Director's Message:

I hope everyone's summer has been getting off to a good start! I think I need seasonal photos as the picture of me dressed for cold weather has a dissonance here!

Summer has this funny way of having a more relaxed schedule but also flying by. Because of this effect, I'll point to an end of summer event you'll likely want to participate in -

Mark your calendars for August 31st, as we invite you to join us for an exciting day of networking, learning, and discovery at the 2023 Industry Networks Day (IND). This event promises to be a great opportunity for professionals and industry leaders to come together and exchange ideas, build new connections, and gain valuable insights into their respective fields. Featuring a diverse range of panel and keynote talks, as well as engaging conversations over meals, from my experience, this is a self-selecting platform to network, learn, and have fun. Sponsorships are available and are an excellent way to connect with and increase brand awareness among the UChicago population. More details below.

Some of you may recall that we are planning happy hours to swirl together UChicago alums as well local industrial friends and colleagues. We recently had a mixer in Los Angeles (see pictures below) in mid May with very encouraging comments and a great turnout. We will be having one in downtown Chicago on August 10th and a few more strategically located in the Chicago suburbs later this year. We are also planning one combined with a Harper Lecture on September 27th in the Irvine/LA area in California with Professor Shirley Meng as the keynote speaker. If there is interest in attending these, please feel free to reach out to me for more information.

Collaborations and partnerships start with small steps - meeting a student, faculty, staff member, or an unexpected industry peer; discovering mutual interests and potential resonance, building relationships, trust, and champions with low hanging fruit and short term wins, and building a culture of innovation as part of the local ecosystem. I'm here to plant the seed - and to present interesting and unique opportunities that I've discovered myself. With your curiosity, I know we can make this a mutual win.

Inside a lab, scientists marvel at a strange state that forms when they cool down atoms to nearly absolute zero. Outside their window, trees gather sunlight and turn them into new leaves. The two seem unrelated—but a new study from the University of Chicago suggests that these processes aren’t so different as they might appear on the surface.The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates — a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.

“As far as we know, these areas have never been connected before, so we found this very compelling and exciting,” said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti.

Mazziotti’s lab specializes in modelling the complicated interactions of atoms and molecules as they display interesting properties. There’s no way to see these interactions with the naked eye, so computer modeling can give scientists a window into why the behavior happens—and can also provide a foundation for designing future technology.

Renowned scientist David Keith has joined the University of Chicago as a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences to explore climate systems engineering.

Keith has worked at the interface of climate science, technology and public policy for over three decades, and is at the forefront of efforts to advance the science and policy analysis of solar geoengineering.

As nations work to begin transitioning away from fossil fuels, experts say that even the rapid elimination of carbon emissions cannot address the climate risks posed by the carbon already in the atmosphere. To head off the effects of rapid climate change, some have suggested using human technological intervention to blunt the effects of climate change.

At UChicago, Keith will lead a new Climate Systems Engineering initiative, which will explore multiple such strategies, including methods to reflect sunlight away from Earth—ranging from injecting particles into the stratosphere, to using ocean salt crystals to brighten low-lying clouds. Other strategies could include ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and more localized interventions, such as protecting glaciers.

However, because interventions can have global impacts, these technologies create moral, social, and political challenges that require deep and wide-ranging thought and discourse.

Despite their immense promise to solve new kinds of problems, today’s quantum computers are inherently prone to error. A small perturbation in their surrounding environment— a change in temperature, pressure, or magnetic field, for instance—can disrupt their fragile computational building blocks, called qubits.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have developed a new method to constantly monitor the noise around a quantum system and adjust the qubits, in real-time, to minimize error.

The approach, described online in Science, relies on spectator qubits: a set of qubits embedded in the computer with the sole purpose of measuring outside noise rather than storing data. The information gathered by such spectator qubits can then be used to cancel out noise in vital data-processing qubits.

Asst. Prof. Hannes Bernien, who led the research, likens the new system to noise-cancelling headphones, which continuously monitor surrounding noises and emit opposing frequencies to cancel them out.

