News

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Innovation Ecosystem has launched the COVID-19 Risk Factor Modeling Challenge. This opportunity may be of interest to MSI users. From the challenge information:

MSI PI Clark Chen (professor and head, Neurosurgery) is a co-author on a recent paper that studied how the brain cancer glioblastoma becomes resistant to radiation therapy. While radiation is the standard for glioblastoma, the treatment rarely cures the disease, and the tumor usually starts growing again after a period where it is stopped.

MSI PI Ryan Langlois (assistant professor, Microbiology and Immunology) was interviewed recently about his team’s work to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This group is using a different development method than other groups working on a vaccine. Professor Langlois explains his research in the interview, which appeared on Minneapolis/St.

MSI PI Marc Jenkins (Regents Professor, Microbiology and Immunology; Director, Center for Immunology) has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in this organization is one of the highest honors a scientist can receive.

On Wednesday, May 6, 2020, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrade to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Mangi will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on May 6. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on May 6 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status.May maintenance will include:

MSI PI Jian-Ping Wang (professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) is a co-leader, with Professor Maxim Cheeran (Veterinary Population Medicine), of a multidisciplinary team that is developing a portable device that can detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19. Professor Wang has been developing this technology, which is based on magnetic particle spectroscopy, for the past ten years. Stories about the project can be found on the following websites:

The University of Minnesota recently announced new awardees to the McKnight Presidential Fellows Program. Three MSI PIs are included in the 2020 class. The McKnight Presidential Fellows Program is a three-year award given to exceptional faculty who have just achieved tenure and promotion to associate professor, to recognize their accomplishments and support their ongoing research and scholarship. The MSI PIs on the list are:

In order to control the invasive species buckthorn, land managers have turned to using goats. The notoriously voracious browsers eat large quantities of buckthorn, but there is a concern that buckthorn seeds might be spread through the goats’ feces.

MSI has introduced a new service, Dedicated Computing. This service allows researchers to purchase dedicated access to computing if groups have computational needs beyond what they can get through the regular MSI allocation process.