News

Five MSU College of Natural Science faculty members are among nine MSU scientists receiving 2022 awards from the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). Erich Grotewold and Jiming Jiang were named ASPB Fellows; Emily Josephs received the Early Career Award; Beronda Montgomery received the Adolph E. Gude, Jr. Award; and Berkley Walker is the recipient of the Robert Rabson Award. This year’s recipients will be presented with their awards at the Plant Biology 2022 Worldwide Conference in July in Portland, Ore.

Shane Crandall always welcomes new challenges. It’s exploring the unknown that motivates the assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Physiology and Neuroscience Program to make new discoveries about the brain. Just last month, the National Institutes of Health awarded Crandall a five-year, $1.9 million grant to study how neocortical feedback projections influence sensory processing in the brain.

Erica Wehrwein, associate professor in the MSU Department of Physiology, was recently recognized for her teaching excellence and passion as a recipient of the 2022 Arthur C. Guyton Distinguished Educator Award by the Teaching Section of the American Physiological Society during the annual Experimental Biology meeting last month in Philadelphia.

The MSU College of Natural Science Dean’s Office has promoted three staff members to acknowledge their outstanding leadership and contributions, and to expand and strengthen the college’s DEI and student success efforts. Danielle Flores Lopez assumed a 50 percent interim appointment as NatSci DEI assistant dean; Kanchan Pavangadkar joined the NatSci Academic and Student Affairs Office as assistant director of student success; and Kaitlin Peterson was promoted to assistant director of pre-health and human biology advising in the office. All three positions became effective in April.

Seven MSU College of Natural Science (NatSci) students and alumni are among 15 recipients selected university wide for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program—the country’s oldest fellowship program that supports graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. NSF Graduate Research Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000, along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees.

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found changes to Earth’s climate in every region of the world, noting the unprecedented scale and speed in warming of the planet’s surface over the past 200 years. To help address this problem, a report, "Microbes and Climate Change: Science, People, & Impacts," was issued by the American Society for Microbiology. It is the outcome of ASM’s November 2021 colloquium meeting, which brought together 30 experts, including MSU’s Jim Tiedje, who provided multifaceted perspectives and insights.

Six Michigan State University College of Natural Science faculty members– Jeffrey Conner, Victor DiRita, Gemma Reguera, Jetze Tepe, Christopher Waters and Marjorie Weber – and one graduate student – Nicholas Rekuski – have received 2021-2022 All-University Awards in recognition of their outstanding contributions to education and research. The MSU Awards Convocation for 2022 will be held on May 11, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., in the Big Ten Rooms at the Kellogg Center.

Michigan State University’s Seth Jacobson and colleagues in China and France have unveiled a new theory that could help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. Specifically, how did the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — end up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do?