, foundational mathematics,” said Ka Yee C. Lee, dean of the Physical Sciences Division. “This richly deserved distinction recognizes Yu’s accomplishments in bridging across mathematics and physics, and his promise of shaping the course of mathematical inquiry.”

Argonne marks 80 years of scientific discovery

07/22/2026 - 12:25pm

In 1946, the United States was on the cusp of a new energy age.

Chartered to study peaceful uses for atomic power, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory helped usher in that pivotal era. Just over five years after its founding on July 1, 1946, the lab designed and operated the world’s first usable electricity from nuclear energy, illuminating four light bulbs at its Experimental Breeder Reactor-I.

Those four glowing bulbs gave way to an industry that today powers countries around the world, including the U.S., where nuclear energy accounts for about one-fifth of the national electricity supply. But nuclear science is just one part of Argonne’s history of groundbreaking research. The lab has expanded far beyond its initial charter to become a leading research institution in supercomputing, quantum information science, X-ray science, advanced manufacturing, energy storage and fundamental research in materials science, physics and other fields.

The University of Chicago has managed Argonne since the lab's founding as an outgrowth of the Manhattan Project. Since 2005, the lab has been operated through UChicago Argonne, LLC, whose contract the DOE renewed in 2026 for another five years.

On the edge of its 80th anniversary, the lab has had some of its biggest developments yet. In 2025, it launched the Aurora exascale supercomputer, capable of performing more than a quintillion calculations per second. That’s an almost unimaginable leap from the lab’s first digital computer in 1953, AVIDAC, a pioneering machine for its time.

Also in 2025, the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, set a new world record for electron beam emittance, confirming its status as the brightest synchrotron X-ray light source in the world. And Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Argonne, in partnership with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, was renewed for another five years.

The APS is one of five flagship DOE Office of Science user facilities at Argonne that enable nearly 8,000 users annually to conduct critically important research. These also include Aurora’s home, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility; the Center for Nanoscale Materials, where scientists engineer matter at the atomic scale for advances in quantum science, microelectronics and ultrasensitive sensors; and the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), where researchers study the structure of atomic nuclei and the forces that govern matter in the universe. In 2025, ATLAS marked its 40th year of operation.

But facilities are only part of the equation. Breakthroughs emerge from the combination of exceptional people, powerful tools and increasingly intelligent scientific systems. In addition to employing world-class scientific and technical staff, Argonne has forged relationships with top universities, companies and the community of researchers who depend on the lab’s powerful tools.

These ties not only bring ideas into the lab but also transform them into real-world innovations that benefit society: better batteries, more efficient engines, new medicines and more.

Looking to the 21st century—and beyond

Science and technology have dramatically changed daily life over the past 80 years, but AI promises to pack even more advances into ever shorter time frames. Argonne is helping lead the way, playing a key role in DOE’s Genesis Mission to transform American science and innovation through AI. The lab will continue to innovate in autonomous discovery, integrating AI with automation and robotics, creating systems that can rapidly design, conduct and refine experiments, dramatically accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.

Argonne and the Argonne Quantum Institute are also a driving force within a growing quantum science hub in the Midwest, uncovering the foundational knowledge needed to build an entirely different way of sensing, processing and storing information.

At the same time, ongoing work at the lab seeks to boost energy storage research, development and deployment; strengthen and secure critical-mineral and critical-materials supply chains; develop next-generation nuclear reactors and safeguard the electric grid. Through these and other endeavors, the U.S. benefits from its long history of investment in world-leading science.

The lab’s 80th anniversary celebration includes OutLoud lectures throughout the year and an AI Roadshow with live conversations and panels in Chicagoland communities.

—This article was originally published on the Argonne website.

CQE-led Bloch Quantum Tech Hub raises $55 million to build U.S. quantum supply chain

07/21/2026 - 03:48pm

The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub has won nearly $55 million to build the nation a quantum supply chain following a U.S. Economic Development Administration award that positions the Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana region as the center of quantum manufacturing.

The multisector project, led by the University of Chicago-based Chicago Quantum Exchange, leverages the Midwest’s existing manufacturing capacity, talent and industry base to overcome a major hurdle to U.S. quantum growth—a reliance on foreign imports that slows innovation, creates security risks and raises production costs. A $30 million EDA award, announced July 20, unlocks additional commitments from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the University of Chicago, Infleqtion, One Region in Northwest Indiana, IonQ, IBM and others. It also paves the way for thousands of new quantum-focused jobs.

