News

Thirty-one (31) MSU College of Natural Science (NatSci) undergraduate students were among those receiving first-place honors for their 2022 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) entries. This year’s event—UURAF’s 24th—took place on April 8 at the Jack Breslin Student Events Center and online at Symposium by ForagerOne. More than 750 students from 14 colleges/academic units participated in the event, including 197 NatSci students.

The MSU College of Natural Science (NatSci) has completed a new strategic plan that articulates a shared vision and direction for the college. The five-year plan (2022-2026) is a co-created consensus document that will serve as a framework for the college’s key priorities, including academic excellence and student success, research to advance society’s health and well-being, building strong partnerships and collaborations to broaden and strengthen our efforts, and creating a safe, equitable and inclusive environment for all.

María Santos Merino, postdoctoral researcher from the Ducat lab at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, is the first to be awarded the Clarence Suelter Endowed Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the MSU Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB). This fellowship, new to BMB in 2022, recognizes outstanding accomplishments and aims to encourage career development. María plans to use the monetary award to visit the University of Turku in Finland to learn a new technique, Membrane Inlet Mass Spectrometry.

College of Natural Science (NatSci) chemist Jetze Tepe was among the honorees at the 12th annual Michigan State University Innovation Celebration on April 12. Tepe, a professor in the Department of Chemistry, received the MSU Innovation Center’s 2022 Innovator of the Year award for his research on the synthesis of natural products and medicinal chemistry. His drug discovery work seeks to identify innovative therapeutics for neurogenerative diseases and cancer.

Vashti Sawtelle, associate professor in the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Natural Science and Lyman Briggs College, was one of three professors selected for the 2022 Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year Award from the Michigan Association of State Universities. Sawtelle was recognized for the significant impact she's had on undergraduate student learning through various activities, particularly classroom instruction, applied research, experiential learning, innovation and mentoring.

Sometimes making a brand-new type of box requires outside-the-box thinking, which is exactly what Michigan State University chemists used to create an eight-atom, magnetic cube. That tiny box is at the heart of a new magnetic molecule that could power future technologies for data storage, quantum computing and more. MSU chemist Selvan Demir and her team recently published their work in the journal Chem, which featured the research on the cover of its March 10 issue.

Climate change doesn’t just mean warmer weather. Cold spells can hit unusual lows, too, and the fluctuations between warm and chilly are becoming more extreme. MSU’s David Kramer is interested in resilience as it relates to photosynthesis because the process by which plants are powered by the sun is particularly sensitive to temperature swings. This knowledge could one day help certain crops grow in more places and help growers decide when to plant crops so they can harvest before the most severe stresses from heat and pests. The work of Kramer and his team was recently published online in the journal Plant, Cell & Environment. 

MSU mathematician Keith Promislow was named a 2022 SIAM Fellow for his contributions to rigorous asymptotic reductions, development of novel models and their applications, and service to the industrial and applied mathematics community by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).