2025 Distinguished McKnight University Professors
Eight MSI PIs have been named Distinguished McKnight University Professors. This program recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status.
The complete list of 2025 awardees for Distinguished McKnight University Professorships can be found on the Scholars Walk website.
The MSI PIs on the list are:
- Manuel Amador (Economics)
- This project analyzes macroeconomic models of sovereign borrowing and default in the presence of incomplete markets, different bonds structures in the home economy, and other imperfections (such as hidden information, and other domestic distortions).
- Mark Bee (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior)
- Professor Bee is interested in of the mechanisms, function, and evolution of acoustic communication systems and seeks to understand both how and why animals use acoustic signals to convey information to other individuals in biologically important contexts, such as social and reproductive interactions.
- Erin Carlson (Chemistry)
- Professor Carlson’s group has identified inhibitors of several classes of proteins important as future drug targets for development of antibacterial agents. They are utilizing modeling methods to visualize how these compounds bind in the active sites of these proteins.
- Jed Elison (Institute of Child Development)
- Professor Elison’s group uses MSI resources to investigate brain development across infancy and early childhood. They collect brain-development data using MRI combine them with behavioral and biological measures.
- Erik Finger (Surgery)
- These researchers are studying organ preservation and transplant immunology.
- Jeffrey Gralnick (Plant and Microbial Biology)
- Professor Gralnick’s research seeks to integrate both classical and modern modern molecular approaches to understand how bacteria influence our planet, using the model bacterial species Shewanella.
- Alexander Khoruts (Medicine)
- Professor Khoruts uses MSI resources for multiple projects whose dominant focus is the pharmacology of live biotherapeutics, which includes the pharmacokinetics of these preparations in different diseases.
- Lian Shen (Mechanical Engineering)
- Professor Shen’s group performs high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations. They are involved in several individual projects in this area that use MSI resources.