“Advancing the frontier of quantum technologies and realizing the benefits of these new powerful new methods and systems will require deep collaboration across academia, government, and industry to develop the necessary talent, infrastructure, and manufacturing ecosystem,“ said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos. “The University of Chicago is grateful for this new federal support and is proud to play an important role in bringing the promise and potential of the Bloch Quantum Tech Hub to fruition in the years ahead.“

The Bloch was one of six U.S. Tech Hubs to earn awards in this round of funding by the EDA, an agency of the Department of Commerce. The Bloch (pronounced “block”) is among the 31 original U.S. Tech Hubs designated by the EDA in 2023.

“The Bloch will drive U.S. quantum leadership, strengthen national security, and create jobs by eliminating barriers to domestic quantum manufacturing, a challenge that the Midwest is uniquely equipped to address,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, director of the CQE, principal investigator of The Bloch, and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana are all top 10 manufacturing states, and the Midwest is home to a diverse industry base, world-leading research institutions, and a large talent pool.“

The investment is the latest boost to the Midwest, which is fast becoming one of the most influential quantum hubs in the world.

“The quantum boom is happening right here in Illinois, helping us create jobs, cure diseases, and strengthen our national security,” said U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. “After years of advocating alongside Governor Pritzker and local leaders, this investment will go a long way to help support the Bloch and our Midwest neighbors. The sky is the limit for what quantum can help us achieve, and Illinois is leading the way.”

The U.S. has signaled its strong interest in scaling a quantum manufacturing supply chain. In May, the Commerce Department announced a landmark $2 billion federal investment in nine quantum companies, including $1 billion in funding to IBM to establish of America’s first purpose-built, pure-play quantum foundry for advanced superconducting quantum wafers. In June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling on federal agencies to prioritize quantum technology by bolstering the domestic ecosystem for quantum supply chains, expanding the workforce, addressing security risks, and more.

Quantum, made in America

U.S. Tech Hubs were designed to drive economic growth by investing in the maturation, testing, and production of emerging critical technologies, such as quantum. The award to The Bloch builds upon deep investments in quantum over the past decade.

“This award is a powerful validation of Illinois’ vision to become the global capital of quantum—helping us accelerate innovation, strengthen supply chains and create good-paying jobs,“ said Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. “Together with our historic investments in the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, our state is building an innovation ecosystem to drive economic growth and shape the future of quantum for decades to come—with Illinois and the United States in a leadership role.“

The Bloch Quantum’s EDA grant funded four interconnected projects, which will:

Transition Midwest quantum companies to scaled manufacturing by providing tools and resources, including a shared quantum sensing testbed at Purdue Northwest, automation software through Infleqtion, and technical assistance funds;
Provide existing manufacturers with the tools, expertise, and customer relationships to become part of a scaled domestic quantum supply chain, a project that the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) will lead;
Strengthen security for U.S. quantum technologies and mobilize a projected $300 million in additional investments;
Build a facility at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park that will bring key players together, giving suppliers access to customers.

Together, The Bloch’s projects integrate key components and processes, enabling quantum stakeholders to create efficient quantum production cycles. Right now, many of the materials, components, and subsystems used in quantum technologies are imported from other countries.

Quantum technologies are poised to deliver advances in medicine, finance and national defense—and their transformative potential has sparked a global race with countries like the U.S., China and Japan investing billions of dollars.

Fueling the ‘Quantum Prairie’

The Bloch’s work is projected to drive billions of dollars in economic impact. IMEC identified more than 60 regional manufacturers that are ready now to become part of the quantum supply chain — and the Bloch’s work is projected to map hundreds more.

“Our region’s deep bench of expertise combined and the CQE’s years of intentional, proactive work to build an integrated quantum ecosystem have created a powerful foundation for The Bloch’s work,” said CQE CEO Kate Timmerman. “We are grateful that the EDA’s support will enable The Bloch to make this vital contribution to the nation while driving job creation and economic value in the Quantum Prairie.”

The CQE region is home to leading universities and national labs; more than two dozen quantum startups; and a growing roster of facilities including the Roberts Impact Lab, a commercialization center and regional hub for business growth under development by Purdue University Northwest; Hyde Park Labs, which provides access to shared quantum equipment; a National Quantum Algorithm Center; and the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park, which will include the DARPA-Illinois Quantum Proving Ground, shared cryogenic facilities, and more.

Launched in 2017, the UChicago-based CQE is anchored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Northwestern University, and Purdue University and includes nearly 70 industry, nonprofit, and international partners.

—Adapted for a story that first appeared on the Chicago Quantum Exchange website.

