The indictment, which carries multiple felony charges, will likely exacerbate the shortage of these monkeys, used in everything from drug safety testing to vaccine research, says Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies infectious disease in cynomolgus macaques. Still, he says, the main priority should be stopping this illegal trade, both for the science and the animals themselves. “These sorts of unscrupulous actors give a black eye to an already heavily scrutinized industry.”
November 25, 2022
Research
The Lab Report: Video games foster intellectual growth, connect scientists to public
The University of Wisconsin’s Field Day Labs is a computer science lab funded through the Department of Public Instruction that creates storyline and simulation video games free for educational purposes. Field Day Labs has developed games with topics ranging from archaeology to astrophysics.
Higher Education/System
Marnie Bullock Dresser: Loss of Richland campus is heartbreaking
This is my 31st and final year as a professor on the campus that Brush Creek runs through. It was UW-Center Richland when I started, then UW-Richland of the UW Colleges, and will end as UW-Platteville Richland. It was recently announced that in-person degree instructional programs at UW-Platteville Richland, about 60 miles northwest of Madison in Richland County, will cease as of July 1, 2023.
Campus life
UW Zoological Museum preserves over half a million animal specimens for research, education
On the fourth floor of Noland hall, a fully articulated chimpanzee skeleton and taxidermy wolf block the whiteboard in a discussion room. Cabinets line the walls, and inside researchers can find pinned bat specimens next to possum skins and the skulls of squirrel species native to Wisconsin. All these preserved animal specimens are part of the UW Zoological museum, which houses over half a million specimens to help researchers answer questions about animal morphology and ecology.
Open Seat fights food insecurity on UW-Madison campus
Community
UW-Madison initiative fills gaps in learning about Indigenous cultures
UW-Madison graduate Paige Skenandore found her identity last fall, in a class about the struggles and successes of American Indigenous people.
Athletics
Wisconsin moves closer to hiring football coach with formation of search committee
Another piece of the search for the next University of Wisconsin football coach has been put in place and one more could happen soon.
An Athletic Board ad hoc committee that serves in an advisory role for hiring has been formed for the football opening, board chair Ann Sheehy said.
UW Experts in the News
The rule you need eight glasses of water a day is nonsense: study
“The science has never supported the old eight glasses thing as an appropriate guideline, if only because it confused total water turnover with water from beverages and a lot of your water comes from the food you eat,” said study co-author Dale Schoeller, a nutritional sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who’s studied water and metabolism for decades.
Wis. election officials weigh changes to military voting
Quoted: “It just is really not possible to engage in much fraudulent activity without being noticed very quickly,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Obituaries
Dolores Ann Lichte
She became employed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the English Department, which was the largest department in the College of Letters and Sciences at the university. She served six years as Administrative Assistant for the department and the department chairman; three of those years she was also Administrative Assistant for Professor Helen C. White, world-renowned English literature scholar, for whom the Helen C. White Library on the UW-Madison Campus is named. In 1966, Professor White requested that Dolores be given a 20% raise, stating: “She maintains a very cheerful and efficient office. Indeed, she is a fine leader and executive. She has more than earned it.”
UW-Madison Related
UW-Madison grad dredges up the past in Netflix’s ‘Descendant’
Thirty years ago, when Kern Jackson was a graduate student in the African American studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he had a “beautiful experience.”
Except for the snow.
“My first experience with real snow,” Jackson said in a phone interview from Mobile, Alabama, where he is a professor and the director of the African American studies program at the University of South Alabama. “There was a snowstorm, and I called the department secretary, and I said, “I can’t make it in to teach because of the snow. I can’t find my car.”