Faculty members and students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have created a free website and mobile app to provide information, social support and resources to Wisconsinites amid the coronavirus pandemic.
With dozens of updates a day tracking positive cases, deaths, and modifications to the safer at home order, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has launched a COVID-19 app to put all these resources in one spot.
Quoted: “In the end of the day, there is only the same number of people wiping their, um, you know what,” said Troy Runge, the chair of the biological systems engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
CROWE director said Wisconsin unemployment rate has reached 19% overall.
Bruce Winkler started his innovation skills at UW Madison, and they haven’t stopped 30 years later. He is the founder of Innovation Strategies LLC. where his company is shifting their focus to ways they can help frontline workers battling Covid19.
E.B., as she was known to family and friends, wanted a career at the intersection of economics, labor and the law. She hoped to attend an elite East Coast law school, but those programs, including Harvard, where her father studied, didn’t accept women. With her father’s approval, she chose the University of Wisconsin, where the “Wisconsin Idea” — fusing academic research to solving social problems — was flourishing.
Shortening vaccine development, which normally has a multi-year cycle. Wisconsin has expertise in this area through its research universities and private companies such as Madison’s FluGen. Co-founders Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Gabriele Neumann are known around the world for their past anti-viral work, which is why FluGen was approached by an India-based firm, Bharat Biotech, which has developed 16 vaccines in the past, to take part in a larger vaccine development project that also involves the UW-Madison.
This time, innovators are exploiting tools and methods that didn’t exist in previous crises. In mid-March, Lennon Rodgers, director of the Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, fielded a plea from the university’s hospital to make 1,000 face shields.
The Studio Zer0 team is made up of mechanical engineering students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and architecture students from UW-Milwaukee. It’s the fifth year that the two universities have joined forces for the contest.
On Friday, representatives from Detroit hospitals started consulting on the project. On Saturday, the group settled on an open-source design from the University of Wisconsin. Suppliers were identified, the factory deployed and prototypes began materializing.
The company is using an open-source design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the project and is being done in collaboration with the UAW, the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, in response to the COVID-19 health crisis.
Quoted: Dave Schroeder, an information technology strategist with the Division of Information Technology at UW-Madison, wrote in an email that controls like those outlined in the district’s email are “ways to use Zoom securely,” but added that “some of those can only be controlled by the person hosting the meeting.”
As the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined universities around the country in shutting down dorms, classrooms and event venues because of the coronavirus pandemic, Jennifer Morzfeld found herself wading through a barrage of emails.
In the midst of finding out about her coursework, the junior political science and international affairs student got one message in particular that left her with a pressing concern, one that thousands of college students now face.
Quoted: That makes the real estate markets difficult to predict for industry experts like Mark Eppli, director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have a lot of uncertainty and not a lot of data,” Eppli said.
If your firm is fortunate to feel confident in your survival and has the liquidity, you should take this opportunity to pay your vendors early. This can make a huge difference in their short term cash flow and might very well be the determining factors in keeping them operating until the environment changes and/or other funding sources become available.
Written by Dan Olszewski, UW Entrepreneurship Center Director
UW-Madison researchers and the vaccine companies FluGen and Bharat Biotech are developing and testing a vaccine against COVID-19 called CoroFlu, they announced Thursday.
The COVID-19 shutdowns have taken away cornerstones of newspapers’ already-struggling revenue: business ads and events, said Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“When news organizations rely on events to advertise about and rely on events that they themselves host, and they’re in an environment where there are no more events, they lose a significant portion of their revenue model,” he said.
Wagner said the situation still has time to get worse.
“It feels like March 84th, but really, we’ve just been at this for a couple of weeks,” he said. “The real economic hits are still to come, and the fact that an organization like the Isthmus had to close down so early, suggests how fragile some news organizations see themselves financially.”
Quoted: “I worry about additional heavy farm losses this year,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
On the other side of Dane County, workers are assembling face shields for doctors based on a design sketched out by UW-Madison engineers and a Madison design firm.
Quoted: Vicki Bier, director of the Center for Human Performance and Risk Analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said such scenarios are common, not just in government, but in virtually all industries and organizations.
Quoted: The numbers reflect the staggering impact of restrictions on mass gatherings of 10 people or more and other efforts to slows the spread of virus. Economists said the number of initial claims were unprecedented for Wisconsin, including Noah Williams, economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE).
