As energy-hungry data centers pop up all across Wisconsin and the nation, fusion startups, including one in partnership with UW-Madison, are working to bring a new energy source to market to meet the colossal need.
Although campus activity slowed with many students home for winter break, news did not stop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Between a conservative law firm filing a complaint on race-based scholarships at UW and a string of burglaries at the UW Law school, here’s what you may have missed while off-campus.
“They try to make you scared by making you feel like you’re the victim, and they’re calling to help,” said Rick Wash, professor of information science at the University of Wisconsin, in a phone interview. Wash is a computer scientist who researched the possibility of electronic breaches two decades ago. He then began mixing his vast technical knowledge to focus on the personal side of the scam.
“I began to realize the human factor was often the most critical factor of computer scams,” Wash said.
“Oh, no,” lamented Sarah, “Is it going to happen again?” She was responding to the possibility that her partner, Joshua, would lose his temper once again, which was a frequent occurrence. She did not trust him, and the result was anxiety, leading to sleeplessness, worry, and irritability. Research reviewed by Tomlinson and Mayer (2009) supports the view that mistrust can be accompanied by anger and fear. Joshua’s temper and Sarah’s response of anxiety were affecting their relationship.
Written by Robert Enright, Ph.D., a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research by Ben Fisher, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor who reviewed 32 evaluations of school-based police programs, found some students say they feel safer with police in their buildings while others say a police presence makes students more attuned to a sense of danger and some see police as a source of violence.
The village will be named for Madison philanthropists Ellen and Peter Johnson, who helped Agrace expand two decades ago and created an endowed professorship at UW-Madison dedicated to improving palliative care. They’re the lead donors with a $7 million donation, as they view the dementia village as a “kinder approach” to memory care.
The doors of a new academic building will open, three-year-old scaffolding is expected to come down, and designs are being drawn up to revamp a historic site on UW-Madison’s campus in 2026.
Upcoming plans for development projects at UW-Madison signal another busy year of changes happening on campus. In 2025, UW-Madison notably opened a new building that houses its new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence: Morgridge Hall, a privately funded $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility.
Dane County’s drug task force seized a sedan as part of a narcotics investigation, while Madison police seized $7,700 in cash in another case.
The task force is a collaboration of the Madison Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department with a focus on dismantling and disrupting drug trafficking.
One of the first signs of trouble came last spring, when the Trump administration abruptly moved to deport scores of international students, including a handful at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
University officials were alarmed, well aware that around 8,000 students, 15 percent of its enrollment, were from abroad. And they worried that the looming deportations might spook prospective international students, said Frances Vavrus, the dean of the international division at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on Chinese demographics, said during an interview with the Financial Times: “The decline in China’s fertility is inevitable, like a giant rock rolling down a hill. China’s one-child policy accelerated the process. It will be very difficult to move it back up hill.”
Former University of Wisconsin basketball player Freddie Owens is preparing to release a memoir next month that traces his path from Milwaukee’s North Side to the NCAA tournament and, eventually, a long career in coaching.
The book, “Echoes of Stark Park,” draws its name from the Milwaukee park where Owens spent much of his childhood and where he says basketball became both a refuge and a guide.
Elijah Gray was dismissed from the Wisconsin men’s basketball team in October due to “events preceding his enrollment at UW-Madison.”
Now, some of Gray’s activity before enrolling at Wisconsin has surfaced in a federal indictment as part of a federal investigation into point-shaving.
A number of University of Wisconsin schools are being recognized for their community engagement.
UW-Madison, UW-Whitewater, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside and UW-Superior are designated as Carnegie Community Engagement Classified campuses.
Bouncing back from the Iowa loss in the Big Ten opener, the Badgers defeated Maryland, 28-13, at the Field House last Sunday to bring their overall record to 9-1.
It was the UW’s largest margin of victory against a conference opponent since beating Northwestern in February 2024. The Wildcats will be Friday’s challenge at the Field House.
Last year, around 300,000 Wisconsin residents qualified for and used the enhanced subsidies, said Dan Sacks, associate professor of risk and insurance with the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It’s just going to be a lot harder for many people to get coverage,” he said.
“It is exciting to bring back something so impactful and reimagine it for a new audience,” said König-Tarasevich, a professor of flute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
According to experts, the average person who works for tips could save up to $1,300 on their taxes.
“But in practice, $25,000 in tips is a lot of tips to be receiving, and so very few people are going to find themselves in that situation,” said Ross Milton, an associate professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Some people who even who receive tips, might not really be saving anything because they may not really have too many people who receive tips, actually don’t have enough income to pay a significant amount of income taxes.”
Avtar Roopra’s research has effectively stalled since President Donald Trump started his second term and upended the federal research funding landscape. Agencies have cut projects, delayed grant reviews, fired thousands of federal employees who offer guidance to researchers and reduced the number of new projects getting funding.
