Awards and Recognition

The University of Minnesota’s Crookston, Duluth, and Rochester campuses have been awarded the Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement, joining the Twin Cities (2006, 2015) and Morris campuses (2015) and making the U of M the country's first and only university system at which every individual campus has received this selective designation.

Of the nearly 4,000 qualifying U.S. universities and colleges, this prestigious recognition has been granted to only 368 institutions. Administered by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the classification requires evidence-based documentation of institutional policies and practices that support dynamic and noteworthy university-community engagement.

The Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics announced its 2023 research awardees. Totaling $6.75 million, this year’s awards fund innovative projects on cancer, rare genetic diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, cognitive aging and new health models to study diseases. The Minnesota Partnership is funded by the State of Minnesota and provides support for innovative research conducted by collaborative teams from the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic.

The Academies for Excellence recognizes outstanding faculty in the areas of scientific research, educational scholarship, clinical practice, and team science. 2023 inductees include inductees to the Academy for Excellence in Clinical Practice, the Academy for Excellence in Health Research, the Academy for Excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the Academy for Excellence in Team Science. See the 2023 Academies for Excellence inductees.

The Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the U of M College of Veterinary Medicine has been awarded a seven-year, $4.99 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support veterinary services capacity-building in East Africa. The grant aims to specifically build capacity for the critical evaluation, evidence-based revision and long-term monitoring of disease control programs to support local systems of animal health and food safety through group training and workforce development.

The University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) is one of 24 recipients across the country that collectively received nearly $16 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in pollution-prevention grants. SPH researchers will use the grant to fund a project to help local, immigrant-owned nail and hair salon businesses and their suppliers use safer, more environmentally friendly products aimed at reducing chronic exposure to hazardous materials. SPH Associate Professors Trân Huỳnh and Susan Arnold received funding for a project to help local, immigrant-owned nail salon businesses and their suppliers use safer, more environmentally friendly products and adopt other pollution prevention practices.

Joanne Billings has joined the Research and Innovation Office leadership team as its new associate vice president for research integrity and compliance. As AVP, Billings will oversee critical research integrity and regulatory functions of the Institutional Review Board, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, the Institutional Biosafety Committee, and the Office of Biotechnology Activities Oversight, among other roles.

Julie Weisenhorn is interviewed in a KARE 11 story about how to keep a Christmas cactus alive; Tina Huang is quoted in a WebMD Magazine story about tinnitus; Michael Howell is quoted in a Star Tribune story about Minnesota companies capitalizing on America's sleep problems; Ben Winchester is quoted in a New York Times story about why Iowa turned so red when nearby states went blue; Jannifer Gregory David is interviewed at MPR News about what’s up with all the labor strikes and whether they’re paying off; Ellen Berscheid is quoted in the BBC story “The qualities that are more attractive than our looks;” Tom Stoffregen is featured in Marketwatch in a story about airport anxiety and first-time flying; Yingling Fan is quoted in Finance & Commerce about the impact of road closures on small businesses; Lori Carrell is quoted in a Forbes story about whether the time for three-year colleges has arrived; Ruby Nguyen is interviewed in a Star Tribune story about a U professor who plans to change the fact that Asian Americans have been left out of health studies; Emily Fairfax is quoted in the Wired story “Spying on Beavers From Space Could Help Save California.

University of Minnesota Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering professor Roger Ruan has been named a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow and will be inducted into the NAI at the academy’s annual meeting in June. Ruan was chosen for induction by the NAI Fellows Selection Committee for demonstrating “a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.” Ruan's research focuses on renewable energy and environment technologies as well as food engineering for sustainable development and circular economy. He has published more than 600 papers, two books and 28 book chapters, and holds 19 U.S. patents.

Zhi-Li Zhang, a professor in the U of M Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has received a $4.25 million grant from the National Science Foundation for his work on autonomous vehicles (AVs). The five-year interdisciplinary project aims to facilitate the safe and incremental adoption of tele-operated AVs.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a condition that affects the brain and spinal cord, resulting in muscle weakness and wasting. Researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School undertook a study to develop a reliable method for assessing changes in the disease's progression during clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of potential treatments. They recently received $3 million in research funding in two different grants, one from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and another from the State of Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE), to continue this research with a multi-center study.

Pramod Pisharady, an assistant professor at the Medical School’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR), led the study and served as the corresponding author of the research paper "Multimodal MRI improves diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity to longitudinal change in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis." Pisharady, the principal investigator of the new study, will lead the multi-center project with co-principal investigators and senior authors of the paper, Christophe Lenglet (CMRR) and David Walk (neurology).