Environment fate of materials and sustainability

Sensing technology and sustainability

Polymer circularity

Resource recovery

Critical material supply chain

Green batteries

Critical materials life cycle analysis

AI/Machine Learning applied to sustainability

Carbon capture

Solar Technology

When we listen to our favorite song, what sounds like a continuous wave of music is actually transmitted as tiny packets of quantum particles called phonons.

The laws of quantum mechanics hold that quantum particles are fundamentally indivisible and therefore cannot be split, but researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago are exploring what happens when you try to split a phonon.

In two experiments – the first of their kinds – a team led by Prof. Andrew Cleland used a device called an acoustic beamsplitter to “split” phonons and thereby demonstrate their quantum properties. By showing that the beamsplitter can be used to both induce a special quantum superposition state for one phonon, and further create interference between two phonons, the research team took the first critical steps toward creating a new kind of quantum computer.

The results are newly published in the journal Science and built on years of breakthrough work on phonons by the team at Pritzker Molecular Engineering.

The University of Chicago’s computing ambitions took a quantum leap forward Sunday with a commitment of $150 million in funding from IBM and Google to build the world’s most powerful computer.

The partnership with the University of Tokyo, announced at the recent G7 summit in Japan, will seek to create the first quantum supercomputer, building up the technology over the next decade to a processing power that would dwarf any computer in current use.

The funding will also support research and training needed to operate the supercomputer.

“It would solve problems that current supercomputers can’t solve,” said Fred Chong, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago. “Things like developing new materials or fertilizers or drug discovery, certain kinds of computations that are just too complex for the machines that we have now.”

Economic way of creating MXene material could enable new electronics or energy storage methods

The secret to a perfect croissant is in the layers — as many as possible, each one interspersed with butter. Similarly, a material with promise for new applications is made of many thin layers of metal, between which scientists can slip different ions for various purposes. This makes them potentially very useful for future high-tech electronics or energy storage.

Until recently, these materials — known as MXenes, pronounced "max-eens" — were as labor-intensive as good croissants.

MXenes were discovered in 2011. Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the University of Chicago shows how to make MXenes far more quickly and easily, with fewer toxic byproducts. The research is published in  Science.

The U.S. National Science Foundation provided funding support through several grants. Usually, when a metal like gold or titanium is shaved to create atomic-thin sheets, it stops behaving like a metal. But unusually strong chemical bonds in MXenes allow them to retain the abilities of metal, such as conducting electricity strongly.

They're also easily customizable. "You can put ions between the layers to use them to store energy, for example," said chemist Di Wang, co-first author of the paper along with Chenkun Zhou.

These advantages could make MXenes useful for building new devices to, for example, store electricity or block electromagnetic wave interference. Previously, the only way to make MXenes involved intensive synthesis steps, including heating the mixture as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and bathing it in hydrofluoric acid, one of the most dangerous chemicals in manufacturing.

"This is fine if you're making a few grams for experiments in the laboratory, but if you wanted to make large amounts to use in commercial products, it would become a major corrosive waste disposal issue," said Dmitri Talapin, corresponding author on the paper.

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Assistant Professor Hannes Bernien has been awarded a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award by The National Science Foundation for his proposal to construct and connect quantum network nodes through a phenomenon called quantum entanglement.

Building a quantum version of the internet would bring about a new paradigm in information processing, including un-hackable communication, networked sensing with unparalleled sensitivity, and scalable, distributed quantum computing.

“I am greatly honored to receive this award,” said Bernien, assistant professor of molecular engineering. “This will enable us to tackle some of the biggest challenges in quantum science, as well as help us engage more of our community on what quantum means for the future.”

Both the University of Chicago and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have made it an institutional priority to give students an international-education experience.

And both colleges have succeeded in getting a large share of their undergraduates abroad — but they’ve followed different paths to do so.

Historically, students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, have studied abroad at lower rates than those in disciplines like foreign languages or the arts, although their numbers have been slowly climbing.

Educators at WPI, as the STEM college in central Massachusetts is known, viewed low participation as a problem. STEM fields are highly international, attracting large numbers of foreign students and sending graduates to work in cross-cultural teams. The challenges scientists and engineers tackle are frequently global in scope.

