News: Students

Joshua Wagner, a graduate student with the Steve Sibener Group, has been named the recipient of the distinguished Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Award from the AVS (American Vacuum Society). 

Michelle Brann has received the 2025 ACS Astrochemistry Dissertation Award in recognition for the significant contributions made during her doctoral studies with Prof. Steven J. Sibener.

Postdocs from multiple labs joined in the Spring JFI postdoc happy hour! Look out for another happy hour coming in the Fall.

The Vitelli and Gardel groups created new models for predicting cell traction forces. Their paper in Cell details how trained neural networks could predict the forces created by complex biochemistry using images of just fluorescent zyxin proteins.

Undergraduates in Chin group lead breakthrough work.

Third-year Frankie Fung and fourth-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects—ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds—between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber.

“They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Cheng Chin, professor of physics, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.

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