In his 24 years at UW-Madison, Gary Sandefur has held almost every role on campus, except the one he is now vying for â?? chancellor.
Sandefur, dean of the university’s largest college, the College of Letters and Science, has been professor, program director, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, and interim provost. He is the only one of four finalists for the job working at UW-Madison.
Hundreds of students stood in shock as they watched fire consume the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house on Langdon Street late Monday and early Tuesday during finals week at UW-Madison.
It appeared the three-story building at 237 Langdon St. would be a total loss. All 25 residents of the house were safe.
Not long ago, forecasts for state appropriations to higher education were gloomy as the credit crisis, a slumping housing market, rising energy costs and unemployment, and sagging consumer confidence took their toll on state finances.
But the budget news emerging from many statehouses for colleges and universities has been better than expected. In many states, higher education has been spared the deep cuts being required of other state agencies. In some states, lawmakers are even providing increases.
MADISON, Wis. â?? A medical helicopter that crashed in Wisconsin did not have two pieces of safety technology the National Transportation Safety Board has recommended to prevent crashes, company officials said Monday.
Mike Allen, senior vice president at Denver-based Air Methods, said the helicopter was not equipped with a computerized voice system to warn of approaching terrain or night vision goggles for the pilot.
His company leased the helicopter to the University of Wisconsin Hospital for its Med Flight program that crashed Saturday night after dropping off a patient at a La Crosse hospital. There were no survivors in the crash that killed a surgeon, nurse and pilot.
The Brittany Zimmerman murder investigation is profoundly troubling on many levels.
Certainly, the fact it’s the third of a string of recent unsolved murders apparently involving strangers is disconcerting as it should be. Let us never be blase about murders in our community. But the Zimmerman case has shed further light on a significant trend in the Madison Police Department — secrecy. And this policy of secrecy is causing the public to lose confidence in a police department that is risking its credibility.
MADISON, Wis. — A federal investigator was in La Crosse on Monday as authorities search for what caused a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter to crash on Saturday night, killing all three crew members on board.
MADISON, Wis. — Madison firefighters battled a fire at a fraternity house on Langdon Street early Tuesday morning.
The blaze started around midnight at a three-story house in the 200 block of Langdon Street, near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Hundreds of students gathered outside and watched as the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity appeared fully engulfed in flames.
Steven H. Lipperer, age 39, passed away on Saturday, May 10, 2008, as a result of injuries sustained in a MedFlight helicopter accident. Since 2000, he was a Med Flight pilot for Air Methods Inc. at the University Hospital.
This past weekend’s crash of a Med Flight helicopter caused a tragic coincidence on Monday at the Badger Chapter of the Red Cross.
Dr. Darren Bean spent much time in recent months teaching health professionals about a new form of CPR. On Monday, volunteers from the Red Cross, who were taught by Dr. Bean, began teaching the public the life-saving technique called compression-only CPR.
As investigators comb through the shattered pieces of the UW MedFlight helicopter, they are asking one big question: could two pieces of well-known safety equipment have prevented this? The answer is maybe.
A company spokesman says the medical helicopter that crashed in Wisconsin did not have two pieces of safety equipment recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The smoke billowing from the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house on North Langdon Street was so intense, you could smell it eight blocks away.
One firefighter was injured, but no students were hurt.
The fire destroyed the house, according to a fraternity member. 25 students must now find alternate places to live.
Madison police officer Angie Dyhr spotted the fire around 11:40pm. She saw a burning glow from the back window of the white building, and thought it was a BBQ grill.
UW Hospital staff struggles to deal with the loss of their colleagues.
Mark Hanson, Program Manager for the UW Hospital Med Flight program, says it was their decision to ground their second medical helicopter until they feel they are emotionally ready to take flight again. That chopper was voluntarily grounded after Saturday night’s fatal crash in LaCrosse. Hanson says the staff is undergoing stress debriefing sessions and they’ll return to flight when they’re good and ready.
Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor is traveling the state, urging eighth graders to sign up for the Wisconsin Covenant. The program seeks to get kids into higher education.
In Rhinelander, Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton told students education is necessary to have good job prospects. She says every student should have some form of post-high school education if they want to have a family supporting job.
After months of negotiations, Assembly and Senate leaders emerged Monday with an agreement on how to repair the state budget. Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) says it will close a $527million hole in the current state budget and prevent government from operating a deficit.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
The city ‘s Community Development Authority now must decide whether to charge the full fee and use it for city revitalization efforts or cut the fee and reduce costs for WARF ‘s much-anticipated Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Dr. Darren Bruce Bean, age 37, passed away on Saturday, May 10, 2008, while serving others. He worked as a UW emergency medicine physician, a Medflight physician, and was the Level 1 Cardiac Co-Director.