Efforts are underway to clean up our atmosphere, from high-powered EV chargers to carbon-neutral aviation fuel. Scientists in Chicago area are focused on decarbonizing our planet and they’re working at unprecedented speeds.

Energy is the focus at Argonne National Laboratory in DuPage County.

Seth Darling, Ph.D is Argonne National Laboratory’s Chief Science and Technology Officer.

“A little more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from transportation are from cars and other light duty vehicles,” he said. ”The easiest way to decarbonize that part of the transportation sector is electrification, going to electric vehicles. We are having to do something we have never done before in terms of the pace of change.”

Darling is one of our country’s premier energy experts.

“There’s more solar energy coming down to earth than we’ll ever need as a society,” he said

Darling, along with a battery of scientists, are working at lightning speed to decarbonize our planet.

“The timescale here is not because we like to be ambitious. The timescale was imposed on us by climate change,” he said. “We know in the next few decades is when we have to decarbonize our economy so we’re racing now to catch up.”

They’re making powerful progress in the transportation sector.

Biologist’s innovative research on how cells rebuild themselves could be the future of regenerative medicine

In the near future, birth defects, traumatic injuries, limb loss and perhaps even cancer could be cured through bioelectricity—electrical signals that communicate to our cells how to rebuild themselves. This innovative idea has been tested on flatworms and frogs by biologist Michael Levin, whose research investigates how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine.

Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

The consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors has grown in both business strategies and investment. It has moved from niche to mainstream as business leaders redefine the purpose of a corporation to serve a wider range of stakeholders and investors seek to use their financial clout to compel positive environmental and social change.

But as use of ESG factors—to manage risks and/or to generate positive impact—has grown, it has attracted criticism and litigation. Some censure stems from fundamental opposition to the goals of stakeholders championing ESG factors, for example by the Texas lawmakers who have banned governmental entities from doing business with financial groups considering exclusions around fossil-fuels companies and those involved in the trade and production of controversial weapons, such as firearms. Some believe ESG adoption is destined to become no more than an expensive reporting burden for the private sector. Other critiques, often from those within the ESG investment industry, are more helpful and aim to provide guidance on how to improve its use to better achieve the global goals related to sustainable development.

EXIT THE lift on the top floor of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and the mechanical beeps and whirrs of a model offshore oil rig welcome you to an exhibit entirely devoted to energy. Explore the riveting history of drill bits or how fracking works, all conspicuously sponsored by Exxon, Chevron or another oil major. Amid all the cheerleading for oil and gas, only a small section is dedicated to renewable energy. But in a few years, perhaps a whole wall will be devoted to a different type of drilling—for heat instead of hydrocarbons.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress last year, offers lots of federal subsidies for established low-carbon technologies, such as solar and wind, but it also attempts to give nascent ones a boost. Geothermal-energy enthusiasts point out that hot rocks can provide baseload power when there is no sun or wind. The technology is cleaner than gas and requires less land than wind or solar farms. This, then, is a test case for whether public investment can jolt a new industry into being.

How Does U.S. Electricity Generation Change Over One Week? [Source: Visual Capitalist]

he U.S. has a dynamic electricity mix, with a range of energy sources generating electricity at different times of the day. At all times, the amount of electricity generated must match demand in order to keep the power grid in balance, which leads to cyclical patterns in daily and weekly electricity generation.

The above graphic sponsored by the National Public Utilities Council tracks hourly changes in U.S. electricity generation over one week, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Lisa Margonelli: There’s a lot of talk about how CHIPS and Science is unprecedented, but how does it fit into the history of government investments in science and security?

Crow: You know, what’s funny—and a lot of Americans I don’t think remember this or have thought about it—but the American government from its design and its outset has always been scientifically driven. President Jefferson in 1804 formed the Corps of Discovery after the purchase of the Louisiana property from France, and then had Lewis and Clark, then as the captains of the Corps of Discovery, scientifically explore from the Mississippi River in St. Louis all the way to the coast of Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River—an unbelievable scientific exploration. Then many times in the history of the United States, with the Coastal and Geodetic Survey and all kinds of other things along the way, the country just became very, very science driven; very, very knowledge core driven.

