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August 11, 2025

Top Stories

Why a UW-Madison ‘treasure trove’ of health data could go away

Posted on
The Cap Times

Fifteen years ago, the Population Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison launched the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. The resource provides a “treasure trove” of public data and offers a snapshot on the health of nearly every county in the nation, said Sheri Johnson, the institute’s director.

While more than 700,000 people use the resource each year, Johnson said, County Health Rankings and Roadmaps will soon lose its primary funder. The New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is set to end its support after 2026.

Research

UW system would fund project to recover MIA soldiers under GOP bill

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Legislative Republicans nixed a plan to fund a UW-Madison program that recovers the remains of missing service members, but a new proposal would require the Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents to pay for it.

A team of students and experts in the Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project at UW-Madison sifts through archives and conducts field excavations in an effort to return the remains of veterans who went missing in combat to their families.

Wisconsin dairy farm count keeps falling amid hard times. Here are some farmers who persevere

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin lost thousands of dairy farms in the ‘90s. At one point, farmers received inflation-adjusted milk prices that were 20% lower than in 1960 and about half of the peak price in 1979, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.

Higher Education/System

How Dane County, UW-Madison have prepared for potential measles outbreak

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Jake Baggott, UW-Madison associate vice chancellor and executive director of University Health Services, said in a statement that UW-Madison as a campus has been actively preparing over the last year for a potential measles case.

University Health Services led and coordinated a walkthrough exercise with campus, local and state public health officials to simulate their preparedness during a measles outbreak, Baggott said

Campus life

UW-Madison organization repurposes old dorm, apartment furniture for students in need

Posted on
WMTV - Channel 15

An organization at UW-Madison is giving gently used college furniture a second life.

“Badger Reclaim” was founded by two UW-Madison students, Amelia Wozniak and Kaleb Roessler.

They started Badger Reclaim during their sophomore year after they noticed the amount of college dorm and apartment items that get thrown on the streets of Madison during student move out.

State news

A ray of hope for public broadcasting

Posted on
The Cap Times

While at NPR, Jack Mitchell co-created the long-running afternoon news program “All Things Considered” and was its first producer and newscaster.

Mitchell’s retired now as emeritus professor at the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he taught after stepping down as WPR’s director in 1997. In the meantime, he’s authored several books, including my favorite, “Wisconsin on the Air: 100 years of public broadcasting in the state that invented it.”

Jack a few days after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was closing its doors after Congress took away its $1.1 billion annual funding (about $1.60 per person.)

Community

Business/Technology

Madison rents up 47% over the last five years

Posted on
Isthmus

Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison professor who studies urban development and housing policy, says the region’s high rents and low vacancy rates spurred developers to build more housing: “We have had a lot of supply come online in the last year, and a lot in the pipeline in the last year. And you see that now in the fact that the vacancy rate has shot up.”

Still, Paulsen cautions that new construction will likely slow down as developers wait for these units to be absorbed into the market. High interest rates and tariffs on construction materials — the U.S. Department of Commerce recently announced it is tripling duties on Canadian lumber to 21% — pushed by the Trump administration are also likely to slow construction. And though rent growth has stagnated, Madison’s high prices are still pricing out many potential residents.

UW Experts in the News

Obituaries

David William Tarr

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Asheville, NC Professor David W. Tarr, emeritus professor of Political Science, Univ. of Wisconsin, died on August 3, 2025 at Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community.

Kenneth Paul Casey

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

He was a managing attorney at Legal Action of Wisconsin, employed as a Public Defender and worked as a clinical instructor at the U.W. Law School.

American astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission who dramatically brought the crew back to Earth

Posted on
The Guardian

Money was tight, so he applied for, and was accepted on, the navy’s Holloway plan, which gave him two years of a free engineering course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus flight training, sea duty and a commission. After two years it also led a senior officer to suggest to Lovell that he should renew his application to Annapolis. He was accepted, wrote his thesis on liquid fuelled rocketry, graduated in 1952, and soon afterwards married his childhood sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach.