MSI PIs Receive 2021-23 McKnight Land-Grant Professorships

Four MSI PIs are among the ten faculty members who have been named as the 2021-23 McKnight Land-Grant Professors. Recipients hold the designation “McKnight Land-Grant Professor” for two years. The goal of the program is to advance the careers of assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives.

The MSI PIs who have been honored with this award are:

Julianna Abel (Mechanical Engineering)
- Professor Abel uses MSI resources as part of research into functional fabrics, which are a novel approach to create pliable, lightweight structures with intrinsic active functionalities, enhancing diverse engineering applications by providing actuation, sensing, energy harvesting, and communication. Research by Abel group member and grad student Kevin Eschen is featured on the Research Computing website: Active Textile Research.
Kate Adamala (Genetics, Cell Biology and Development)
- Professor Adamala uses MSI to support projects involving the engineering of synthetic minimal cells for studying healthy and diseased biological processes.
Turan Birol (Chemical Engineering and Materials Science)
- Professor Birol uses software available at MSI for first principles studies of oxide materials, with the long-term goal of identifying materials realizations of the exotic phases in condensed matter.
Peter K. Kang (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
- Professor Kang is using MSI for projects concerning the mechanism of subsurface flow and transport and the characterization of hydrogeological properties.