Aaron Kelly’s research focuses on evaluating the safety and efficacy of obesity medications in children and adolescents. Through his leadership directing landmark clinical trials, he has played a pivotal role in bringing new therapies to the clinical setting and generating new knowledge that has informed clinical practice guidelines to improve the care of children and adolescents living with obesity.
Douglas Kearney is a poet, essayist, and librettist whose writing incorporates interdisciplinary elements ranging from performative typography, comics grammar, and critical/creative hybrids. His work most frequently examines the collisions between Black people, violence, and entertainment. He is working on a monograph examining aesthetic rupture in Black music, a poetry collection about disintegration, and a speculative opera about the afterlife of Bessie Coleman.
Jiarong Hong creates “flowscopes” — imaging systems that make fluid and particle motion visible from micrometers to kilometers. He combines innovative optics, fluid dynamics, computation, and robotics to measure winds around turbines, track wildfire smoke and snow transport, and analyze microparticles in air and water. These capabilities advance fundamental fluid mechanics and enable high-resolution, real-time environmental sensing and cleaner energy, with public-health and medical impacts — mitigating disease transmission, enhancing dialysis safety, and enabling early cancer detection.
Karen Gran is a fluvial geomorphologist who studies how rivers respond to a wide range of landscape disturbances from volcanic eruptions to continental glaciation to land use change. Her research helps provide a deeper understanding of river behavior to improve environmental management in Minnesota and beyond, including reducing sediment loading in agricultural watersheds, understanding how beaver management impacts hydrology, assessing stream restoration practices, and delineating landslide hazards across the state of Minnesota.
Renee Frontiera’s research determines how nanoscale environments can be controlled to fundamentally shape chemical reaction trajectories and energy flow. Her group is known for the development and application of new spectroscopic techniques designed to initiate, control, and probe chemical transformations.
Kathleen Collins investigates the complex politics of post-communist Eurasia, particularly Soviet legacies and threats to democracy. She examines the long-term consequences of Soviet power. By brutally repressing clans and Islam, the USSR inadvertently sowed the seeds of violence. Communism also created formidable, civilian-controlled militaries instilled with anti-democratic norms and practices that devalued human life. Collins examines the conditions under which such profoundly destructive legacies can be transformed to support democracy, religious freedom, and human security.
Lin Yee Chen pioneered the term “atrial myopathy,” describing impaired function of the heart’s left upper chamber. He demonstrated that atrial myopathy independently increases stroke and dementia risk, even without atrial fibrillation, a common heart rhythm abnormality. These findings set the foundation for landmark clinical trials to examine whether blood-thinning medications can prevent stroke and dementia in patients with atrial myopathy alone—a major paradigm shift in cardiovascular disease prevention.
Cities are complex systems where people and the environment intersect across space and time. Integrating geographic information science, artificial intelligence, and urban theory, Di Zhu’s research studies the structures of human-environment interactions at three scales: places and their contexts, connectivities and their dependencies, and patterns and their evolution. By developing social sensing theories and intelligent spatial analytics, his work contributes to data-informed planning and policy while advancing scientific understanding of urban complexity.
Pregnancy stands at the interface of biology and mechanics. Throughout 40 weeks of pregnancy, hormones surge as the growing fetus loads the maternal organs. In response, soft tissues adapt to support a healthy pregnancy. While hormones and mechanical loading are known drivers of soft tissue changes, how these signals interact remains unclear. Kyoko Yoshida’s research focuses on these critical interactions by combining experimental and computational approaches, with the long-term goal of improving pregnant patients’ health.
Adolescents use smartphones and social media intensively, raising urgent concerns about mental health effects, yet existing research relies on inaccurate self-reports. Xiaoran Sun revolutionizes this field by objectively capturing what adolescents actually see and do on their phones and using machine learning to identify key patterns. Her research reveals how specific digital behaviors affect mental health and well-being, generating the evidence needed by families, educators, and policymakers addressing one of society’s most pressing concerns.