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

09/15/2026 - 10:00am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booth School of Business

Sarah Assian — Chicago

Physician assistant, Cook County Health

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

Vincent Buckman — Ghana

Former health care consultant, AArete

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

Jared Jerrick — United States and Guyana

Former commissioned officer, U.S. Army

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

Jackson Montgomery — Chicago

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

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

Ade Oparinu — Nigeria

Founder, PathShapers Africa

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

Sanjeev Parameswaran — Chicago

Former senior consultant, AT&T

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

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Hailey Aldrich — Chicago

Survivor fund associate, The Network Advocating Against Domestic Violence

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

Mariah Cooley — Chicago

Program manager, UChicago Crime Lab

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

Alexia Estrada — Pasco, Washington

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

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

Anna Grant-Bolton — Evanston, Illinois

Outreach lead and steering committee organizer, Evanston Community Fridges

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

Joseph Mapp — Chicago

Director, Chicago Mayor’s Office of Reentry

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

Juliet Rowe — United States and United Kingdom

Director of development, OneGoal

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

Harris School of Public Policy

Apollinaire Abi — Togo

Executive director, NawiriTech

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

Jess Artis — Chicago

Founder, Home Wealth School

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

LeAaron Foley — Chicago

Regional head of government and community relations, Lime

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

Kavita Rawat — India

Former senior project manager, Central Square Foundation

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

Bhavya Sharma — India

Former project lead, Integrated Leadership Forum Against Trafficking

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

Booth School of Business and Harris School of Public Policy

Erica Choi — Chicago

Growth fellow, Fabric Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Ralph Waldo Emerson to FIFA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Refereeing through the lens of philosophy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Wood — 09/11/2026 - 09:09am

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

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

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

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

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

A flowering network of genetic effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first, he was skeptical.

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

Direct, measurable impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A powerful, interdisciplinary collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colin Terrill — 09/10/2026 - 12:14pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago College website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding access and strengthening career pathways

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

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

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

Building on a national commitment to rural opportunity

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

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

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

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

Strengthening communities and the national workforce

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

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

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

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

New study shows reward can spread through complex memory networks

Tori Lee — 09/04/2026 - 02:01pm

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

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

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

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

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

Turns out, pretty far.

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

Mental gymnastics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reward unlocked

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

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

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

Their hypothesis was confirmed, with one major caveat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The race to keep the right data

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

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

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

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

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

A computer science approach to a physics problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A broader collaboration with wider implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Lerner — 09/03/2026 - 09:50am

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing open questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the mass in the universe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to read during America’s 250th anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Slauter

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

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

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

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

Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves

Marie Jenkins Schwartz

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

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

Evan Haefeli

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

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

Emma Hart

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

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

Amir Alexander

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

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

Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism

Deirdre McCloskey

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

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

—Book descriptions adapted from the University of Chicago Press.

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

Ashley Jost — 09/01/2026 - 11:15am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Lerner — 08/31/2026 - 11:00am

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

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

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

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

Making useful molecules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding the scope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devon McPhee — 08/28/2026 - 12:00pm

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

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

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

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

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

A marked difference in spending patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications for health equity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Mindworks, where museum visitors become research subjects

Justin Curto — 08/27/2026 - 11:05am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solving a behavioral science research problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding the possibilities of research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth website.

Five new members elected to UChicago’s Board of Trustees

08/26/2026 - 10:00am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08/25/2026 - 10:15am

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

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

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

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

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

From quantum experiments to biological tools

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

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

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

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

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

Four research areas

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

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

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

Building Chicago's quantum workforce

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

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

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

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

Establishing quantum sensing for biology as a field

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

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

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

What ancient trade tells us about globalization

Sarah Steimer — 08/24/2026 - 02:15pm

Indian Ocean imports shaped many lives across the ancient world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers clear hurdle toward ‘EKG for a single cell’

Paul Dailing — 08/21/2026 - 10:15am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following the clues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there was a surprise in store for the team.

‘Unexplained and puzzling’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—This article originally appeared on the UChicago PME website.

Why humor can look a lot like deception

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

Pinocchio is bullshitting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To start with the obvious, humor is intensely prosocial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Randal C. Picker, renowned legal scholar, 1959-2026

Mark Cohen — 08/18/2026 - 05:15pm

Prof. Randal C. “Randy” Picker, an influential legal scholar and beloved teacher whose ties to the University of Chicago began nearly five decades ago as a College student, died Aug. 15. He was 66.

Picker, AB'80, AM'82, JD’85, was the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1989 and helped shape intellectual and institutional life both there and in the wider University. A leading scholar of antitrust, intellectual property, competition policy and regulated industries, he was a highly popular teacher known for his intellectual curiosity, enthusiasm, humor and willingness to experiment with new ways of engaging students.

“Randy Picker was an influential scholar, a dedicated teacher and one of the Law School’s and University of Chicago’s most devoted institutional citizens,” said Dean Adam Chilton. “Randy personified the best of our values. He was always willing to give his time generously to his students and colleagues, and he was uniquely committed to protecting what makes this University special.”

Chilton also pointed to the extraordinary trust that colleagues across the University placed in Picker’s judgment.

“For decades, Randy was asked to serve on or chair nearly every important committee across our institution, from the faculty senate to dean searches to presidential searches,” Chilton said. “When a high-stakes decision had to be made about the future of the Law School or the University, the only thing that seemingly everyone agreed on was that Randy Picker needed to be in the room.”

Picker’s connection to UChicago stretched back nearly five decades, beginning with his studies of economics at the bachelor's and master's levels before earning his JD with honors. As a student at the Law School, he was an associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif.

After graduation, Picker clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and practiced at Sidley & Austin in Chicago, working on debt restructuring and corporate reorganizations in bankruptcy. He returned to Hyde Park in 1989 to join the Law School faculty and served as associate dean from 1994 to 1996.

