At the end of one of the most tumultuous semesters in the history of the University of Wisconsin System, Board of Regents President Drew Petersen says he “couldn’t be happier” with the performance of the system’s colleges amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
UW Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine & Public Health James Conway leads UW Health’s immunization efforts as the programs’ medical director. After serving as a scientific advisor for both Moderna and Pfizer this summer, Conway now works on a Wisconsin Disaster Medical Advisory Committee about the state’s COVID-19 vaccine allocation and distribution and also works in Dane County’s distribution efforts.
Our brains, generally speaking, operate qualitatively, not quantitatively, explains Dominique Brossard, a professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who focuses on risk communication. In short, that means we tend to think in terms of emotion, not numbers.
Voting by mail may seem more convenient, but it also requires the voter to act much earlier than they would if they went to the polls, said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. You have to make sure to request your ballot early, and in some states, make sure you have a valid ID to do so.
One key benefit of therapy is the close relationship between the patient and the provider, which fosters a strong sense of belonging. “You’re meeting with somebody with whom you have a real relationship—this is a person who cares about you, seeks to understand you, is warm and accepting,” says Bruce Wampold, a professor emeritus of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “And for many people, this is particularly healing.”
By controlling COVID-19 cases in correctional facilities, we have a chance to reduce illness and death for everyone and signal to these particular communities that they, too, have a share in the modern-day miracle of COVID-19 vaccines.
–Brent Orrell is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on job training, workforce development, and criminal justice reform. He has worked for the United States government for 20 years, including senior roles at the Department of Labor and at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is on Twitter @SociologistRay. Dr. Howard Henderson is a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, a Professor of Justice Administration at Texas Southern University, and director of the Center for Justice Research. John M. Eason is the Director of the UW Justice Lab and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He was a part-time lecturer on factory-built housing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The New York City native, with the accent to prove it, graduated first in her class from Indiana University Law School in 1956, three years after her marriage to Seymour Abrahamson. The couple moved to Madison and her husband, a world-renowned geneticist, joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in 1961. He died in 2016.
He taught and provided supervision for decades at the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Social Work and Department of Counseling Psychology.
There is concern, though, that changes in behavior may not last long enough to prevent another big rise in coronavirus cases, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said Trump has clearly proven popular in the state, even though he lost this year. “There is a pretty big coalition of voters in Wisconsin who are attracted to Trump’s style and to his messages,” Burden said. “It looks like Johnson is kind of mimicking that style in pursuing these odd or peripheral stories, so maybe it’s possible to assemble that Trump coalition even after Trump’s out of office.”
Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at UW-Madison, said it’s unusual for employers to mandate a vaccine. She thinks they should rely on voluntary compliance. “There’s going to be enough people who have some reason why they can’t necessarily take the vaccine that an employer who issues a mandate on pain of being dismissed from employment is going to wind up having to essentially negotiate with many individual employees about their particular circumstances and have to dance around these very confusing rules,” said Charo. “In many ways it’s much easier for an employer to simply say ‘I’m going to encourage it, I’m going to strongly recommend it. I’m going to make it easy for you’.”
UW System President Tommy Thompson says surge testing on system campuses is helping the entire state of Wisconsin.
Betty then decided to return to her first love of librarianship and served as a law librarian and later an instructor in legal research at several law schools, including Duke Law School and finally the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison.
In 1982, Terry and Mary Ann, along with their now four children, moved to Madison, Wis., where he assumed the Directorship of the Waisman Center for Mental Retardation and Human Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(Ret. Col.) David G. Dibbell Sr., M.D., Professor Emeritus and past Division Chair, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Wisconsin Department of Surgery, passed away peacefully at home and on his terms on Nov. 19, 2020 .. One of his greatest accomplishments and the legacy he leaves is building the first program in reconstructive surgery at the UW Department of Surgery, where he created international outreach programs, providing plastic surgery and care in Central and South America.
When COVID-19 cases skyrocketed in early September, Chancellor Rebecca Blank knew she had to try something. So on Sept. 9, the fifth day of classes, when the university reported 404 infections of the nearly 5,300 it would accumulate by the end of the semester, she announced a two-week lockdown for two large dorms and a campus-wide pause on face-to-face instruction. “A lot of people thought that we would never recover from that,” she said in an interview on Friday, the final day of the semester. “More than one person has come up to me and said, ‘I thought we’d never get back to in-person classes. I thought you’d have to send everyone home.’ And, you know, we did recover from that.”