Three times prior to the CHIPS and Science Act, the US government stepped up and decided to ensure national security around something that they felt was absolutely essential. The first was our moves in the nineteenth century, in the 1860s, with both the establishment of the Department of Agriculture and the land-grant universities, to make certain that food security would always be maintained in the United States. And now we’ve become the most agriculturally abundant, most agriculturally creative, most scientifically driven, food-secure place that’s ever existed. That was sort of case number one.

Case number two was following the Manhattan Project during World War II, nuclear security became a thing, where we had developed this scientific thing: atomic fission. We had done this during World War II; we’d built all of these labs, and now we knew we had this tiger by the tail that would have both civilian applications and weapons applications—which we needed to basically be the best at, forever, so that we could maintain the advantage that we’d gained. And so the Atomic Energy Commission was formed in 1946, later the ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration, in the early 1970s. And this really became a core thing.

Numerous companies have rolled out green products, processes, and production, benefiting both shareholders and in so doing contributing to global decarbonization. But going big demands a broader, collaborative mindset, says Preeti Pincha, director of Deloitte’s Sustainable Systems Initiative. “Corporations tend to look inward for solutions rather than imagining structural change for their entire value chain.” Executives need to expand sustainability efforts far beyond org charts and HQ walls.

Fundamentally reengineering the structure and dynamics of most major sectors’ end-to-end value chains and redesigning them around new ecosystems of collaboration—that’s what it will take to both aid the transition to a low-carbon economy and uncover long-term business opportunities. “A single company or a single government can only go so far,” says Scott Corwin, chief strategic and commercialization officer in Deloitte’s Climate & Equity Growth practice. “Our only realistic chance of reaching something proximate to the Paris Agreement target requires unprecedented collective action.”

Large language models like AI chatbots seem to be everywhere. If you understand them better, you can use them better.

AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are certainly having a moment—the next generation of conversational software tools promise to do everything from taking over our web searches to producing an endless supply of creative literature to remembering all the world's knowledge so we don't have to.

ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other bots like them, are examples of large language models, or LLMs, and it's worth digging into how they work. It means you'll be able to better make use of them, and have a better appreciation of what they're good at (and what they really shouldn't be trusted with).

An artificial photosynthesis system that combines semiconducting nanoparticles with a non-photosynthetic bacterium could offer a promising new route for producing sustainable solar-driven hydrogen fuel.

Other artificial photosynthesis systems that integrate nanomaterials into living microbes have been developed before, which reduce carbon dioxide or produce hydrogen, for example. However, usually it is the microorganism itself that makes the product via a metabolic pathway, which is aided by a light-activated nanomaterial that supplies necessary electrons.

Now, the labs of Kara Bren and Todd Krauss at the University of Rochester, US, have turned this concept on its head. They have designed a new hybrid bio-nano system that combines finely-tuned photocatalytic semiconducting nanoparticles to make hydrogen with a bacterium which, while it does not photosynthesise or make hydrogen itself, it provides the necessary electrons to the nanomaterial to synthesise hydrogen.

‘In this system, catalysis takes place at the nanoparticle,’ says Bren. ‘The development and study of nanoparticle catalysts is a highly active field, and thus we expect that the range of reactions that might be supported in this or related systems will expand.’ This could overcome the limitations of traditional approaches that rely on compatible bacterial metabolic pathways and struggle to precisely control nanomaterial properties inside organisms.

It is one of the defining competitions of our age: The countries that can make batteries for electric cars will reap decades of economic and geopolitical advantages.

The only winner so far is China.

Despite billions in Western investment, China is so far ahead — mining rare minerals, training engineers and building huge factories — that the rest of the world may take decades to catch up.

Even by 2030, China will make more than twice as many batteries as every other country combined, according to estimates from Benchmark Minerals, a consulting group.

Here’s how China controls each step of lithium-ion battery production, from getting the raw materials out of the ground to making the cars, and why these advantages are likely to last.

An explosion of skeletal editing methods to insert, delete or swap individual atoms in molecular backbones could accelerate drug discovery.