Geoffrey R. Stone, JD '71, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, first got to know Picker while Picker was a student at the Law School. As dean, he later hired Picker to join the faculty.

“He was a dedicated and terrific teacher and scholar, and a wonderful colleague,” Stone said.

For decades, their offices were near each other, and Stone recalled regularly talking with Picker about the Law School, his courses, and his many professional and personal pursuits.

“Randy was in so many ways a special person,” Stone said, “and I shall miss him every day.”

A scholar and teacher of extraordinary range

Picker built an influential and wide-ranging scholarly career spanning private law, law and economics, antitrust and the legal implications of technological change.

Picker’s scholarship evolved considerably over the course of his career. Long before his work on law and technology, he established himself as a leading scholar of private law.

Douglas G. Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law and a former dean of the Law School, pointed in particular to Picker's role in bringing insights from game theory into law and economics.

“Randy Picker was responsible for incorporating the lessons of game theory into the standard account of law and economics, first in the context of secured transactions, then bankruptcy, and finally the law of contract and torts more generally,” said Baird.

Picker, along with Baird and Robert H. Gertner, coauthored the foundational 1994 book Game Theory and the Law, which applied game theory and information economics to legal rules and institutions.

Picker also had a significant influence on the development of the law itself. As a member of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, he played an important role in the 2001 overhaul of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code.

While he served as vice chair of the National Bankruptcy Conference, Congress adopted the organization’s recommended reforms of small-business bankruptcy, which Baird described as the most significant change in Chapter 11 since the Bankruptcy Code was adopted in 1978. Baird also described Picker's paper with Michael McConnell on municipal bankruptcy as “the canonical work in the field.”

Picker's later scholarship increasingly explored technology, competition and the evolution of the computer industry. His forthcoming book The Quest for Next: A Competitive History of the Computer Industry explores how law and antitrust shaped competition, innovation, computers and chips.

The book, a sweeping history of how law has shaped the computing and technology industry, is widely expected to be a field-defining work. When he signed the contract for the book with Princeton University Press last year, Picker proclaimed, “I don't know what it means to be pleased as punch, but I am that and more.”

Prof. M. Todd Henderson, JD’98, recalled frequently bringing Picker provocative court decisions involving American technology companies and trying to persuade him to take a side. Picker invariably resisted.

“He’d pull out his own copy, already full of tabs and scribbles,” Henderson said. “He’d patiently lead me through the details—it was always about the details—showing how the issues were more complex and nuanced than I suspected. He took things seriously but with a joy and curiosity that was absolutely infectious.”

Generations of UChicago Law students knew Picker through his antitrust courses, but his teaching ranged widely, encompassing network industries, technology policy, copyright, secured transactions, bankruptcy and corporate reorganizations. He also taught business law at the Chicago Booth School of Business.

For Picker, teaching was itself a subject for experimentation and discovery.

He incorporated new technologies into the classroom and in 2015 became the first Law School professor to offer a massive open online course, “Internet Giants: The Law and Economics of Media Platforms,” which reached thousands of students around the world. He approached the project with characteristic commitment: spending dozens of hours filming and even taking a filmmaking course as he thought about how best to teach in a new medium.

Picker's influence as a teacher extended well beyond the students in his classroom. Henderson credits Picker with inspiring his own academic career.

“I became an academic because of Randy Picker,” Henderson said. Returning to campus for his fifth reunion, Henderson attended a lecture Picker gave to alumni.

“Watching him take apart a complex issue with characteristic analytical rigor, boyish enthusiasm and intellectual clarity was spellbinding. I knew I had to do this.”

“Over the past decades, I turned to Randy more than anyone else for how to teach, how to write, how to approach a problem, and, more than I'd like to admit, how to be a husband, father and friend,” Henderson said. “He always had time for me, whether it was to talk about ideas or life. He also made my thinking better.”

Former Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Richard A. Posner Distinguished Service Professor of Law in the Wallman Society of Fellows, recalled the important role Picker played in the everyday intellectual life of the Law School.

“Randy was present at the Law School—in workshops, at the faculty lunch table, and every day in his office with the door wide open, inviting conversation,” Miles said. “He was always eager to discuss new legal developments, and he elevated the conversation with his incisive questions, his analytical mind and his good humor. He set a shining example of what it is to be a faculty member: to be present with colleagues for learning.”

Picker brought that same curiosity and willingness to experiment to his life outside the classroom. He took improvisational theater classes at The Second City and later performed and organized an improv group that performed publicly—an experience he saw not simply as a hobby but as another opportunity to be a student, encounter new people and ideas, and challenge himself in unfamiliar ways.

Stone experienced that side of Picker firsthand when Picker invited him to be the special guest at one of his improv shows.

“I was quite daunted, but he made it delightful,” Stone said.

A devoted University citizen

Picker’s impact extended far beyond his scholarship and teaching. Over more than three decades, he became one of the University’s most dedicated institutional citizens, serving in numerous leadership and governance roles across the Law School and University.

“Randy was an extraordinarily generous and influential University citizen in every phase of his work, and his dedication and energy for the institution were seemingly boundless,” said Provost Katherine Baicker. “In addition to his distinguished contributions as a scholar and educator, he served on numerous important faculty committees, where his clear voice and keen insights played a vital role in advancing our shared mission. His all-too-brief service as vice provost for academic affairs, which began this summer, was an opportunity that he relished. I deeply admired his intellectual seriousness and agility, his sharp wit, his adept navigation of complex institutional problems, and his profound commitment to this community. He leaves an indelible mark across the University."

"Randy was an extraordinary member of our community,” said President Paul Alivisatos. "He reveled in our world of ideas and brought imagination and rigor to his work. I so much enjoyed hearing from him about his most recent research on the history of the tech industry through the lens of intellectual property. He was tireless in service. He always asked that we return to principles and that we honor our values when we do the work of supporting our University. He was one of our leading lights. I will miss him greatly."

