The report touted Madison as a center for research (the third category), but suggested that in order to keep up with the country’s emergent AI industry, local business leaders should forge more corporate research partnerships with UW-Madison, promoting entrepreneurship and encouraging local job retention and attraction.
“So, how are we going to decide where to put these charging stations? The way I think about it and the way we’re looking at it, at least from a research perspective, is related to something (we call) an origins destination study,” said David Noyce, a professor in the UW-Madison College of Engineering who specializes in transportation planning and the future of on-the-road vehicles.
Quoted: Panelist David Noyce, who is the executive associate dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering, said consumer worries about not being able to recharge an electric vehicle — what the industry calls range anxiety — is still one of the biggest barriers to electric vehicle adoption.
Noyce said vehicle makers are working to improve batteries as a remedy to this problem. But he said making charging stations more available is the other half of the solution.
“That’s where the emphasis is going on as we speak,” he said during the panel. “The federal government has jumped into the fray here … because of the market demand, but as well as climate goals, decarbonization, reduction in the use of fossil fuels and so forth.”
Katy Huberty has spent two decades at Morgan Stanley analyzing technology hardware stocks. Her coverage has included Apple, Dell Technologies, and Seagate Technology Holdings, among many others. Now director of equity research for the Americas, Huberty is thinking about how to scale her IT hardware team’s data-heavy approach to stock analysis to all of Morgan Stanley’s 49 research teams.
A Morgan Stanley lifer, Huberty, 44, joined the firm after college at the University of Wisconsin. Today, she sees technology diffusing into every corner of the market.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has hired one of Foxconn’s most prominent former Wisconsin executives.
Part of the deal former Gov. Scott Walker and Foxconn executives struck with Wisconsin included a promise to give UW-Madison $100 million. But that money never showed up. And the Foxconn project has only faltered since it was announced.
Now Alan Yeung has joined UW-Madison’s College of Engineering as an entrepreneurship consultant. He’ll be helping the college “commercialize research, and connect with industry and entrepreneurs,” said Renee Meiller, a spokeswoman for the College of Engineering.
A new study by researchers at the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy found inaccurate labels on some non-prescription CBD products sold in the Badger State.
Quoted: Laura Albert is a professor of industrial and systems engineering with University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said business travel in particular is slower to return to pre-pandemic levels.
“We found ways to do things remotely that are quite effective,” Albert said. “There’s not a substitute for everything, but some of that, I think, will stick around, and that might affect where routes are selected, because a lot of routes follow where business travel is needed.”
Quoted: Wisconsin producers primarily grow winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, making it unlikely farmers will plant more this spring in response to potential shortages or to capitalize on higher prices, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said.
But farmers in the state will likely spend more time managing the wheat fields they do have planted this spring, he said.
“More fertilizer, maybe more concerned about fungicide applications if you’re looking at a problem with disease. That’s what we might see, is farmers more willing to spend money on managing the planted crop for winter wheat,” he said.
Noted: Instead of limiting milk production, the plan focuses on reducing the negative impacts of uncontrolled expansion and sending stronger market signals to farms about whether they should produce more milk. The group worked with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create models for what a mandatory management program could look like and how it would affect farmers’ and consumers’ prices.
A new report is highlighting how much the Great Recession widened racial wealth gaps, particularly on the basis of income and homeownership.
“Racial Disparities in Household Wealth Following the Great Recession,” authored by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Fenaba R. Addo and Duke University Professor William A. Darity Jr., found that Black and Latino households continue to lag behind white households in wealth and income statistics.
The report was published this month through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty and used Survey on Consumer Finances data to come to its conclusions.
There is no doubt that farming can be extremely rewarding, yet also stressful and demanding. Various risk factors including weather, economic uncertainty, as well as, ever-evolving supply and demand changes, can take a toll on farmer’s mental health.
In order to address some of these issues, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Division of Extension will be offering virtual and in-person educational programs to help the Wisconsin agricultural community identify and respond to a variety of behavioral health challenges.
Noted: Tractor prices are up as much as 20% from two years ago, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension. Used equipment is difficult to find and expensive.
“Supply chain disruptions have created chaos in new-and-used machinery markets,” UW Extension said in a report last fall.
After state agriculture officials confirmed the presence of bird flu in Wisconsin, one poultry management expert shared safety tips for poultry farmers and what risk exists to humans.