In UChicago’s Development Innovation Lab, undergraduates assist research that can reach ‘millions’ worldwide

Patrick Maguire — 07/20/2026 - 10:15am

At the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab (DIL), undergraduate researchers contribute to studies of public health, education and economic development in low- and middle-income countries.

Working with faculty and policy experts, students analyze data, assess outcomes and support fieldwork that informs government and community interventions around the world.

Led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer, the lab uses economic research and randomized controlled trials to evaluate large-scale development programs in partnership with governments, nonprofits and community organizations.

“Undergraduates at the Lab contribute to research that helps inform policymakers and community organizations in multiple countries," said Kremer. “That understanding has already had an impact on the work of international NGOs, and continues to inform global institutions like the World Bank.”

Undergraduate students work on those problems alongside faculty, field experts and international partners, forming what DIL director of policy Terrina Govender described as a “student research body” that supports the day-to-day work of the lab. Students run calculations, assist with coding, conduct literature reviews, prepare policy summaries and help design field studies.

“We’re doing research to inform policy,” said Govender. “We work on problems that have the potential to scale to millions, or hundreds of millions, of people.”

Students also engage with Kremer and collaborate with a large team of researchers across policy areas, giving them insight into how partnerships are developed and how projects move from design to implementation.

“They get to see the full value chain,” said Govender. “We’re not doing research in a vacuum.”

From research to real-world impact

The lab’s commitment to real-world impact is what inspired rising third-year economics major Himyar Kamaka to join the lab last fall.

Growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia, Kamaka observed the kinds of public health, education and infrastructure challenges that many rapidly developing countries face. He developed an early interest in development economics—which he wrote about in his UChicago application essay—and a belief that research-informed policy could make a difference in lives and communities.

“The fact that there’s something that could be done makes me excited,” Kamaka said. “I could make a little contribution to developing countries, like where I grew up.”

Since joining the DIL, Kamaka has worked on projects related to water infrastructure and public health in multiple countries. One of his first assignments involved reviewing survey and GPS data from a water chlorination intervention in Uganda and Malawi, where a partner organization was evaluating the effectiveness of chlorine dispensers installed in rural villages.

More recently, Kamaka contributed to a project analyzing the distribution of water infrastructure systems across India. Working with publicly available government data, he analyzed records covering roughly 600,000 villages and 1.1 million water infrastructure schemes. The project aimed to create what Kamaka described as “a clear picture” of village-level water infrastructure across India, including where service gaps remain and how different types of systems are distributed.

Preparing the data for analysis required learning new technical tools. After realizing that spreadsheets would not be practical for a project of that size, Kamaka taught himself SQLite, a database management tool, to organize and structure the datasets. The process took weeks, but Kamaka described the experience enthusiastically: “It was really cool.”

Like Kamaka, rising fourth-year economics major Marcus Kuo was drawn to DIL by the opportunity to connect technical research with real-world policy questions.

Kuo, who grew up in the Bay Area, developed a passion for economics in high school. He came to UChicago knowing that he wanted to do research and joined DIL during his second year.

“DIL stood out to me,” Kuo said, because the lab’s work can improve people’s lives in “a scalable, cost-effective way.”

Like Kamaka, Kuo first worked on the chlorination project in Uganda and Malawi, supporting fieldwork for a safe water program in roughly 200 villages. He helped design survey instruments, coordinate with a survey firm and review incoming data from the field each day.

Those daily field checks made the impact of his work tangible. When he and his colleagues identified issues in data submitted by field enumerators, the survey partners in Uganda and Malawi made quick corrections to the data collection process. Collaborating with colleagues thousands of miles away—and seeing the results of that collaboration reflected in the data each day—was formative for Kuo.

“I was like, wow, I’m impacting the quality of the data being checked in real time,” he said.

Last fall, Kuo transitioned from water projects to an air quality study in Colombian schools, focusing on increasing the use of classroom air filters. He’s hoping the work broadens his experience.

“I wanted to try something outside of water and learn more about a different context,” Kuo said. “Air quality in schools—that was something new that I could do.”

His current project focuses on increasing the use of classroom air filters in Colombian schools. Kuo said the work involves not only statistical analysis, but also collaborative brainstorming about intervention design, proposal development and identifying what additional data researchers may need to collect.

The experience has also shaped how he thinks about research as a method of learning. Rather than learning development economics primarily through coursework, Kuo said the best training has come from learning along active researchers and global partners.

“I feel like the best way to learn about it is just to go onto the project, read the background literature and try things out,” he said. “You learn as you go.”