Since 2013, tuition for in-state undergraduate students at UW campuses has been frozen.It’s helped protect students from the rising costs of college tuition, but a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found this incentive for students is threatening the UW’s ability to be competitive against other universities. “The tuition freeze is a clear part of that, but you also see stagnant state funding, enrollment declines that are greater than other states nationally … all things that were adding up before COVID-19,” said Jason Stein, Research Director for the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
After graduation, Donna worked at the University Hospital in Madison as a Medical Technologist in the bone marrow lab until she retired in 2003.
The University of Wisconsin football team will play Wake Forest in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl on Dec. 30 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Abrahamson, a New York City native, graduated first in her class from Indiana University Law School in 1956, three years after her marriage to Seymour Abrahamson. The couple moved to Madison and her husband, a world-renowned geneticist, joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1961. He died in 2016. She earned a law degree from UW-Madison in 1962. Abrahamson worked as a professor and joined a Madison law firm, hired by the father of future Gov. Jim Doyle, in 1962.
A UW doctor calls the vaccine more precious than gold, and vaccinators are handling it that way.
It’s hard to imagine the challenges that COVID-19 has presented to the frontline workers who come into contact with it every day. But for UW Health respiratory therapist Becky Sturdevant, she knows that the COVID unit is where she’s needed.
Doctor shares her experience.
If you’re feeling the weight of quarantine fatigue, here’s something that may help you get through another virtual holiday. This could be our last one, according to Dr. Jeff Pothof, UW-Health’s Chief Quality Officer.
A University of Wisconsin- Madison singing troupe are sharing the spirit of the holidays virtually this year by posting their productions online.
Dr. Cheryl B. Gittens was named interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 2020. S
Now 28, the University of Wisconsin First Wave alum has won a Chicago Emmy for her three-part music video series, “The Light,” produced with PBS Wisconsin, with her sights set on launching a career in television and music.
Malia Jones and “Dear Pandemic”: Jones is a researcher who works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work centers on infectious disease and social epidemiology, demography and geography, and she is also a creator of the project “Dear Pandemic.”
At UW Hospital, which received 3,900 doses this week, about 1,000 employees should be vaccinated by the end of the week, according to spokeswoman Emily Kumlien.
After an increase of COVID-19 cases on the roster wiped out six of the eight Badgers games scheduled for November and December, coach Mark Johnson said before Wednesday’s release the rest of the slate had to be easily moldable into whatever form is needed.
UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber said rules limiting installations like the representatives’ Christmas tree in public spaces are constitutional if content-neutral, allow sufficient alternative avenues for expression and serve a legitimate purpose unrelated to suppressing expression.
Does that mean this particular storm has been fueled by climate change? Jonathan E. Martin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cautioned against drawing quick conclusions.
The study is “a major contribution” to our understanding of migration in ancient Mesoamerica and violence following Teotihuacan’s collapse, says Sarah Clayton, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the research.
Among other recommendations in the report, the commission also called for the creation of government programs designed specifically for rural communities; the easing of local levy limits to give local governments greater flexibility to fund innovative programs; and boosting state funding for the county-level education programs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison known as the Division of Extension
Bennett worries that Black kids aren’t afforded the same opportunities to imagine their way into mischief that white kids are. Surveying the children’s-entertainment landscape, he sees stories in which Black characters either don’t exist or exist merely to satisfy some goal of representation. Black authors are rarer still: According to data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, less than 5 percent of children’s books published in 2019 were written by Black authors.
Duane held great strength in his ability to relate to anybody, said Greg Gard, the UW-Madison men’s basketball coach and a long time friend of the family.
College administrators have pointed to declining birth rates in Wisconsin and the Midwest overall as one driver in current and projected enrollment declines. UW-Madison Applied Population Laboratory researcher Sarah Kemp said while high school enrollment data from the 2019-2020 school year shows an average decline of 3 percent the number of 12th grade students was relatively unchanged compared with the previous school year.
“Imagine that the patient, who has some degree of cognitive impairment, says ’yes’ to the vaccine but the surrogate says ’no’ and tells the nursing home, ’How dare you try to do this?” said Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
UW Health expected to vaccinate 250 employees against COVID-19 by Wednesday and SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital anticipated immunizing about 500, as a weeks-long effort to inoculate Wisconsin’s 450,000 health care workers and nursing home residents against the coronavirus before others can get the injections started to ramp up.