Ron Kean, a faculty associate and extension specialist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, also explained what costs farmers can and cannot get covered if the flu hits their farm.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while concerns of negative effects from a buyout aren’t unfounded, he sees it as a positive story in an industry that has had few positive stories in the past decade.
“This is all happening because Kohl’s is, of department store retailers, one of the best positioned department store retailers,” Posen said. “This is (a) department store that has real potential. Some folks think they can pull more out of it, which may or may not be true.”
A small Madison startup launched only two years ago to provide free alternative data for investors says it now has 340,000 registered users.
Twin brothers James and Chris Kardatzke debuted Quiver Quantitative in February 2020 while they were students at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying finance, economics, and statistics. They graduated that year and gave their full attention to running the business which now has six full-time employees, with plans to hire a few more soon.
Engineers at UW-Madison have created a new method for improving the quality of 3D-printed metal products.
Additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, can create complex metal structures with greater ease than traditional manufacturing processes, a release from the university shows. But the process often introduces defects such as tiny cracks and pits in the materia
Quoted: The consolidation of farms seen across agriculture is a big part of why the state has fewer licensed dairy producers, according to Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In many cases when farms sell out, most of their cows may go to other dairy farms. And so the remaining farms have gotten a little bit larger,” Stephenson said.
Stephenson said in 2005, the average herd size in Wisconsin was 82 cows per farm, and in 2020, that average climbed to 177 cows per farm. In other words, the average more than doubled over 15 years.
Quoted: Tom Eggert, a retired sustainability professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said customers, employees and investors are pushing businesses to make commitments to reduce their emissions.
“You start with maybe a lot of greenwashing, but we’ve seen over time that the infrastructure gets created underneath those goals, underneath those targets, to be very credible, when people then question them on what they’re doing,” said Eggert. “I would say companies in Wisconsin, companies in the United States, companies around the world are on a continuum from complete greenwashing at one end to complete transparency and viable targets on the other.”
Now, thanks in part to a $5 million UW-Madison grant meant to facilitate anti-racism in higher education, Represented Collective has launched a project called “Legendary” — a portion of the money is funding an interactive exhibit at nine Dane County libraries that spotlights the women who made STEM history, but weren’t celebrated for their accomplishments as much as their male counterparts.
According to Enno Siemsen, a professor of operations management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, if the conflict is short and companies want to reopen their operations, “all the investments you’ve made over years are basically gone. If you want to reenter the Russian market, you’re starting more or less from scratch.”
As Wisconsin farms prepare for the upcoming growing season, some producers are having a hard time finding enough workers.
Claire Strader is an organic vegetable educator for FairShare CSA Coalition and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Dane County. Last fall, she started hearing from farmers who were worried about a potential labor shortage.
“They knew that they were going to be losing workers from their farms because those workers were telling them that as they were moving on to other opportunities,” Strader said. “Those farmers, in particular vegetable farmers, were telling us that they were in a crisis looking for workers.”
UW-Madison scientists and engineers helped develop the first weather satellites that served as the precursors to the GOES series.
An important new weather satellite will head to space Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and meteorologists in Madison will be watching the launch very closely.
Signs are static.
They can, of course, convey concise and relevant historical information. But they are limited to one point in time, said Kasey Keeler, an assistant professor of civil society and community studies and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That’s why Keeler is leading a project, “Mapping Dejope: Indigenous Histories and Presence in Madison,” which will make Indigenous history of the area digitally accessible.
Experts said America could see a potential for cyber attacks from the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A UW Madison professor said though nation-state attacks don’t seem to be Putin’s goal at the moment, now is a good time to take stock and put added security in place.
“I think we have to be careful generally, but I think it wouldn’t be a bad time for companies and individuals to take security precautions seriously,” said Yoshiko Herrera, Professor for the Department of Political Science at UW Madison.
Herrera recommends backing up hard drives and making sure you have secure passwords in place.
Quoted: “Stock markets tend to react very quickly, but then unless there’s some real material damage, you’re gonna get a reversion.” said Mark Copelovitch, Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Noted: Scientists say the last two decades have been the warmest on record in Wisconsin. Among them is Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“No season has been immune to the warming trend,” he said. “Winter has warmed the most. That has been true in the past, and it’s expected to be true in the future.”
Quoted: Heather Schlesser is an agriculture educator for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension in Marathon County. She said the state has seen many producers transition out of dairy farming, which requires a lot of land for growing feed.
