“If you are a consumer worried about what’s going to be happening to your food, housing or health care expenses, you might start to cut back on the categories that are less essential or in the categories where you have options,” said Tessa Conroy, associate professor and economic development specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s more uncertain this year somewhat because of the government shutdown but also because of some other factors moving around in some of these markets,” said Jeff Hadachek, assistant professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Generally, I anticipate prices will be higher, but the question is: ‘How much higher?’”
Tomas Dodds, journalism professor and founder of the Public Media Tech Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hopes to help local journalists understand the implications of AI in the newsroom by providing a variety of resources, such as training sessions and workshops.
“In the newsroom, you don’t know how your colleagues are using AI,” Dodds said, adding that the Public Media Tech Lab would facilitate discussions in the newsroom where coworkers could disclose how they use it and create AI usage policies from these discussions.
Families across the country are asking that same question when it comes to childcare, as the yearly costs for daycare are becoming comparable to a year’s rent in many places. How did childcare become so expensive, and how might everyone benefit if the government provided more support to parents? Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Jessica Calarco, and Senior Fellow at the Think Tank Capita Elliot Haspel are here to help Brittany find out.
A new collaboration between UW-Madison, Microsoft, and TitletownTech is set to boost scientific research in Wisconsin. The partnership will leverage advanced AI tools to help researchers tackle major challenges more efficiently.
QTS, the company planning to build a data center in the DeForest area, on Friday announced a $1.5 million partnership with UW-Madison.
The money will go towards a new research initiative focused on data center sustainability.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, students almost immediately found uses for the new technology, sometimes over the objections of their teachers. But whether schools choose to ban or embrace it, AI has become a part of everyday life for students.
QTS Data Centers is partnering with the University of Wisconsin–Madison to advance sustainable digital infrastructure.
The initiative, Advancing Data Center Sustainability, involves a $1.5 million investment from QTS, aimed at driving innovation in responsible data center development.
QTS Data Centers is partnering with University of Wisconsin-Madison to invest $1.5 million in a new research initiative.
The new initiative, Advancing Data Center Sustainability, will help the university advance sustainable digital infrastructure though research and innovation.
The research team examined the audit reports of 19,200 financially distressed companies in Belgium between 2008 and 2017. The vast majority of the companies examined were private companies, as is the case with most Belgian companies. The study is authored by Kris Hardies from the University of Antwerp, Sanne Janssen of the Court of Audit, Ann Vanstraelen of Maastricht University, and Karla M. Zehms from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
As the pot of federal funding for research at universities and colleges continues to shrink, UW-Madison’s campus leaders are positioning the university to grow its work with the Department of Defense.
That doesn’t mean UW-Madison researchers will be at the forefront of developing new bombs, said Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Grejner-Brzezińska.
Microsoft, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Princeton University, and the New Jersey AI Hub, announced a unique partnership with TitletownTech to accelerate scientific discovery.
This new model will combine the agility of a startup, the technology of a global company, and a university’s expertise.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is employing the work of a unique robot dog at the Kellner Family Athletic Center’s construction site near Camp Randall.
The trial, led by the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Davis will look at hundreds of thousands of mammograms at UW Health and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical school, as well as academic medical centers in four other states. Wisconsin researchers say it’s an important foray into better understanding both the potential benefits and drawbacks of using AI in cancer screenings.
Benefits that people with low incomes do receive may be outweighed when considered alongside other provisions in the bill, said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This is especially true of cuts to safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, Reschovsky said.
“This is the dilemma – if you count those things in with the tax side, the net will be that a lot of people are going to be worse off.”
“Corn is one of the biggest contributors to the dairy industry, both in corn silage crop and a corn grain crop, which is also used for foraging,” said Harkirat Kaur, a corn agronomist with UW-Madison Division of Extension Crops and Soils program. Harvesting grain differs from producing silage because it focuses on using the corn plant’s kernels for human food and animal feed, as well as the basis for ethanol biofuel.
Two University of Wisconsin–Madison professors have been named MacArthur Fellows, receiving one of the nation’s most prestigious honors.
Angel Adames Corraliza studies tropical weather patterns, focusing on atmospheric physics and climate model simulations. He says his research helps improve understanding of the planet and can ultimately save lives.
