From 2020 to 2024, preliminary figures show the state has seen reports of 495 manure spills and incidents, according to Kevin Erb. He’s the manager of the Conservation Professional Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, which trains manure applicators. Erb did not have figures on the amount of manure spilled, saying releases are often estimated.
Last year, just as she was finishing a teacher residency program through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, federal funding for the project was cut by the Trump administration.
“So we were in the spring semester and we were all like, are we going to be able to continue?” Lind said. “Are we going to still be able to get our teaching license? Are we going to have to pay this back?”
Consolidation continues to be the biggest factor shaping the number of farms in the state, according to Steven Deller, agricultural and applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If you’re in your mid-60s, it just doesn’t make sense to be operating a dairy farm with 150 cows,” he said. “That’s demanding work, that’s really hard labor, and you hit a certain point where you just say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
UW-Madison has picked its first leader of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, the initiative launched last fall to encourage more startups on campus and boost Wisconsin’s economic growth.
Lewis Sheats will serve as associate vice chancellor and executive director. Sheats previously served as executive director of Saint Louis University’s center for entrepreneurship and spent two decades at North Carolina State University as assistant vice provost for entrepreneurship. His first day at UW-Madison is Feb. 2
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
Co-authored by Tony LoSasso, the Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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.”
While conflict can feel messy, it’s not a sign something is broken. According to Hernando Duarte, farm labor outreach specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it’s a reality of farm work.
“In labor-intensive environments like farms and other agricultural operations, conflict between employees [and family] can happen,” Duarte explains. And on farms, that friction is hard to avoid.
“Conflict doesn’t have to be a negative thing,” Duarte says. “When handled properly, it can lead to stronger communication, better teamwork and long-term improvements and innovation.”
Paul Mitchell, chairman of the Agricultural and Applied Economics program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said many farmers weren’t prepared for the drop seen in soybean prices in recent years, and the tariffs compounded the situation.
“It creates a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “That’s the effect of these trade wars.”
In 2025, the Universities of Wisconsin had another packed year.
The fallout from the Trump administration canceling students’ visas, federal funding uncertainty for research, the closure of a branch campus and downsizing of another, the rollout of new policies faculty called controversial and campuswide budget cuts at UW-Madison are just a few of the moments the State Journal covered.
“Low wage folks were saying ‘the minimum wage is going up, but my groceries are going up, my rents going up. Like I don’t necessarily have more left over, right?’ And so, raising the wage is a big political deal, but it’s only one tool we have to help people deal with the rising cost of living,” said Callie Freitag at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Starting Jan. 1, Wisconsin will have a film incentive program and film office, both efforts to attract moviemakers to the state.
This means we might get a few more iconic big-screen moments in familiar places, akin to seeing downtown Madison in 1994’s “I Love Trouble,” Milwaukee County Stadium in 1989’s “Major League,” the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus in 1986’s “Back to School,” the many Wisconsin backdrops in 2009’s “Public Enemies” or the car chase scene filmed near Daniel Hoan Memorial Bridge in Milwaukee in the 1980 classic “The Blues Brothers.”
A common quip about nuclear fusion is that the technology is perpetually 30 years from deployment. Fusion research has not been funded to the same levels as other, already-realized clean technologies like solar, wind and fission, but new billion-dollar investments signify interest is picking up.
University of Wisconsin-Madison fusion spinoff company Type One Energy aims to bring nuclear fusion to the grid within a decade, backed by funding and a physics-based model.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin who studies extraction and resource frontiers, says these things deserve more scrutiny. “Particularly as we’re moving into a time where there is much more overt taxpayer-funded support of critical mineral mining and processing projects, the taxpayer does need to have quite a bit more information,” she said.
Established in 1960, the center says it provides “state-of-the-art resources, including supercomputers, research aircraft, sophisticated computer models and extensive data sets” to the atmospheric and related Earth system science community. It’s funded through the National Science Foundation.
Among other things, the center has helped improve early warnings in weather forecasts and air safety, the American Meteorological Society said in a statement.
Launched in February, the lab is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. It provides an opportunity for students from across the university to try emerging technologies — including AI, blockchain and virtual reality — and use them to potentially solve real-world problems.
“I love it because I see students progress remarkably,” said Sandra Bradley, the lab’s executive director. “When you give them a lot of … space and then hand them things that they need, the magic happens.”
“My take on the inflation story is that a lot of that is uncertainty,” says J. Michael Collins, a professor of public affairs and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A lot of that is, ‘I enjoyed a world better where I knew kind of what my rent was going to be in three years. Now, I have no idea how much my rent’s going to get jacked up in 2028, and that freaks me out.'”
Giving health testing and monitoring gifts comes with some tricky etiquette questions.
