Alev Kelter had just finished a snowboarding run when her phone rang.The call came on a December day in 2013, and it resulted in Kelter preparing to represent Team USA women’s rugby at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Wisconsin Democratic legislators are greeting the news that Gov. Scott Walker wants to freeze tuition at UW System schools for another two years with a rallying cry of sorts: Fund the freeze!“I think a tuition freeze is good for the state of Wisconsin and for students. However we have to fund the freeze,” said state Rep. Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, a member of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.
Cellectar, a publicly-traded company, was founded in Madison in 2003 by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jamey Weichert.
Dot Earth Blog talks to Jacquelyn Gill, a former graduate student at UW-Madison and now young faculty member at the University of Maine, about some of the pathbreaking work she did at UW and why it matters to this day.
Managing editor Deidre Green coordinates this year’s summer writing workshop program, an effort to reduce the academic “summer slide” for students. Her instructors include graduate students from UW-Madison. Green grew up in the Simpson Street neighborhood and now attends grad school at UW’s School of Education. She has worked for Simpson Street Free Press since she was in eighth grade.
Roelli credits John Jaeggi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research with helping him develop and perfect the Little Mountain cheese.
Scientists finally worked out what killed a group of the creatures stranded for millennia on an island no bigger than Disney World. Yue Wang and John Williams from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked for mammoth-related clues: spores from three fungi that grow in the dung of plant-eating animals.
Family stressors can take a toll on children and approximately two-thirds of youth will experience some form of childhood adversity by the age of 18. Research has primarily focused on how adversity at a young age can lead to mood disorders in adolescence, but most children exhibit resilience to adverse experiences. So senior author Dr. Marilyn Essex, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues followed 132 kids from infancy to 18 years old to search for a neurobiological mechanism of emotional adaptation.
For a precise definition, I asked an expert.Richard Amasino, a biochemist at University of Wisconsin, Madison, is also on the committee at the National Academy of Sciences, which produced a recent report on genetic engineering.
Here in Madison, a grand experiment is being carried out. Most of our professional and community theater groups have women in positions of artistic leadership.There are lots of reasons why that’s happened. UW-Madison has a great theater department, and this city boasts an outsized amount of artistic talent.
The horrendous tragedy in Orlando has prompted fierce debates about how to prevent such attacks – should there be more restrictions on gun ownership? Different military and diplomatic policies combatting terrorism?Many of these debates break out along partisan lines with seemingly little room for compromise and action. But there is something we can do – each of us, whether parents or policy-makers, Republicans or Democrats.
Zack Kemmerer is unexpectedly chipper and doesn’t seem bummed at all that viewers have yet to see him full-on conquer the American Ninja Warrior course.Nor does he feel any awkwardness about attending his own watch party for the extreme athletic challenge — even though he barely appears in the season opening episode his fans gathered to view at Union South.Kemmerer, a Ph.D. student in UW-Madison’s biochemistry program studying mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell!), says most of his run on the show, which opened its season on June 13, wasn’t just challenging — it was actually fun.
Wisconsin consumers widely agree that “local” food means food grown in Wisconsin, according to a new statewide survey conducted by faculty affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Extension, UW-Madison, and UW-River Falls. Food from Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, meanwhile, is not considered “local” by most Wisconsin shoppers.
Bike to the Library began in 2015 as part of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute’s “Climate Change Policy and Public Health” Massive Open Online Course. Bike to the Library Director, Terry Ross said he conceived of the idea as part of a larger effort to engage libraries with the important content of these MOOCs, beginning with “Changing Weather and Climate in the Great Lakes Region.”
Inspired by a Life magazine article about Frank Lloyd Wright, Gertrude Kerbis, then a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, hitchhiked to Wright’s Taliesin estate in Spring Green, Wis. Entranced by the rooms she was seeing as she peered through glass exterior walls, she crawled in a bathroom window and somehow managed to stay the night.By the time she awoke the next morning, she recalled in a short 2008 film about her life, “I had decided I was going to be an architect.”
The stress caused by internal stigma can evoke a biological response. According to Stephanie Budge, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, there is broad consensus in the research community that “minority stress” — including internalized self-hatred — creates massive physical health problems.
Op-ed by Kathy Cramer: “A job for life.” Those are the words Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is using to describe tenure. It may be a terrible tact to take for his state’s university system, but it’s a smart move politically.
The Materials Project has attracted more than 20,000 users since launching five years ago. Every day about 20 new users register and 300 to 400 people log in to do research.One of those users is Dane Morgan, a professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who develops new materials for a wide range of applications, including highly active catalysts for fuel cells, stable low-work function electron emitter cathodes for high-powered microwave devices, and efficient, inexpensive, and environmentally safe solar materials.
No one expected Back to School to be a hit. But the Rodney Dangerfield comedy—which saw the legendary comedian starring as Thornton Melon, a self-made millionaire who attends Grand Lakes University with his son, Jason, and becomes the most popular man on campus—ended up becoming the second highest-grossing comedy of 1986 (only Crocodile Dundee made more). To celebrate its 30th anniversary, here are some facts about the only film that ever dared to pair Dangerfield with Robert Downey Jr., Sam Kinison, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Four candidates, including two from UW-Madison, are being considered to head the new campus-wide initiative for cultural competency at the state’s flagship university.
Since the 17th century, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed microorganisms through the lens of a rudimentary microscope, humans have slowly come to appreciate that ours is a germy world.
Wisconsin’s Rebecca Blank and Michigan’s Brian Kovak (now at Carnegie Mellon) find that the share of single mothers with no earnings or welfare and not in school doubled from 10 to 20 percent from 1990 to 2005. If you include women with very low earnings and no SSI income, the rate goes from 12 to 22 percent. As work requirements spread, mothers who couldn’t find work lost benefits and were left getting by with nothing.
The case against Mr Barrientos will be presented by lawyers from Chadbourne and Parke, who said they will show evidence of the torture and summary execution of Mr Jara through the testimony of his widow, his daughters Amanda Jara and Manuela Bunster, renowned Chilean journalist Mónica González and Professor Steven Stern from the University of Wisconsin.
Why zebrafish represent a miracle for the economics of lab-testing?—?and why rats are overpriced. Maybe the biggest advantages of zebrafish, though, is the species’ expansive reproductive capacity. “One of the benefits is the number of offspring they can produce,” says Cara Moravec, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “A single female can lay several hundred eggs per week,” according to Sirotkin.
Here, via University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn, is their result in a picture: On the horizontal axis, we see the strength of the effect of minimum wages on employment. A positive number means that a minimum wage is found to increase employment; a negative number means it decreases it. On the vertical axis, we see the precision of the studies — a higher point means a study with a bigger sample size, indicating greater accuracy.So what does this graph tell us? The average effect found in the econ literature is an elasticity of about -0.2 as indicated by the vertical red line. That means that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would decrease employment by about 2 percent. So if we doubled the minimum wage — a 100 percent increase — we would expect to see the employment of young people go down by a fifth.That’s a small but real effect — a $15 federal minimum wage might throw a million kids out of work. We would have to balance that negative effect against the broad-based positive effect of raising lots of low-income people’s earnings. Balancing the good against the bad is necessary to make a decision.
“Naked protests in Africa have historically been symbolic forms of collective protest, generally by the poorest and most marginalised women in society,” says Aili Mari Tripp, Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Women have used these forms of protest throughout history and in many parts of the world, but especially in Africa.”
Northwestern Medicine and University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) scientists have identified a gene that causes severe glaucoma in children. The finding, published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, validates a similar discovery made by the scientists in mice two years ago and suggests a target for future therapies to treat the devastating eye disease that currently has no cure.
Schools like Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin are already piloting VR technology in specific majors to measure student experience outcomes, and while some experts believe the industry for “immersive experiences” will grow to be as big as the mobile revolution, cost and pairing between technology and mission may settle VR to be an enhanced professional training resource for students in STEM and military disciplines.
When a man drowned during a triathlon that Pat Hughes was also competing in several years ago, it was a life-changing moment for the shaken Hughes.“It seemed like a very preventable tragedy,” said Hughes, a 2012 Wisconsin School of Business graduate.
Academics have consistently found that making “gives kids agency” over their learning in ways that traditional classes often don’t, said Erica Halverson, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There’s also mounting evidence that making is a good way to teach academic content. “The fear out there is that schools have to choose between making and academic work, but empirically that turns out not to be true,” Halverson said.
The Ohio State University will start selling beer at its football games this fall.
Snapshot Wisconsin, as the project has been named, is “an unprecedented effort to capture in space and time the deer, bears, elk, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, and any other wild animal that lumbers, hops, lopes or slithers across the Badger state,” according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the school leading the charge on this project. “Snapshot Wisconsin aims to provide one of the richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.”
“Royal democracy is only possible because of him. It is not an exaggeration to say that without him, royal democracy might not survive,” said Thongchai Winichakul, a Thai scholar and professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Thailand’s political future is highly uncertain.”
An expansive study of employee positions, pay and benefits in the University of Wisconsin System will also touch on family leave policies that a UW-Madison report found are far less generous than those available at other universities.
They’ve never been a well-liked insect, but now more than ever most people want nothing to do with mosquitoes. A University of Wisconsin Entomology researcher is the exception. With the help of county health departments, Dr. Susan Paskewitz is actively tracking mosquitoes in Wisconsin that could be carrying the Zika Virus.
UW-Madison hopes to get approval from the Board of Regents on a couple of projects later this week.One of the projects is a $47 million renovation of Witte Hall. The university plans to replace heating and electrical systems, add new elevators and make other safety improvements, among other fixes.
Alex Kubicek, a UW-Madison grad, moved Understory back to Madison weeks ago after developing it with his team in Boston. The company’s hardware tracks weather events to provide better data for companies, and it’s returned after closing a $7.5 million fundraising round that included Monsanto’s venture capital arm. The lead investor, Wisconsin fund 4490 Ventures, had asked Kubicek whether they’d be willing to come back to Madison.