UW-Madison School of Education Dean Diana Hess acknowledged that, “Literacy is a big part of our teacher ed. programs because it’s such an important part of our education.” Hess and Jenkins talk every two weeks about various partnerships between the two entities, and are specifically considering ways to partner on literacy instruction. Monday, they announced the formal new partnership: a task force with seven UW faculty and seven MMSD representatives to strengthen reading instruction in MMSD and teacher preparation at UW-Madison.
Medical school applications are at an all-time high during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the University of Wisconsin is no exception. In fact, it’s exceeding national trends.
Specifically, the report calls for investing in county-based educators employed through UW-Madison’s Extension division. The task force recommended partnering with UW Extension to help every region of the state understand its assets and create an area-specific development strategy.
Payton Wade is the communications coordinator at the office of Student Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The lead researcher of the study at Wisconsin, Tim McGuine, said in an interview in August that “the greatest risk [to student-athletes] is not covid-19. It’s suicide and drug use.” The study caught the eye of the organization overseeing high school sports, the National Federation of State High School Associations, which was already dealing with an uptick in reports from state athletic directors about mental health concerns for teen athletes whose seasons were in flux.
It had an even more profound impact on the University of Wisconsin’s athletic department, whose coffers dwindled as its conference postponed the football season totally in August, only to decide weeks later to play the season in the fall after all.
“While all of these people that care about monarchs are doing a lot of positive things, there are a lot of negative things happening at the same time,” said Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin who has studied monarchs since 1985. “We’re running as fast as we can to stay in the same place.”
“Finding a virus in a wild mink but not in other wildlife nearby likely indicates an isolated event, but we should take all such information seriously,” said Tony L. Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. He added, “Controlling viruses in people is ultimately the best way to keep them from spreading to animals.”
There’s also an element of uncertainty about what the monarch numbers collected by surveyors really mean. “The year-to-year fluctuation in monarch numbers makes it difficult to put an exact number on the degree to which monarch populations have declined,” says Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has studied monarchs since 1985. Data from as far back as the 1950s show “it is very clear that monarch butterflies are a very high fluctuation species in terms of their population dynamics,” Agrawal agrees. Populations that crash can recover. Females lay hundreds of eggs, only two of which need to survive for the population to survive. And because four generations occur per year, even if most of the butterflies in Mexico die one year, “there is opportunity for the population to recover.”
“There’s no such thing right now as the national popular vote. It’s just a bunch of 50 state races that get added together,” explained Barry Burden, political science professor and founding director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gutmann said he’s particularly excited about one study, led by Dominick Ciruzzi at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in which a team attached accelerometers to street trees to measure how much rainfall they intercept on their leaves. The study showed that rainfall bound up in trees reduced the amount of water that reached the ground below. When taken together, thousands of trees in an urban area could be a sustainable tool to mitigate flooding related to heavy rains.
Freezing tuition at the University of Wisconsin without adding more state funding to offset the loss has contributed to the system falling behind its peers and hurting its competitiveness, according to a report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum released Tuesday.
Enter Revive Therapeutics, a biotech company with its fingers in several pies: the emerging psychedelics industry, where it has a research partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison for formulation development and a clinical trial for substance use using psilocybin; the cannabis industry, where it has patented several unique cannabinoid delivery methods; and more recently, the market for coronavirus treatments, where it is one of fewer than 20 companies undertaking a phase 3 FDA trial—and the one with the lowest market cap.
“Research would confirm again and again, when people feel that what’s asked from them is not actually followed by those in power, there’s a sense of betrayal that will occur,” said Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“But a lot is happening that’s taking away habitat at the same time,” said Karen Oberhauser, a restoration ecologist and arboretum director at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It’s like we’re running fast but staying in the same place.”
UW Health is the health system of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has more than 1,750 doctors and 21,000 staff at seven hospitals and more than 80 outpatient sites, according to its website.
It’s time for federal and state legislators to work together to make targeted public investments, close resource gaps, and address structural barriers to opportunity that have plagued the higher education system for decades and that have been made only more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and our national reckoning on racial justice. It’s time for a real conversation about equity-based funding in U.S. higher education.
Nick Hillman is associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Follow him on Twitter: @n_hillman
Some of the causes of the revenue declines, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, include shifts in how Wisconsin funds the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS).
The University of Wisconsin System President Tommy Thompson announced additional details today about incentives to UW students with nursing skills and other health backgrounds to work on the front lines of Wisconsin’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. These include qualifying criteria, deadlines and how students can apply.
UW Health has received its first shipment of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine Monday morning.