“There is some risk of offending,” says Evan Polman, a consumer psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied gift giving. It could convey that the recipient is somehow inadequate, he says.
If you are giving devices that track both sleep and physical activity, such as those from Oura and Whoop, Polman suggests highlighting the sleep monitoring—not the fitness.
When giving health-testing and tracking devices, he suggests buying them for yourself, too. “If we’re doing it together, I think it takes away almost all of the judginess,” he says.
“Part of President Trump’s power has been his ability to make many people in the United States feel seen and heard,” said Katherine Cramer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Telling them that the economy is doing fine, when their every day reality tells them otherwise, runs the risk of weakening that power. Particularly for people who aren’t super interested in politics—that is, most people—every day indicators of affordability like gas and grocery prices have a big effect on how well people think the economy is doing.”
With top grades, he was offered a scholarship to study in the United States.
After completing a preliminary course at the International Education College in Shah Alam, Akmal spent four years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science and economics.
This means Akmal is essentially equipped with the skills of a financial risk manager, trained to study the financial impacts of uncertain future events.
he Madison School District will partner with the UW-Madison School of Public Affairs to come up with a policy for implementing the state’s new ban on cellphone use during instructional time.
The ban, signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers in October, requires school districts to come up with such policies by July 1. The law includes exceptions from the ban for emergency situations, a student’s ability to manage their health and educational purposes authorized by teachers.
“It will help a lot—especially with cash flow issues—because by then, they will be finishing up paying for a lot of the inputs for the ’26 crops,” said Paul Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison Agricultural and Applied Economics Professor. “It will be nice to get some cash flow in from not selling your crop from the payments.”
When Brayan Riascos looks at the Wisconsin cattle herds, he sees untapped potential.
A third-year Ph.D. civil and environmental engineering student from Colombia, Riascos’ research looks at what most consider the least attractive part of dairy and beef cattle — the piles of manure — and he sees what could someday be the building block of a more sustainable plastic than traditional petroleum-based production.
Any plastic made from manure undergoes several chemical makeovers before it’s a finished product, and certainly looks — and thankfully, smells — nothing like its source material.
Across the country, many school districts are experiencing high vacancy rates and turnover in cafeterias — largely because of low wages, according to Jennifer Gaddis, a University of Wisconsin Madison associate professor who studies food labor and policy. A 2024 study found that school food service workers make an average of $3.16 less than custodial staff.
“It is much harder to not only improve meal quality, but also to provide a really caring, constructive environment for young people in schools when you’re dealing with that much turnover,” Gaddis said.
According to data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, organic farming in the state supports more than 2,000 jobs and results in about $424 million in revenue. Wisconsin is home to 1,455 certified organic farms, covering 245,333 acres, second only to California, according to the Wisconsin State Farmer.
For working-class parents, however, allowances are more likely to serve an actual budgetary purpose. Parents may say, “Here, you get $5 a week,” J. Michael Collins, a professor of personal finance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me, because that is all they can afford to give their kid to spend for fun. But that type of budgeting offers kids a valuable lesson.
“You want a healthy amount of skepticism in a democracy…You don’t want 100 percent believers,” said Dietram Scheufele, a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perspectives on science and technology. But he warned that skepticism in the US is “on steroids,” pushing people from the middle into polarized political camps and toward conspiratorial thinking.
Philip Mulder, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business, co-wrote the study. He joined WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” to talk about trends in home and condo insurance in Wisconsin — and possible solutions.
“Our collective expectations of fathers have shifted. We expect dads to be more involved with their kids,” says Allison Daminger, author of “What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life” and a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“At the same time, the expectations on breadwinning and dads hasn’t changed. We’ve added to their job description. I think younger dads are starting to feel that strain.”
To try to determine the probability of those name repetitions being a coincidence, Cary checked two databases of Chinese names and consulted with Yi Fuxian, a professor of Chinese demography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The name Qiu Daibing—or 邱代兵 in Chinese characters—turned out to be a relatively unlikely name to show up twice just by chance, he says. The surname 邱 alone, Yi confirmed to WIRED, represents just 0.27 percent of Chinese names, and in combination with the specific 代兵 given name would represent a far smaller percentage.
Rich Hartel, a food science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studies chocolate for a living. He said one of the most common ways manufacturers cut costs is removing a key ingredient from their chocolate.
“Cocoa butter’s probably the most expensive component in chocolate. So if you can replace some of the cocoa butter with a different, cheaper fat, then you’re saving money,” he said.
As final exam season starts, many University of Wisconsin-Madison students are increasingly turning to a new kind of study partner — one that never sleeps, charges hourly rates or judges a panicked 2 a.m. homework question.
Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT have become embedded in student life with 86% of students using AI in their studies, according to a study by the Digital Education Council, marking a rapid cultural shift in how students prepare for exams and complete coursework.
“I really saw a turning point during the pandemic when parents were really struggling, and moms in particular were really struggling,” said Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the division of labor in adult romantic relationships.
Daminger’s book, “What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life,” examines how gender shapes household duties and why women are more likely to carry the mental load.
Insurers “think that risk is at a higher new normal than they thought maybe 10 years ago,” said Philip Mulder, a professor of insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who co-authored the paper. “And they’re going to be setting prices accordingly.”
Supporters of isocycloseram said it could help with a pest that’s long shown resistance to insecticides. Russ Groves, an entomology professor and Extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the insecticide has been evaluated in Wisconsin to gauge its effectiveness at controlling the Colorado potato beetle. The pest eats the leaves off potato plants, resulting in serious yield losses.
“We’ve evaluated this tool alongside others, and we see that it’s a very good fit,” Groves said. “It performs well in controlling the insect.”
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, who leads the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees opening a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence as the right move to support in-demand majors and says funding the school won’t come at the expense of other areas of the university.
The technology is ready to treat at least some of these diseases, though. “There’s a whole toolbox now that can target arguably any part of the genome pretty precisely,” said Krishanu Saha, a gene-editing researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Leonard Polzin, dairy markets and policy outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said whole milk has benefited from the diet craze around protein, driven in large part by health and fitness influencers online.
“The more protein, the better. Consumers are all about that,” he said. “The other portion is kind of a shift towards healthy fats too. So for example, cottage cheese is having a real moment right now.”
For the first time in more than 40 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a new college.
Approved by the UW Board of Regents on Thursday, the “College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence” is set to open in July.
“We see the new college as kind of the next step,” UW-Madison Interim Provost John Zumbrunnen said. “We envision it as a hub around computing, data and AI on our campus, but really beyond our campus too.”
“If we want land to be available to new or beginning farmers, figuring out ways that the land can be affordable for them and still provide the income that the owner generation needs is key,” said Joy Kirkpatrick, a farm succession outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
Surrounded by tools and wires in his lab at UW-Madison, Luis Izet Escaño holds up a tiny object, 3D-printed with metal powder in a device he created. It’s a little product that could lead to something much bigger, and he’s crafted it through his startup company.
That effort is getting some help from a new program at UW-Madison, through which he gets some seed money from the university and one year of training, with the help of campus experts, to get his company out of the door and pitch it to real-world investors.
Rich Hartel, a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who teaches candy science to his students, wonders if freeze-dried candy “will just be a fad, but you never know if long-time customers will continue to come back to a type of sweet they didn’t really enjoy when it was chewy.”
UW-Madison has the go-ahead to start a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
The UW Board of Regents on Thursday gave UW-Madison permission to move the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS) out of the College of Letters and Science and transform it into the new college.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved the reorganization of the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences to create a new, standalone College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence during its December meeting on Thursday.
UW Board of Regents approved UW-Madison’s proposal to create a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI), school officials announced on Thursday
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) will be reorganized into the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence under a proposal approved by the UW Board of Regents Thursday.
Politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison received approval to separate the school’s largest and fastest-growing majors into a new college focused on Artificial Intelligence and computing ahead of next fall.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted unanimously Thursday to authorize creation of a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI) at UW-Madison, the first new academic division since 1983, when UW-Madison created the School of Veterinary Medicine.
For the first time in 42 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison will launch a new college.
In 1983, the college opened the School of Veterinary Medicine so students could learn how animals and humans relate.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is set to create a new college for the first time in more than 40 years.
The Board of Regents — which oversees UW-Madison and Wisconsin’s 12 other public universities — approved a proposal Thursday to establish the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
A study led by Andrea Hicks, the director of sustainability education and research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, yielded similar results, concluding that single-serve coffee pods have a similar environmental impact to drip-filter and French press coffee.
“I was surprised when we first found this, after reading all of the popular press saying that single serve coffee pods were terrible for the planet,” Dr. Hicks said. “It seems the public has a hard time believing this, as well.”
John Miller, who previously served on the UW Board of Regents and several national boards and commissions, has been appointed secretary and CEO of the state’s top economic development agency, Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday.
Benjamin, who graduated from Vassar College and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin, made her novel debut in 2014 with The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long-listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
AI-generated tracks already make up nearly one in five uploads on some platforms, said Jeremy Morris, a media and cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, raising concerns about royalty dilution and algorithmic bias.
“Streaming is the new record-store shelf,” Morris told Axios, adding that algorithms now determine which artists get the best placement.