To get a sense of the challenge, consider that the small, carbon-based molecules that make up most of the world’s drugs typically contain fewer than 100 atoms, and are assembled piece by piece in a series of chemical reactions. Some connect large sections of the molecule’s skeleton; others decorate that skeleton with clusters of atoms to create the final product. But few methods can reliably tweak a molecule’s core skeleton once it has been assembled. It’s a little like clipping together a house from Lego bricks: remodelling the exterior is trivial, but inserting a brick into the middle of a completed wall can’t be done without taking the house apart.

For organic chemists, the idea of being able to swap an atom in a molecule’s skeleton holds an intrinsic fascination. “It’s almost magical that these changes are now possible,” says Richmond Sarpong at the University of California, Berkeley, a leading light in skeletal editing.

But there’s also a very practical purpose. Drug discovery involves first finding a promising molecule, and then making hundreds of slightly different versions to try to improve potency or reduce toxicity. It’s relatively easy to change atomic groups on a molecule’s periphery to make variants. To edit the core, however, researchers typically must return to the start of their synthesis and make the modified skeleton from scratch. This is expensive, time-consuming and, in practice, heavily limits the variety of designs that drug firms screen and test. Reliable skeletal editing could massively speed up the process (see ‘The emerging chemistry of skeletal editing’).

The growing burden of non-communicable diseases goes hand-in-hand with an increasing need to address tissue defects and organ loss. Organ transplantation is key to improving patient survival and quality of life, as well as relieving a substantial socioeconomic cost. In Europe in 2021, an additional one thousand patients – or nearly five patients per hour – were added to an already enormous waiting list, comprising tens of thousands of patients. While the waiting list was constantly growing, only 36,000 patients received a transplant. It is estimated that of those on the waiting list, up to 4% of patients will die before undergoing a transplantation procedure. This ongoing and widening disparity between supply and demand speaks to the need for organ and tissue sources beyond typical donation avenues. Enter regenerative medicine (RM), an emerging field within biomedical sciences looking to replace, repair or regenerate defective or deficient tissues and organs.

Distinct from traditional transplantation medicine, regenerative medicine (RM) aims to engineer new body parts through a combination of strategies, such as cell therapy, genetic manipulation, immunomodulation and tissue engineering. This latter approach concerns the seeding of biocompatible scaffolds with cells ex vivo for the manufacture of tissues. Perhaps the earliest documented clinical application of tissue engineering, and thus RM, involved the combination of fibroblasts, keratinocytes, and a scaffold to yield a skin replacement intended to promote wound healing.

In this episode of The Quarterly Interview: Provocations to Ponder, Jony Ive, the former design head of Apple, talks about what it takes for the creative process to thrive at any company.

In 2019, Jony Ive left Apple to cofound a creative agency, LoveFrom, with his friend and long-time collaborator Marc Newson. LoveFrom is a small collective, with some 40 employees, but it works with some very notable companies and people, including Airbnb, Ferrari, and the new King of England, Charles III. Ive is an obsessive student of what it takes to design and create great products and services in the context of a large corporation. In discussion with McKinsey chief marketing officer Tracy Francis and McKinsey Quarterly editorial director Rick Tetzeli, Ive went deep on what a CEO must do to foster great design, the fragility of new ideas, and how group dynamics both inhibit and propel creation. An edited version of their conversation follows.

“How many cells are there in a human being?” It sounds like a question from a nerdy pub quiz. It is also a profound philosophical inquiry. One answer is around 37trn. This is the number, in a typical adult weighing 70kg, that trace their descent from the fertilised egg which brought that human into existence.

Look at it another way, though, and you arrive at a figure roughly twice as large. That adds in the archaean, bacterial, fungal and protist cells which occupy the mouth, gut, skin, lungs and almost every other surface, nook and cranny of the human body. These cells contribute only about 0.3% to a person’s body weight. But being, on the whole, much smaller than “proper” human cells, they are almost equally numerous.

That human beings have this accompanying microbiome is not news. Nor is it news that, while some of those extra cells are mere passengers, others are actively beneficial. The idea of symbiosis, in which different species live together intimately and collaboratively, goes back to the 19th century. Yet what started as a finite list of unusual cases has gradually grown to the point where it is clear that almost every multicellular organism—and even some single-celled ones—have symbionts.