Changes to federal funding directly impacts Wisconsin’s largest university. The National Institutes of Health is reducing the rate for its “indirect costs” grants to 15%, which goes into effect on February 10.
Op-Ed by John Gross,a clinical associate professor of law at University of Wisconsin Law School and director of the Public Defender Project.
Column by UW-Madison student Devin Mehta: At a state school such as my own, the wide range of political beliefs, backgrounds and ideas creates wide-ranging discussions and open worldviews. DEI initiatives are valuable on campuses because they force constructive dialogue that challenges existing viewpoints.
Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Register we’ve been here before, citing how the prior Trump administration all but disappeared the US Environmental Protection Agency.
“That apparently made him happy enough to try to disappear half the federal government this time,” she said. “As happened last time, lots of citizens and citizen groups are rescuing what they can. It’s organically fairly decent preservation practice – the rescued work is being duplicated in widely geographically disparate places, which lowers the odds that sheer bad luck wipes it out. The difficulty is discovery – who’s got what data [and] where? If, as I hope, US leaders someday return to a belief that government transparency is important to democracy, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together will be a huge lift.”
Indirectly, U.S. producers might raise their prices because they face less foreign competition for certain goods, Lydia Cox, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said during a recent webinar.
U.S. companies that use tariffed goods to manufacture their products might also raise prices for downstream goods, Cox said. For example, steel tariffs might lead to higher prices for cars, heavy machinery and other products that use steel.
Nicholas Hillman, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of the report, believes it’s critical to understand students’ geographical contexts.
He said conversations about higher ed access often revolve around “informational problems”—whether students know about different college options and understand the college admissions process. But his previous research shows most students, even if well-informed, choose to stay close to home for college. That’s why he wanted to take a deeper look at where residents do or don’t have broad-access institutions within reach.
“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare,” said Gregg Mitman, an environmental history professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Empire of Rubber. It provided free housing, education, and medical care, and sold rice and palm oil to workers at subsidized rates.
Urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that Madison is a tech hub with a university, which drives housing growth.
“It’s also driven by companies like Epic that employ thousands of people,” he said.
Dr. Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., a recently tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Leadership and Policy Analysis, exemplifies how personal experience can shape academic pursuits and social justice advocacy.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion has been removed from his position after an internal review found “concerns about financial operations and fiscal judgements,” according to the school.
Seventy-five percent of CWD-positive deer necropsied were in poor nutritional condition, according to Marie Pinkerton, clinical professor of anatomic pathology at the University of Wisconsin.
Two years ago, Dr. James A. Bigham, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, began teaching medical students on the issue, not just providing statistics around firearms injury but also arranging for instruction from firearms trainers on how guns function and why someone may want to own one.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison removed its chief diversity officer from his position after an internal financial review sparked concerns, university leaders announced Wednesday.
“Policy and markets in Europe have enabled renewables to drive down the shares of both coal and natural gas,” said Gregory Nemet, an energy researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
From 2005 to 2023, Madison stands out as a top performer in the Upper Midwest in addressing the housing shortage, according to a new analysis. Yet, Texas has 15 cities out-pacing the nation in housing stock growth. Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison urban planner, examines the report and offers takeaways.
Karen Oberhauser, professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying monarchs since 1985. She noted the number of monarch butterflies varies widely from year to year driven mostly by weather conditions that have become more extreme due to climate change.
“What we want to do is make the ceiling, or the top of those fluctuations, higher than it has been,” Oberhauser said. “Right now, the population is so low that there’s a chance that, in any given year, a catastrophic event could send monarchs spiraling to a point from which they might not be able to recover.”
Robert Enright, professor of educational psychology in the School of Edcuation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, explains the benefits of mercy on physical and mental health.
Nancy Wong is a professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said department stores are grappling with multiple types of challenges at the same time, including demographic changes and economic pressures affecting America’s middle class.
“Given the economic turbulence and challenges that we’ve been facing in this country, the segments that are most financially squeezed are the middle class — the core segments of the customers that most department store chains used to enjoy,” Wong said.
Greg Nemet, energy expert and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the president doesn’t decide what to do about spending that Congress has authorized.
“This could end up just being more of a power struggle between Congress and the president,” Nemet said. “But in the meantime, it does reduce some confidence in the funding and the expectations that would go to our state.”
Meanwhile, about five to 10 University of Wisconsin law students are preparing for a visit to the Dodge County Detention Facility, where people facing deportation are detained. Erin Barbato, director of the UW Immigrant Justice Clinic, said the goal is to be thoughtful in the information they share with clients about the Trump orders.
Back in summer 2013, paleontologist Dave Lovelace took some University of Wisconsin-Madison students on a dig in Wyoming. There, they found an ankle bone in an area where fossils typically aren’t found.