A rotational model for undergraduate research

Behind these projects is a lab structure designed to give undergraduates sustained, varied experience across multiple research portfolios.

DIL operates as a large, multi-project lab. Students can rank their interest in available assignments, and lab leadership will match them with teams based on project needs, technical requirements and students’ skills and interests.

Students are also contributors to a broader research ecosystem and vibrant community within the lab. Kuo said he was initially surprised by how collaborative the lab felt, especially given its size. Most DIL project teams, he said, are relatively small. Undergraduate researchers are encouraged to contribute ideas during discussions about research design and implementation.

The collaborative structure of the lab shapes both the research process and students’ experiences within it.

“A lot happens at lunchtime,” Govender joked, describing regular group lunches where students and researchers talk about their projects, their coursework and their lives.

Those lunchtime conversations often evolve into discussions about graduate school, policy careers and the different ways students might apply research skills after leaving the University.

“I think of it as mentorship,” Govender said, “but I also think of it as illuminating careers they might not know, or paths they might not be super familiar with.”

Part of that mentorship involves helping students think about how research findings are communicated outside academic settings. Govender said she often works with students on presenting technical analyses in ways that are accessible to policymakers and nontechnical audiences.

“I work with them when they produce analysis to make it relevant and comprehensible for a policy audience,” she said.

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

UChicago scientists create interactive screens that can appear on demand

Miranda Redenbaugh — 07/16/2026 - 10:31am

Imagine reaching for a record or glancing at a map and seeing a display bloom from a small box, offering interactive guidance—and then vanishing moments later.

A new device, inspired by science fiction and designed by computer scientists at the University of Chicago, lets digital displays bloom from everyday objects and surfaces. The creators hope it’s a step towards creating touch interfaces only when they're needed, and helping technology fade seamlessly into daily life.

The device, named BloomBeacon, consists of a small box with a pair of arms atop it. One arm has LEDs that light up as a display, and the other arm is touch-sensitive; when the device whirs to life, the two arms spin and create an interactive screen where none previously existed. The arms are soft and can be touched while spinning.

The breakthrough comes from UChicago graduate student Willa Yang, supervised by Asst. Prof. Ken Nakagaki in the AxLab—a group known for blending technology seamlessly into everyday life and designing technology that adapts to users, not the other way around.

“Screens are a powerful medium for displaying digital information and supporting interaction, but we either need to carry them, as with phones and tablets, or dedicate space for them in the environment, which creates visual clutter and limits where interaction can happen,” Yang explained. “BloomBeacon blooms into a larger surface only when needed. This keeps our environments responsive without permanent screens or clutter.”

In a world crowded with digital screens, the scientists said they hope this flexible approach could reshape how we access information in homes, workplaces, and public spaces.

Blooming on demand

Inspired by flexible interfaces in science fiction, Yang and Nakagaki asked: what if screens could appear only when needed?

BloomBeacon delivers on this concept, blooming from a slim line atop a small device into a touch-responsive display.

In schools, libraries, and design offices, the scientists imagine BloomBeacon could turn materials like paper maps into dynamic surfaces, offering overlays such as weather or heat maps when context demands. It could also augment a speaker with album art and touch controls, or provide safety alerts at the edge of a shelf; the group demonstrated a use in which BloomBeacon detects when someone reaches for a bottle of chemicals without using safety gloves and displays an alert.

“This can allow everyday environments to become interactive without being permanently filled with screens,” Yang said. “The concept broadens the possibility of where interactive content can be placed and tangibly interacted with.”

‘People should be able to shape their environments’

As technology evolves, the group envisions that faster sensors and smarter algorithms could allow even more dynamic forms. Yang sees future versions collapsing a display down to a dot, ready to bloom when context demands.

“People should be able to shape their environments instead of adapting themselves to fixed technologies,” Yang said.

“When designing interactive devices, the part that excites me most is not only what a device itself can do, but how it should exist in our space, and how to make it effortless for people to deploy. Through that lens, even traditional devices can be reimagined. I hope to design devices that empower people to make their environments work for them on their own terms.”

—Adapted from an article first published by the Department of Computer Science.

Why we still care about the ‘Odyssey’

Tori Lee — 07/16/2026 - 10:09am

“Tell me the story of a complicated man,” opens Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey.

Odysseus, the epic’s hero and complicated man in question, is returning home from the Trojan War when he is waylaid by the gods. For 10 years, the king of Ithaca endures shipwrecks, enslavement, monsters and seduction to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.

“The Odyssey is a story of how hard it is to come home,” said Emily Austin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Chicago. “This is a supremely relatable human experience.”

Attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, the epic has been retold, retranslated and readapted countless times. At UChicago, the Odyssey is a foundational text in the undergraduate Core curriculum.

On July 17, director Christopher Nolan’s sweeping, A-list-studded take on Odysseus’s journey home will be released in theaters. Even before its release, the film, shot on massive IMAX cameras, sparked an equally outsized internet backlash on everything from the armor to the dialog to the casting choices.

We spoke with UChicago’s Assoc. Prof. Emily Austin, an expert on Homer, Prof. Patrice Rankine, who studies the intersection of ancient Greco-Roman classics with contemporary issues of race, gender and politics, and the Divinity School’s Prof. Carolina López-Ruiz, a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions, to understand why we remain so invested in this ancient tale and what this version might say about our current culture.

The following Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Why has the Odyssey persisted for nearly 3,000 years as a foundational text in the Western canon? What can we still learn from it?

Austin: The poem is not simply an adventure story, but asks us to really think about what it’s like to be away from home for 20 years—and then to come back.

When Odysseus finally returns, he has lost all his men, arguably through his own fault. His house is no longer in his control; he is at risk of losing his wife, his property, the life he once had as king of Ithaca. And in addition to the 10 years of trying to get home, Odysseus was at war for another 10 years before that.

The poem devotes half of its narrative to the process of Odysseus reintegrating, revealing himself little by little to his loved ones, testing them—and, in the case of his wife, being tested himself—and trying to reestablish his life.

Whether or not we’ve been at war, or in exile, or forced to move, we can relate to this longing for home, for belonging, and the difficulty of achieving it.

Why is Odysseus so compelling as a character and hero?

Austin: Odysseus is often described as “long-suffering” or “much enduring.” Although he has moments where he proves his excellence, the Odyssey also suggests that Odysseus is a different kind of hero.

He is different not only because he is clever and comes up with famous tricks to get him and his companions out of tight spots (the Trojan Horse being the prime example!).

But also, because he suffers a lot, for a long time.

It is telling that the Odyssey begins with Odysseus on Calypso’s island facing a choice between a luxurious, immortal life with the goddess and the continuation of a mortal life, with its suffering.

He chooses a mortal life.

How would people have experienced the poem when it was first composed? What is gained or lost when adapting it into a visual medium?

Rankine: These were so-called occasional poems, oral in composition. Some scholars speculate that their purpose was not only entertainment but also didactic.

We have to imagine the occasion of an epic performance, although common among the elite, for the average person significant. In the case of a major poet known across elite circles in the Mediterranean, as we imagine with a poet of Homer’s sophistication, his presence within your island, your community, your festival, would have been memorable.

What the cinematic medium gives us—and why Nolan undoubtedly would want to film this—is something like the scale and immersiveness that the epic must have had for early audiences. The aesthetic experience is entertainment, but I am certain that speculations about the ‘message’ in the movie will dominate the cultural discussions.

What does it mean, for example, to cast characters in the way that Nolan has?

That’s a great question. Nolan’s choice to cast non-Greek actors, for example, or Helen of Troy (the most beautiful woman in the world) as a Black woman sparked internet chatter and backlash. What might casting choices of a classical text—and the public’s reaction to them—say about contemporary culture?

Rankine: It’s a poorly guarded secret that the return to the classics is always as much about us as it is about the past.

It is no surprise that the internet backlash would inevitably center on race, ethnicity and sexuality. These are the battlefields of our contemporary culture wars, and we project those concerns onto antiquity.

Not only were previous Odysseys decidedly not Greek—Armand Asante was New York-born, of Irish and Italian descent—but we would have to question what it would mean to be Greek in the first place, a term which did not exist at the time of the Trojan War, and was only a vague possibility when the poem was first composed.

Antiquity often is a blank canvas for our projections—or if not entirely blank, certainly with enough space for us to cast ourselves.

Can we read the Odyssey as a religious text?

López-Ruiz: Though the Odyssey is still a very human-centered poem (the first word of the epic is andra or “man”), it is all driven by the will of the gods. Think about how Poseidon sets Odysseus back after he blinds the Cyclops, the god’s son, or how Athena transforms Odysseus so he can reenter his palace in disguise.

In the opening of the poem, Zeus himself says something to the effect of: People always blame the gods, but it is human folly that brings their demise when they knowingly or unknowingly transgress divine laws or cross the gods.

What challenges might a film face when depicting the stakes and norms of an ancient religion?

López-Ruiz: When you put these stories on screen, you have two choices.