“This is like the Holy Grail of epilepsy, what we’ve been looking for for hundreds of years,” Roopra said. “All of it is on hold. It’s extremely frustrating.”
Multiple states, including California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, have implemented similar “converse-1983” laws, according to the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, told Votebeat.
Anderson is a professor at UW-Madison and Edgewood College. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Oregon Area Food Pantry.
Experiments by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison show that viruses and bacteria behave differently in near-weightless conditions. In space, they develop genetic changes not typically seen on Earth.
Lead study author Dr. Phil Huss, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, noted that interactions between viruses that infect bacteria — known as phages — and their hosts play an “integral” role in how microbial ecosystems function, per the SWSN report.
States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”
Federal officials may be prosecuted if they “acted beyond the scope of their duties, violated federal law, or behaved in an egregious or unwarranted manner,” Bryna Godar, an attorney at the State Democracy Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, wrote in a brief explainer.
States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”
The other proposed amendment would prohibit governmental entities from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting or public administration, according to the resolution memo.
Bill author David Murphy, R-Hortonville, said the proposed amendment was meant to bring “merit, fairness and equity back to the state of Wisconsin.”
The first shipment of 29 wild turkeys was flown to Wisconsin on Jan. 21, 1976.
It was received at the La Crosse airport by about a dozen people, including DNR wildlife biologists Carl Batha and Ron Nicklaus, a few members of local conservation clubs and Tom Yuill, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specialized in wildlife diseases.
Vatsan Raman never expected he would send a research experiment to outer space.
“This is like a box that’s sitting on our lab bench one day, and the next day it’s on a rocket that’s going up to (the International Space Station). … It was really quite surreal,” said Raman, an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed a civil rights complaint against the University of Wisconsin-Madison on behalf of conservative students on campus.
The firm alleges the school is offering about two dozen race-based scholarships. WILL is asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate “race-based practices” on behalf of its client, the Young America’s Foundation.
The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff.
Now in its second century, the nonprofit faces challenges, though. The Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal research funding could limit the number of discoveries coming to WARF.
To better understand how microbes may act differently in space, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria, also called phages — in identical settings both on the ISS and on Earth. Their results, published recently in the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that microgravity can delay infections, reshape evolution of both phages and bacteria and even reveal genetic combinations that may help the performance against disease-linked bacteria on Earth.
“Studying phage–bacteria systems in space isn’t just a curiosity for astrobiology; it’s a practical way to understand and anticipate how microbial ecosystems behave in spacecraft and to mine new solutions for phage therapy and microbiome engineering back home,” said Dr. Phil Huss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s lead authors.
Her family still in Iran has chosen to join the latest wave of anti-government protests, which are largely focused on the country’s soaring inflation.
“There are very few people in the United States who can wrap their mind around an inflation rate of 42%,” said James Davis, a professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.
Franciska Coleman, an assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the First Amendment places firm limits on when speech can be treated as disorderly conduct.
Coleman said courts usually look for evidence of incitement – a call for immediate lawless action – before speech can be punished as disorderly conduct.
“Here, there’s no advocacy of lawless action, period,” Coleman said. “So, it’s hard for it to meet the incitement standard.”
Other categories of unprotected speech, such as threats or “fighting words,” also do not appear to apply here, she said.
In addition to his day job as a laboratory manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Corbett spends about 40 hours a week talking with other collectors, photographing plates and trying to grow the community on YouTube. His long-term project is writing a coffee-table book with every Wisconsin plate ever made.
“Data centers are a new issue that has not taken on a partisan edge in the public mind,” Barry Burden, a political science professor at UW-Madison, said. “This is likely to change because among politicians Democrats are more skeptical about data centers and Republicans are more enthusiastic about them. If this partisan divide continues or even becomes sharper, the public is likely to begin mimicking the positions taken by party leaders. But at least for a while the issue is likely to cut across party lines.”
If your impression is that there are more female students than male students at UW-Madison, you’re not wrong.
In 2025, the university enrolled almost 1,000 fewer men (3,800) than women (4,744) as first-year students. Also, according to data from the university’s office of the registrar, male students are less likely to stay at the university and less likely to graduate on time than women.
The Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame has selected William Lunney, Keith McCaffery and Neil Paine as its 2026 induction class.
Payne grew up in Sheboygan County and was the first of his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor of arts in zoology in 1961 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, master of science from Virginia Tech in 1964 and a doctorate in wildlife science from Utah State University in 1975 (dissertation on beaver).
Berndt received his MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. Since then, he’s traveled and lived in several different places and had several different jobs, including one as a taxidermist at the field museum in Chicago.
According to the most recent data, a University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers survey found 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms is performed by people living in the country illegally.
Children’s Wisconsin and UW Health have stopped providing gender-affirming care treatments to minors, citing recent federal policy changes.
Both are among the state’s largest pediatric hospitals. Advocates fear the lack of access to gender-affirming treatments could lead to negative mental health effects for transgender youth.