Class size of fall 2020 expected to be 80, compared to 67 last year.
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers are working with Madison-area manufacturers on medical face shields for healthcare workers treating coronavirus patients.
Quoted: A 2015 study of influenza and credit card and mortgage defaults in 83 metro areas found the largest effects were for 90-day defaults, suggesting a flu outbreak has a “disproportionate impact on vulnerable borrowers who are already behind on their payments.”
“And that’s just a regular flu, not a pandemic where you actually are having people sent home before they’re sick,” said J. Michael Collins, one of the study’s authors and professor and director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: One in five Wisconsin workers holds “a poverty wage job with few benefits,” according to a 2018 report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Social distancing would be a lot less inequality promoting if we had the infrastructure of strong medical care, insurance and housing supports for low-wage workers, but we don’t,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and the associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. “That means that this crisis tends to push the inequality along, instead of the crisis showing how connected we are and pulling us closer together.”
Michelle Somes-Booher had been helping entrepreneurs and small business owners get their companies off the ground long before she became director of the Small Business Development Center in Madison … The center is based in Grainger Hall on the UW-Madison campus and is open to anyone in Dane, Columbia and Sauk counties.
The outbreak could cut the country’s annual gross-domestic-product growth by half, said Ian Coxhead, an economist who studies Asian economies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he cautioned that making such projections is difficult.
If you want to know if your job is in jeopardy, consider whether management has laid people off recently, said Charlie Trevor, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison school of business.
Startup company JangoBio develops organoid therapy for hormone imbalances.
COVID-19 is expected to have a major impact on the global economy. Projections have become increasingly pessimistic in recent weeks as the virus has continued to spread, said Ian Coxhead, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor. He noted some forecasts predict negative economic growth in the U.S. during the second quarter or even over the whole year.
As a graduate of Middleton High School and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Fanning’s local roots are an important part of his business model and larger mission.
Despite receiving fewer applications and enrolling its smallest class in at least a decade, UW-Madison’s traditional, full-time graduate business program won’t be shuttered anytime soon.
Quoted: COVID-19 is expected to have a major impact on the global economy. Projections have become increasingly pessimistic in recent weeks as the virus has continued to spread, said Ian Coxhead, a University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor. He noted some forecasts predict negative economic growth in the U.S. during the second quarter or even over the whole year.
“The fortunes of any company in the state or in the U.S. are going to be, first of all, determined by the macroeconomic health of the U.S. economy,” Coxhead said.
Quoted: “The goodwill impairment test is one of the most second guessed of the accounting tests that exist,” said Thomas Linsmeier, professor of accounting and law, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yet the tuition fee of $74,520 for the 54 credit hours required to complete the course is comparable with that for a residential MBA at a school such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison or Texas A&M.
After a layoff, “employees see less of an obligation to be loyal to the company, resulting in more of a free agent mentality,” said Charlie Trevor, a professor of management and human resources in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “With this mentality comes the freedom to actively seek another job where, hopefully, one’s future will be less tenuous.”
Barnett discovered the plant-based method while working on his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at UW-Madison in professor George Huber’s lab.
Noted: Noah Williams is the founding director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He expects automation to have a more prominent role in Wisconsin manufacturing as companies continue to face worker shortages.
Grant will bring prominent speakers to UW System campus.
Quoted: Those rivals have increasingly moved into selling home furnishings and merchandise that were once virtually the exclusive domain of Pier 1, according to Hart Posen, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin.
“You’d see something in someone’s house—a wicker-rattan chair or an elephant-themed umbrella holder—and know it came from Pier 1,” Mr. Posen said. “You could buy it at Pier 1 or nowhere, but that’s just not the case anymore.”
“Twenty years ago, you could look at a product and you would really know that it came from Pier 1,” said Hart Posen, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin School of Business who studies corporate decision-making during technological change. “They were really the only big national firm with that kind of unique identity.”
The technology stems from research by Bill Murphy, a UW-Madison biomedical engineer who is the company’s co-founder and chief scientific officer. It is based in part on archaeological studies that showed proteins in fossils could remain stable for centuries if associated with calcium-based minerals.
The technology is based on research at UW-Madison’s Morgridge Institute for Research … Surgeons at UW Hospital are expected to be among the first to use the device, within the next two months, before a nationwide launch later this year, said Adam Uselmann, CEO.