“They were transitioning out of dairy, making that decision to retire because they’re getting older. Or maybe they’re still younger, but they’re switching into beef production,” Schlesser said. “You can only do that for so long before you’re like, ‘You know what, I really don’t need this land. I don’t want to deal with the renters anymore. There’s no one new coming on the farm.’ And then they’re just deciding to sell it off.”
Intentional conversations around farm succession and developing future plans for the farm provides a better chance of transition success. University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension will provide resources during the webinars to assist families in transition discussions and planning for the future.
Quoted: America’s Dairyland continues to set the bar high, and some of the credit can go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, which just added a cheese cave and copper vats to continue helping cheesemakers develop recipes and grow.
“This is part of our new building,” said Andy Johnson, who also holds the role of program coordinator for the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker program. “Outside of Europe, the ripening caves, there is nothing like it particularly for research and development. We have 10 different ripening rooms or aging caves, each with their own controlled environment. We’ll be able to make any style of cheese.”
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other universities recently published the findings of a four-year study called Baby’s First Years, which looked at the impact of “poverty reduction on family life and infant and toddlers’ cognitive, emotional, and brain development.”
Quoted: UW-Madison Environmental Science expert Andrea Hicks says the news is fantastic.
“It’s really, really exciting, actually,” Hicks said. “We need to reduce the environmental impact of aviation.”
Aviation, Hicks explains, puts a considerable amount of carbon dioxide into air every year. “Biofuels” like the ones being produced at Virent are one solution.
“What’s really exciting is these are ‘drop in replacement’ biofuels,” Hicks said. “What that means is you can use them just the same way you use traditional aviation fuels, but they’re made from plants. And that has a lower carbon footprint. So there’s less environmental impact. It’s really, potentially the future of sustainable aviation.”
The University of Wisconsin Traffic Operations and Safety Lab is studying autonomous vehicle technology using a new autonomous shuttle called the Badger.
Noted: The report found nitrogen from manure and fertilizer exceeded rates recommended by University of Wisconsin scientists in eight of the nine counties. In four counties, nitrogen from the two sources went more than 50 percent beyond proposed rates, including Kewaunee County where it was applied at nearly double recommended levels. Residents there have long struggled with nitrate contamination of private wells.
A new report by the Environmental Working Group and Midwest Environmental Advocates (MEA) has found that in nine counties, animal manure is over-applied to farmland, exacerbating rural Wisconsin’s water quality struggles. According to the report, four counties applied manure at more than 50% above the rate recommended by University of Wisconsin researchers to minimize pollution.
Quoted: What’s not good is to be the town that’s only a short ways from a retail hub because people will easily go there instead of shopping locally, according to Steven Deller, a professor and community development specialist with University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension.
“You don’t try to compete head-on with a Walmart because they will chew you up and spit you out,” Deller said. However, businesses can gain customers from being in the same plaza as one of the big chains, or at least near it.
Noted: Fetch Rewards has offered customers incentives for purchasing products from partner brands like General Mills, Frito Lay and Unilever. Points earned on purchases can be redeemed for gift cards from Amazon, Target and Starbucks.
“We see a huge opportunity in that there’s probably 100 million U.S. households we should be very well plugged into, but today we only have 13 million active monthly users,” said company founder and CEO Wes Schroll.
Schroll started the company in 2013 when he was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s now valued at more than $1 billion, making it part of an elite group of startups called “unicorns.”
Quoted: Menzie Chinn, an economist with the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is skeptical of the idea that federal pandemic relief spending is the primary cause of recent inflation.
“It’s certainly part of the explanation – but other economies (UK, Euro Area) have also seen an acceleration of inflation,” Chinn says, with higher oil prices, continued supply disruptions and other factors being the main contributors. “One could argue that part of the inflation is due to too little spending, say, on childcare support, which would enable parents to work.”
Mark Copelovitch, a La Follette School political scientist whose work looks at the intersection of economics and politics, says that the ability of the U.S. to finance its debt at virtually no interest shows that the marketplace — essentially, the world’s lenders — isn’t worried about the sustainability of the economy.
On inflation, he considers shortages such as in semiconductors, a key component of cars, or the spike in energy prices, not pandemic relief aid, as leading culprits for rising prices. “Most of what’s driving the inflation is global supply chain issues during a pandemic,” Copelovitch says.
He credits pandemic relief, in the form of direct aid to households as well as other forms of support as well as directly to the state, for preserving incomes, keeping businesses going in the pandemic, and enabling the economy to recover much more quickly than it might have otherwise.
