McKnight Presidential Fellows

Kate Adamala
Genetics, Cell Biology & Development
College of Biological Sciences, Twin Cities

Synthetic cell engineering

Kate Adamala is a biochemist working on engineering synthetic cells. Her research aims at understanding chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. Kate’s research spans questions from the origin and earliest evolution of life, using synthetic biology to colonize space, to the future of biotechnology and medicine.
Kate also works on biosafety and biosecurity implications of synthetic biology. She is a Polymath Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and a coordinator of the international synthetic cell engineering community Build-a-Cell.

Dana Mowls Carroll
Environmental Health Sciences
School of Public Health, Twin Cities

Addressing commercial tobacco-related health disparities in Minnesota and beyond

Dana Mowls Carroll researches ways to help people quit commercial tobacco use with a particular focus on working with American Indian and rural populations. Reflecting the interests of her community partners, she applies methodologies ranging from secondary data analyses to qualitative research and clinical trials. She also contributes to the evidence base on potential cigarette product standards, such as reducing levels of nicotine; which is another avenue for addressing commercial tobacco use disparities. In 2023, her contributions to co-creating smoking cessation resources for American Indian persons were highlighted by the White House as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Cancer Moonshot Agenda to end cancer.

Gretchen Hansen
Fisheries, Wildlife & Conservation Biology
College of Food, Agricultural & Natural Resource Sciences, Twin Cities

Understanding and managing freshwater ecosystems in a changing world

Gretchen Hansen studies freshwater ecosystem responses to environmental change. Her work is interdisciplinary and spans from local to global scales. She leverages mechanistic understanding of biological and physical processes to inform large-scale landscape predictions of lake and fish responses to climate change, species invasions, and other stressors. She frequently partners with management agencies and environmental groups to identify local management responses that can influence lake responses to global change. Dr. Hansen disseminates her work through peer-reviewed journals as well as through public-facing web tools, and has been widely covered by the popular press.

Jacob Jungers
Agronomy & Plant Genetics
College of Food, Agricultural & Natural Resource Sciences, Twin Cities

Diversifying crops to improve agricultural sustainability

Nearly 80% of global farmland is dedicated to growing just five crops. While the incredible productivity of these crops is crucial to feeding the world and supporting global economies, farming practices to cultivate them can negatively impact the natural environment. Dr. Jungers and his research group are helping develop new crops and farming strategies that improve agricultural output, economic viability, and environmental sustainability.

Peter Larsen
Veterinary & Biomedical Sciences
College of Veterinary Medicine, Twin Cities

Neurodegenerative disease diagnostics and field-based genomics

 

Peter Larsen is a molecular biologist who leads an interdisciplinary research team spanning several colleges and departments across the university. He is Co-Director of the Minnesota Center for Prion Research and Outreach and has spearheaded an effort to develop new diagnostic tools for animal and human prion diseases. This work has resulted in the development of an exciting new class of portable tools that can detect biomarkers for several neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Larsen also specializes in studies of mammalian biodiversity and zoonotic disease surveillance. His latest work in this area brings cutting-edge genomic tools out of the lab and into the field for real-time species discovery and pathogen surveillance.

William Leeb
Mathematics
College of Science & Engineering, Twin Cities

Robust and efficient algorithms for corrupted data

William Leeb researches the design and analysis of efficient algorithms that are robust to corruption of the input data. Sources of corruption can include missing values, geometric perturbations, noise, and other types of information loss. Datasets with these challenges are encountered across numerous domains, from structural biology to image processing. His research program includes the development of new tools from multiple branches of mathematics, including harmonic analysis and random matrix theory, and has led to fundamental contributions to the problems of matrix estimation, orbit recovery, and robust metric design.

Terresa A. Moses
Graphic Design
College of Design, Twin Cities

Exploring Black liberation through design

Terresa A. Moses is a community-engaged scholar who uses applied research and creative works to intentionally intersect three areas of expertise, all of which are centered in Black liberation and anti-racism: 1) design curriculum and pedagogical approaches, 2) community building and abolitionist organizing, and 3) empowering Black women. Some of her work includes her solo exhibition, Umbra, her community distro project, Stop Killing Black People, her applied research project, Project Naptural, and her co-created curriculum and framework, Racism Untaught. She has published two books, Racism Untaught and An Anthology of Blackness, in addition to national and international recognition in her field.

Hannah Neprash
Health Policy and Management
School of Public Health, Twin Cities

Toward a more efficient and resilient health care system

 

Hannah Neprash is a health economist whose research focuses on the delivery and financing of health care. As the expense and complexity of American health care continues to grow, Dr. Neprash works to build a more efficient and resilient health care system. Her research studies new threats (cyberattacks in health care), persistent challenges (public insurance reimbursement design), and emerging opportunities (artificial intelligence in medicine). Dr. Neprash publishes in leading medical, clinical, and economics journals. Her work frequently receives local and national news coverage, in addition to attention from policymakers.