Sébastien Philippe, the second recipient, studies the harms and risks of building, testing and storing nuclear weapons. Using archival research, data modeling and his experience as a nuclear safety engineer, he examines the damage caused by nuclear testing. His work has influenced policy and improved compensation for people exposed to nuclear radiation.
Despite worries over rising temperatures, it turns out anglers have a greater effect on fish populations than global warming. That’s according to a new study led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We found that for the majority of the populations so far fishing has far more greater impact than warming on the fish populations,” said Luoliang Xu, postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology.
Wisconsin’s cranberry industry generates nearly $1 billion annually and supports over 4,000 jobs in the state, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. While 2025’s production of the fruit saw a slight decrease from the 6.01 million barrels harvested in 2024, the forecasted 5.3 million barrels will make up roughly 65% of the total U.S. supply.
wo more MacArthur fellows were added Wednesday to UW-Madison’s growing list of faculty who have received the prestigious award.
Since 1985, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has granted eight UW-Madison professors the fellowship, which often is referred to as a “genius award.”
Two UW-Madison professors have been named MacArthur Foundation fellows, called “genius awards,” for their work in studying weather patterns in the tropics and investigating the effects of nuclear weapons.
UW-Madison professors Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, who is an atmospheric scientist, and Sébastien Philippe, a nuclear security specialist, were selected Wednesday for the prestigious fellowships. Fellows receive $800,000 paid out over five years for any use.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named atmospheric scientist Ángel Adames Corraliza, 37, and nuclear security specialist Sébastien Philippe, 38, as recipients of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship. Also known as the “genius grant,” the national award is given annually to a small group of people across a range of disciplines who show exceptional creativity in their work and future ambitions.
For Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the award is also a recognition of the talent and grit coming from Puerto Rico, where he is from, despite the hardships his community has endured. His research has uncovered many new findings about what drives weather patterns in the tropics, which may eventually help improve forecasting in those regions.
Adames said usually one of his classes would be ending right when the foundation would publish the new class of fellows, so he was planning to end the lecture early to come back to his office. He said he’s having trouble fathoming what it will be like.
“I am low-key expecting that a few people are just going to show up in my office, like right at 11:02 a.m. or something like that,” he said.
Since the fellowship launched in 1981, fellows have included writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers and entrepreneurs. While no institutional affiliation is required, the award went to the following 2025 fellows with ties to a college or university:
It’s no secret that Wisconsinites love fishing. But who knew the effects of local anglers on our fisheries were outpacing that of climate change?
That’s exactly what a new study from postdoctoral researcher Luoliang Xu and Prof. Olaf Jensen at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology found. The discovery was published last week in the journal Science Advances.
“Warming and fishing are happening at the same time, and they both can strongly affect the fish populations,” Xu said. “So the intention of our study is to try to tear apart these two factors.”
In Wisconsin, grain farmers will likely face negative margins in 2025 as expected prices for corn and soybeans are below the estimated break-even points for Wisconsin producers, according to projections by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
In Wisconsin, there were 37,600 women farmers in 2022, accounting for 35.5% of the state’s total producers, according to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. However, some people have a hard time believing that.
Funding for a long-term study on the effects of social media on 325 Wisconsin teenagers aged 13-15 resumed on Monday after funding for the study was frozen by the Trump administration in March of this year, according to UW News.
The study is operating on a five-year $7.5 million grant from the National Institute of Health who terminated the grant on the basis that the grant no longer “effectuates agency priorities,” according to UW News.
Morgridge Hall, the new home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS) programs, which may soon separate from Letters & Sciences, is officially open for business.
After a two-and-a-half-year construction project which cost $260 million, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and a host of other speakers cut the ribbon on Morgridge Hall Friday, ushering in a “new AI revolution” that will sweep the campus.
Bringing a new power station online means Wisconsin would need more nuclear engineers to design and operate the plant.
Department Chair Paul Wilson and Assistant Professor Ben Lindley believe there is a ready pipeline of qualified workers in the state to keep up with that added demand. UW-Madison “pumps out” nuclear engineers, but Wisconsin has only one nuclear plant located in Two Rivers, Lindley said. This leaves some graduates to look for employment in other states.
“A lot of them want to stay in the state, and so having more job opportunities would certainly help,” Lindley said.