“The reason we have this big surplus now in Wisconsin and elsewhere is because all the other things basically prevented people’s incomes from going down — which meant tax revenue didn’t crater like we worried it was going to,” Copelovitch says.
There are plenty of indicators that farmers across the country are starting 2022 in a strong financial position, said Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While the roots of JK Williams Distilling in Peoria, Ill., go back to prohibition, the business is a career change for UW-Madison alumni Andy Faris and his wife, Stacy Shunk Faris, a Madison native. The former co-owner of Taste of Minnesota, Faris bought the business in 2019.
Quoted: While other states brag big dairy and crop industries, Wisconsin’s insulation from fertilizer price spikes is thanks to having more cows per acre than corn per acre, according to Paul Mitchell, a professor in the UW-Madison department for Agriculture and Applied Economics.
“About a third of our nitrogen for corn comes from dairy manure,” Mitchell said. “And we have more cows per acre of cropland.”
However, manure isn’t easily accessible. It’s difficult to transport due to its high water content and therefore large volume, so it can’t usually go beyond it’s own farmland or crop farms neighboring dairy farms.
But it’s lack of transport ability shouldn’t dissuade you from seeking it out, according to Matt Ruark, a professor of soil science at UW-Madison and soil nutrient expert.
“We think of [manure] as a waste stream, but it is has relatively high nutrient value in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Those are big three nutrient inputs into our corn production systems,” Ruark said.
Jeremy Solin’s earliest memory from his family’s longtime syrup business is with his grandma, sitting at a kitchen table, pounding a nail through the top of a metal Folgers coffee can.
They wound a piece of wire through the can so they could hang it from the spout on a tree.
“We just used whatever we had, right?” he said.
Solin is a fourth-generation syrup producer with a farm just north of Antigo. He’s the maple syrup project manager for the University of Wisconsin-Extension and he runs Tapped Maple Syrup in Stevens Point.
Part of the UW Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship, the Food Finance Institute expects to take on four cohorts of 15 businesses grouped by specialty.
Construction crews will erect the research facility next to Exact’s corporate headquarters on 5505 Endeavor Lane inside University Research Park on the West Side. The lab and warehouse are additions to Exact’s Discovery Campus on 1 Exact Lane, which is located between Schroeder Road and the Beltline on the Southwest Side.
Quoted: Last month, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan State University released results of a study revealing that society’s reliance on rock salt is salinating Lake Michigan.
Even small increases can trigger unknown ecosystem changes and secondary effects such as drinking water pipe corrosion, said Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of the study.
Lake Michigan is still “extremely fresh” water, Dugan said. “There’s no cause for alarm. But I think people should be aware that it is rising and that is fully because of human-derived salts.”
Aaron Olver is managing director of the nonprofit UW-Madison affiliate, which is designed to provide a space for commercializing discoveries made on campus. “At our core, we’re a real estate operation,” Olver said. “Our job is basically to create homes where innovation companies, particularly (ones) affiliated with the university, can get started and can grow and can thrive.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Casavant, 34, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, founded the company in 2012 with his UW lab-mate Erwin Berthier, 38, who is the company’s chief technology officer. They had studied microfluidics, which deals with the behavior and control of very small volumes of fluids in networks of channels, in the lab of UW-Madison professor David Beebe.
Quoted: “We’re learning that it’s pretty easy to turn the economy off. But it’s really hard just to flip the switch and turn it back on,” said Steve Deller, a professor in agriculture and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“What COVID has done is, among other things, it’s changed the risk-benefit calculation that workers do,” said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at UW-Madison.
Noted: University of Wisconsin Administration: Up to $5.7 million to create a “workforce-ready curriculum” for students who are incarcerated “to teach employable skills to students while incarcerated and continue supporting them post-release through program completion and career placement.” The program will pilot at UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside, UW-Green Bay, and UW-Madison.
The Flambeau test, rather than needing a swab from inside a patient’s nose, is saliva-based, said Dave Beebe, who is also a biomedical engineering professor at UW-Madison. That makes the test less invasive, and therefore more rapid than traditional ones.
The Entrepreneurial Training Program provides grants of up to $750 to entrepreneurs who complete startup coursework by the Small Business Development Center at the University of Wisconsin. Entrepreneurs must match at least $250, and the coursework must focus on business modeling or business planning.
