News

Regents Professor Timothy Lodge, an MSI PI who holds dual appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, has received the 2018 Paul J. Flory Polymer Education Award. This award is given by the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Polymer Chemistry, and will be presented at the ACS National Meeting in March 2018.

Three MSI PIs are among the investigators working on a project that has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. The grant was awarded to the Medical School’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) for a project that will study ways to make Deep Brain Simulation (DBS) more efficient and safer. DBS is used to treat many neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s Disease. The MSI PIs are:

A new study by MSI PI Jennifer Powers (associate professor, Ecology, Evolution and Behavior) and graduate student Leland Werden provides data to help with the restoration of tropical dry forests that have been destroyed by activities such as logging or farming. In many cases, the soil of these former forests is extremely degraded. The study, published recently in the Journal of Applied Ecology, showed that traits in certain trees allowed them to survive in poor soil conditions.

MSI PI John Bischof, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named to be Interim Director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine (IEM). Professor Bischof has been associate director of the Institute and is also a member of the Masonic Cancer Center.

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 few months. Several MSI Principal Investigators, shown below, are on this list. The complete list can be found on the OVPR’s Inquiry blog, "Patent Roll Call, Fall 2017." The PIs' MSI group pages are linked from their names (PI names are in bold).

PhD candidate Lotus Lofgren, who uses MSI resources as part of the group of Associate Professor Peter Kennedy (Plant and Microbial Biology), was recently awarded the J.L. Harley Medal from the International Mycorrhiza Society. This award is given to a graduate student for excellence in research and presentation at the Society’s annual conference.

MSI PI Peter Reich (Forest Resources) is a co-author on a recent study that studied the factors that result in size of plants’ leaves. The study was the cover article on the September 1, 2017 issue of the prestigious journal Science. Professor Reich and his colleagues studied thousands of leaves from all continents, climate zones, and plant types. They discovered that cold, as well as heat, can be the main factor in determining how large a plant’s leaves can get.

Three MSI PIs are among the University faculty who have received seed grants from the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics. The Partnership is a collaboration between the University of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic, and the State of Minnesota that supports biotechnology and biomedical research. The projects receiving grants include researchers from the University and Mayo. The PIs receiving awards are:

On Wednesday, September 6, 2017, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month's scheduled maintenance period, Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Itasca will be unavailable throughout much of the day. September maintenance will include: Mesabi: Compute nodes will be upgraded from CentOS 6.8 to 6.9 Windows updates: Install Windows updates on all Windows machines CentOS and Debian updates for Lab machines Systems status is always available on our Status page.