MSI PIs Among 2023 Winners of Awards for Academic Unit Service

Several MSI PIs are among the inaugural winners of the University’s new Awards for Academic Unit Service. These awards recognize faculty for exceptional service that has strengthened the functioning and climate of a local unit or department and are a collaboration between the Provost’s Office and the Faculty Consultative Committee. The awards include the Provost’s Unit Service Award (one winner; $15,000), the University of Minnesota Unit Service Award (five winners; $5,000 each), and the Award for Excellence in Academic Unit Service (40 winners, $500 each).

MSI PIs received the following awards:

University of Minnesota Unit Service Award

Associate Professor Xavier Prat-Resina (Chemistry, University of Minnesota Rochester)
- Professor Prat-Resina uses MSI resources to perform molecular simulations of enzyme catalysis; the group also uses the Jupyter Notebook service available through MSI for analysis and to represent data with Python.

Award for Excellence in Academic Unit Service:

Assistant Professor Jannell Bazurto (Plant and Microbial Biology)
- Professor Bazurto uses MSI resources as part of investigations into formaldehyde imbalance in Methylobacterium and the mechanisms used to maintain intracellular homeostasis and avert/repair cellular damage
Associate Professor Joshua Feinberg (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
- Professor Feinberg uses MSI resources, especially the Jupyter notebook server, for several projects being run by the Institute for Rock Magnetism at the U of M.
Assistant Professor Lindsay Glesener (Physics and Astronomy)
- Professor Glesener uses MSI resources to run simulations of a CubeSat and its environment; the CubeSat was built and designed by U of M students.
Associate Professor Candice Hirsch (Agronomy and Plant Genetics)
- Professor Hirsch uses MSI resources for genomics research into maize to understnd the plant’s genotypic and phenotypic variation and to improve maize as a crop plant.
Professor Hubert Lim (Biomedical Engineering)
- Professor Lim uses MSI resources for large-scale neural data analyses, to run computational models for characterizing energy stimulation fields, and for large-scale genomic/RNA-seq analyses.