As 2024 comes to a close, we invite you to revisit how UChicago PME’s unique interdisciplinary focus is collaboratively tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges.
But two words have never been applied to this groundbreaking technology: Cheap or sustainable.
An interdisciplinary team including Prof. Liang Jiang and CQE IBM postdoctoral scholarJunyu Liu from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, UChicago graduate students Minzhao Liu and Ziyu Ye, Argonne computational scientist Yuri Alexeev, and researchers from UC Berkeley, MIT, Brandeis University and Freie Universität Berlin hope to change that.
Quantum computers offer powerful ways to improve cybersecurity, communications, and data processing, among other fields. To realize these full benefits, however, multiple quantum computers need to be connected to build quantum networks or a quantum internet. Scientists have struggled to come up with practical methods for building such networks, which must transmit quantum information over long distances.
Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have proposed a new approach — building long quantum channels using vacuum sealed tubes with an array of spaced-out lenses. These vacuum beam guides, about 20 centimeters in diameter, would have ranges of thousands of kilometers and capacities of 10 trillion qubits per second, better than any existing quantum communication approach. Photons of light encoding quantum data would move through the vacuum tubes and remain focused thanks to the lenses.
As our digital world generates massive amounts of data — more than 2 quintillion bytes of new content each day — yesterday’s storage technologies are quickly reaching their limits. Optical memory devices, which use light to read and write data, offer the potential of durable, fast and energy-efficient storage.
Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have proposed a new type of memory, in which optical data is transferred from a rare earth element embedded within a solid material to a nearby quantum defect. Their analysis of how such a technology could work was published in Physical Review Research.
The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself—in short, a hydrogel. Semiconductors, the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices, on the other hand, are rigid, brittle, and water-hating, impossible to dissolve in the way hydrogels have traditionally been built.
A paper published in Science from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers, reimagining the process of creating hydrogels to build a powerful semiconductor in hydrogel form. Led by Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang’s research group, the result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.
Drifting at sea, isolated on a space station, or stuck in a war zone, engineers trying to build new things or patch together a repair are often constrained by the materials they have at hand. But what if they had one single polymer that they could coax into anything from a rubber band-like material or a ball of silly putty to a flexible sheet of plastic or a stiff, molded device?
Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have now developed such a material, which they call a “pluripotent plastic.” Like pluripotent stem cells which can give rise to any type of adult cell in the human body, their plastic, described in the journal Science, can take on many final forms.
Researchers at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry have engineered tiny, spinning micro-robots that bind to immune cells to probe their function. The robot, or “hexapod,” gives scientists a new, highly adaptable way to study immune cells and to aid in the design of immunotherapies against cancer, infection, or autoimmune diseases.
Each hexapod robot has six arms containing molecules that might be recognized as foreign by the immune system — such as protein fragments from a tumor, virus, or bacterium. Researchers can use the hexapods to scan large collections of immune cells and discover which immune cells bind the foreign molecules of interest and how the hexapods’ movements impact that binding.
What causes food allergies to develop? There’s compelling evidence that suggests imbalances of the gut microbiome could be to blame, creating inflammation of the intestinal tract and a gut environment that’s prone to food allergies.
New research from Cathryn Nagler’s lab at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Biological Sciences Division (BSD) reveals a mutually beneficial relationship between an unassuming microbial species and the prebiotic lactulose – together, they encourage the production of an important metabolite known for its positive influence on gut health, butyrate, that’s generated as bacteria feed in the gut.
Vaccines provide a front-line defense against dangerous viruses, training adaptive immune cells to identify and fight specific pathogens.
But innate immune cells — the first responders to any bodily invader — have no such specific long-term memory. Still, scientists have found that they can reprogram these cells to be even better at their jobs, potentially fighting off seasonal scourges like the common cold or even new viral diseases for which vaccines have not yet been developed.
A UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering team has found several small molecule candidates that induce this trained immunity without the potential side effects of other methods.