Among his most significant contributions, Picker chaired the University committee that produced the highly influential 2017 report that became widely known as the “Picker Report.” The report addressed the relationship between disruptive conduct and freedom of expression and remains an important part of the University’s approach to protecting free inquiry and expression while ensuring that members of the community can speak and be heard.

Picker also served as a member of numerous key Law School committees, chairing appointments committees, dean search committees and most recently as a member of the Law School’s AI committee. Across the University, Randy’s institutional service included serving as spokesperson for the Council of the University Senate, serving on the Laboratory Schools board, chairing the Library Board and serving on the faculty advisory committee to the Board of Trustees during the search that led to the appointment of Alivisatos as UChicago president.

Upon assuming the position of vice provost for academic affairs this summer, Picker took on vital responsibilities involving faculty hiring and promotion, the Kalven tradition and faculty governance.

Shortly before his death, while reflecting publicly on the career of his mentor Richard Posner, Picker described a quality he particularly admired: the belief that one could learn ideas from anyone and that each encounter could be a “learning moment.” It was an observation that also captured much about Picker himself, colleagues said.

He is survived by his wife, Gretchen, and their children, Adam, Ben and Emma. The University will hold a memorial service and reception on Sept. 18 at Rockefeller Chapel. Registration for the event can be found here.

—This article originally appeared on the Law School website.

From lab to layperson, UChicago students learn to make science land

Benjamin Ransom — 08/18/2026 - 11:30am

While many environmental science majors spend their summers in campus labs, rising third-year Brianna Leech found herself in a NASA research center, building presentations on the spread of invasive tree species across the state of Utah.

It was less a typical research gig than a crash course in building and communicating data on the ground. In a small cohort at a NASA research center, Brianna teamed with three students from wildly different backgrounds and was handed a real client: the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Their task was to track invasive tree species creeping across the state, processing satellite imagery into a wildfire-risk tool that flagged where the department should focus its tree-cutting efforts first.

“There was a feeling of a bit of everything: sending emails, attending meetings, scientific technical skills, and presenting science—with posters, flyers and research papers for NASA staff,” said Leech.

The opportunity came up in office hours at a class for the science communication minor at UChicago. Leech was rattling off her interests to Jordan Bimm—her professor, and the developer of the program’s curricula. They talked about mapping, sustainability, and the writing and public speaking skills sharpened in his classes. Bimm immediately thought of a former student who'd done the program and pointed her toward it.

“It’s something that I would have never thought to do if Jordan wouldn't have helped me put it together in my head,” Leech said.

UChicago’s Science Communication minor had set the whole thing in motion, connecting Leech to Jordan and equipping her to communicate environmental data on the ground. By the time she reached NASA, she could make satellite data translate into something a land manager could actually use in their work.

Learning by making

That hands-on ethos sits at the heart of the science communication minor. Rather than just a final exam, courses often end in a finished product. Students might produce a podcast, report a piece of science journalism, or communicate about exhibits on a museum floor.

“At the end of the quarter you're always producing something, and it's usually something that I could take and show to other people later on,” said Leech.

For example, Leech created a podcast digging into the science behind popular movies. The first episode tackled Interstellar, unpacking how the producers consulted with physicists to explore concepts like black holes, time dilation, and relativity.

“We see so many physics and chemistry concepts in these blockbuster movies, but we don’t really get them fully explained," said Leech. “I really loved making that. I had so much fun.”

Bimm, who not only designs, but teaches many of the program's course offerings, builds that learn-by-doing spirit into the classroom. A prolific science communicator himself, he teaches from his own practice in real time.

“Whatever's happening to me at the moment, I bring the students along with me. When Artemis II was flying around the moon, I was getting inundated with media requests—so I'd show students what a reach-out email from a science journalist looks like, and a recording of me talking to the TV producer,” said Bimm. “So when they're in that position, it won't be the first time they're encountering it.”

Are facts enough?

But the program isn't just about producing things. Behind every podcast episode and museum panel sits a set of theoretical questions that have preoccupied science communication researchers for decades. How do you actually get people to care about science? And is explaining the facts, laying out a rational argument, and citing solid data enough to change anyone's mind?

“A lot of times when people get a science communication course, they're only getting the practical side,” said Bimm. “But even if you just take one class with me, you're still going to get a theoretical foundation in the key frameworks—so students understand the history and the different approaches that are possible.”

That approach resonated with Elijah Tan, a rising third-year studying astrophysics, who took the introductory course as his way into the minor—and now recommends it to fellow students.

One case study from that class stuck with him. After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, nuclear fallout drifted onto the hills of Cumbria in northern England. Government scientists, betting the contamination would clear within weeks, didn’t recommend a ban on sheep sales.

They were wrong. The region's peat held onto the radioactive cesium in a way the clay soils they'd studied never had. But rather than own the error, they reversed recommendations abruptly—alienating farmers and corroding their credibility.

A scientist might think: “The evidence changed, so the recommendation changed. So what?” But an explanation that talks past local knowledge, or a story that reverses the instant the data does, can corrode the very credibility it's meant to earn. In other words, these scientists were working from what experts like Bimm call the "deficit model."

“The deficit model is the default model that scientists just assume always works—the idea that just providing facts and information will be enough to convince people to believe what you're saying and have a positive attitude towards science,” said Bimm. “The research for the last 30 years has shown this doesn’t work in practice."

When Tan shared a piece on a new nuclear microreactor, he ran into another similar lesson. Scientists, immersed in their own work, tend to assume everyone else thinks the way they do, and that what fascinates them in the lab will obviously interest a reader too. But that often isn’t true.

“One of my friends in the class, in the nicest way possible, just asked, 'Why should I care?’” said Tan. “And it was a great question, because I just thought it was neat.”

