Highlights from 2024-2025
2024-2025 saw the continued growth of IRC Discovery, with a record number of collaborations between researchers at UChicago and the CNRS. Collaborative projects contributed to significant advancements in fields across disciplines, from particle and neutrino physics to quantum technologies to economic history.
Projects with UChicago and CNRS-affiliated co-PIs were awarded numerous grants, including four CNRS-funded International Emerging Actions, comprising half of the total number of projects awarded in the United States, and eighteen grants through UChicago’s FACCTS program (France and Chicago Collaborating in the Sciences). IRC Discovery contributed funding in support of five FACCTS and one IIRP (International Institute of Research in Paris) project with UChicago and CNRS co-PIs.
IRC Discovery’s support of PhD students continued through the selection of six new PhD Joint Program projects and the facilitation of five spots for UChicago students in the CNRS co-sponsored French-American Doctoral Exchange Program. IRC Discovery also provided support for the Marguerite Fellowship administered by UChicago’s France Chicago Center, which will allow Binaya Paudyal, PhD student in Biophysics, to spend one month working with Thomas Lecuit, CNRS researcher and professor at the Collège de France.
2024-2025 also saw several exchanges between the CNRS and UChicago. The leadership of CNRS Physics visited in September, followed by the leadership of CNRS European and International Affairs in October and the leadership of CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences in May. In November, Scientific Director Nicolas Chevrier and Associate Director Sylvia Alajaji met with leadership and representatives of CNRS Mathematics, CNRS Biology, CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences to discuss ways to grow collaborations in these areas. IRC Discovery also facilitated the visits of two CNRS chemists awarded through the Emergence@International program.
And in May, Vincenzo Vitelli of the University of Chicago was named Fellow-Ambassador by the CNRS. The Fellow-Ambassador program was initiated in 2023 to honor internationally renowned scholars from around the world. Recipients spend one month in France over each of the three years of their appointment. Past Fellow-Ambassadors include Nobel laureates Ardem Patapounian and Saul Perlmutter. In its press release, the CNRS noted Vitelli’s achievements in the study of nonreciprocal systems, innovative materials, and his recent work on the nonlinear dynamics of biological systems.
PhD Joint Program
In 2019, CNRS and UChicago signed a collaborative research agreement to foster research and training for graduate students across all disciplines, with the PhD Joint Program representing a cornerstone of the long-standing relationship between the two institutions. Each year, up to five projects are selected for up to three years of funding, providing mobility costs for travel ($5k/year) as well as a 3-year PhD fellowship for the student enrolled at a CNRS-affiliated institution. To date, the program has supported 33 projects and more than 50 PhD students. Completed projects have unlocked new possibilities in human prosthetics, enhanced understanding of the formation of the Earth, and enabled the creation of new technologies to remove toxic chemicals from drinking water.
On November 12, IRC Discovery hosted the annual workshop for PhD students participating in the program. Students from the 2023 and 2024 cohorts presented their projects to almost 50 attendees. The event was an exciting opportunity to see the incredible work being done in the program. In their closing comments, Alain Schuhl, CNRS Deputy CEO for Science, and Ka Yee Lee, Senior Advisor to the Provost for Global Initiatives, noted the quality and breadth of this year’s presentations and the impact of the participants’ work.
PhD Joint Program - 2026-2028 Cohort
IRC Discovery received 24 applications for the 2026-2028 cycle—an increase of 33% from the previous year and the highest number of applications to date. This year’s cohort includes projects from a wide range of disciplines, on topics such as particle accelerators, the development of the nervous system, linguistics, quantum systems, synthetic chemistry, and the physics of life.
Sustainable Technologies That Enable Editing Processes
David Leboeuf (CNRS) and Mark Levin (UChicago)
Fundamental research on ultrahigh performance superconducting radiofrequency resonant cavities
Achille Stocchi (CNRS) and Orlando Quaranta (UChicago)
Function and transcriptional regulation of the conserved secreted synaptic organizer Agrin
Jean-Louis Bessereau (CNRS) and Paschalis Kratsios (UChicago)
Beyond formal registers: Reduced and elliptical structures in written language and colloquial varieties
Carlo Cecchetto (CNRS) and Jason Merchant (UChicago)
Novel tools for quantum simulation with quantum atomic gases: time-dependent control of two- and three-body interactions
Thomas Bourdel (CNRS) and Cheng Chin (UChicago)
How non-reciprocal interactions produce chaotic flows and novel physical properties in crowded active materials
Ludovic Berthier (CNRS) and Vincenzo Vitelli (UChicago)
PhD Joint Program - 2024-2025 Highlights
In October 2024, PhD Joint Program grant recipient Rochelle Ackerley and PhD student Sophia Faresse participated in the second annual Bionic Breast Project Symposium, organized by co-PI Stacy Lindau and hosted at the University of Chicago. Ackerley and Faresse presented their paper, “New Discoveries in Neurophysiology of Breast Sensation” to a wide audience of researchers and medical practitioners from across the United States. The work of Ackerley and Lindau was the subject of an extensive feature in UChicago News, which detailed the ways in which their research on how receptors in different types of skin—from the breast and torso to the nipple and areola—respond to touch is being used to build a groundbreaking implantable device that has the potential to restore sensation to the breast after mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
2023 recipients Zeresenay Alemseged (UChicago) and José Braga (University Paul Sabatier, CNRS), who are also part of the EUCLIDE International Research Network, hosted a workshop funded by the University of Chicago and the CNRS, titled “New Ways to Study Anatomy: A Collaborative Effort Between the University of Toulouse and the University of Chicago.” The workshop included the three PhD students who participated in the PhD Joint Program: Alexandre Gat (UMR 5288: Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse), Weldeyared Reda (UChicago; currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at UChicago), and Hannah Farrell (UChicago; currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at UChicago).
