News

Professor David Redish, an MSI PI in the Department of Neuroscience, is featured in an interview on the University of Minnesota Foundation’s website. Professor Redish uses MSI for investigations into the information processing associated with complex decisions. He is also a poet, author, and playwright.

On Wednesday, May 3, 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.  May maintenance will include:

MSI PIs Nicholas Phelps and Jeff Forester, both assistant professors in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, have co-authored an article on the news outlet MinnPost.com that describes ways to fight aquatic invasive species.

Four MSI Principal Investigators from the Department of Chemistry are receiving awards from the American Chemical Society (ACS). Those honored on April 4, 2017 at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco, California include:

MSI PI Michael Sadowsky (Director, BioTechnology Institute) and colleagues have published a new study indicating that bacteria and fungi from land-based sources may be damaging coral reefs. Earlier studies have failed to find the same land-based microbes on other reefs, suggesting that that the microbes are invasive on the reefs. The researchers are planning additional experiments to test the hypothesis.

ACM SIGHPC and Intel are launching a new international program of graduate fellowships in computational and data science. The goal of this new graduate fellowship is to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women as well as students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have not traditionally participated in the computing field.

The SC17 Student Volunteers program is now accepting applications. SC17, the annual Supercomputing Conference, will be held November 12-17, 2017 in Denver, Colorado. The application deadline is June 15, 2017 at 11:59 p.m. (AoE). Acceptance notifications will be sent by the end of June 2017. Advantages and benefits for students:

In a new study, researchers have found an explanation about why more diverse stands of trees are more productive than stands with only one species. Two MSI PIs, Associate Professor Jeannine Cavender-Bares (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior) and Professor Peter Reich (Forest Resources), were part of this study.

MSI PIs are among the authors of a paper that announces a new technique for warming cryofrozen tissues. Although it is possible to freeze tissues and organs without harm, thawing them usually causes damage. The method described in the paper uses iron oxide nanoparticles that surround the frozen tissue and warm when activated by an external magnetic field. This method may eventually help keep organs viable for transplant for a much longer time than is currently possible.