The question forced Tan to rethink the piece. Rather than relying on readers to be compelled by the subject, he showed the stakes—how a reactor small enough to be transported could be flown into a disaster zone, for instance, instead of the logistical nightmare of providing a whole supply chain of diesel. It was a lesson in writing for the reader’s interest rather than his own.

Tan, who dreams of drawing science comics for a living, sees the minor as preparation for whatever shape his career takes—whether in journalism, an astrophysics Ph.D., or institutional work. More than any single skill, he values how it has trained him to think about what an audience actually needs.

The next chapter

The minor is now being offered as a track within the Climate and Sustainable Growth major, led by the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth. It’s a natural fit, given how central climate is to public debate, and the conversation on how to communicate complex science to the public.

“It's one of the big science problems of our day. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is worried about it, but we still seem to be sliding further and further into it,” said Bimm. “Part of the way out of this isn't just science and technology—it's going to be a new generation of people who are able to effectively and responsibly communicate about it.”

For Leech, who wrote an editorial on the overlap between climate and sports as part of the minor—she came away struck by just how far the subject reaches. Climate science, she realized, “can pretty much be applied everywhere.”

That flexibility is part of the point. Whether the subject is climate, a nuclear microreactor, or invasive trees creeping across Utah, the minor is teaching students to carry science across the gap between the lab and the layperson.

And while the partnership with the Institute is new, Bimm has already seen three years of students come through the minor—and he knows what the payoff looks like.

"You can see them selecting the tools that I've taught them and implementing them at the right time. That's just so rewarding—not only have they taken this in, but they're now capable, smart, savvy communicators,” said Bimm. “This is exactly what the world needs."

How to better forecast once-in-a-millennium weather events

Maureen Searcy — 08/17/2026 - 10:30am

For all that day-to-day weather predictions have improved, it remains a challenge to forecast events that might happen once in 1,000 years—like the deadliest heat waves.

Traditional supercomputer-based models can forecast these events, but they require a lot of time and energy. Meanwhile, newer forecasting models, based on artificial intelligence, are good at day-to-day forecasts, but often fail to predict outlier events that weren’t represented in their training data.

“AI weather and climate models are one of the great achievements of AI in science, but they’re not magical—they fail on gray swans, the rarest and most extreme events,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, University of Chicago associate professor of geophysical sciences. “Detailed physics-based models can capture extremes, but they require prohibitively large amounts of time and energy.”

An international team of researchers in the United States and France, co-led by members of Hassanzadeh’s Climate Extremes Theory and Data Group, has developed a new hybrid method, published in Physical Review Letters, to solve the problem.

Their solution marries the efficiency of AI tools with the trustworthiness of traditional models to help predict the odds of rare events quickly and accurately, while using far fewer resources.

“The power of this method,” Hassanzadeh said, “is that it combines the strengths of both AI and traditional physics and is particularly effective for extreme events, which are the hardest to simulate and have the greatest societal impact.”

The statistics of rare events

Heat waves are one of the deadliest forms of extreme weather. In 2003, a heat wave led to roughly 70,000 deaths across Europe, and Russia suffered 56,000 deaths in 2010. This past June, nearly half of the United States—roughly 180 million people—experienced dangerous temperatures.

These waves are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, but the nature of outlier events makes them difficult to study and challenging to predict.

Forecasting has long relied on physics-based climate and weather models. They help us see how different conditions, like atmospheric pressure, might affect temperature and other variables over time. These models compute many different potential scenarios, which researchers use to see what is most likely to actually occur.

The trouble is: If you want to know the odds that Chicago will reach 90°F in July—which is not uncommon—you wouldn’t need to run many simulations before one landed on that temperature. But if you want to know the odds that it would reach 105°F, you’ll need to try many more times before you see that extreme. Running that many simulations takes a lot of time and computational power.

Researchers can mitigate the issue by using a statistical technique called rare event sampling (RES), which speeds up the process by scoring conditions so the climate model can focus on only the most promising and ignore the rest. However, rare event sampling doesn’t work well for short-duration events, like week-long heat waves, rather than an entire season that is overall unusually hot.

To address this, the team came up with a new method named AI+RES, which boosts the scoring mechanism by adding AI’s ability to predict which conditions are most likely to lead to shorter, rapidly developing extremes.

“After doing this iteratively, you eventually get to a bunch of simulations that do indeed capture whatever rare extreme event that you’re interested in,” said Alexander Wikner, Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in Hassanzadeh’s group and co–first author on the study. “The more you get, the better you can estimate the probability of that event, and that ultimately gives you a lot more certainty.”

To test the method, the team ran 50,000 simulations using a traditional climate model to predict heat waves over areas of France and the U.S. Midwest. Their new AI+RES method gave nearly identical results using one-hundredth as many simulations.

Because this work was a proof-of-concept, they used a model that didn’t take into account climate change, which adds another level of complexity. The researchers hope to test their method on models running under different climate change scenarios to see how results might shift as the planet warms.

Wikner notes that the method could also help generate rare-event datasets to train even better AI models, which would then speed up their method even further.

Scaling up

According to the scientists, the hybrid method could be applied to other severe weather, including tropical cyclones or extreme precipitation.

“What I like about this framework,” said Hassanzadeh, “is that it’s ready to be scaled. AI models trained on real weather observations are already built and in use, so the next step is to connect a state-of-the-art numerical weather or climate prediction model to one of them through this algorithm.”

This would give decision-makers access to accurate information they need, like the frequency of strong storms and heat waves in the current and future climate, at regional scales—such as specifically over Texas, Florida or California, for instance.

“This is exactly the kind of information federal, state, and local governments need as a first step for climate adaptation and mitigation planning,” added Hassanzadeh. “It’s very exciting that we could be scaling this up into real-world models that directly provide such information to the public and to policymakers.”

