Michigan State University will hire 100 new faculty members as part of an initiative to bolster studies and research in areas such as plant science, engineering, cybersecurity, and computational science. The university will dedicate $17.5 million in recurring funds for the initiative.
"Targeting emerging areas of scholarship will leverage Michigan State's considerable strengths and enhance our reputation as a top-100 world research university," says Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State.
Simon says the priority research areas, which also include precision medicine and genomics, were developed from nearly 90 proposals submitted by Michigan State faculty members.
Funding for the Global Impact Initiative was approved by the board of trustees in 2014. Simon says Michigan State has already begun fulfilling the initiative's goals with the creation of the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering in April. Computational science focuses on the construction of mathematical models to analyze and solve complex scientific problems across disciplines.
Simon says the university also plans to hire faculty with expertise in genetics to enhance food crops and help build a bioeconomy. Michigan State is also looking for faculty with expertise in electromagnetics and computational physics to capitalize on the university's new Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, funded by the Department of Energy Office of Science, that will help researchers to make discoveries in the fields of energy and medicine.
"Over the next three years we are making a significant investment, seeking to make dramatic institutional gains in a relatively short period of time," says June Pierce Youatt, provost at Michigan State.