Either you make the gods more theologically modern—aloof, abstract entities that characters interact with only by praying, cursing or performing some ritual. For instance, Ridley Scott's Troy (2004) followed this path, but it made the plot almost unrecognizable.

Or, you can go fully Homeric and show them as in the poems—involved, sometimes visible, quarreling among themselves and changing the plot in very specific ways. The risk here is that the gods appear so anthropomorphic that they seem less divine to our modern eyes.

I personally prefer this approach even if it requires more cultural translation. It has more magic, charm and better reflects the theology of the epics.

Chemists shrink gallium nitride, the material behind LED lighting, into nanocrystals

Louise Lerner — 07/15/2026 - 10:35am

Nanocrystals are so useful that they formed the basis of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But for all their usefulness, to date, scientists have only been able to make these microscopic crystals from a limited palette of materials.

A group of chemists with the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory has announced a way to make nanocrystals from a useful class of materials known as metal nitrides—a previously impossible task. Their study, published July 15 in Nature, opens new doors for electronics and other technologies, such as flexible lighting or medical implants.

“We were able to show how to make a series of nearly a dozen materials that could not be synthesized by traditional methods,” said Ruiming Lin, graduate student at UChicago and first author on the new paper.

Metal nitrides are widely used in technology and manufacturing today. For example, gallium nitride is used in nearly all modern lighting, from LED bulbs to laptop screens.

The ability to make nanocrystals out of such materials fundamentally increases what can be done with them. Beyond just rigid films, they could someday be blended into polymers, inkjet-printed, and integrated into fabrics or other flexible devices.

“This expands the boundaries of the field beyond what were previously fundamental constraints, and lays the foundation for the use of nitrides as nanomaterials,” said Dmitri Talapin, the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at UChicago, a scientist at Argonne and the senior author on the paper.

The right solution

Nanocrystals are just what they sound like—very tiny crystals, so small that millions to billions of them could fit on your fingernail. At this scale, materials can often have surprising and useful properties, such as creating bright light or boosting chemical reactions.

In theory, nanocrystals can be made from almost anything. But in practice, that versatility has been elusive.

Lin and other scientists with Talapin’s laboratory wanted to see if they could change that.

In particular, the group focused on metal nitrides. These are made when metals mix with nitrogen, and as a class, they are tough, biocompatible, and heat- and corrosion-resistant.

The resilience of metal nitrides makes them perfect for uses such as consumer electronics. But that same stability presented a problem for chemists trying to make nanocrystals out of them.

When crystals form, their ions must swap around a bit before settling down into their final configurations, like dance partners switching during a square dance. Metal nitrides, though, form extremely strong bonds—like tango dancers—so they are reluctant to change partners.

“If bonds cannot break during this process, that’s a death sentence for nanocrystals,” said Talapin. “Once you make an incorrect bond, everything goes south.”

The solution to the problem came in two parts, the team said.

First, the Talapin lab built on a previous discovery that using molten salts as the liquid in the recipe could stabilize the formation of nanocrystals. Then, experimenting further, they found a “sweet spot” of temperature and ammonia pressure conditions that allowed the metal-nitrogen bonds to detach and reattach more readily.

“This process is very unusual—it goes against every bit of common sense in the field,” said Talapin. “We had to entirely rethink the approach.”

Crystals with many uses

The team showed how to make nanocrystals not only out of gallium nitride, but a range of other related nitrides. These included titanium nitride, which is used in medical implants; niobium nitride, an industrially important superconductor; and molybdenum nitride, a common catalyst.

These materials are not only useful but relatively inexpensive. The team hopes the ability to make them into nanocrystals could expand their utility even further.

“I remember the first time I looked through the electron microscope and saw those crystals,” said Lin. “You always hope something you discovered will wind up in applications. I think there will be many uses.”

Other authors from UChicago included Ningxin Jiang, Wooje Cho, Zirui Zhou, Di Wang, Justin Ondry, Zehan Mi, James Cassidy, Alex Hinckle, Alexander Filatov and John S. Anderson.

The scientists used resources at the UChicago-based National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center; the UChicago Soft Matter Characterization Facility; and Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials.

Citation: “Ammonia pressure controls colloidal metal nitride synthesis in molten salts.” Lin et al, Nature, July 15, 2026.

Funding: U.S. Department of Energy, Samsung QD Cluster Collaboration, National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Department of Energy extends contract with UChicago Argonne, LLC

07/14/2026 - 11:00am

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced July 14 that it has renewed its management and operating contract for Argonne National Laboratory with UChicago Argonne, LLC, which manages Argonne for the DOE’s Office of Science.