Other co-authors on the study include Dorian Abbot, professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago, as well as researchers from École Normale Supérieure in Paris; Réseau de Transport d’Electricité (RTE) in Paris; the World Energy & Meteorology Council in Norwich, UK; and the Courant Institute of New York University.

Citation: “AI-boosted rare event sampling to characterize extreme weather.” Lancelin and Wikner et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. August 5, 2026.

Funding: The Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship, France-Chicago Center FACCTs Award, US National Science Foundation, the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth at UChicago, RTE France, the National Agency for Research and Technology (ANRT) and the Institut des Mathématiques pour la Planète Terre (IMPT).

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

Study gauges efficiency of Affordable Care Act at reducing uninsured rates

08/14/2026 - 11:09pm

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010—known now mostly as the ACA or Obamacare—dramatically expanded publicly supported health insurance coverage across the United States. But how efficiently did those gains translate into fewer people being uninsured?

A new paper by University of Chicago Research Professor Robert Kaestner with Anuj Gangopadhyaya of Loyola University Chicago examines that question by looking not only at whether more people gained coverage, but where that coverage came from.

The ACA’s efficiency, the authors find, depends heavily on who is being covered. For the lowest-income adults, the ACA’s coverage provisions translated almost directly into fewer uninsured people. As income rises, the relationship becomes weaker, and public support is more likely to replace existing employer-sponsored insurance rather than insure someone who previously lacked coverage.

“This research sheds light on a key aspect of the Affordable Care Act, which is the law’s ability to increase access to health insurance,” said Kaestner, an economist at the Harris School of Public Policy.

“While the law did reduce uninsured rates among the lowest-income adults, the research also shows that it shifted a significant number of people who already had health insurance to new plans under the ACA—certainly not the intent of the policymakers, who sought an efficient mechanism for lifting the number of insured people in the United States.”

Using data from the 2008-2024 American Community Survey, the authors study changes in uninsured rates, Medicaid and Marketplace coverage, and employer-sponsored insurance among adults ages 19 to 64. Their analysis focuses on how those relationships varied by income level, across states and over time.

Eligibility for public support is linked to the federal poverty level, an income measure used to determine eligibility for programs and subsidies. These include Medicaid and financial assistance for Marketplace health insurance plans.

The dollar amount changes by household size and is updated annually.

In 2026, for instance, the federal poverty level is $15,960 for an individual and $33,000 for a family of four.

People with incomes up to four times the federal poverty level qualify in all states for premium tax credits that lower monthly premiums for Marketplace plans. People with incomes up to almost 1.4 times the poverty level may qualify for Medicaid, if they live in a state that has expanded it.

People with incomes below the poverty level generally do not qualify for Marketplace savings. For adults in households below 150% of the federal poverty level, or $49,500 for a family of four, nearly all the increase in public coverage via the ACA came from people who had previously been uninsured.

That pattern changed at higher income levels. For adults with incomes between 151 and 400% of the federal poverty level, $132,000 for a family of four, each percentage point increase in public coverage was associated with about a 0.6 percentage point decrease in uninsured rates and about a 0.4 percentage point decrease in employer-sponsored insurance.

The authors describe this shift as “crowd-out”: public coverage did not always newly insure someone, but in some cases replaced coverage that had previously come through an employer.

The paper argues this distinction matters for evaluating the ACA’s efficiency. If public subsidies extend coverage to people who were uninsured, the policy directly reduces the uninsured rate. But if publicly supported coverage replaces employer-sponsored insurance, the number of uninsured people does not fall—instead, the payer simply changes.

The authors find a clear income gradient. Among adults below 150% of the federal poverty level, public coverage gains translated almost directly into fewer uninsured people. But among those with incomes above 250% of the federal poverty level, the tradeoff was closer to 1.5 people receiving publicly supported coverage for every one-person reduction in the uninsured rate.

The paper also finds that crowd-out was larger among groups more likely to have employer-sponsored insurance before the ACA, including parents and married adults. For parents and married adults with incomes between 250 and 500% of the federal poverty level, the authors estimate the ACA supported approximately three people for each newly insured person.

“This finding gets at the central question of policy efficiency,” Kaestner said. “The government was often subsidizing a change in who paid for coverage, rather than newly insuring someone who otherwise would have gone without.”

The study’s broader approach is important, the authors argue, because much of the existing research on the ACA has focused primarily on Medicaid expansion. By contrast, the authors estimate the total effect of the ACA’s major coverage provisions, including both Medicaid expansion and Marketplace coverage.

That broader view changes the interpretation of crowd-out.

Looking only at Medicaid expansion can overstate crowd-out among low-income adults and understate crowd-out among higher-income adults. Among higher-income households, the authors find that much of the estimated shift away from employer-sponsored insurance comes from Marketplace coverage rather than Medicaid expansion.

Some states did not expand Medicaid. The authors argue that analyses focused only on the difference between expansion and non-expansion states miss important parts of the ACA’s overall impact.

The paper shows the ACA affected both expansion and non-expansion states. Medicaid expansion states saw large increases in Medicaid coverage. But non-expansion states also experienced meaningful coverage gains through the Marketplace, along with substantial reductions in uninsured rates compared with pre-ACA levels.

The timing of coverage changes also matters.

The authors identify a weakening relationship after 2021 between increases in public coverage and decreases in uninsured rates, a period that coincided with changes to Medicaid eligibility rules during the COVID-19 pandemic and enhanced Marketplace tax credits under the American Rescue Plan Act. Their results suggest more generous subsidies and eligibility rules may have increased public coverage in ways that did not always produce proportional reductions in the uninsured rate.

If the goal is to reduce the number of uninsured people as efficiently as possible, the authors find that policies targeted at low-income populations are likely to produce larger reductions per public dollar spent. They point specifically to expanding coverage among low-income adults in non-expansion states as a more efficient approach than subsidizing coverage for higher-income groups.

