The new policies give eligible employees six weeks of paid time off following the birth or adoption of a child. The change comes after UW-Madison faculty and staff lobbied administrators to implement such a policy.
“I’m really happy that we’re in a position to be able to announce this,” Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin told faculty at a meeting Monday. “This has been something I’ve wanted to bring to conclusion, and there’s been interest in this for a very long time.”
UW-Madison and the Universities of Wisconsin are each proposing a paid parental leave policy granting six weeks of leave for the birth or adoption of a child, following more than a decade of studying its feasibility and increasing pressure from faculty and staff.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said Monday that adding paid parental leave allows the university to stay competitive in recruiting graduate students and employees, and catch up to other local private businesses and governmental agencies that already offer it.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new vaccine that offers broad protection against not only SARS-CoV-2 variants, but also other bat sarbecoviruses. The groundbreaking trivalent vaccine has shown complete protection with no trace of virus in the lungs, marking a significant step toward a universal vaccine for coronaviruses.
The symposium kicks off at 6 p.m. April 12 with a keynote presentation (via Zoom) by Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin-Madison on “The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Then and Now: Is it Still Working?” Temple will talk about the first century of migratory bird protection and speculate about its future, given ongoing challenges from loss and degradation of habitat, collisions with human-made structures, predation by cats, pesticide poisoning and oil spills.
In the dark, dungeon-like basement of Birge Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researcher Guilherme Gainett examined a tiny arachnid under a microscope and jumped from his chair in excitement.
Potential solutions to the problem are ongoing across the state. Brining, where salt is mixed with water before being applied to roads, cleared Wisconsin highways faster and resulted in a 23% reduction in salt use on average, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found. Some counties even use beet juice as a brining agent to allow the solution to work at colder temperatures, since standard road salt won’t work if it’s colder than 15 degrees.
New center allows for more sophisticated PFAS analysis, lab director says.
This year, the U.S. Department of Education revised their Free Application for Federal Student Aid – or FAFSA. They say that the new application is more user friendly and could broaden eligibility for federal aid by more than 600,000 students.
Concordia University Wisconsin will lay off 24 employees at its Mequon campus, according to a federal WARN Notice filed with the state Department of Workforce Development.
Up to 20% of students applying for federal financial aid may have to wait even longer to be awarded financial assistance, forcing many to hold off deciding where to attend college next year until they know which schools they can afford.
Under their proposals, eligible employees would have six weeks of paid leave available to them within a 12-month period for the birth or adoption of a child. The UW Board of Regents will review the policies at its meeting this week.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, some of those younger voters have also been organizing an effort to educate more people about the uninstructed option on the ballot.
Experts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have verified it as a meteorite made of iron and nickel, created in the solar system’s earliest days. It likely started out as part of an asteroid or protoplanet, says Richard Slaughter, director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Geology Museum.
UW–Madison professors, Sara McKinnon (communication arts), Erin Barbato (law), and Jorge Osorio (pathobiological sciences), are leading a multidisciplinary research project aimed at understanding the risks that face people as they move through fieldwork with migrants, legal clinics, and humanitarian organizations in migration hot spots like the Darién Gap of Colombia and Panama and the northern parts of Mexico.
The Morgridge Center for Public Service and Associated Students of Madison hosted Voterpalooza Monday evening at Memorial Union to emphasize the importance of voting through musical performances and civic engagement messages.
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the case highlights the importance of immediate action by dairy farmers if they see disease symptoms in their animals, which can include decreased lactation and low appetite. He said the people working on a farm with sick animals should be monitored closely.
“We don’t think that it’s a significant public health threat at this point,” Poulsen said. “But just like in our farms with poultry (highly pathogenic) avian influenza, they’re getting a large challenge, so we need to watch them very closely, and make sure that everyone is provided with the best public health care that we have available.”
It is likely the election funding ballot initiative will pass, but it is hard to gauge voter turnout in a presidential primary when neither major party has a competitive contest, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison public affairs assistant professor and property tax expert Ross Milton said it is hard to find academic literature with “real world evidence” of how higher property taxes are shared between tenants and landlords.
He said renters voting Tuesday should be aware that landlords can decide to make them bear the brunt of higher property taxes. However, Milton added that property companies can raise rent whenever they want in Wisconsin, regardless of a new tax. “We don’t have rent control in Wisconsin,” Milton said.
This April, which marks Donate Life Month, the UW Health Transplant Center is reflecting on a major milestone. In Feb. 2024, surgeons completed the 20,000th organ transplant in the program’s history.
“Kind of top of mind is the fact that, how many people have helped that many people receive the gift of life,” Dr. Dixon Kaufman, UW Health Transplant Center’s medical director, said. “At the top of that list are all the organ donors [and] their families — the vast majority from our community and the state of Wisconsin. That … allows us to give the gift of life to so many people.”
The Massachusetts General Hospital recently completed the world’s first successful transplant of a genetically altered pig kidney. A pair of Wisconsin kidney specialists share their insights on this milestone. Then, we dive further into chronic kidney disease, including transplantation and dialysis. Includes interview with Dr. Didier Mandelbrot, the medical director of the UW Health Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation Program
“We are proud that our incredible expertise in transplantation has transformed the lives of thousands of people,” said Dr. Dixon Kaufman, the medical director at the UW Health Transplant Center. “Our program is consistently ranked as one of the leaders in simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplants, making this milestone a truly full-circle moment.”
Letter to the editor: The Wisconsin women’s basketball team was fantastic Thursday night in their first postseason game in 13 years, but where were the Wisconsin cheerleaders?
Letter to the editor: Wisconsin Republican legislators, with one exception, deny the University of Wisconsin staff and programs that help individuals whose economic, cultural, historical and educational backgrounds did not give them the preparations for higher education (“DEI deal votes lead senators to reject two Evers Regent appointees,” March 12).
Founded in 2013 by CEO Wes Schroll and fellow UW-Madison student Tyler Kennedy, Fetch users scan shopping receipts and can earn points based on the items purchased. Those points are converted into redeemable awards, which include gift certificates, charitable donations or contest entries.
Supporters argued that allowing outside money can “create undue influence on elections and the work of election officials,” as well as foster distrust in elections, Emily Lau, an attorney with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s State Democracy Research Initiative, told Wisconsin Public Radio.
Trump’s wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, in addition to Pennsylvania, over Clinton in 2016 secured him that election and the White House, even as he lost them four years later. But Wisconsin might be the most competitive of the battleground states, according to University of Wisconsin, Madison, Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.