The new five-year contract, which starts Oct. 1, 2026, will continue the productive partnership between the laboratory and the University of Chicago.

Since its founding in the wake of the Manhattan Project during World War II, Argonne has become a leader in innovative science and engineering that addresses pressing national problems—from medicine, to computing and AI, to advanced nuclear technologies and batteries.

“As a hub that fosters groundbreaking discovery, Argonne provides an essential service to the benefit of the individuals and institutions that comprise the broader scientific community,” said UChicago President Paul Alivisatos, who is the chairman of UChicago Argonne LLC’s board of governors. “I look forward to continuing this partnership and stewardship as together we enter the next era of discovery and impact.”

Under the current contract with UChicago Argonne LLC, which began in 2006, Argonne has expanded and modernized six DOE national user facilities, which are among the most important scientific resources in the world. Together these facilities support nearly 8,000 researchers each year from universities, industry, government and international institutions, and provide world-class capabilities in X-ray science, supercomputing, nanoscale research and materials science.

Argonne is home to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the world's brightest synchrotron X-ray light source, which enables discoveries in public health, microelectronics, energy, manufacturing and national security.

Argonne was also an early pioneer in computing, having built its first computer in 1949, and has since become a national hub for open-science supercomputing and a leader in harnessing AI for scientific discovery. In 2025 the laboratory deployed Aurora, one of the world’s first exascale supercomputers, alongside a new generation of AI systems built to take on some of the nation's most complex scientific challenges.

“Argonne's mission has always been rooted in a simple but powerful idea: that the best science, pursued by exceptional people and guided by the public good, can change the world,” said Argonne National Laboratory Director Paul K. Kearns. “The strong partnership between the Department of Energy, the University of Chicago, and Argonne has given our researchers the mandate and the resources to prove that idea right—in laboratories, in communities, in industry and in the technologies that power everyday American life. We are enormously proud of that legacy and deeply committed to what comes next.”

Argonne remains at the forefront of nuclear energy innovation, building on eight decades of expertise in the development of next-generation nuclear reactor technologies and recycling of nuclear fuel. The laboratory is widely recognized for next-generation battery and energy storage innovation.

Argonne also is helping the U.S. advance critical quantum technologies and leads Q-NEXT, one of five national quantum research centers, renewed for a second five-year term in 2025. As a driving force in emerging technologies, Argonne strengthens the nation’s scientific and technological competitiveness.

Located in Lemont, Ill., Argonne generates an estimated $2.5 billion in annual U.S. economic impact. The lab employs some 3,800 people and includes 21 research divisions. Its researchers publish roughly 1,700 peer-reviewed articles and secure about 60 patents each year, and staff have earned 150 R&D 100 awards over the laboratory's history.

Court Theatre marks 10 years of ‘spotlighting’ Black playwrights

Tori Lee — 07/13/2026 - 12:19pm

Few know the work of playwright August Wilson quite like director Ron O.J. Parson.

In 2027, the longtime resident artist at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre will complete Wilson’s famed “American Century Cycle” on the mainstage. The series of 10 plays—one for each decade of the 20th century—documents the breadth of Black life.

This summer, the venerable Chicago artist will step into the role of Wilson himself.

The Spotlight Reading Series, founded by Parson and director Aaron Mays in 2016, aims to resurface lesser-known and rarely produced work by primarily Black playwrights.

Over the past decade, the series has grown from play readings in community centers across the city into multi-day symposia with a dedicated following and robust slate of programming.

For its 10th anniversary, Court is celebrating the series with “A Century of Black Progress.” Ten events throughout August, including film screenings, archival workshops, book clubs and staged play readings, will nod to both the 100th anniversary of Black History Month and the imminent completion of the American Century Cycle with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone this winter.

On Aug. 12, Parson will read the role of August Wilson in his autobiographical play How I Learned What I Learned.

“This 10th anniversary series is an extension of Ron’s work to keep these plays alive, present and available to people,” said Kamilah Rashied, director of engagement at Court who now leads Spotlight. “Now, let’s take it to another level.”

All events are free and open to the public, though reservations are required.

‘People needed to hear them’

When Parson began the series with Mays, he reached back to the playwrights of his childhood: Ed Bullins, P. J. Gibson, Ntozake Shange, Ron Milner.

Their plays—experimental and bold—pushed against racist stereotypes and grappled with the complexity of the Black experience. This surge of art inspired by the struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements is known as the Black Arts Movement.