Benjamin Toff
Journalism and Mass Communication
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

Growing indifference and distrust in news and how journalists can respond

Benjamin Toff studies news audiences in the contemporary media environment. He is the leading expert on news avoidance, the subject of a co-authored book (2023), and previously led the most extensive, international study to date on trust in news as a fellow at the University of Oxford. His work grapples with both the political implications of the public’s growing disconnection from news and its impact on the sustainability of the industry. He is also Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, where he is working on advancing applied projects partnering with local news outlets to test the effectiveness of strategies designed to rebuild relationships with the public.

George Annor 
Food Science and Nutrition
College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, Twin Cities

Characteristics of new and novel cereal, protein, and oilseed crops

George Annor’s research focuses on components of cereals and grains and how they are affected by breeding, agronomical practices, and nonthermal processing techniques. With faculty in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, he is working to explore the food and functional characteristics of new and novel cereal, protein, and oilseed crops. As an example, he developed a method to rapidly screen large numbers of samples for wheat gluten quality at early stages of wheat variety development. He also collaborates on breeding programs focusing on oats and corn, and is working on potential uses of ingredients made from intermediate wheatgrass (Kernza), a crop known for producing ecosystem services.

Luciano Caixeta
Veterinary Population Medicine
College of Veterinary Medicine, Twin Cities

Towards dairy sustainability by improving the health of dairy cows

Luciano Caixeta is an animal health researcher who focuses on improving the health of dairy cows with the ultimate goal to help feed the ever-growing world population. His research focuses on the period around parturition of dairy cows. During this period, cows have a considerable risk of metabolic disorders and infectious diseases. Dr. Caixeta combines basic and applied research to describe the physiological adaptations of dairy cows under metabolic stress. With his research, Dr. Caixeta strives to develop practical intervention strategies to decrease the use of antimicrobials in animal agriculture and increase farm sustainability through improved animal health. He communicates his findings broadly, through peer-reviewed manuscripts, presentations at conferences and working directly with farmers.

Yuan (Daniel) Cheng 
Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Twin Cities

Reimagining Government-Nonprofit Relations and Bridging the Research-Practice Gap

Yuan (Daniel) Cheng is an outstanding scholar in the field of public and nonprofit management and has an international reputation for his interdisciplinary research in the areas of government-nonprofit relations, coproduction, and cross-sector collaboration. He is the managing editor of Public Administration Review and board member of the Minneapolis Parks Foundation. In close collaboration with governmental and community organizations, Dr. Cheng is currently embarking on new research directions to better understand the implementation of evidence-based practices in government, the policy impacts of academic research, and how to design more inclusive public sector grant-making programs.

Audrey Dorélien
Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Twin Cities

Population, Health, and Environment

Audrey Dorélien is a population health researcher. She studies the impacts of climate change and infectious disease exposure on maternal and child health. She also studies how human behavior and population dynamics affect the spread and severity of infectious diseases. She describes demographic and health patterns and attempts to identify the causal factors responsible for these patterns. She uses secondary data from household surveys and vital records in novel ways, and often links these datasets with climate, contextual, and infectious disease data. Her work is global in scope and has been published in leading demography and population health journals.

Peter K. Kang
Earth and Environmental Sciences
College of Science and Engineering, Twin Cities

Using the subsurface for the benefit of society

Improved understanding of flow processes in the subsurface is essential for addressing global water, energy, and climate crisis. Peter Kang and his group combine a range of methods (lab and field experiments, numerical simulations, and machine learning) to investigate reactive transport in porous media with applications in geologic carbon sequestration, enhanced geothermal systems, and groundwater management and remediation. He mentors a large team of students and post-docs, and publishes in the top journals in his field. Peter’s group actively collaborates with state hydrogeologists to address pressing groundwater issues in Minnesota, and also with high school teachers for K-12 education

Christian Uwe
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

Reading and shaping our political lives with literature

Christian Uwe’s scholarship joins together literature, semiotics, and philosophy to investigate contemporary forms of cultural and political existence. Drawing particularly on sub-Saharan, Caribbean, and French literatures, his research proposes a comparative examination of crises such as contemporary afterlives of the colonial project, environmental degradation, migration, and attendant geopolitical conflicts. His work, which has been described as “exquisitely intellectual” and “truly impressive”, includes two books, Le Discours choral (2017), on the influential works of Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant, and L’Archive paradoxale (2022), on contemporary sub-Saharan novels. He is currently working on a book-length critique of the politics of Difference from the perspective of African and Caribbean thinkers.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Sociology
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

New ways to understand racial inequity in disease and death

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field studies racism and mortality in the United States in two settings: the early twentieth century and the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of her work puts mortality inequities into new perspective with surprising comparisons; for example, she showed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, white mortality was still not as high as Black mortality has been every year, long before the pandemic. She also helped lead an award-winning community Covid-19 vaccination program (based in Minneapolis’s Seward neighborhood). Her work has been widely covered in national and local media and has won more than a dozen national and international awards.

