Board of Regents approves promotions, tenure and continuous appointments; newly tenured faculty describe AI, fraud and herbicide resistance

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved this year’s recommended promotions, tenure and continuous appointments during a special May meeting, the board’s vice chair announced.

Executive Vice President and Provost Gretchen Ritter moved the board to approve the list of regular faculty promotions and tenure actions and the recommended academic professional continuous appointments; the motion was seconded and the board adopted it by voice vote.

The provost and vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, Beth Lewis, summarized the review process: external reviewers review dossiers, tenured faculty and departmental committees vote, and recommendations proceed up through deans and the provost to the board. Lewis said the cohort under consideration collectively reported substantial scholarly activity, including “126,000,000 in grants as principal investigator or co‑principal investigator, 37 books, and 1,507 peer‑reviewed publications,” and outlined counts of recommended promotions and tenure actions presented to the board.

After the formal vote, the board invited a panel of newly tenured and promoted faculty to describe their work. Luke Busta, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the Duluth campus, said his lab studies plant chemistry — from drought responses to molecules with industrial uses — and described how he pairs undergraduates and graduate students and uses artificial intelligence tools, including large language models, to accelerate student-led research. “As artificial…tools become more commonplace, disciplinary expertise becomes more important, not less,” Busta said, adding that his lab’s approach mixes computational tools with foundational training.

Martie De Lima, associate professor in the School of Social Work at the Twin Cities campus, described research on scams and fraud among older adults and said AI advances have been a “force multiplier” for organized scam operations, citing deepfake video and convincing voice cloning as new challenges. De Lima called for broad, cross‑sector solutions and described collaborations with state agencies, financial‑services partners and law enforcement.

Debelin Swarangi, a weed scientist in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, warned that some weed species are evolving resistance to herbicides. He cited a research estimate of roughly 43,000,000,000 in annual U.S. economic losses from three crops (corn, soybean and sugar beet) and reported that his lab confirmed a Minnesota waterhemp population resistant to most available herbicides. Swarangi described integrated management strategies that combine chemical and nonchemical tools as well as robotics and genomic methods.

Judy Yang, associate professor in civil, environmental and geoengineering, described experiments that span flume‑scale simulations to microfabricated channels to study how microbes affect sediment erosion, river meandering and contaminant transport. Yang said a clay‑based technology developed with support from an environmental trust fund led to a multimillion‑dollar Army Corps of Engineers grant to test the approach in the Great Lakes region and noted NIH‑supported collaborations on related biomedical flow problems.

After the panel, the board publicly congratulated the faculty who received tenure, promotion or continuous appointment and closed that agenda item. The meeting then moved to a longer awards and recognition program before adjournment.

The board did not record a roll‑call tally in the transcript for either the consent or promotion votes; the actions were adopted by voice vote.