Numerous projects awarded through the PhD Joint Program were published in top academic journals. Cohort 2023 participants Claire Mironov (CNRS) and Ed Blucher (UChicago) and PhD students Yinrui Liu and I Cheong Hong were among the co-authors of the article, “Neutrino interaction vertex reconstruction in DUNE with Pandora deep learning” published in European Physical Journal C in June 2025. The article details the results of a new machine-learning approach to the identification of neutrino interaction reconstructions, noting a 20% increase in efficiency compared to previous models.
The work of 2025 recipient Luca Santoni (CNRS) and PhD student Oscar Combaluzier-Szteinsznaider on black holes in four-dimensional general relativity was published in the article, “Symmetries of vanishing nonlinear Love numbers of Schwarzschild black holes” (Journal of High Energy Physics, March 2025). And in “Evolutionary history and association with seaweeds shape the genomes and metabolisms of marine bacteria” (mSphere, June 2025), 2024 recipients Cathy Pfister (UChicago) and Catherine Leblanc (CNRS), PhD student Maximiliana Bogan (UChicago), et al analyze 72 paired bacterial genomes, highlighting significant metabolic differences in seaweed-associated strains with implications for carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling in the coastal ocean.
Additional Highlights
Four projects with CNRS-affiliated and University of Chicago co-PIs were awarded International Emerging Action (IEA) grants from the CNRS. Of the eight IEAs awarded to projects with US-based partners, four went to collaborative projects between CNRS and UChicago researchers. The awarded projects span multiple disciplines and demonstrate the richness and breadth of collaborations between the two institutions.
Heterogeneous catalysts applied to the plasma-degradation of per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water followed by field-effect transistor sensing
Jérémy Dhainaut (CNRS) and Junhong Cheng (UChicago)
Generative AI Techniques for Network Management
Francesco Bronzino (CNRS) and Nick Feamster (UChicago)
Novel tools for quantum simulation with quantum atomic gases: control of time-dependent two- and three- body interactions
Thomas Bourdel (CNRS) and Cheng Chin (UChicago)
The Struggle Against Infant Mortality: Chicago, Lille and Manchester, 1900-1980
Clarisse Berthezène (CNRS) and Gabriel Winant (UChicago)
Supporting Researcher Partnerships
One of IRC Discovery’s primary objectives is supporting the growth of collaborations between CNRS researchers and UChicago faculty across all disciplines. To that end, IRC Discovery reports new and growing partnerships in multiple disciplinary fields, including Archaeology and Ancient History, Chemistry, Computer Science, Materials Science, and the Physics of Living Systems.
Chemistry
The University of Chicago welcomed two Emergence@International grant recipients for on-campus lectures: Fédérico Perche (CNRS Institute of Chemistry) gave a talk on 18 November hosted by Gregory A. Voth of the Department of Chemistry and Jérémy Dhainaut (CNRS – Unité de Catalyse et Chimie du Solide) gave a talk titled “Oxidation Catalysts for Indoor Air and Water Purification,” hosted by Junhong Chen of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. In September 2024, Viresh Rawal, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UChicago, was named CNRS Ambassador in Chemical Sciences in France. And in October 2024, Greg Voth (UChicago), Patricia Bassereau (CNRS, Institut Curie), and Feng-Ching Tsai (CNRS, Institut Curie), held a workshop at the UChicago Center in Paris, “The International Symposium on Membrane Protein Interactions,” which featured a number of speakers from the CNRS and UChicago, including Ka Yee C. Lee, the Interim Dean of the Physical Sciences Division at UChicago and IRC Discovery Steering Committee Co-Chair.
Quantum
The France-Chicago Conference on Spin Defects in Solids for Quantum Information Science was held at the Center in Paris on 21-22 November 2024. The conference was hosted by Argonne National Laboratory’s Q-NEXT, which is one of four U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. The CNRS’ Sebastien Tanzilli and UChicago’s David Awschalom provided opening remarks and several other CNRS researchers participated. IRC Discovery facilitated the contribution of $15k from the CNRS to complement funding from the DoE. And for the second year, the Office for Science and Technology at the Embassy of France in the United States set aside dedicated spots for UChicago PhD students for participation in the French American Doctoral Exchange Program (FADEx). Eighteen UChicago students applied and four were selected for this year’s program on Quantum Information Sciences.
Physics of Living Systems
Collaborations in the Physics of Living Systems have grown significantly since 2019, when Stephanie Palmer (UChicago) and Aleksandra Walczak (ENS Paris, CNRS) established the International Research Network, “Predictability, Adaptation, and Navigation” (2019-2023), which investigates differences and similarities between biological systems such as co-evolving viruses and immune receptors, odor and chemical sensing animals and microbes, animals following visual cues, and coevolving microbial species.
In May 2025, UChicago professor Vincenzo Vitelli was named Fellow Ambassador by the CNRS. Vitelli is an Investigator with UChicago’s Center for Living Systems (CLS), which, under the leadership of Margaret Gardel, has had long-standing and robust collaborations with researchers at the CNRS. CLS affiliates include CNRS researchers Thierry Mora, Aleksandra Walczak, Patrick Lemaire, and Thomas Lecuit while its faculty includes past PhD Joint Program recipients Stephanie Palmer, Arvind Murugan, Peter Littlewood, and Jasmine Nirody.