Ya Yang 
Plant and Microbial Biology
College of Biological Sciences, Twin Cities

Functional phylogenomics of plants

Ya Yang is recognized nationally and internationally as one of the top researchers working in the field of plant functional phylogenomics—a field of molecular evolution that utilizes genome sequences to analyze and reconstruct evolution. In addition to her impressive track record in funding, scholarship, and teaching, Dr. Yang also serves as the curator of plants for the University of Minnesota Herbarium at the Bell Museum of Natural History. Dr. Yang and her lab members are active participants in public engagement and outreach through the Bell Museum, ranging from summer camps to interactive demonstrations on carnivorous plants and plant pigments. 

Valerie Belair-Gagnon

Journalism and Mass Communication
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

Rebuilding Journalism

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon’s publicly engaged and empirical research has made contributions to the understanding of digital innovation and engagement in journalism. She studies digital media as structuring conditions of journalistic work, including how old and new actors adapt and respond to change in digital innovation, and the cultural forces of change in news organizations and the news industry. She is co-editor of Journalism Research That Matter (Oxford U Press, 2021), author of Social Media at BBC News (Routledge, 2015), and co-author of The Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media Transforms Journalistic Labor (Illinois U Press, forthcoming 2022). She is currently working on a happiness in journalism project.

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan

English
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

At the intersection of literature, history, and the news

V.V. Ganeshananthan is a fiction writer and essayist who writes about Ilankai / Lankan Tamil communities and the Sri Lankan civil war. Her debut novel, Love Marriage, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of The Washington Post’s Best of 2008. Her work has appeared in The New York Times​, Granta, Columbia Journalism Review​, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, ​among others.​ She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. She has taught classes on novel writing, plot and revision, and political literature. Her forthcoming novel, Brotherless Night, will be published in January 2023.

Carrie Henning-Smith

Health Policy and Management
School of Public Health, Twin Cities

Advancing Health Equity and Social Well-Being for Rural Residents

Carrie Henning-Smith is a public health researcher who focuses on health equity and the structural drivers of health for rural populations, with an emphasis on mental health and social well-being for older adults and people with historically marginalized identities. In her work, she uses a range of methodologies to examine the role of policy, geography, and community context in shaping health outcomes, including loneliness and social isolation. Dr. Henning-Smith prioritizes community input and engagement in her work, and disseminates her findings broadly, through peer-reviewed manuscripts, but also through media interviews, OpEds, policy briefs, and other publicly-available outlets.

Alexander Opitz

Biomedical Engineering
College of Science and Engineering, Twin Cities

Non-invasive brain stimulation technologies for brain disorders

Alexander Opitz’s research focuses on developing non-invasive brain stimulation technologies for brain disorders. Dr. Opitz has a particular interest in the underlying physics and physiology of transcranial magnetic and electric stimulation. Research in his lab spans from computational modeling of electric fields and their effect on neurons to electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in animals and humans. His lab is further developing closed-loop stimulation technologies to improve the effectiveness of brain stimulation. Dr. Opitz organizes the annual “Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Workshop” targeted at researchers interested in advancing their tool kit in non-invasive brain stimulation methods.

Hyun Soo Park

Computer Science and Engineering
College of Science and Engineering, Twin Cities

AI to measure human and animal behaviors

Paragraph: Hyun Soo Park is a computer vision researcher who is passionate about developing an AI system that can decode implicit codes of our non-verbal social signals, e.g., gaze direction, facial expression, and body gestures, that plays a major role in our daily communications. His lab designs a massive sensing infrastructure to measure the subtle social signals in three dimensions, develop a computational model to analyze and forecast the behaviors, and render them in an immersive technology to enable authentic social telepresence.

Talvin Wilks

Theatre Arts and Dance
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

Rootedness in scholarship and performance practice

Talvin Wilks is an acclaimed director, dramaturg and playwright with an almost 30 year professional career. For Wilks, politics and history become the rooted foundation in which to examine, by means of drama, identities continually divided by race, class, gender and sexuality and have informed his original works and collaborations which have reached Broadway, off-Broadway and national stages. His strength in these multi-faceted areas of creativity and performance is what makes him an inspiring and compassionate team builder, thoughtful, and highly skilled master-teacher, a generous mentor, and an intrepid advocate for undergraduate students’ intellectual and artistic endeavors.