In 2016, the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison became the first business school to win STEM classifications from DHS.
The business major was sitting in his entrepreneurship class when his instructor told the class to “focus on problems that you have yourself and try to solve them.” Michels thought of the medical problems he could have avoided if he’d been better able to rotate injections sites, and he thought of the millions of American insulin users who face the same limitations.
Quoted: Absorbing Dean’s operations could give DFA more than 60% share of fluid-milk sales in upper Midwestern markets like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, said Peter Carstensen, a University of Wisconsin Madison law professor emeritus and former antitrust attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Column: As one of just over 100 Tier 1 institutions in all the U.S., UW-Milwaukee could be our state’s second driver of enterprise and innovation. The problem is UW-Milwaukee is underfunded by any reasonable metric.
Noted: Plans for the institute surfaced in August 2018 as part of the unveiling of Foxconn’s partnership with UW-Madison, a partnership best known for the company’s pledge of $100 million to the university.
Foxconn’s donations to date stand at the previously reported $700,000, university spokesman John Lucas said Tuesday by email. He directed questions about the research institute to Foxconn.
A University of Wisconsin student is changing the tailgate game — literally.
Many CEOs are at or nearing traditional retirement age, says Fabio Gaertner, associate professor at the Wisconsin School of Business at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Generational change is creating more churn,” he said. The average age of S&P 500 CEOs is 58, a point at which many CEOs, especially if successful, might think about packing it in.
Some experts have said that trying to follow the ITEP analysis was difficult. “It was hard to tie their numbers to the financial statements I looked at,” says Mary Vernon, a PhD candidate and tax researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business who is part of a research team currently looking at effective tax rates.
Quoted: “Typically, the Saturday before Christmas is very close to Black Friday in sales,” said Executive Director of the Kohl’s Center for Retail at UW-Madison, Jerry O’Brien. “There’s a lot of people [where] it’s actually part of their tradition, you go out just before the holiday and buy the stuff.”
O’Brien says one of the advantages of having a mid-week Christmas is the potential many workers might either start their holiday next weekend, or begin a long weekend at the start of Christmas.
“Additionally, it’s the time where people are taking their returns in, and they have gift cards, so there’s a lot of traffic in the stores and there’ll still be some really great deals out there,” he said.
Long known as a biotech and health care hub–from which university graduates often fled to bigger cities–Madison today is home to rising wages, plenty of incubators, and booming upstarts. And, finally, there’s financing for all the innovation.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Maria Muniagurria said the retaliatory tariffs will have long-term effects beyond that $12 billion. They give other countries a chance to swoop in and take America’s spot in China’s supply chains, like Brazil did when China put tariffs on American soybeans, she said.
“Suppose we end the trade war with China, and China removes the tariffs. Well, we are not sure we are going to be able to recover the market again,” Muniagurria said.
Madison is primed to become the next great technology hub in the country if it receives federal financial help to drive such economic growth, according to a new report.
The explosion of top-tier tech jobs has clustered in a handful of coastal hubs, expanding the wealth and innovation differential that’s draining talent from the rest of the nation, new research shows. Madison is noted prominently in the study as an area that could become a major tech hub.
There are about a dozen industries at the frontier of innovation. They include software and pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and data processing. Most of their workers have science or tech degrees. They invest heavily in research and development. While they account for only 3 percent of all jobs, they account for 6 percent of the country’s economic output. Madison is noted prominently in the study as an area that could become a major tech hub.
Brookings suggests intensive government investment — direct funding, tax preferences, workforce development — to stem future regional economic divergence. The report lists a number of areas like Madison, Wisconsin; Albany, New York; and Provo, Utah, that have existing assets like universities that could potentially make them future innovation hubs, but this will only happen if there’s a concerted effort.
Ivan Shaliastovich, associate professor of finance, quoted: “As a brief remark: the tariff wars will have a negative impact on the markets and the economy. This is a good example of a bad uncertainty:’ most market participants and business executives view tariffs as a downside risk, and are unlikely to take on substantial investment projects in light of a heightened uncertainty about the outcome. We already see an occasional upsurge in volatility as the markets attempt to interpret and respond to the news about tariffs negotiations. It’s only a matter of time when delays in investments will lead to slower growth in the US and elsewhere.”
Quoted: Dean “had bigger, industrywide issues with the consumption of milk products. But the loss of the Walmart business was just another thing they didn’t need,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
