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April 1, 2024

Top Stories

UW-Madison to open PFAS center with federal funds

Wisconsin Public Radio

A new center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will focus on studying PFAS and finding solutions to environmental contamination by the chemicals. The new center will be launched with federal funding announced last week. Scientists said they hope to be able to identify PFAS they currently can’t measure, and find ways to reverse or stop environmental damage caused by the substances sometimes called “forever chemicals.”

Research

Higher Education/System

Behind the scenes of the University of Wisconsin’s diversity deal

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Over a single week, the UW Board of Regents faced unprecedented pressure from all sides, according to interviews and nearly 1,500 pages of emails and text messages the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received under the state’s public records law. The records showed deep fissures among board members, and UW System President Jay Rothman questioning his ability to continue leading.

Campus life

State news

Black scholars face anonymous accusations in anti-DEI crusade

Inside Higher Ed

Six of the seven are Black. Among them are Harvard’s first chief diversity and inclusion officer and her husband, who’s the chief diversity officer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They also include the chief DEI officer for staff at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. If you add Gay to the seven, four are Black women at Harvard

Athletics

UW Experts in the News

What Would A Solar Eclipse Have Looked Like to Neanderthals? Here’s What We Know

Inverse

“It’s almost impossible to imagine that ancient hominins would have ignored an eclipse, or not noticed,” University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks tells Inverse. What’s harder to guess — and more interesting to speculate about — is what the Neanderthals would have thought and felt when darkness suddenly swallowed the day.

Deepfakes raise alarm about AI in elections

The Hill

What might have taken a studio budget and a production team to produce a few years ago can now be put together by everyday users with just a few clicks, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And with the ubiquity of social media platforms, fabricated content can be widely spread, with few formal checks in place.

Obituaries

Shelley M. Lagally

Wisconsin State Journal

She believed that further education would offer new opportunities and so she earned, with honors, an MA in Public Policy and Administration with a concentration in bioethics from The LaFollette Institute at UW and immediately accepted a position as a staff member in the office of the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University. Shelley’s charm often won the day in vital ethics deliberations.

UW-Madison Related

Patricia Coffey is a forensic psychologist who loves learning about what makes you tick

Wisconsin State Journal

The forensic psychologist is a faculty member in the UW-Madison Department of Psychology. She not only teaches UW-Madison students pursuing their graduate degrees how to conduct court-ordered psychological evaluations or forensic assessments for those who have been charged with crimes — at times quite violent crimes; she also teaches an introductory psychology course at Oakhill Correctional Institution near Oregon, for which incarcerated people can obtain college credit.