News

MSI PIs Receive NSF CAREER Awards
Two MSI PIs from the College of Science and Engineering have received CAREER grants from the National Science Foundation. These grants are awarded to junior faculty to help support outstanding research and teaching.
Patents Awarded to MSI PIs - Spring 2019
The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) has published a list of patents that have been awarded to University researchers during the past year. Thirty-seven MSI Principal Investigators, shown below, are on this list. The complete list can be found on the OVPR’s Inquiry blog: Patent Roll Call, Spring 2019. The PIs’ MSI pages are linked from their names (PI names are in bold).
MSI PI Jaime Modiano Receives Cancer-Research Grant
MSI PI Jaime Modiano (Veterinary Clinical Sciences; Masonic Cancer Center) has received a grant totaling $600,000 over three years from the V Foundation for Cancer Research. The grant will support research into novel treatments for sarcomas, cancers of the bone and connective tissue.
Machine Learning Aids Citizen Science
Citizen-science projects include thousands of people who sort through huge datasets. Now these human volunteers have a partner - computers with sophisticated image-recognition capabilities. A recent study led by University of Minnesota researchers used machine-learning techniques to “teach” computers to identify different types of animals based on camera-trap photos from several datasets. The article was the cover story for the January 2019 issue of the British Ecological Society’s journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Finding Resistance Genes in Wheat
MSI PI Brian Steffenson (professor, Plant Pathology) is the co-lead on a recently published method that will help researchers find and clone disease resistance genes. The method is called Association Genetics Resistance Gene Enrichment Sequencing (AgRenSeq), and has been tested on Aegilops tauschii, a progenitor of modern wheat. The study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology and can be found on the journal website: S Arora, B Steuernagal, K Gaurav, S Chandramohan, Y Long, O Matny, et al.
The Genetics of Cannabis
MSI PI George Weiblen (professor, Plant and Microbial Biology) is featured in a story about genomic research into Cannabis sativa as legislatures discuss its legalization for medicinal and recreational use. The story was featured on Minneapolis/St. Paul tv station Fox 9.  Professor Weiblen has studied Cannabis sativa and its close relative hemp for many years. His group uses MSI resources for their genomics studies.
MSI PI Dante Cicchetti Receives Award From APA
MSI PI Dante Cicchetti (professor, Institute of Child Development) will receive a 2019 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. This award recognizes distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to psychological research.
February Maintenance
On Wednesday, February 6, 2019, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Itasca will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on February 6. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on February 6 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. February maintenance will include:
MSI PIs Receive Minnesota Partnership Grants
Two MSI PIs are among the university researchers who have been awarded collaborative research grants from the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics. These grants go to teams of researchers from the University and the Mayo Clinic for projects that cannot be completed by either institution alone. These are two-year projects dedicated to discovering treatments for diseases that affect Minnesotans. The MSI PIs on the list include: 

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