University of Wisconsin System interim President Tommy Thompson plans to resign from the position March 18.
The former Wisconsin governor took on the role July 1, 2020, after being hired that June by the system’s Board of Regents. Thompson has been filling the void after a failed search for a replacement for former UW System President Ray Cross, who retired in 2020 after serving as president since 2014. Thompson was 78 at the time of being hired for the interim role.
UW System interim President Tommy Thompson is resigning from his post, effective March 18.
He announced his impending departure to the UW Board on Friday, as the search committee tasked with finding a permanent president anticipated it would name a hire sometime in February.
Ellen Samuels has spent a lot of hours in loud, cramped MRI machines.
She said medical personnel would give her these “little headphones” to play music, but the sound of banging metal coils and vibrating electrical pulses all but muted that music.
So to pass the time, she would craft poems in her head. Without the ability to jot them down, she imagined haiku because the five-seven-five-syllable format was easier to remember.
Quoted: “This has gotten worse, not better,” said Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication whose research focuses on the functioning of American democracy. “I think we had a moment a year ago to try to push the reset button on how we think about democratic elections, and instead, we kept playing.”
“It’s made it convenient for people who want to doubt the election to cling to that — and that was part of what motivated the insurrectionists,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison.
A new program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will give youth in three Wisconsin counties the chance to work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension to explore post-high school educational and work opportunities.
A class of fourth graders from Green Bay public schools recently submitted questions about renewable energy and the environment to WPR’s “The Morning Show.”
Greg Nemet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, joined the show to answer those questions.
“(Evers) has resources to do things that I think were not expected and are available without him having to raise taxes to make it possible,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The fact that he is basically in sole control of distributing the federal COVID relief funds means that he’s satisfying a lot of different constituencies heading into the 2022 midterm elections without paying the price of being branded as a liberal Democrat who has raised taxes to make that happen.”
Despite a federal effort to expand lung cancer screenings to more individuals, research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows Black and Hispanic individuals were still less likely to be eligible for screenings than white counterparts.
Noted: If you’re an aspiring content creator and you want to learn how to make YouTube video thumbnails, attract sponsorships or gain more followers, then Muaaz Shakeel is your guy.
As Shakeel’s freshman year of college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was approaching, he decided he wanted to give content creation another try. This time, he took it seriously, he said, and taught himself everything he needed to know about being a YouTuber.
Noted: Bubolz, Christenson, 87, and Falk, 70, each earned law degrees at the University of Wisconsin but took different paths to affect conservation in the state.
Valentin Picasso, an agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said researchers in his field have known for a long time that planting perennial crops in farm fields has a long list of environmental benefits.
The plants’ year-round presence protects the soil from erosion and helps absorb nutrients that would otherwise runoff into lakes and rivers. The forages, which are used for livestock feed, also create an environment for increased biodiversity and can even help fix carbon into the soil, mediating the effects of climate change.
“We’ve shown, in looking at long term research here in Wisconsin, that the more diversity we have in a cropping system, the more resilient it is to weather extremes like drought. And we’ve also shown that the more perennials in the system, we have more stability in production,” Picasso said.
Noted: With a new building, the Burlington Area School District needed a new middle school principal. Nick Ryan’s the man for the job.
Before landing in Burlington, Ryan taught in Oconomowoc and Watertown. After receiving his master’s degree from UW-Madison, he ventured back to his birth state, Wyoming, to serve as an assistant principal before taking a similar job back in Watertown.
Embedded within a four-decade-long endeavor to document the history of cartography is a deceptively simple question: What is a map?
In a world where most people interact with maps almost daily, pulling them up on their smartphone to effortlessly chart a path through the lattice of streets that lie between Point A and Point B, the map, at first glance, is a tool.
But ask a generations-spanning team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison what a map is, and they’ll give you a more complex answer. Maps are more than a flattened rendering of the land around us, said Matthew Edney, a senior scientist at UW and a professor of geography at the University of Southern Maine.
“They’re cultural documents,” he said. “They’re social instruments.”
Noted: Blumenfeld, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has been involved in the Madison Jewish community for most of her adult life. She is a former president of the Jewish Federation of Madison and served as a board member there for 17 years.
We Are Here: Local Mapmakers Explore the World That Connects Us is an exhibit that was developed by the UW Madison Cartography Lab and currently showing at the Overture Center until January 16th. The exhibit features work from both current students and alumni from their current places of employment and aims to let people know that Madison is a hub and important place of cartography training.
List includes:
April 16: A Johnson & Johnson vaccine update and vaccinating children
Dr. Jim Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, explained why distribution was paused for one type of COVID-19 vaccine, and expanding vaccination eligibility to teenagers and younger children.
June 25: The roots of ‘critical race theory’
Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita at the UW-Madison School of Education, and John Witte, a professor emeritus at the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, discussed the academic origins and underpinnings of critical race theory.
Oct. 29: Ground rules for the Rittenhouse trial
Lanny Glinberg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and a former prosecutor, explained pretrial rulings made by a Kenosha Circuit Court judge in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse and legal requirements of a self-defense argument.
Quoted: At the beginning of the pandemic, the rate of inflation was almost zero and prices were falling, said Dr. Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
In response, the government passed robust support packages — including stimulus checks, enhances unemployment benefits and tax cuts — to boost spending. The spending those programs created was concentrated more on goods than services, Chinn said.
“We have kind of a weird time where people have shifted more towards buying goods and we get a lot of our goods from China and abroad,” Chinn said. “So that means you have this collision, at least in the goods sector, of enhanced demand and not quite enough supply to keep up. And what happens is prices go up. Supply and demand.”
Wisconsin families may have received their last Child Tax Credit payment for a while, as Congress has missed its year-end deadline to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better framework.
The roughly $2 trillion package would have reauthorized the expanded Child Tax Credit through 2022. Parents received their last credit on Dec. 15, and Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said to get the rest of the aid, they’ll need to file their income tax returns for 2021.
“So, there’s still another $1,500 or $1,800, depending on how old the child is, that will come to them once they file their taxes this next spring,” he said.
While the latest surge of coronavirus cases has interrupted winter exhibition game plans, several former Wisconsin Badgers are training and vying for roster spots on Olympic hockey teams.
In an aquatic lab in Madison, four juvenile nurse sharks are living up to their name. They’re providing treatment for COVID-19.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that antibody-like proteins from sharks are highly effective at neutralizing coronaviruses, according to a new study published this month.
Nurse sharks (Ginglymostomatidae) are slow-moving, bottom-dwelling predators that stalk prey in warm shallow waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In a new study published in Nature Communications, scientists suggest the sharks could lend a fin in a new, more effective treatment for Covid-19.
Quoted: “If you’re a virus and you turn off the innate immune system, it’s like a thief cutting off the alarms in a bank in order to sneak in,” said Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the department of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.
The latest COVID-19 wave has hit the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball program.
UW officials announced that the Badgers’ game set for Thursday night against George Mason has been canceled because of positive COVID-19 tests in the UW program.
University of Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh has tested positive for COVID-19 and will not travel to Las Vegas for UW’s bowl game.
McIntosh must quarantine for 10 days.
“I would encourage everyone to follow the advice of medical professionals and get vaccinated, boosted, tested and wear a mask,” McIntosh said. “Those mitigation measures may not keep us from contracting COVID, but there’s a good chance they will keep us from having a severe outcome.”
The latest COVID-19 wave that is sweeping across the University of Wisconsin campus has affected the UW football team.
Multiple sources close to the program told the Journal Sentinel Saturday both players and staffers tested positive in recent days and that the Badgers would be short-handed when they face Arizona State Thursday in the Las Vegas Bowl.
Bryson Williams’ life changed in 2019.
The young nose tackle was preparing for his sophomore season that summer when he learned his application to the University of Wisconsin School of Business had been denied.
“That was the eye-opener for me,” Williams acknowledged. “I said: ‘Let’s get working. Let’s get going.’”
Noted: Nearly 12,000 people gathered in the University of Wisconsin Field House to hear Desmond Tutu in 1998 and gave him a “thunderous standing ovation,” according to a Milwaukee Sentinel article from the time.
Speaking about racism toward Wisconsin’s Native American population, Tutu urged the crowd to “be committed to racial justice here as you are committed to racial justice in South Africa.”
Tutu, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize four years earlier, also detailed why Americans should not support apartheid, calling it “as evil, as unacceptable, as immoral as Nazism.” He encouraged people to see each other as brothers and sisters and to find strength in diversity.
“Brothers and sisters sometimes disagree, and disagree violently, but they still remain brothers and sisters,” he said, according to the Milwaukee Journal.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that running for office is a remedy “as long as it is done in the spirit of genuine public service and not merely to implement a dogmatic agenda.”
He notes: Volunteering on local boards and commissions is “an underappreciated way to contribute and see what good is happening in the public sphere.”
Noted: “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”: In this franchise reboot, Carrie Coon plays the daughter of OG (original Ghostbuster) Egon. After he dies, Coon, who got her start at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Madison-area theater, brings her kids to his rural Oklahoma house and discovers the ghosts are coming back.
“Enemies of the State”: Oscar-winning documentarian and University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Errol Morris is executive producer of this true tale of a family that caught up in intrigue when their hacker son is targeted by the federal government.