Conversely, the paper suggests that subsidies aimed at households above 250% of the federal poverty level are less efficient at reducing uninsured rates, because a larger share of public coverage gains among those groups appears to come from people moving out of employer-sponsored insurance.

The authors set the efficiency question against a clear gain in enrollment.

“The ACA dramatically expanded publicly supported insurance coverage across all states,” the authors conclude.

—This article originally appeared on the Harris website.

UChicago psychology study points to new potential for treating eating disorders

Sarah Steimer — 08/12/2026 - 02:11pm

Individuals with anorexia nervosa restrict food intake, sometimes to the point of starvation. And yet, a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience finds the cognitive machinery they use to make decisions about what to eat is remarkably similar to that of healthy eaters.

Instead, the difference lies in the brain regions that supply evidence to the decision, the University of Chicago researchers found. Participants without anorexia showed hippocampal activation as they weighed food choices, whereas those with anorexia recruited the striatum too.

The findings suggest that those with anorexia rely on different inputs that lead to restrictive food choices, rather than a maladaptive decision process per se. UChicago Asst. Prof. Akram Bakkour, who was on the research team, explained the significance of the brain regions and said the findings could help target new eating disorder interventions.

“The hippocampus is at the center of this flexible memory system,” Bakkour said. “We think about episodic memory as being very flexible, and it allows us to travel back in time, but we can also think about the future. It’s important for planning. The striatum, on the other hand, really is at the heart of a pretty inflexible memory system. It’s been implicated in habit learning, for example. It helps us learn habits, but also to sustain habits over time.”

To separate valuation from other aspects of decision-making, the research team had participants make food choices and complete a perceptual decision-making task, in which they judged the predominant color in a display of flickering dots.

This allowed the researchers to test whether any differences in the decision process were specific to food or reflected broader alterations in how decisions are made. They combined computational modeling that captures both choices and reaction times simultaneously with fMRI to examine the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of food choice.

Consistent with prior research, patients with anorexia consistently chose low-fat foods and avoided high-fat foods, whereas healthy controls neither preferred nor avoided fatty foods. But once those preference differences were accounted for, the decision-making process itself looked the same across groups. Both groups were faster and more accurate on easier decisions, and the model fit both groups’ behavior equally well, with no differences in key parameters such as the rate of evidence accumulation or the amount of evidence required to commit to a choice.

Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, the findings indicate that anorexia does not involve a breakdown in the cognitive process of deliberation for either food or non-food decisions. Instead, these results shift the focus to the input to the decision process, or the valuation stage, that leads individuals to choose one food over another.

Where the groups did diverge was in the brain. The fMRI results showed greater hippocampal activation in the control group during food choice deliberation, specifically as decision time increased, compared with perceptual decisions.

Patients with anorexia showed a similar hippocampal effect but additionally recruited the striatum. The researchers interpret the results to suggest that individuals with anorexia recruit different neural systems to compute and generate internal evidence as inputs to the decision process.

Bakkour said this means the source of evidence for decision-making in anorexia may be drawn from a more rigid system, whereas healthy individuals draw on a more flexible one. The direction of causality is still unknown, and it remains unclear whether striatal involvement is a cause or consequence of the disorder.

The team will next explore the attributes that contribute most strongly to choice and valuation between patients with anorexia and those without. But as Bakkour and his colleagues continue to probe the behavioral decision-making angle behind the disorder, they may open new treatment opportunities.

“That might give us some hope that maybe we can move things around,” Bakkour said. “If we can just tip the balance a little bit more toward the hippocampus in the patients, maybe we would normalize decisions.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is available at 1-866-662-1235. UChicago students can reach Student Wellness at 773-702-3625.

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

Senior theses put UChicago students' economics training to work on messy reality

Kevin McKeough — 08/11/2026 - 09:53am

Immigration. The media and elections. Commodity prices and war.

These subjects are front-page news almost daily. They’re also among the widely varied topics that were investigated this past year by students in the Undergraduate Honors Workshop in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

During the year-long capstone course, fourth-year students in the undergraduate honors economics program conduct in-depth research on a topic of their choosing and write a thesis paper about it, guided by faculty and input from their fellow students in the workshop.

“It’s their first foray into research, into creation of knowledge,” said Senior Instructional Prof. Victor Lima, AM’96, PhD’00, the co-director of undergraduate studies and master’s programs in economics. “The honors variant of the standard economics track equips students with the tools and topical knowledge necessary to arrive at the honors workshop ready to pursue research into a topic of their choice.”

The range of these inquiries is wide. The 26 theses from this year’s workshop spanned public transit in national parks, the 2016 Olympics and Rio de Janeiro’s labor market, online collectibles auctions and vacation rentals in Hawaii.

“The breadth is incredible,” Lima said. “Here, there’s a philosophy that economics is a set of tools and that set of tools is applicable to anything people do. This department has a history of taking these tools and applying them to questions of broad interest to social scientists.”

That range extends to the faculty advisor that each student seeks to coach them in the research process. The advisor can be an economist in any of the University’s colleges and schools, such as the business, law and medical schools, and the crime and poverty labs.

For some students, their thesis paper will become part of their application for Ph.D. programs. Lima said that in recent years, multiple honors economics graduates have been admitted to each of the top five doctoral programs in economics in the country, with one cohort making up a third of an entering class at Harvard University.

What’s more, “students report back that they feel well prepared and ready to engage when they arrive at their Ph.D. programs.”

Other students go on to work in consulting or tech.

“A lot of the really good private sector jobs that students take place a premium on problem-solving and the ability to analyze questions,” Lima said.

“The first step in all these journeys is taking the honors workshop, where they learn how to take this ideal world we put on blackboards and put that ideal work into the messy, complicated, roundabout real world we encounter.”

