Star Tribune’s Richard Chin refers to Brian Krohn ‘08 as a “Minnesota Genius” in his article. Among Krohn’s creations are surgery tools, wizard staffs, a cycling workout app, and more recently, Soundly, a cell phone application designed to help people who snore by getting them to play a voice-activated game to strengthen their upper airway muscles.
While at Augsburg, Krohn switched majors from film to chemistry, that’s when his interest in becoming a scientist began. His undergraduate research led him to “Good Morning America” where he talked about a process to produce environmentally-friendly fuel, which was later commercialized in the development of a $9 million pilot plant.
“A lot of times I get a little bug about something, I kind of just do things and see where they go,” says Krohn about his ventures.
The 2012 Sverdrup Visiting Scientist Lecture will feature Brian J. Anderson ’82, deputy project scientist, NASA MESSENGER mission. Anderson will speak about the MESSENGER mission to explore the planet Mercury and about space exploration as a moral imperative. Anderson is a physicist with The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and serves as magnetic fields co-investigator and deputy project scientist for NASA’s MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission.
At the 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) international meeting in Vancouver B.C., biology major Alex Sorum won the student poster competition in the medicine and public health category. Alex won with his poster titled, “Effects of Airway Epithelial Secretions on Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm Formation” which presented the research he did as a Sundquist Scholar with biology assistant professor Jennifer Bankers-Fulbright during 2011.
Last week, just past midnight after St. Patrick’s Day, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully slipped into an orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet. This was a difficult maneuver against the pull of the sun, and the groups of science teams around the country who have worked on the Mercury MESSENGER project for seven years were elated, to say the least.