Tracking how widely norovirus is spreading can be challenging, because it’s not considered a “notifiable disease” that requires doctors to report infections, said Malia Jones, a public health researcher in the department of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison.
The Wisconsin Innocence Project operates as a legal clinic through the University of Wisconsin Law School. Since the project’s founding in the late 1990s, student teams have exonerated more than 30 wrongfully convicted people.
While many Wisconsin schools — including Madison College and the Madison Metropolitan School District — have already announced Tuesday closures due to the extreme cold, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is planning to “operate normally.”
What started as an impromptu lunch (at two square tables pushed together; the round table came a year later) proved to be such delicious fun that the group returned at 1 p.m., and practically every day thereafter, inviting new lunch companions, until it dissolved in the early 1930s,” wrote University of Wisconsin history professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the New York Times.
Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, knows his music knows no borders, so, alongside the project, he also released visualizers going over the history of Puerto Rico with the help of Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I’ve always wanted to take academic knowledge outside the ivory tower, and this project has allowed me to share our history on a global platform,” Meléndez-Badillo tells Teen Vogue in Spanish. “Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced. There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”
Since 1990, more than 1.4m new housing units in California have been built in wildlife-urban interface areas, which have a higher fire risk, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As of 2020, they found, there were more than 5m housing units in these areas across the state. In Los Angeles, a real estate data company identified nearly 250,000 homes “with a moderate or greater wildfire risk”, according to a 2024 report.
“Both ethanol and acetaldehyde are carcinogenic and when they touch the lining of the mouth, throat or esophagus, that can cause cancer,” Dr. Noelle LoConte, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told Live Science in an email. Like ethanol, acetaldehyde can also disrupt DNA methylation.
“If you don’t have people framing the house, installing the drywall, you cannot have the American electricians and plumbers come in and do their work,” said Dayin Zhang, an assistant professor in real estate and urban economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Aotus monkeys, a genus of nocturnal monkeys, are native to Central and South America, according to the University of Wisconsin’s National Primate Research Center.
Lim Kimya’s case is “part of a long-standing and unchanging mistreatment” that exiles and asylum seekers suffer in Thailand, Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told DW.
“What enables this to take place with impunity is an unwillingness to investigate or hold perpetrators to account,” said Haberkorn.
Dinosaur fossils discovered by paleontologists working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been determined to be the oldest-known fossils, presenting evidence that the species was in existence millions of years before previously thought.
For enhanced rock weather (ERW) to have a large impact by 2050, it will need to expand quickly, says Gregory Nemet, an energy scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Last May he and his colleagues published a study analyzing the combined potential of novel CO2 removal methods such as ERW, direct air-capture machines and the use of biofuels with CO2 captured from smokestacks. Between now and 2050 these methods need to grow “by something like 40 percent per year, every year,” Nemet says.
Audrey Girard is a food scientist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Girard explained why the effort has taken a long time. “We have other natural additives, but a lot of times they’re more expensive and not as stable,” Girard said.
Girard explained that a scientific study on rats — completed more than 40 years ago in the 1980s — first raised health concerns about the dye. “At high ingestion levels, rats can have adverse effects, like growing tumors,” Girard said.“At high ingestion levels, rats can have adverse effects, like growing tumors,” Girard said.
Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told “Wisconsin Today” that these types of reductions are becoming more common in local television across the state and country.
“We’re seeing local television stations experience less investment from their owners,” Wagner said. “Reporters are tasked with doing more stories for more newscasts, plus do stuff for the web, plus do stuff for social media, all in the job of also trying to chase down the verifiable truth about important matters for their audience.”
This “love letter to Puerto Rico,” as one headline about the album puts it, isn’t just entertainment. Working with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Puerto Rico: A National History,” Bad Bunny includes 17 mini-history lessons about the island, one for each song.
“[Bad Bunny] was really interested in having that sort of historical component, so people were not only listening to the songs on YouTube, but learning their history while they do so,” Meléndez-Badillo told the Los Angeles Times.
Expect more increases ahead. “If you are thinking about housing expenses, you probably shouldn’t rely on historical data on premiums and don’t assume that this is a high point that will be a flash in the pan,” says one of the paper’s authors, Philip Mulder, a University of Wisconsin professor of risk and insurance.
Anyone can show their love for the Wisconsin Badgers with this plate — it’s not just available to alumni. While the UW-Madison plate is the most popular, you can choose a plate logo for any of the other UW System campuses.
The annual donation associated with the plate is $20, less than the typical $25. Proceeds support scholarship programs at the selected campus.
Between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in fire-prone parts of California grew by 40 percent, according to research led by Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By contrast, the number of homes in less-flammable areas — such as downtowns — only grew by 23 percent.
The winter months’ colder temperatures and constant gray skies can really take a toll on your mood. We talk with Shilagh Mirgain, a psychologist at UW Health, about how to cultivate hope and optimism during this dark time of year.
Offering classes under the broad umbrella of “independent living skills” are people like Amanda Kostman, a family living educator with the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s Human Development and Relationships Institute.
About one third of all houses live within a mile-and-a-half of a forest, grassland or another ecosystem, said Volker Radeloff, a professor at UW-Madison who investigates wildfire risk. Scientists call this zone the wildland-urban interface. Researchers at UW-Madison, along with Radeloff, have been tracking this population movement towards natural spaces.
Of course, $3.65 is just an average. Egg prices are similar across most U.S. states but can vary slightly, said University of Wisconsin-Extension poultry specialist Ron Kean.
“I would say the Midwest tends to be a little bit cheaper, but, by and large, prices are pretty similar, because we can ship eggs pretty easily,” Kean said. “So, if they’re a lot cheaper in one place, people will probably ship (those) eggs to the more expensive areas.”
Multiple health systems have abandoned merger and acquisition plans in recent years following FTC interference—but only about 1 percent of hospital mergers are flagged by the government agency, according to an April 2024 study from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That study—and others—associated health system mergers with rising costs amidst dampened competition.
Antitrust expert Peter Carstensen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, discusses the soccer monopoly trial starting up in Brooklyn.
“Thinking about how the central part of the country or even the Gulf Coast states get cold air isn’t just thinking about what’s happening locally,” says Andrea Lopez Lang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You have to really zoom out and take a big-picture perspective.”
Others like Chris McCahill, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and managing director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative, point out one negative to the tax — is electric vehicle owners already pay more than those with gas powered vehicles when registering their vehicle each year.
“So now with this new surcharge, the folks will be paying the state twice to try and compensate for those lost gas tax revenues,” said McCahill.
A 2023 UW-Madison School for Workers survey found that over 10,000 undocumented workers perform around 70% of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms. “Without them, the whole dairy industry would collapse overnight,” the researchers concluded.
A confirmed case of mumps in Clark County, which has one of the state’s lowest rates of vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, has public health officials on alert.
Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine and the associate dean of Public Health and Community Engagement for the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, spoke with WPR’s Shereen Siewert to explain the symptoms of mumps and the broader implications involved.
Now, Patterson will take over for the time being. But Patterson is no stranger to Madison. In addition to serving in his current role for about six years, he’s also been captain, lieutenant and sergeant for the Madison Police Department. In total, he’s spent over 26 years with the department, his LinkedIn page indicates. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hearing aid technology has advanced significantly. Many of these devices are now AI-enabled, track other aspects of your health and can be purchased over the counter. We talk to UW-Madison audiologist Rachel Lee about the latest in hearing aids.
With the discovery of a new dinosaur species, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have challenged a long-held belief about where dinosaurs originated and how the ancient reptiles spread throughout the planet.
Freshwater organisms are sensitive to salt, so when too much road salt gets flushed into waterways it has lethal consequences, said Jessica Hua, an associate professor at UW-Madison who studies human influence on aquatic ecosystems. Even small amounts can build up over time.
A new professional volleyball league, known as League One Volleyball (LOVB), is starting this year. LOVB Madison Volleyball setter Carlini said being able to play professionally in front of her home crowd in The Field House at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a dream come true.
UW-Madison sociology professor Chad Alan Goldberg discusses researching the roles of economic anxiety, political alienation and social status in the rise of populism and considers impacts of Jan. 6.
The State Building Commission on Friday approved a new proposal to use unspent funds for a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other projects in the university system.
The embattled University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering building is back on track.
The State Building Commission unanimously approved the project’s new $420 million budget during a Friday meeting, a few weeks after Republican lawmakers stalled the project last month over transparency concerns related to increasing the project’s budget.
“(Middle class) is often equated with this idea that you’re financially comfortable,” says Megan Doherty Bea, an assistant professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Increasingly, more and more families do not feel financially comfortable.”
Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and disinformation, said that arguments about the alleged bias of fact-checking initiatives were made in bad faith.
“In any healthy democratic discourse, you want people offering evidence in public for what kind of statement and what kind of claims should be believed and what shouldn’t, and of course it’s always up to you to make a judgement on whether to believe what you hear,” Graves told Al Jazeera.
We know that pleasure, even non-sexual pleasure, is political because some people’s pleasure is encouraged, valued and protected, while others’ pleasure is shamed, criminalized or policed, says Sami Schalk, a professor of gender and women’s studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I think about how many times the police are called on people who are experiencing pleasure in public ― sleeping on a bench in the sun, BBQing, listening to loud music ― simply because other people don’t take pleasure in it,” she said.