Staying on track to study emigration and birth rates

Ben Miele, AB’26, credits his advisor Yana Gallen, AB’09, with literally keeping his research on the right track—or rather, tracks. For his thesis, Miele investigated the effect emigration from Mexico to the United States had on Mexico’s birth rate, drawing on Mexican government migration and birth rate data.

In addition, his calculations incorporated municipalities’ nearness to sections of railroad track whose top allowable speeds were slow enough that migrants could jump on board trains there and ride them into the U.S.

Using the rail data eliminated potential factors on birth rate other than migration.

“You estimate the effect of proximity to those sections of rail on emigration rates, and under certain assumptions, using fancy linear algebra, you can estimate the causal effect of migration on fertility,” Miele explained.

He added that he’d wanted to focus on rail travel for a long time, but that Gallen had helped him figure out the details of his work. Gallen is an assistant professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and an alumna of the Honors Workshop herself.

“It’s an incredible privilege to have someone as smart as she is look at your work and give you feedback about it,” Miele said.

His thesis considers the period from 2000-2020, when emigration from Mexico to the U.S. increased dramatically. His analysis found that on average, 0.5 fewer births occur annually in a Mexican municipality for each local household with an emigrant in the U.S.

“The idea is, if someone leaves Chicago and goes to the United Kingdom, there would be one-half fewer births in Chicago,” Miele said. However, in some subsets of his research, he found a positive correlation between emigration and birth rates.

In the second part of his thesis, Miele assesses factors that might explain latter results, using data from the Mexican Migration Project, a collaboration between Brown University and El Colegio de Mexico. He looked at unmarried women’s rates of birth and marriage and births among couples that didn’t emigrate.

He found no effects of emigration on unmarried women, but that emigration corresponded to a decrease in birth rates among married couples. However, Miele also found increased emigration was linked with increased birth rates among financially poorer-than-average couples.

Miele is going to work for a consulting firm in the Bay Area after leaving Hyde Park. He said being in the workshop was “a tremendous amount of fun.”

Considering an airwaves auction’s civic consequences

Fittingly for a project centered around broadcasting, Vera Chaudhry, AB’26, got the idea for her thesis from a podcast. After listening to an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that discussed market demand for the broadcast spectrum of the airwaves last fall, she became fascinated with the topic.

That fascination led Chaudhry to explore whether a U.S. government auction of broadcast frequencies in 2016 led to closure of television stations that provided local news programming, and if in turn the stations going dark was followed by a decline in voter participation in their broadcast areas. As she discusses in her thesis, the federal government has regulated the use of broadcast airwaves, which are a public resource, to varying degrees and in varying ways ever since the advent of radio in the early 20th century.

The government has auctioned frequencies on the broadcast spectrum for commercial use since 1994, Chaudhry said. Responding to increased demand for use in wireless communications, the 2016 auction was noteworthy for allowing owners of some existing stations to sell their station’s bandwidth in addition to the established practice of businesses buying the use of as-yet unallocated airwave frequencies.

A subset of stations at the far end of the spectrum were even required to sell their wavelengths and either move to another channel or close.

Chaudhry drew on Federal Communications Commission records and data from the auction to determine which stations closed due to selling their frequencies, and which closed stations had provided news programming. She then looked at data from an MIT lab that studies elections and U.S. census data to compare levels of voter participation in areas with those closed stations in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

Chaudhry’s analysis of this data found the stations required to sell their wavelengths were 16.2% more likely to close due to the auction than the stations with the option of selling their share of the broadcast spectrum. She also found that voter turnout in affected areas decreased by 0.83 percentage points in 2020 compared to the 2016 election and by 1.26 percentage points from the 2016 to 2018 elections.

Chaudhry already had an interest in the intersection of markets and public resources prior to beginning her research. It first was piqued by a class on crony capitalism she took as a third-year taught by Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, in the Chicago Booth School of Business.

“It was the first time I started thinking about some of these questions,” she recalled. “I was pretty inspired.”

She enlisted Zingales as her thesis advisor, and he helped guide her research process, even connecting her with journalists and scholars who had covered and studied the broadcast airwaves and the spectrum auction.

In addition to developing research skills, the Honors Workshop often nurtures strong camaraderie among the students. Chaudhry is among the students who exemplify this aspect of the program—Miele even includes her among a handful of students he cites for contributing to the development of his thesis.

“The economics thesis workshop is very much student-led. Students present their ideas and their papers and their work throughout the year. That was a part of the seminar that I really enjoyed,” Chaudhry said.

Measuring mitigators of conflict, with a Nobelist’s mentoring

Anderson Hu, AB/SB’26, observed that “conflict doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There has to be some sort of shock” that prompts it, and the resulting devastation that war and political violence cause.

Hu’s research examined recent civil conflict in Africa, and how much state capacity could prevent or diminish conflict by offsetting the shocks that cause it. Specifically, Hu considered both state administrative capacity—the ability to provide public goods and services—and coercive capacity, the use of force via police and the military to impose order.

To assess capacity, Hu took data on 24 countries from the Afrobarometer, a research network that measures public opinion on economics and government in dozens of African nations, using survey results from 2014 to 2024.

To derive conflict incidence and fatalities, he relied on Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a non-profit organization that monitors conflict worldwide. He chose commodity price changes as a representative economic shock that could lead to conflict, which he obtained from an International Monetary Fund dataset.

Hu’s analysis of this data found that greater administrative capacity could lessen conflict by reducing the negative effects of commodity price shocks. However, “in general, coercive capacity doesn’t seem to be that significant, which is a bit surprising,” Hu said.

Hu’s thesis advisor was James A. Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at Harris and the Department of Political Science. A recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics, Robinson is among numerous Nobel faculty who have served as an Honors Workshop advisor over the years.

At the suggestion of one of his TAs, Hu had begun working for Robinson as a research assistant in the fall of 2024, shortly before the Nobel award was announced.