“It absolutely puts people in this impossible situation where you’re signed up for a plan that you thought covered your provider and then it turns out it doesn’t,” said Dan Sacks, associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Many residents in high-flood-risk areas, like coastal or riverside communities, have shifted to private flood insurance programs that can cover more damage, said Ben Collier, an associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The NFIP covers up to $250,000 for homes and buildings and up to $100,000 in personal property. Collier said costs can easily exceed that in the most severe flood situations.
“The National Flood Insurance Program has been priced too low and has run deficits for many years,” Collier said. “The coverage limits are not especially high.”
“The tariffs are an insult to injury,” said Paul Mitchell, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mitchell says farmers are now quietly rethinking the Trump administration’s strategies.
“We already have enough problems,” as he puts it. “Why are you making more for us?”
While heat pumps in the US have traditionally been associated with warmer locations, they are starting to become more feasible for colder climes. “You can pretty much buy a heat pump for most climates in the US and it can lower your energy bills,” Allison Mahvi, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells Popular Science. Some of Mahvi’s research focuses on how to make more efficient heat pump systems for cold climates.
The University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty hosted a webinar Sept. 30 to examine the impact of housing quality on families and communities — focusing on health, stability and the lasting effects of discriminatory policies such as redlining.
The event featured presentations from senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Erik Hembre, Emory University assistant professor of epidemiology Christine Ekenga and Boston University assistant professor of sociology Steven Schmidt.
Sam Frank, the head of the University of Wisconsin-Madison startup Realta Fusion’s theoretical physics team, Kai Shih, a Realta scientist, and Aaron Tran, a UW-Madison postdoctoral researcher, have spent years designing a model that shook up the order of the fusion world.
Barret Elward is an engineer at UW-Madison, and co-president of United Faculty and Academic Staff (UFAS) Local 223, the union that represents faculty and staff at UW-Madison.
Elward and his team study fusion energy. Their work is mainly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is directly affected by the government shutdown.
“We’ve already been operating under don’t buy the expensive things, or be really cautious about your expenses,” Elward said.
In the short term, it will also force patients to rethink their upcoming health care appointments, said Dan Sacks, associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“It absolutely puts people in this impossible situation where you’re signed up for a plan that you thought covered your provider, and then it turns out it doesn’t for three months,” he said.
Wisconsin is welcoming guests from around the globe as the 2025 World Dairy Expo is now underway in Madison.
According to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension Farm Management program, Wisconsin exported $3 billion of agricultural products in 2024, making agriculture a major economic driver for the state.
“What we study is thinking about new technology that would be a way to start up future fusion devices. And it’s really looking at, how do you reduce the cost and complexity,” said Steffi Diem, an assistant professor at UW-Madison and principal investigator of the Pegasus Three experiment. “And our technology looks at building. It looks kind of like a small lightsaber that injects, you know, the fuel in it, and then we capture it by a magnetic field.”
A construction robot is getting its footing, using the Kellner Family Athletic Center’s construction site, next to Camp Randall on the UW-Madison campus.
UW-Madison is getting an extra $13.5 million to add two floors to the lab it’s constructing for a new cyclotron particle accelerator, which can be used to help detect cancer.
The UW Board of Regents approved the revision to the project Thursday, which will create more space to treat patients for cancer and other diseases at the facility, amid a booming biotech industry.
Dan Sacks, an associate professor of risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, said the expected end of enhanced tax credits likely factored into Common Ground’s decision. That’s because subsidies help people who wouldn’t get insurance due to the cost gain coverage, he said.
“Generally, when they take away the subsidies, it’s less profitable to offer insurance,” Sacks said. “It makes sense that an insurer would want to drop out.”
In all, there are about 70,000 employees working for various state agencies and the Universities of Wisconsin system. The Legislative Audit Bureau estimates that from 19% to 75% of those employees work remotely or have hybrid work schedules, depending on the agency.
Patients with cancer could be diagnosed and treated in one building if UW-Madison gets approval for its expanded multimillion-dollar cyclotron lab.
Construction for a $48.5 million cyclotron lab between two research buildings next to UW Hospital was expected to start this year, but the university now is seeking the green light from the UW Board of Regents to add more space for patient treatment and research.
Amaya Atucha, a professor and chair of the department of plant and agroecosystem sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says many apple growers in northeast Wisconsin are reporting less-than-ideal crops.
