News

MSI PI Ningling Kang (associate professor, Hormel Institute) has received a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. The grant will be used to study how colorectal cancer cells metastasize to the liver. When this type of cancer spreads to the liver, the five-year survival rate drops dramatically.

MSI PI Nidhi Kohli (professor, Educational Psychology) and colleagues Panayiota Kendeou and Kristen McMaster have been awarded a five-year, $3.9 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences. The grant will allow the researchers to scale up their Early Language Comprehensive Individualized Instruction (ELCII) technology. This technology provides supplemental early instruction in language comprehension skills.

Come see MSI at the Minnesota State Fair! We’ll be there with our partners at the Institute of Engineering in Medicine (IEM) and the Earl E. Bakken Medical Devices Center (BMDC) on Wednesday, August 31. You can see videos of cool research being done using MSI. Come say hi! MSI will be there 12 – 3 p.m. 

MSI PI Vlad Pribiag (professor, Physics and Astronomy) is leading a team that is developing a new process combining quantum physics and biochemistry that could lead to a major breakthrough in the quantum computing field. The team has received a $1.4M grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for a project that will use DNA nanoassembly techniques to create stable quantum structures.

Several MSIs PIs are participating in a project that has received a $1.7M grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The project, “Neurobehavioral Mechanisms Linking Childhood Social Disadvantage With Substance Use Trajectories in Adolescence and Adulthood,” includes the following MSI PIs:

Climate change is having enormous effects on farming. One of these effects is reduced snowfall. With less snow protection, winter crops may be more likely to freeze, and the reduced amount of snow could lead to drought later in the year.

On Wednesday, August 3, 2022, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month's scheduled maintenance period, primary storage may be unavailable or in a read-only state throughout much of the day. Mesabi and Mangi front-end nodes will be unavailable some portion of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on August 3. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on August 3 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status.

The mountain pine beetle (MPB) is destroying pine forests throughout North America. Not only do they kill trees by boring under bark, they spread pathogens from tree to tree. Because of this, although the beetle hasn’t been found yet in Minnesota, the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center (MITPPC) has given research into the pest top priority.

MSI PI Harry Orr (professor, Laboratory Medicine and Pathology; Director, Institute for Translational Neuroscience) is one of four winners of the 2022 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. This award is presented by the Kavli Foundation and Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research to scientists in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.