“It was very cool to wake up to one morning,” Hu said.

Having an established relationship made it easier to ask Robinson to be his thesis advisor, even if he was a little nervous about his question being “salient and interesting enough to be worth his time.”

But Robinson eagerly suggested research papers for Hu to read and discussed with him how to interpret the results of his data synthesis.

“What perspective to take when it comes to numbers, the attenuating effect of state capacity is something he helped me develop,” Hu said. “A large part of my thesis was shaped by meeting with him.”

Hu said his experience with Robinson and the workshop overall showed that “the University is very rigorous, it’s very intense, and that results in a very important research output.

“It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. There’s a high standard of what research ought to look like, a high standard of the quality of research.”

—This article originally appeared on the College website.

Researchers discover cleaner route to purifying rare earth elements

Sarah C.P. Williams — 08/10/2026 - 10:34pm

Rare earth elements such as lanthanum, neodymium and dysprosium are used to build the electric motor in your car, the LED lights in your house and the MRI machine at your doctor’s office.

But first, they have to be mined and separated from each other. Historically, that purification has been a costly, difficult process, relying on huge amounts of toxic chemicals.

Now, researchers in the lab of Assoc. Prof. Chong Liu at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), working with colleagues at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, have discovered a cleaner method to separate rare earth elements from each other.

The new approach relies on a layered form of manganese oxide—a mineral material with the right size layers to allow ions to slip in and out and to differentiate rare earth elements.

“This is the first time that people have used electrochemical intercalation and harnessed the structural characteristics to separate similar lanthanides, which are intrinsically very hard to separate,” said Liu, senior author of the new study, which published in Nature Chemical Engineering. “What’s also valuable is that we provided a lot of new understanding of how rare earth ions are interacting with this material and how we can manipulate it to better selectivity.”

“This kind of separation is competitive with other rare earth separation methods, but it’s done in water, without organic solvents,” said George Schatz, professor of chemistry at Northwestern and a co-author of the study. “That’s a difference that could actually matter at manufacturing scale.”

Squeezing elements through channels

The 17 rare earth elements—including the 15 lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium—rarely occur alone. They’re almost always mined together and chemically they’re nearly identical, with only tiny differences in ion size and acidity differentiating each one. Pulling them apart typically requires custom-built molecules and large amounts of acid, which is used to strip each element off those molecules.

“Rare earths always come mixed together, whether they’re in an ore or in a waste stream, and separating them from each other is a second, very challenging step even after you’ve pulled them away from everything else,” said UChicago PME graduate student Jiadong Liu, a co-first author of the new paper.

Chong Liu and her colleagues knew that one of the differences between rare earth ions was the size of the water shell surrounding each one when they are dissolved in solution. Lighter rare earths like lanthanum have a larger first water shell, while heavier rare earths like dysprosium have a smaller first shell.

Taking advantage of that size difference, Chong Liu’s group engineered manganese oxide so that the gaps between its stacked layers were only a few water molecules wide. Then, they squeezed raw mixtures of rare earth elements inside.

The approach divided the elements into two groups. Heavier lanthanides with smaller water shells stuck in the channels more tightly. Lighter lanthanides with larger shells pushed the layers apart, loosening their grip.

To confirm what was happening at a molecular level, the UChicago PME team collaborated with Schatz’s group at Northwestern to run quantum mechanical simulations using a method called density functional theory, which predicts how atoms arrange themselves and interact based on the underlying physics. They also worked with Argonne scientists to obtain experimental X-ray data.

“It was incredibly rewarding to see how closely our density functional theory calculations matched the synchrotron X-ray measurements,” said co-first author Woo Cheol Jeon, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher in Schatz’s lab at Northwestern. “The calculations let us see, atom by atom, how each rare earth element arranges its hydration shell inside the confined channel, which experiments couldn’t resolve directly.”

Fine-tuning the purification

While the new process separated the heaviest and lightest rare earths, some of the most useful elements still behaved too similarly to separate. To fine-tune the purification so that it could differentiate similar pairs of rare earth elements, the research team used an electric current and added magnesium ions.

The magnesium acted as a scaffold, holding the manganese oxide channels to their designed spacing, even when rare earth elements tried to expand it—an effect called pinning. Now, rare earth ions showed differences in binding to the layered material even when they were extremely similar.

“Even elements that behave almost identically will still try to expand the material to make room for their water molecules,” said Siqi Zou, PhD'24, co-first author of the study and former UChicago PME graduate student. “By pinning the channel so it can’t expand at all, we forced that small difference in behavior to become a much bigger difference in how strongly each element binds.”

With the addition of magnesium, the enrichment of neodymium over lanthanum jumped from a 1.6-fold difference to a 5.4-fold difference. After two cycles of purification, researchers could get a neodymium sample that was 97% pure. Similar improvements were seen for other rare earth elements.

A cleaner future

The new purification method could ultimately point toward different ways of thinking about where rare earth processing happens, the researchers said.

“Right now, rare earth ores get mined all over the world, but almost all of them end up being sent overseas for processing,” said Schatz, co-author of the study. “A method like this, that just uses water and electricity instead of organic solvents, is the kind of technology that could actually change how and where that processing gets done.”

The method isn’t yet ready to be scaled up to replace industrial purification. Still, it points to a broader design principle: tuning a channel’s width can determine which ions a material prefers, even for ions that differ by a fraction of an angstrom.

Chong Liu’s group is now testing the approach against more of the 15 lanthanides, while Schatz is refining his computational models, aiming to explain the pinning effect more quantitatively. He is also using the same modeling approach developed for this work to study other materials.

Citation: “Pinning Angstrom-size solid ionic channel for the separation of rare earth elements,” Zou et al, Nature Chemical Engineering, July 21, 2026, DOI: 10.1038/s44286-026-00418-8

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