A genre whirled out of the grist of urban pain and worn as a low-slung hat and baggy jeans has somehow slipped on clown shoes and taken up night classes in pantomime. Its dances are silly, its beats infantile, its rhymes lazy. I am sorry to report this, but hip-hop is no longer cooler than me. I’ve known it to be true for some time but dared not acknowledged it — until I saw Bo Ryan do the “Soulja Boy.” Bo Ryan is the men’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. He is old, he’s white, and he should have nothing to do with pop-cultural relevance. And yet there he is, online, dancing the Soulja Boy, an ongoing craze among young aficionados based on the song “(Crank Dat) Soulja Boy” by an artist of the same name. Soulja Boy’s Internet sales of his 2007 self-titled album have exceeded 3.3 million copies, the most ever on the Web.
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A Memorial Gathering for Fannie “Fan” Taylor, who died on April 15, 2008, will be held on Sunday, May 25, 2008, at 2 p.m. at the MAIN LOUNGE OF THE WISCONSIN MEMORIAL UNION, 800 Langdon St., Madison.
Rachel Meredith Hitch, 41, of Madison, died May 5, 2008. She attended the University of Wisconsin and was a guest lecturer in the Women Studies programs. She advised the university on a task force to help bring more accessibility to the Madison campus.
Madison – On April 2, in the light of day, the unthinkable occurred on a quiet street in Madison.
The murder of Brittany Zimmermann, a 21-year-old University of Wisconsin student, sent a shock through Madison, putting people on guard and on edge.
People like Kate Maternowski.
Mark Coyne gave liberally of himself, as an emergency nurse teaching thousands of students and in his strongly held opinions.
“One time he said to me, just in passing, A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle, ‘ ” said Todd Cole, a student, friend and colleague of Coyne ‘s for 20 years. “I look out and I think of all the candles he ‘s lit in the state of Wisconsin and it ‘s just amazing. “
The pilot of the crashed Med Flight helicopter, Steve Lipperer, was a calm, experienced hand at his work, a friend said Sunday.
Heather Grant, a friend of Lipperer and his wife, Dr. Desiree La Charite, said Lipperer worked as a pilot for at least two decades.
Dr. Darren Bean was always moving.
“He was one of those people who have a million different things they want to do, and they ‘re doing them all at once, ” said Dr. Paul Stiegler, medical director of Dane County ‘s Emergency Medical Services.
“He was a bright star, and he brought everybody into what he was doing, ” Stiegler said.
Chris Clark and Eric Hansen have much in common beyond the fact they’re highly regarded coaches at the University of Wisconsin.
Both are among the longest-tenured in their positions at UW: Clark has overseen men’s rowing since 1997, while Hansen has handled men’s and women’s swimming since 1999.
Both men have tremendous passion for the so-called “suffering sports” –such as crew, cross country, swimming and wrestling — which are defined by the prolonged, intense exertion involved.
A medical helicopter dropped off a patient and then crashed shortly after it took off on its return flight to Madison, killing the surgeon, nurse and pilot on board, officials said Sunday.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Adult women who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who were not breast-fed, unless they were first-born, study findings suggest.
“As a general group, women who reported they had been breast-fed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk,” Hazel B. Nichols, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
“However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women,” said Nichols, of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.
Quoted: Michael Fendrich, a psychologist who directs the Center for Addiction and Behavioral Health Research at the University of Wisconsin, said the White House report “overreaches” in some of its conclusions.
Putting food back in the freezer after it thaws causes ice crystals to grow, imparting the unwelcome crunchy texture and mildew-like taste of freezer burn. Now food chemist Srinivasan Damodaran of the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison has derived an edible antifreeze from papaya enzymes and gelatin. His concoction, which stunts ice-crystal growth, promises always-creamy ice cream and juicier T-bones, even after their third trip between icebox and table.
Of the four young American writers who emerged in the mid-1980s (the others being McInerney, Easton Ellis and Janowitz), Lorrie Moore certainly had the strongest gift and the least narcissism. Yet in her short stories, that gift is rather upstaged and overruled by a literary personality which makes a fetish of its quirkiness.
Ethanol is to blame for some of the increase in the price of corn to $6 a bushel from $2 a bushel two years ago, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin agribusiness professor Randy Fortenberry and graduate student Hwanil Park.
The study looked at the rise in corn prices paid to farmers from September 2006 to December 2007. It found that 31 percent of the total price increase was related to ethanol production. The remainder was linked to a combination of other factors – increased demand for food from developing countries, the shrinking value of the dollar and commodities speculators.
The interim chancellor at UW-Whitewater has been recommended as its next leader. Richard Telfer says he looks forward to leading the university where he has worked 23 years.
UW-Madison classes have come to a close for the year and finals week is quickly approaching. While some students diligently plan their study schedules, others already realize it will be a week filled with caffeine, late-night snacks and no sleep for nights at a time.
