News

Professor Kelvin Lim (Psychiatry) is featured in the U’s Fall 2016 Driven to Discover campaign. Professor Lim is part of the “End Addiction” section of the campaign. He uses MSI resources for analysis of fMRI and MRI data as part of multiple projects to examine brain structure, connections, and function in brain disorders.

MSI PIs Chad Myers, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Carol Lange, a professor at the Masonic Cancer Center, are on the interdisciplinary team that has won one of the two Grand Prizes in the National Cancer Institute’s Up for a Challenge (U4C) Breast Cancer Challenge Award.

Regents Professor Vipin Kumar (Computer Science and Engineering) is featured in the U’s Fall 2016 Driven to Discover campaign. Professor Kumar is part of the “Abolish Hunger” section of the campaign. He uses MSI’s supercomputers for data-mining projects in climate science, earth science, and bioinformatics.

MSI PI Vipin Kumar, a Regents Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been named to receive the Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award from the IEEE Computer Society. Professor Kumar is being recognized for foundational work on understanding scalability, and highly scalable algorithms for graph partitioning, sparse linear systems, and data mining.

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) has posted a conversation with MSI PI Peter Sorensen, a professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and member of the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center. Professor Sorensen spoke at the annual statewide conference on invasive species in early October. His presentation concerned setting aside “freshwater preserves” or “stewardship areas” in lakes and rivers to protect their ecosystems.

Two MSI PIs, Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos (Computer Science and Engineering) and Professor Nathan Springer (Plant Biology) have been named McKnight Presidential Endowed Professors by the University of Minnesota. This is one of the University’s highest honors.

MSI PI Eric Newman, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and his colleagues have published a paper showing that glial cells have functions in information processing and signaling. Previously, they were thought to have only “housekeeping” functions. This research was the cover story in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Associate Professor David Masopust, an MSI PI in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, has been named one of the first group of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Faculty Scholars.

MSI PI Mo Li, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and members of his research group have succeeded in measuring the torque (twisting force) that is generated by light on a silicon chip. Light’s torque comes from the spin angular momentum of photons. This research is on a smaller scale than previous such measurements and has implications for such devices as miniaturized gyroscopes and torsional sensors.