Noted: Another striking example is the singing shawls made by the Karen people of Myanmar and northern Thailand, says Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These woven garments, so named because they’re worn at funeral ceremonies where mourners sing around the clock for several days, sometimes have a fringe made from the shiny, iridescent elytra, or hard outer wings, of jewel beetles. Angus, who grew up in Canada, had never seen anything like it. “I really had trouble believing that it was real,” she says.
The discovery inspired Angus to start incorporating insects into her own work. Her first installation was at a storefront gallery in Toronto, where she arranged hundreds of weevils into a wallpaper-like pattern on the walls. When people walked up to take a closer look, Angus says, “literally, I saw them take a step back as they realized the wallpaper was composed of insects.” The piece created tension, she says, between what people expect when they see a pattern they associate with domestic spaces and the realization that the pattern is composed of bugs, which most people don’t like to find in their homes.
More than 1 million metric tons of salt is flowing into Lake Michigan each year, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings come as the state has been making significant strides to reduce salt use on roads to curb pollution.
Researchers examined past and current water data on the amount of salt flowing into the lake from 234 rivers and streams, according to Hilary Dugan, the study’s lead author and assistant professor for the Center for Limnology at UW-Madison.
“There’s a tremendous amount of salt going into the lake each year,” said Dugan. “But because of the volume of Lake Michigan, that concentration is still pretty low.”
Quoted: In Wisconsin, there were more deaths than births for the first time since the state began keeping vital records, said demographer David Egan-Robertson of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It’s just been a complete sea change in terms of how we view the population,” Egan-Robertson said.
About 1,000 University of Wisconsin students working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic will be eligible for a new tuition incentive.
The University of Wisconsin system will offer healthcare students new incentives for working on COVID-19 front lines.
President Tommy Thompson announced Wednesday that a thousand students will be eligible for a $500 tuition incentive for working in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
Quoted: Recruitment and retention has always been difficult in corrections due to grueling work conditions and lower pay, according to Jirs Meuris, assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“You have a job that’s already difficult to get people to apply to, to join and then to retain those people. And then you add a labor shortage, as well as a pandemic, that’s going to make that job even harder to do,” said Meuris.
Interview with Andrew Nine, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Astronomy
We hear from a graduate student working to learn, and tell, stories of indigenous people who attended and worked at UW-Madison — stories that have so far been missing from the university archives.
Noted: Jeff Sindelar, associate professor in the meat and science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees 100% with the European influence when it comes to Wisconsin’s sausage skills.
It started with people with strong meat-processing skill sets putting down roots here, but having people who wanted to purchase those foods provided a sustainable market throughout the generations.
Wisconsin was also well-positioned geographically to help carry on those traditions, Sindelar said. Being located between the large population centers of the Twin Cities and Chicago, the latter with its famous stockyards, brought railways to Wisconsin.
Noted: Abrams said his organization also is working with the University of Wisconsin System to provide a $500 tuition credit to UW students who work in a health care facility over winter break, which is typically a month in length.
University of Wisconsin System officials have dramatically increased salary ranges for top leaders, giving them more leverage as they search for the next system president and UW-Madison chancellor.
The state Legislative Audit Bureau released its annual financial audit of the University of Wisconsin System Tuesday.
This holiday weekend, AAA expects over 100 million Americans to travel. But state health leaders urge unvaccinated people to reconsider.
“If they’re not [vaccinated], really, it’s important that folks do not try to gather,” Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
According to the UW Health Chief Quality Officer, only a group of people who are fully vaccinated with a booster shot should get together during Christmas time.
Quoted: “If you’re vaccinated and boosted, holiday celebrations for the most part pose really low risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said.
For unvaccinated people, that’s not the case. If someone gets vaccinated or boosted now, they won’t be fully protected by Christmas Day, but Pothof said some protection is better than none.
“The best day to get your booster shot, if you haven’t gotten it, is today, as soon as possible,” Pothof said.
Quoted: “We’ve entered a convergence of timing here of cases are rising,” said. Dr. Dan Shirley, an infectious disease physician with UW Health. “There’s this kind of variant question, and obviously the holiday season is an important time to get together.”
A study released by UW-Madison economist Noah Williams says eliminating the personal income tax and raising the sales tax would jump start Wisconsin’s economy.
Noted: Zuckerman dedicates nine pages to Jon Wolff, an mRNA pioneer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Medicine. In 1990, Wolff and several colleagues published an article about “the first successful use of mrna” that could be used as a vaccine, as it ultimately was for Pfizer and Moderna.
Noted: A recent count by Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that “books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three-quarters of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” In other words, vegetables, animals, monsters, and aliens had more visibility in books than brown or black characters.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents has approved increasing salary ranges for top university positions in order to match ranges at peer institutions. The vote Monday came after UW System interim President Tommy Thompson said he favors smaller, successive increases for top executive pay ranges.
