Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, has been awarded the 2015 Inamori Ethics Prize by the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.
Supratik Guha has been named the next director of the Nanoscience and Technology (NST) Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory as well as director of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering, and Science (FEMMES) is introducing computer science and teaching coding skills to middle school girls in a series of entertaining and hands-on activities that continue throughout the year.
The 2015 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize recognizes the University of Chicago’s John E. Carlstrom, PhD alumnus Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Princeton colleague Lyman Page for their individual and collective contributions to the study of the universe on the largest scales.
In his recent book, The Twilight of Human Rights Laws (Oxford University Press), Posner takes to task international human rights treaties. The Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law contends they have failed to accomplish their objectives because they are “too ambitious, even utopian and too ambiguous,” and there is little evidence that these laws have improved people’s well-being.
This year, in a new partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative awarded grants to five teams comprised of nine University of Chicago graduate students and three SAIC graduate students.
If you’re a musician, this sounds too good to be true: University of Chicago psychologists have been able to train some adults to develop the prized musical ability of absolute pitch, and the training’s effects last for months.
In light of China’s pressing environmental challenges, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Paulson Institute will host a May 19 conference on climate change that will feature current and former senior government officials and renowned scholars in China and the United States.
Study shows boost to positive outcomes for young adults aging out of foster care and the juvenile justice system. A large, rigorous study shows Youth Villages Program increases economic well-being and reduces homelessness for young adults.
Scientists at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and China have described the surprising discovery and function of a new DNA modification in insects, worms, and algae.
Nationwide implementation of the American College of Cardiology's appropriate use criteria could result in a cost savings of more than $2.3 billion, based on a two-year study of a community hospital in Illinois.
The University of Chicago Library has acquired the papers of cartoonist Daniel Clowes, Lab’79, giving researchers access to never-before-seen notes and sketches from the acclaimed comic book author.
On Friday, May 1st, the University of Chicago will host the Latin American Policy Forum 2015, a day-long event in which prestigious and high-ranking practitioners and policy players from Latin America are invited to the University to discuss relevant and pressing issues for the region.
A new report on global trends in suicide terrorism shows that during 2014 more than 4,300 people in more than 15 countries were killed in suicide bombings. Out of the 15 countries, Afghanistan and Iraq led the world last year in suicide attacks with an increase in Iraq.
The University of Chicago Press has awarded the 2015 Gordon J. Laing Prize to Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, professor of history, for his book, I Speak of the City.
President Robert J. Zimmer presented the award at a reception at The UChicago Quadrangle Club on April 21. The Press awards the Laing Prize annually to the UChicago faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.
UChicago’s Main Quadrangle had a little more brain power than usual when the Illuminoggin recently made an appearance. The Illuminoggin is a giant anatomically correct glowing brain that rides on top of The Think Tank, a mobile neuroscience lab headed by Daniel Casasanto, assistant professor of psychology.
Tsuen-hsuin (T.H.) Tsien, curator emeritus of the East Asian Collection of the Joseph Regenstein Library and professor emeritus of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, passed away April 9 in Chicago. He was 105.
The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will bring together scholars from many fields to examine the historical, social and intellectual circumstances that give rise to different kinds of knowledge, and to assess how this knowledge shapes the modern world.
n an effort to advance public discourse about the ongoing national crisis over police-community relations in urban America, the University of Chicago Law School is hosting a conference on youth and police. The April 24-25 conference is designed to contribute to the development of concrete policy, advocacy and research agendas for addressing issues arising from the interactions between youth and police.
A newly developed spectroscopy method is helping to clarify the poorly understood molecular process by which an anti-HIV drug induces lethal mutations in the virus’s genetic material. The findings could bolster efforts to develop the next generation of anti-viral treatments.
Norman H. Nie, a political scientist and inventor of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, or SPSS, computer software technology that changed the way social scientists analyze data, died April 2, one day after his 72nd birthday. Nie had lung cancer.
As the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to deliberate on same-sex marriage later this month, Prof. Geoffrey R. Stone, the 2015 Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecturer, will devote his talk to this contentious social and legal issue that could mark one of the high court’s most important rulings this year.
Thousands of mathematics teachers and millions of students have used the curricular materials that Zalman Usiskin and his associates wrote and developed during his career as UChicago professor and director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project.
Wide-ranging impact has been a hallmark of the University of Chicago Mathematics Project and its most widely used product, Everyday Mathematics. Each year approximately 4.3 million students in 220,000 U.S. classrooms learn with Everyday Mathematics, a comprehensive pre-K through grade 6 mathematics program.