“After a cold winter caused potential damage to apple trees, cool spring temperatures led to delayed and slower pollination, resulting in smaller crops in some orchards in Northeast Wisconsin,” Atucha said in her scouting report.
A 2021 study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Financial Security found 77% of Social Security recipients have reduced odds of owning a home.
“There’s a whole bunch of studies on violence in the news, documenting the fact that people’s emotional cognitive reactions early on are high, and then as time goes on, the more you are exposed, those cognitive emotional reactions lessen,” said Karyn Riddle, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin who studies violence in media.
“It could be that Weinstein’s appointment represents an effort to turn down the temperature,” says Kathleen Culver, director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, against the pressure of Trump’s frequent complaints of liberal bias in the media.
“Or it could be part of a larger effort to redesign CBS News to pursue neutral coverage or take a more partisan tack, either in pursuit of a corporate owner’s partisan goals or in pursuit of a larger audience and a proper profit motive.”
Timothy Smeeding, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, similarly believes that tariffs will influence poverty rates primarily through their effect on prices. The industries most vulnerable, he said, are those dependent on sales, with grocery workers, retail workers and other blue collar professions likely to be hardest hit.
“When the SNAP cuts and Medicaid cuts go into effect, the same people will be hurt as grocery stores sell less and health care costs rise, closing some stores and maybe some rural hospitals and clinics,” he added.
Within weeks of arriving in Madison, Tomas Dodds has already launched an exciting lab on campus: the Public Tech Media Lab. Dodds, a native of Buenos Aires, was happily working at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he was a research fellow at the AI, Media & Democracy Lab and the Institute for Advanced Study, when he saw a job opening at UW-Madison’s J-school.
According to Dodds, a main goal of the Public Tech Media Lab, which already counts faculty associates from around the globe, will be to teach journalists how to use open source technologies to create their own AI systems that align with their values and needs. The idea is to make newsrooms less dependent on big tech companies that have their own private interests.
UW-Madison professor Jimena Laporta Sanchis wants to help dairy cows beat the heat.
While a 70-degree day is welcome news to most Wisconsinites, it’s approaching a heat danger zone for dairy cattle. Due to cows’ much larger bodies and the immense work they must do to process food through four stomachs and produce gallons of milk daily, they’re more prone to overheating and increasingly vulnerable to climate change.
Parents struggle to help teens deal with online racism. Online racism is different from in-person racism because the people behaving that way usually hide behind fake names, making it hard to stop them. Studies found that teens of color see more untargeted racism – memes, jokes, comments – and racism targeting others online than racism targeted directly at them. But vicarious racism hurts, too.
Morgridge Hall, the new home of the School of Computer, Data and Information Science, at UW-Madison seen from University Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin, on the first morning of classes, Sept. 3, 2025.
Had Novy’s worker’s comp payment kept pace with inflation, which rose 34%, he would have received nearly $21,000 more over the past nine years, according to calculations by University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn.
Exploding interest in computer and data sciences over the last decade at the University of Wisconsin-Madison led to hundreds of students on course waitlists and a lack of lecture halls large enough to accommodate demand.
The growing pains will begin to ease with the opening of Morgridge Hall this semester. The gleaming seven-story building is the home of the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences. It houses the two most popular majors on this 50,000-student campus.
Had Novy’s worker’s comp payment kept pace with inflation, which rose 34%, he would have received nearly $21,000 more over the past nine years, according to calculations by University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn.
Allison Daminger was in graduate school when she learned that men and women use their time differently: On average, men spend more time on paid work, and women spend more time on unpaid work.
“I remember wondering whether the time-use numbers were telling the full story,” says Daminger, who is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “What about differences in how men and women use their mind on their family’s behalf?”
The new building for the School of Computer, Data, and Information Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has opened its doors.
This facility, called Morgridge Hall, brings various departments together under one roof for the first time. It inspires collaboration, as students and colleagues can simply bump into each other in the hall and get ideas for projects they are working on.
UW-Madison students Wednesday morning shuffled into their first day of classes in the university’s newest building — funded entirely by private donations — to house its growing School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences.
Morgridge Hall, a $267 million, 343,000-square-foot facility, is UW-Madison’s largest privately funded building and puts all the disciplines seeing the most growth at the university under one roof.