Noted: Written by Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and faculty co-director of the Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.
Noted: “Just Be Claus” is Joosse’s 55th book published for kids. Originally from Grafton, she started telling stories in grade school and later studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After having her own children, she was inspired by them to write children’s books.
The Wisconsin Badgers are NCAA volleyball champions. Finally.
In five neck-and-neck sets, No. 4 Wisconsin defeated No. 10 Nebraska, securing the national title in women’s volleyball.
Noted: Marisa Moseley is in her first season as the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. She came to Madison from Boston University, where she was head coach for two seasons. She led the Terriers to their first winning season in five years and was named Patriot League Coach of the Year. Moseley was an assistant coach for nine years under Coach Gino Auriemma at the University of Connecticut, a national women’s basketball powerhouse, following assistant coaching stints at Denver and Minnesota. She played for Boston University from 2000-2004.
Quoted: The U.S. last experienced rampant inflation four decades ago. “We have very short memories,” says Steven Deller, an economist in the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. “We don’t remember what it was like during the 1970s and early 80s, so this is unusual.”
In a recent analysis, Menzie Chinn, an economist at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, writes that inflation averaged just 1.7% in the last decade, at times “raising concerns that inflation was too low.”
But while the current inflation might have first looked like the economy playing catch-up after prices tumbled early in the pandemic, it has since “overshot the trend,” Chinn adds. Big-ticket purchases — cars, appliances and other so-called durable goods — are showing the sharpest increases, Chinn writes on his blog Econbrowser. High real estate prices and rental costs have also been a factor.
Antibody-like proteins found in a shark’s immune system could be a natural COVID killer that not only prevents the virus that causes it, but also different variants – such as Omicron that is currently spreading across the globe.
The proteins, known as VNARs, are one-tenth the size of human antibodies, making them small enough to ‘get into nooks and crannies that human antibodies cannot access,’ Aaron LeBeau, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of pathology who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
Antibody-like proteins developed from the immune systems of nurse sharks can prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 from infecting human cells, a University of Wisconsin researcher reports.
The first time professor Elizabeth Bearden asked the University of Wisconsin-Madison for permission to teach remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she heard back in three days.
It was fall 2020. Bearden’s fears about contracting the virus were as high as ever.
Quoted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said stormy days aren’t that rare of an occurrence at this time of the year for the state.
“Even in a normal year, under perfectly normal circumstances, we’d have a nice progression of pretty stormy days, followed by a couple of clear days, followed by stormy,” he said. “But there are a couple of things that might be fueling a little bit of an extra punch for these things.”
Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute for Climatic Research at UW-Madison, said the amount of time where tornadoes are a risk for the state is only going to grow.
“On the whole, we’re not sure how (tornadoes) are going to change in the future, whether they’re going to become more intense, less intense, more common, less common,” he said. “But in a warmer climate, we’ll start to see conditions more favorable for tornadoes earlier in the year, in April or May, and then becoming more common in the fall through November.”
Quoted: People are quitting their jobs at nearly twice the rate they did before the pandemic. And they’re not in a rush to come back, Michael Childers, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business professor, said.
“Workers are more selective and have that opportunity right now based on the job market. And that almost becomes self-fulfilling. It’s sort of this sustaining cycle that we’re in,” Childers said at Tuesday’s event.
Quoted: Jeff Sindelar is a meat specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension. He said most of the price increases have been in fresh meat products, with more processed items like hot dogs or lunch meat seeing small price growth or none at all.
But Sindelar said the meat industry is “too dynamic” to clearly point to the factor that is driving up prices.
He said farmers are facing increased costs to raise animals. But price changes are more likely to come from the processing companies, which have a greater influence on what consumers pay for products. Sindelar travels the state to work with all sizes of meat processors, and he said they’re seeing higher production costs, too.
“Regardless of where I go, I get the same response: they can’t hire enough people, they have open positions. When they’re trying to produce products, it’s taking them seven days to produce five days worth of product,” Sindelar said. “So 20 to 25 percent more resources to produce the same amount of product as they once did.”
Mark Stephenson, UW-Madison’s director of dairy policy analysis, said mixed market signals for dairy farmers could be keeping prices from increasing as rapidly as other food groups.
“Our future markets are showing that we would expect higher (commodity) prices over the next several months. But we’ve also had a few reports that are kind of pulling back on those reigns a little bit. One of them are the stocks reports,” Stephenson said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has reached the Final Four of the women’s NCAA volleyball tournament for the third straight season.
No. 4 Wisconsin will face the No. 1 Louisville on Thursday evening. The other semifinal match features No. 3 Pittsburgh and No. 10 Nebraska. The winners will play for the championship Saturday.