In addition to donning team colors, sports stadiums in Chicago will become ‘greened’ as part of the Sustainable Chicago Sports Project, an environmental conservation effort led by the Green Chicago Restaurant Coalition, the City of Chicago, and the University of Chicago.
Harry Hoffner, one of the founders of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary and a leading expert on the ancient Near East, died suddenly on Mar. 10 in South Carolina. He was 80.
With 20 countries racing to design and build a better rechargeable “super battery,” A veteran reporter gained special access to write about U.S. researchers leading the “battery war” charge. The result is a new book, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World.
The National Science Foundation has renewed funding for the University of Chicago's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center for another six years with a $20.6 million grant. UChicago was one of 12 institutions nationwide to receive a MRSEC grant from the NSF in this round of competition.
The Water Research Initiative of the Institute for Molecular Engineering has added a sixth research project to the original five that received funding last year.
A research conference, to be held on April 7-8, 2015 in Washington DC, aims to explore how uncertainty manifests in fiscal policy, and exactly how that uncertainty can shape the real economy.
The University of Chicago’s partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) has made possible a new educational opportunity for students studying environmental science.
The University of Chicago is creating a new network of five Urban Labs to address some of the world’s most daunting urban problems and help realize the promise of cities in an era of global urbanization.
Although the work of UChicago Urban Labs is global, its inaugural competition for partners seeks promising ideas that can be implemented in the city of Chicago.
The Urban Labs Innovation Challenge seeks to generate evidence on what urban policy interventions work, for whom, and why. Urban Labs are seeking letters of interest from organizations or agencies with promising strategies for addressing one of the focus areas of the three newly created Urban Labs: energy and the environment, health, and poverty. The labs also welcome interventions that span multiple focus areas.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded four UChicago faculty members 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships: Eric Budish, associate professor of economics at Chicago Booth; Jian Ding, assistant professor in statistics; Magne Mogstad, assistant professor in economics; and Stephanie Palmer, assistant professor in organismal biology & anatomy.
Millions of African Americans moved from the South in the early 20th century to seek better job opportunities and higher wages, but a new study on the historic Great Migration shows that with improved economic conditions came a greater risk of mortality.
A research team led by the University of Chicago’s Dmitri Talapin has demonstrated how semiconductors can be soldered and still deliver good electronic performance.
The current compensation arrangement for big-time college athletics is inefficient, inequitable and very likely unsustainable, according to a new study by economists from the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University. The article concludes that an evolution to a competitive labor market with fewer restrictions on pay for top athletes may be inevitable, though the transition will be difficult.
In 1941, future Nobel laureate Lev Landau predicted that superfluid helium-4 should contain an exotic, particle-like excitation called a roton. Roton structure has been a matter of debate ever since. University of Chicago physicists have now created roton structure in the laboratory.
The University of Chicago has appointed James Robinson, a renowned political scientist and economist and an expert on Africa and Latin America, as University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy.
Three UChicago scholars—Doniger, Prof. Anthony Yu, and Prof. David Tod Roy—spent decades rigorously researching and reinterpreting ancient Indian and Chinese masterpieces. Their exemplary works have set the standard in the field of literary translation, reviving interest in ancient classics that had become taboo, due to censorship or public misperception.
A new report provides further evidence that it’s not too late to improve academic outcomes for adolescents from disadvantaged environments if they receive individual attention. The latest data is from the first year of a two-year study that shows that participation in the Match tutoring intervention improved student math test scores, which is equivalent to narrowing the nationwide achievement gap between black and white students by about a third.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics schools vary in many ways, but they share eight major common elements. So finds a nationwide study of 23 STEM schools conducted by the University of Chicago’s Outlier Research & Evaluation group.
University of Chicago scientists have experimentally observed for the first time a phenomenon in ultracold, three-atom molecules predicted by Russian theoretical physicsist Vitaly Efimov in 1970.
In a new study published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Mogstad and his co-authors at University of California, San Diego, and the University of Bergen in Norway investigated family welfare cultures in the context of Norway’s Disability Insurance System. From 14,722 parent-child observations, they have found strong empirical evidence that reliance on welfare in one generation is likely to cause greater welfare use in the next generation.
Thinking small has enabled an international team of scientists to gain new insight into the evolution of planetary building blocks in the early solar system.
The University of Chicago is establishing a professorship in molecular engineering dedicated to the development of solutions to the emerging crisis on the global supply of clean water.
The Marine Biological Laboratory, an international center for research and education in biological and environmental sciences and an affiliate of the University of Chicago, invites journalists to apply for a fellowship in its Logan Science Journalism Program, to be held May 27 to June 5, 2015.