Red light therapy, sometimes called photobiomodulation, applies specific wavelengths of light (usually around 630 nanometers) onto your skin. These wavelengths can penetrate two to three millimeters below the skin, and cause positive reactions in the cells just under your skin, says Dr. Apple Bodemer, a board-certified dermatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
There aren’t a lot of high-quality scientific studies available, and many of the red light therapy studies are funded by companies that make red light products, which should be taken with a grain of salt, says Bodemer. But there seems to be enough evidence that red light therapy may be helpful for some people, she says.
Co-authored by Tony LoSasso, the Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Elections Research Center, noted, generally, there simply aren’t many districts that Republicans can win and that are “swingable.”
“There aren’t very many competitive districts, whether we’re looking at the period before this latest round of mid-decade redistricting or since some states have put new maps in place,” said Burden. “Either way, there just aren’t very many districts that are truly up for grabs.”
Written by Maryellen MacDonald, a professor emerit of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department (UWPD) is investigating a three-month string of four burglaries at the UW-Madison Law Building, according to a Wednesday crime alert.
The first burglary took place in late October, UWPD Executive Director of Communications Marc Lovicott told The Daily Cardinal in a statement. The most recent incident occurred Sunday. All four burglaries happened after hours, when the building was closed.
Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa and moved to Wisconsin in 1925. He taught game management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the first courses for it in the country. Leopold is best known for his collection of essays “Sand County Almanac” that explains the way the natural world works and ways conservation could be used to preserve it.
Quentin Riser pursued academia, earning a PhD and eventually joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, where he studies child development and family outcomes. Quinlan went into the financial world, spending nearly a decade at Principal Financial Group before becoming a financial advisor and later leading an insurance business.
“It’s designed to be a two-generational book,” Quentin Riser said. “The kids are going to ask their parents, ‘Mom, Dad, what is estate planning?’ And if the parents don’t know, they’re going to have to go look that up.”
To prove whether its methods work, the demonstration school would be required to participate in longitudinal studies through the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The school must also share its practices with other schools.
A charter school would be eligible for the designation as a demonstration school only if it is authorized by the Universities of Wisconsin’s Office of Educational Opportunity, which would select the demonstration school. Wittke said lawmakers chose the Universities of Wisconsin as the sole authorizer because it already has the infrastructure to support new techniques and conduct studies through UW-Madison’s education department.
It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since — the men’s and women’s hockey teams from the same school winning NCAA championships in the same year.
But in 2006, both the men’s and women’s University of Wisconsin hockey teams won national titles, and the teams were led by a brother and sister who grew up playing youth hockey in Madison.
tudents are on track to take classes in a new humanities building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall. And the athletics department plans to finish an indoor football practice facility next to Camp Randall Stadium this summer.
As those two projects wrap up in 2026, Wisconsin’s flagship public university also plans to break ground on a visitor and education center at the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, near Picnic Point.
“Rare earths” is a misnomer, as the elements are relatively ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust, according to Julie Klinger, geographer and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. But extracting them and refining them is the difficult part.
“Federal officers do not have absolute immunity for actions taken on the job but they do have some immunities,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The idea behind the concept of immunity for federal officers is to prevent a situation where states could grind the federal government to a halt by commonly arresting its agents, Godar said, but the protection is not absolute if the facts of the case support that the officer was acting unreasonably.
Federal courts have sometimes blocked state prosecutions under that provision, out of concern that state authorities are using their prosecutorial power to frustrate the federal government from legitimately exercising its own powers, according to Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Godar wrote in the Lawfare legal publication that federal courts have repeatedly blocked state prosecutions when the federal official was reasonably carrying out lawful federal duties. But, outside those circumstances, courts have allowed the prosecutions to go forward.
“In many cases, the federal officer may ultimately walk away with immunity. But not always,” Godar wrote.
The UW-Madison Police Department (UWPD) released images Wednesday of people it has identified as persons of interest in a series of e-bike and e-scooter thefts.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she came to Milwaukee with seven years of journalism and communications experience, entering into a role that champions local communities and participatory news media.
She was previously based in Kansas City, working at Kansas City PBS, and her work can be found in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison Magazine, Kansas City Star and more.
The awards are given annually to community members who embody “the values of service, equity, and justice that Dr. King championed.” Gift Akere, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, will be honored with an MLK Humanitarian Award in the category of “Youth Leader.”
Carrie Coon – a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks – was nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role on Television for her role as Laurie Duffy in “The White Lotus.”
The HBO program led all shows with six nominations, including best drama series.
Co-authored by rofessor in the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist who researches sleep at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved with the new work, tells Nature that she was impressed by the study. “Every time somebody adds to the list of species that sleep, it is a very important step for the field,” she says.
But, for comparison, she wishes the researchers had kept some of the creatures awake after inducing the DNA damage to their neurons. She wonders if similar DNA repairs might be taking place while the creatures are awake but not actively learning.