“The extent to which parents are tied up with these devices in ways that disrupt the interactions with the child has potential for a far bigger impact,” says Heather Kirkorian, who heads up the Cognitive Development & Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If I’m on the floor with a child but checking my phone every five minutes, what message does that send?”
While most smaller cities may never become information hubs, some clearly will. For the most part these will be either university towns such as Chapel Hill (home to the University of North Carolina), Provo-Orem (Brigham Young) and Madison (University of Wisconsin).
Fuzzing’s method of using random data tweaks to dig up bugs was itself an accident. In 1987, University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Barton Miller was trying to use the desktop VAX computer in his office via a terminal in his home. But he was connecting to that UNIX machine over a phone line using an old-fashioned modem without error correction, and a thunderstorm kept introducing noise into the commands he was typing.
According to the Oak Ridge institute’s report, Pennsylvania State University had the largest number of nuclear engineering degrees awarded in 2015, followed by Texas A&M and UT. Other top programs are located at the University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, University of Wisconsin, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Overall, the number of students enrolling in undergraduate and graduate programs in nuclear engineering were up by 23 percent and 5 percent.
world’s fastest stretchable, wearable circuit that could become the foundation for the next generation of wearable gadgets.This ‘smart skin’ could do everything from monitor your vitals, control your music, track your runs or even let you control your own home – all wirelessly.
Finalists announced Friday for UW-Madison’s top financial and administrative position include a vice chancellor from UW-Platteville and an official overseeing financial planning at the University of California-Berkeley.
Noted: It was through Games+Learning+Society and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory — a University of Wisconsin online learning research group — that Norton, a young developer and designer, ended up meeting the computer scientists Dan White and Alex Stone. And it was thanks to their exposure to the growing body of learning games scholarship that the three decided to start a for-profit gaming company.
How are you supposed to buddy up with your professor, when you’re just one of 300 other students in a lecture hall?
In addition to Maryland, the only other universities receiving the maximum of four Goldwater awards are Cornell University, Stanford University, the University of North Texas, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We accept that to err is human. Not so with machines. When our electronic counterparts fail us—whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence—we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues.University of Wisconsin researchers recently sought to test how we might get along with our future AI coworkers.
Since winning his regional bee in March, Jashun has been studying with Jeff Kirsch, a Spanish professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Century Foundation on Wednesday published a report that is critical of state policies that link funding of public colleges with measures of their performance, such as graduation rates and degree production numbers. The new report’s author, Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied such state-based formulas, argues that performance-based funding is rarely effective.
Musician David Teie composed music inspired by cats’ vocalizations and matching purr frequencies. “An independent study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and published in Applied Animal Behavior verified that Music for Cats resonates conclusively with its audience,” Music for Cats says on its site.
Twenty years after UW-Madison scientist Jamie Thomson began work to isolate human embryonic stems, research has advanced so far that the field is now poised to boom and create Wisconsin companies that could rival Epic, the Verona-based electronic healthcare records company with more than 9,000 employees.That was the optimistic forecast by three panelists who spoke Tuesday at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon in Madison.
Featured: UW-Madison commencement speaker Russell Wilson.
Featuring Susan Paskewitz:
Mosquitoes like to have a good time like anyone else, which is why studies have shown they often target beer drinkers. “There’s possibly something different about the way they smell to a mosquito,” Susan Paskewitz, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told ABC News.
Noted: James Johannes, professor of finance and director of the Puelicher Center for Banking Education at UW-Madison, says there are three forces driving mergers: an easing of government regulations, a search for better efficiency, and a drop in profitability for banks. He says in the past 15 years, the U.S. has gone from 14-thousand banks to just 6-thousand. A more efficient operation saves money and more assets means more profit.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Susan Paskewitz said similar efforts in Wisconsin would be futile, because there are no Zika virus-carrying mosquito breeds in the Badger state.
“We’ve never seen them here all,” Paskewitz said of the breeds. “All of the people who do any kind of mosquito surveillance work have never seen them here.”
And so we ask once again: should we rethink the value of fraternities on U.S. college campuses? Is it finally time to acknowledge these organizations are an anachronism at best and a breeding ground for intolerance and bigotry at worst?
The suspension of Sigma Alpha Epsilon for UW-Madison is but the latest example of an American college fraternity exposed for racially insensitive behavior.
Noted: Doctors diagnosed her with acute myeloid leukemia. Initially she was treated with chemotherapy, but in March, doctors at the UW Carbone Cancer Center performed a stem cell transplant on Denise.
Editor’s note: The Water Sustainability and Climate project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison collaborated with other groups to launch the Our Waters, Our Future Writing Contest in January. The group—including the UW–Madison Center for Limnology, Sustain Dane and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters—sought short stories reflecting visions for positive futures for the watershed. This is the winning piece.
The Badgers have once again snagged a recruit from the state of Minnesota. Nathan Reuvers announced on Twitter Wednesday night he has committed to the University of Wisconsin.
Noted: A second species of mosquito that health officials say may also carry the virus, has never been found further north of the state of Illinois.
“They’ve never been found here, but we are working with the UW to enhance surveillance this year, just to make sure that is still true,” McKeown says.
