News

On Wednesday, January 3, 2024, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month’s scheduled maintenance period, primary storage, Mesabi, Mangi, and Agate will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on January 3, 2024. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on January 3, 2024 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status.

MSI PI Georgios Giannakis (professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) has been elected as a 2023 International Fellow for the Royal Academy of Engineering. A ceremony was held on November 28, 2023, to formally admit the 73 new Fellows.

On Wednesday, December 6, 2023, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. MSI’s storage, compute clusters, and front-end servers will be unavailable for some portion of the day. Reminder: any SLURM batch job submitted that has a time limit beyond the beginning of maintenance (5 a.m. Wednesday, December 6) will not be queued to start until after maintenance is completed.

Research by MSI PI Thierry Chekouo (assistant professor, Biostatistics and Health Data Science) was recently featured on the U of M News website. Professor Chekouo is developing Bayesian-based statistical learning methods to analyze -omics data. These methods will be made available to other researchers online and will be published in peer-reviewed statistical methods journals. Professor Chekouo uses MSI resources for -omics analysis.

MSI PI Claudia Schmidt-Dannert (director, BioTechnology Institute; professor, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics) is leading a project to develop biofilms that would have the capability to extract metals from mining or electronic waste products. This would be much more sustainable than conventional mining methods.

The University of Minnesota has been awarded a $16M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. The goal of the project, which is led by the U of M Medical School, is to find out how the brain’s neurons are connected to each other and how they communicate. The researchers will use advanced MRI and other emerging technologies. Three MSI PIs are involved with this project:

A start-up company co-founded by MSI PI Paul Dauenhauer (professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science; Center for Sustainable Polymers) and Dr. Andrew Jones won the grand prize at the MN Cup startup competition. The start-up, Carba, was founded in 2021 and is working on a solution to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by converting plant waste into solid carbon.

MSI PI Kimberly VanderWaal (associate professor, Veterinary and Population Medicine) is leading a team that has been awarded a $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study various of a swine virus, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus-type 2 (PRRSV-2).

The Technology Commercialization office has compiled a list of U of M researchers who were awarded U.S. patents in 2022. Many of these patents were awarded to MSI PIs. Links to the patent documentation and the complete list can be found on the Tech Comm website: Patent Roll Call: 2022.