News

Michigan State University researchers Piotr Piecuch and Guowei Wei were formally recognized as outstanding faculty at an investiture event held by the College of Natural Science.

Four undergraduate seniors in the Michigan State University College of Natural Science (NatSci) have been nominated for the Marshall Scholarship, a competitive opportunity that funds graduate school in the United Kingdom (UK). Kyleen Hall, Brennan Haugen, Isaac Smith, and Dorothy Zhao are among 10 MSU Honors College students and two alumni nominated this year. Annually, up to 50 students in the United States receive Marshall Scholarships to pursue graduate studies in the UK. Haugen was also nominated for the Mitchell Scholarship, which allows students to pursue a year of graduate study in Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

Michigan State University Professors Danny Caballero and Aman Yadav were each honored as Lappan-Phillips Endowed Professors at an investiture ceremony held Sept. 28 in the Jackson Lounge at MSU’s Wharton Center. The Lappan-Phillips Professorship was established in 2013 through royalties from the ‘Connected Mathematics 2’ textbook authored by Michigan State University’s Glenda Lappan and Elizabeth Phillips. The textbook, now in its fourth iteration, is the single most widely used mathematics textbook in America for students in grades 6-8.

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, at Michigan State University is home to a world-unique particle accelerator designed to push the boundaries of our understanding of nature. Now, FRIB is accelerating that work with a form of artificial intelligence known as machine learning with support from the Office of Nuclear Physics and the Office of High Energy Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. FRIB scientists have received several grants that aim to bring machine learning’s power to process immense data sets to bear in experiments, theoretical studies and the science and engineering that keeps the accelerator humming.

The stars aligned when Shannon Schmoll was elected to be the next president of the International Planetarium Society (IPS). Schmoll, director of Michigan State University’s Abrams Planetarium and an instructor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Natural Science, has been a leader in the planetarium community for many years. She will serve a six-year term beginning this year—two years each as president-elect, president and past president.

Michigan State University is leading pioneering research on the world’s fastest supercomputer, thanks to a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE has awarded an MSU-led team 1.3 million node hours of computation time on the Frontier supercomputer (Frontier is made up of 9,400 computing nodes, and one hour of computing on a single node is equal to one “node hour”). Lead researcher Brian O’Shea and the multi-institution team will harness the power of Frontier to better understand galaxies.