Four years ago, Mary Nolan of Davenport was young and somewhat winging it.
Weeks ahead of her graduation from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the journalism major knew she would leave the Midwest in June.
She had a dream to chase on the East Coast. She also had a job at a magazine. But that was it. Everything else was up in the air.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation wants Madison to significantly cut a $600,000 bond closing fee on a $150 million campus project, saying it is a nonprofit entity doing a project in the public interest.
MADISON, Wis. â?? A medical helicopter dropped off a patient and then crashed shortly after it took off on its return flight to Madison, killing the surgeon, nurse and pilot on board, officials said Sunday.
Skin game: First James Thomson created a controversy; then he resolved it. In 1998, Thomson became the first scientist to isolate human stem cells, which can develop into any tissue in the body and thus have tremendous medical potential. Researchers are currently working to figure out how to “instruct” these cells to replace damaged tissues. But the science has been bogged down in controversy, because until recently the cells could be harvested only from embryos.
Last fall, Thomson, 49, announced that he had caused a human skin cell to revert to a stem cell that was virtually identical to those found in embryos. The achievement could open the floodgates of investment. How soon might this bear fruit? “In my lifetime,” Thomson says.
MADISON, Wis. — Officials are beginning the process of piecing together what happened before a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter crashed on Saturday night, killing all three crew members on board.
The helicopter had traveled from Madison to La Crosse to drop off a patient at Gunderson Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse and was heading back to Madison when officials said they lost contact with the craft. Authorities launched a search on Saturday night and the crash site was found on Sunday morning.
More than 75 doctors, nurses, pilots and patients have died in medical helicopter crashes across the country in the past decade as the workers risk their lives to transport patients in need of medical care.
The reality of that risk has hit Madison, where three members of a UW Hospital Med Flight crew died late Saturday in a crash near La Crosse. It was the first crash since Med Flight began in 1985.
Quoted: Robert M. Hauser, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has researched retention rates and policy in the public-school system.
Quoted: David Drake, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology, has been spending considerable time with the birds in recent weeks during their mating season, and says the effort seems to be succeeding.
APPLETON â?? A February snowstorm prevented University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center “brain investigator” Richard Davidson from opening Appleton Education Foundation’s speaker series on early brain development.
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Now Davidson, the scientific community’s equivalent of a “rock star” for his groundbreaking research, will wrap up the four-part “Brain to Five” series at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Appleton East High School.
MADISON, Wis. — The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ultimate Frisbee club team, the Hodags, are returning to the Ultimate Players Association College Championships this weekend in a bid for a second-straight national title.
Town of Medary, La Crosse County: Randy Viner and his wife Deborah were in bed just before 11 Saturday night when Deborah heard a loud crash coming from the woods behind their home. “It sounded like thunder, but I’m thinking why is it thundering because it’s not raining that hard out?”
The next morning firefighters found the missing Med Flight helicopter a quarter-mile from their home.
The helicopter took off from the airport about five miles to the west of the Keil Coulee valley. It crashed into the trees as it came over the ridge, slid down the slope, and came to a rest against some trees -about halfway down the valley.
MADISON, Wis. — A University of Wisconsin Med Flight helicopter crashed on a journey from La Crosse on Saturday night. Three crew people were killed.
The helicopter disappeared on Saturday night and authorities launched a search. The crash site was found on Sunday morning.
A UW spokesman said that three people onboard the helicopter died in the crash. They were identified as Dr. Darren Bean, a physician, Mark Coyne, a registered nurse, and Steve Lipperer, the pilot. The three victims all lived in Madison, WISC-TV reported.
Many family and friends of the Med Flight crew members who were killed Saturday night near LaCrosse heard the tragic news for the first time. Many of those mourning are in disbelief.
All three members of the deadly crash were from the Madison area. Friends of the victims we spoke with on Sunday said they were more than just Med Flight workers. They were fathers, friends and mentors to the entire emergency medical community.
Madison Assistant Fire Chief Jim Keiken is in disbelief. “I was just sick,” he said. Keiken was among those who found out that co-worker, and friend, Dr. Darren Bean was killed in Saturday night’s crash. “I hoping the information was incorrect,” said Keiken. “And that you later find out he was safe.”
Saturday night’s crash of a medical helicopter was the first in the history of UW Hospital’s Med Flight program. For more than two decades, Med Flight helicopters have transported patients daily, with no issues.
Before the crash near LaCrosse that killed all three crew members on board, the helicopters took off and landed three to four times a day. They fly an average of 55 miles to transport patients.
“The aircraft we fly is the most popular make and model of helicopters used in EMS patient transport,” said Med Flight program director Mark Hanson.