Emilyn Alejandro

Integrative Biology and Physiology
Medical School, Twin Cities

Fetal origins of obesity and type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is the most common chronic disease affecting about 420 million people worldwide. To stop the vicious cycle of the disease, Emilyn Alejandro’s team combine integrative approaches and using both animal models and human studies to uncover the role of nutrient-sensor protein mTOR and OGT in the placenta and pancreas, to ultimately predict individuals who are at risk for obesity and diabetes and to find ways to increase insulin secretion to improve clinical interventions for patients with diabetes. The team is shedding new light on the fetal origins of pancreatic-β-cell dysfunction, obesity, and diabetes.

Samira Azarin

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
College of Science & Engineering, Twin Cities

Engineering healthy and diseased tissue environments to develop novel therapies

Samira Azarin studies the role of the cell microenvironment in the development and function of healthy and diseased tissues to enable fundamental insights into biological mechanisms, develop model systems for drug discovery, and design biomaterials that direct the behavior of cells and tissues in the body. A major focus of her research program is to combine cell and tissue engineering with novel biomaterial platforms to address current therapeutic roadblocks in the treatment of cancer, including metastatic spread and drug resistance, with the aim of improving clinical outcomes for patients with any types of cancer.

Jeffrey Calder

Mathematics
College of Science & Engineering, Twin Cities

Continuum limits in machine learning and data science

Jeff Calder is a mathematician whose research involves using continuum mathematical analysis, including partial differential equations and the calculus of variations, to study discrete problems at the foundations of machine learning and data science. The goals of his research are to further our understanding of existing algorithms, and to develop new, more efficient algorithms founded on strong theoretical principles with provable performance guarantees. He has made foundational contributions to many problems, including the sorting of multivariate data with data peeling algorithms, and graph-based semi-supervised learning with limited data.

Trinity Hamilton

Plant and Microbial Biology 
College of Biological Sciences, Twin Cities

Using modern microbial ecosystems to unlock Earth’s past, present, and future

Trinity Hamilton is an environmental and molecular microbiologist. Her research examines microbial photosynthesis and global biogeochemical cycles throughout Earth’s history. Her research combines genomic, functional, and evolutionary studies of complex microbial ecosystems to answer outstanding questions in microbial ecology and evolution in the face of changing environmental conditions, and has been applied to places ranging from Yellowstone hot springs to Minnesota lakes to Greenland glaciers. Hamilton’s research has informed outstanding questions regarding the physiology of Earth’s oldest phototrophs and the contribution of these organisms to biogeochemical cycling in Earth’s past, present, and future.

Douglas E. Kearney

English
College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities

Ways of reckoning: Critical Black poetics

Douglas Kearney is an award-winning poet and critic working on / with / through Black aesthetics and performance. His research engages literature, music, and entertainment with foci in interdisciplinary artistic praxes, the grotesque, and the crossroads where antiblack violence meets spectacle. His books include Mess and Mess and, Buck Studies, and Sho. A librettist, Kearney’s most recent operas are Crescent City, Sweet Land, and Comet / Poppea (commissioned by the American Modern Opera Company).  His courses range from a lab for developing new poetic forms to seminars on genre agnostic writing.

Bonnie Keeler

Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy
Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Twin Cities

What is clean water worth? In pursuit of more equitable, efficient, and effective water policy

Bonnie Keeler works at the intersection of sustainability science and environmental economics, with particular expertise in water policy. Keeler’s research investigates the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, the social costs of water pollution, and the dynamics of social-ecological systems. Keeler is the co-director of the CREATE Initiative, a community-engaged research project that aims to leverage the resources of the research university in service to the needs and priorities of environmental justice organizations in urban watersheds. Keeler also directs the Beyond the Academy network - a coalition of university leaders seeking to reform academic models to promote actionable, engaged scholarship on sustainability.

Esther Krook-Magnuson

Neuroscience
Medical School, Twin Cities

Illuminating neuronal networks in health and disease

Esther Krook-Magnuson is a neuroscientist seeking to improve our understanding of how cells interact within a network, how networks interact with each other, and the physiological roles of neuronal populations. Neuronal networks, diversity, and specificity of function are important to both physiological processes and neurological disorders. The Krook-Magnuson lab utilizes models of temporal lobe epilepsy and essential tremor, and a range of techniques including electrophysiology, optogenetics, imaging, and behavioral experiments to address fundamental questions in the field of neuroscience.

Olihe Okoro

Pharmacy Practice and Pharmaceutical Sciences
College of Pharmacy, Duluth

Addressing structural inequities to eliminate health disparities

Olihe Okoro is a community-engaged scholar whose research efforts aim to investigate and address structural inequities that drive health disparities. Dr. Okoro’s work is unique in that it seeks to understand the intersections of social determinants of health with race/ethnicity and sociocultural context, and the implications for health care and health outcomes. Her work continues to inform interventions to improve health outcomes in Black communities. Dr. Okoro is currently working with the African heritage community to address COVID-19 disparities and using findings from a community needs assessment to address long-standing inequities associated with disparities in health care and health outcomes.