Though the average theatergoer might recognize the names August Wilson or Lorainne Hansberry, many works by Black playwrights remain noticeably absent from American stages.

“Some of these old plays and playwrights from the ‘60s and ‘70s, a lot of people today don't remember them,” Parson said. “We thought about these plays that were Black classics that needed to be done; people needed to hear them.”

For Parson, who Rashied calls “a living library of plays,” the goal of the series was not only to resurface these classics, but to bring Court Theatre directly to the community.

Starting with James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie in 2016, the series brought professional actors and directors into Chicago neighborhoods. With scripts on stands, they read Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger in an Englewood YMCA, Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind at the South Shore Cultural Center and Buffalo Hair by Carlyle Brown in Bronzeville.

Brown himself attended the reading.

“He came in for it because he hadn’t seen it in a while,” Parson said. “When the playwright wants to come out and be involved—can’t beat that.”

Some of Parson’s favorite moments from the past decade came from the excitement of older community members.

“They would get up and say: I remember when that came here; I remember when that was over at the Regal,” Parson said. “It just rejuvenated that room.”

‘A life all its own’

Though Rashied attended a prestigious drama program, the first time she’d ever heard of playwrights Pearl Cleage or Ntozake Shange was from her peers.

“I was furious,” she said. “I expected to have a well-rounded education, and I didn't.”

This lack of representation has been “a perpetual thorn” in her creative and professional life ever since. When Rashied overhauled Court’s community programming a few years ago, she decided to make Spotlight a cornerstone.

“For me, [the series] feels like the education I never got,” she said.

To better accommodate the series’ growing popularity—with guidance from its founders—Rashied expanded the series to an annual three-day summer symposium held in Hyde Park.

“Hosting symposia is what academics and art historians do to venerate, commemorate and discuss the significance of artists,” Rashied said. “Changing the series to a symposium was signaling that this Black intelligence needs to be canonized and taken as seriously as Shakespeare.”

This year’s 10th-anniversary festival will kick off on Aug. 7 with a film screening of Black films in partnership with UChicago's Film Studies Center.

In addition to Parson’s turn as Wilson, staged play readings will include “A Womanist Trilogy” of Black feminist plays: Color Struck (1925) by Zora Neale Hurston, A Black Woman Speaks (1950) by Beah Richards and She Talks to Beethoven (1989) by Adrienne Kennedy.

Rounding out the century will be a reading of the recently produced are you ready to smash white things? by Chicago playwright Ireon Roach, presented in partnership with Definition Theatre.

In partnership with Chicago Public Library, the festival will also host several events at local branches. At Harold Washington Library, participants can step into the Black Arts Movement with an exclusive peek into the archives of the Kuumba Theatre Company. At the Woodson Regional branch, participants can explore the Vivian G. Harsh collection and discuss Gwendolyn Brooks’s debut poetry collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). At the Blackstone Branch, they can join a book club discussion on Chicago’s theater and dance history.

The festival will culminate with an afternoon of roundtable discussions about Black authorship and placemaking in collaboration with UChicago’s Arts and Public Life.

As for the future, Rashied and Parson hope the plays highlighted by the series can eventually be produced as full-blown productions on Court’s mainstage. Though the series has steadily grown more popular and diverse, the team still hopes to reach new audience members, especially young people.

“For me, Spotlight feels like a family reunion, a little bit of a homecoming,” Rashied said. “It has a life all its own now, which was really the goal.”

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

Louise Lerner — 07/13/2026 - 10:30am

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

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

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

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

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

The study is accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.

A planetary puzzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to tell what planets are like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The key ingredient for life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding: NASA, Brinson Foundation, Suzuki Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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

Emily Ayshford — 07/10/2026 - 09:24am

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new kind of bioelectronic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of sensing and stimulation devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Gregory — 07/07/2026 - 04:28pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘struggle’ of free expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeding solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probing cosmic structure formation

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

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

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

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

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

Additional authors include:

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

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

—Adapted from an article by Argonne National Laboratory

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

Matt Wood — 07/02/2026 - 04:25pm

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

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

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

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

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

The bush at the bottom of the evolutionary tree

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

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

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

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

From coal mine to CT scanner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

07/01/2026 - 11:55am

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

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

Their appointments are effective July 1.

Biological Sciences Division

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physical Sciences Division

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Sciences Division

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

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

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

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

Booth School of Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

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

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

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

As America turns 250, how the Declaration of Independence endures

Andrew Haffner — 06/29/2026 - 04:17pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

06/29/2026 - 09:45am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the Harris website.