A Wisconsin biotech firm is using home grown technology to produce flu vaccine faster and better. Paul Radspinner, president and CEO of Madison based FluGen, says flu vaccines today are manufactured in embryonated chicken eggs. “It can be time consuming, it can be messy, it’s ripe for contamination, there’s all kinds of issues than can and have arisen,” with that procedure, says Radspinner.
FluGen is built on technology, licensed through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and created UW Madison’s Yoshi Kawaoka and Gabrielle Neumann. “This . . . shows why Wisconsin is a hotbed for biotech right now,” says Radspinner.
Dane County residents should not doubt the community’s 911 services despite a controversial error involving homicide victim Brittany Zimmermann, the 911 center director said Thursday.
“We haven’t stopped operating just because of this call,” county 911 director Joe Norwick told County Board members at a late afternoon meeting Thursday.
Q. After such a tough winter and a rare January tornado, can we expect more thunderstorms and tornadoes than usual this spring and summer?
A. For better or worse, the past winter doesn’t offer many clues to the coming spring and summer, said UW-Madison atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor Jonathan Martin.
UW-Madison authorities are looking into a possible reverse hazing incident at a fraternity in which human excrement and vomit in a bucket were dumped on fraternity members.
No one was hurt in the incident, said Kevin Helmkamp, associate dean of students, and no one complained about it. The university began investigating when officials learned about it.
A California biotech company that had expressed frustration over Wisconsin’s stem-cell patents has signed a licensing agreement for stem-cell technologies with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
“We were able to work out our differences,” said Joydeep Goswami, vice president for stem cells and regenerative medicine at Invitrogen Corp. of Carlsbad, Calif.
Invitrogen, which announced the agreement Thursday, is one of the largest of 25 companies that have signed 30 licensing agreements for stem cells with WARF, said licensing manager Andy DeTienne.
Quoted: M. Jake Vander Zanden, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, in a recent study. The same study shows that the number of invasive species in the Great Lakes rose from zero in 1810 to 160 in 1999.
May 8, 2008 — An expert panel’s new quit-smoking guideline says more smokers would quit if their doctors offered them both counseling and medication — and if health plans covered the expense.
The official 256-page U.S. Public Health Service guideline comes from a panel of 37 experts who reviewed some 8,700 scientific articles — about 2,700 of them published since the last guideline came out in 2000.
What’s different? More hope, says panel chairman Michael C. Fiore, MD, MPH, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: There is breaking news, actually shocking news, about that botched 911 call made from the phone of a murdered college coed, Brittany Zimmermann. People in Madison, Wisconsin, are reeling. Did that bungled 911 call cost Zimmermann her life?
When television news reports about traffic crashes, fires or other injury-causing events feature interviews with police officers and fire department officials, viewers are more than twice as likely to hear prevention information that could help them and their families, according to a U.S. study.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin analyzed one month’s worth of late-evening TV newscasts from 122 stations in the nation’s top 50 television markets.
DETROIT — A medical doctor has been tapped to replace longtime president Irvin Reid as the head of Wayne State University.
A search committee Thursday announced the selection of Dr. Jay Noren, founding dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health, to lead the university.
From 1976-99, he was a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Later, he was a professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
Marguerite A. Christensen, age 90, died on Tuesday, May 6, 2008. From 1967 until her retirement in 1982, Marge was the head of the general reference section at the Memorial Library at UW – Madison.
Four people are vying to take over for University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley at the helm of the nationâ??s 10th largest university when he steps down in September. One candidate is Cornellâ??s own Provost Biddy Martin.
U.W. System President Kevin Reilly named Martin a finalist for the position on Wednesday, signifying that she has made one of the last cuts in the chancellor search.
â??It is a particularly exciting opportunity because of the quality of the institution and the fact that it is my Ph.D. alma mater,â? Martin, who graduated from UW-Madison in 1985 with a degree in German literature, stated in an email.
When Dane County 911 Center director Joe Norwick said last week that Madison police forced him to keep mum on the emergency call made from UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermanâ??s cell phone shortly before she was murdered, Madison Police Chief Noble Wray countered hours later with a press conference of his own, disavowing this representation.
Wray said he asked county officials to not reveal the contents of the call, not the call itself. But the blame game continues. On Tuesday, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk defended Norwickâ??s reason for initially denying that a 911 call had been placed from Zimmermannâ??s cell phone. Though her finger pointed back to police, Falk also said, â??There is no blame to lay.â?
MADISON, Wis. — A pair of Dane County Board of Supervisors committees held a special meeting Thursday evening to address lingering questions about the area’s 911 call service.
Officials were looking for answers Thursday on the controversy over how the Dane County 911 Center handled a call from the cell phone of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student on the day that she was found dead. Some officials have said the dispatcher mishandled the 911 call.
