News

Forty-two (42) MSU College of Natural Science (NatSci) undergraduate students were among those receiving first-place honors for their 2021 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) entries. The annual event, which took place virtually this year from April 15 through April 19, provides students with an  opportunity to showcase their scholarship and creative activity.

MSU computational biologist Arjun Krishnan is the recipient of a 5-year, $704,889 NSF Early CAREER Award to develop machine learning approaches that will automatically annotate publicly available samples from human and major animal models on a massive scale. His efforts will allow researchers to seamlessly search and re-analyze immense reserves of untapped omics data for advances in biology and human health. The award will also support Krishnan’s efforts to help students interested in programming and data science gain access to the “hidden curriculum” of bioinformatics.

Two Michigan State University students – one an undergraduate, the other in her second year of medical school – analyzed a decade’s worth of stroke studies and found a glaring flaw: women patients were significantly underrepresented. That two students made such an important finding is impressive enough. Even more so is that their study was published in JAMA Neurology, a prestigious journal of the American Medical Association.

More than 260 alumni, friends and guests registered for the MSU College of Natural Science's virtual Classes Without Quizzes held on April 24. The day’s “classes” featured three presentations about what researchers have been working on in NatSci labs. In addition to the three faculty presentations, two Dean’s Research Scholars presented their work to attendees.The 12th annual Classes Without Quizzes will be held April 23, 2022.

The MSU College of Natural Science has selected several alumni, faculty and students for outstanding achievements and excellence. Patrick Lukulay (Ph.D., analytical chemistry, ’95) received the 2021 Outstanding Alumni Award; Shannon Morey (B.S., chemistry, ’10) received the 2021 Recent Alumni Award; and Shannon Manning, MSU Foundation Associate Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, received the 2021 Meritorious Faculty Award.

Yesterday, on April 20, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter for the death of George Floyd. While Chauvin’s conviction cannot undo the harm created, the outcome of this trial must spur essential systemic and societal change.

An international research team led by Michigan State University has helped created cosmic conditions at RIKEN's heavy-ion accelerator in Japan to better understand this extreme science. The team, which included MSU's  d William Lynch and Betty Tsang recently shared its results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

An expansive project led by MSU plant biologist Lars Brudvig is examining the benefits, and limits, of environmental restoration on developed land after humans are done with it. Although humans can heal some of that damage by working to restore the land to its natural state, questions remain about how far restoration can go in overcoming a land’s past.. Brudvig and his collaborators now have some answers that they’ve published April 19 online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.