Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discussed ethical concerns stemming from the rise of generative artificial intelligence in academia and research at a Jan. 30 panel.
The panel, which included experts from the UW-Madison Data Science Institute, Libraries and Institutional Review Boards Office (IRB), provided recommendations for researchers, offering definitions and opportunities for ethical AI use in research.
Many people think that the amount they spend on a gift is directly associated with how much the receiver will appreciate it. But as long as it meets reasonable expectations, the people you are gifting are unlikely to care too much about how you spend, said Dr. Evan Polman, professor of marketing at Wisconsin School of Business at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also focuses on gift-giving decision-making.
The goal of gift giving should be relationship maintenance, especially on a holiday so focused on love, and gifting an activity or experience you and your loved one can do together is a great way to spend quality time together while communicating your level of care, Polman said.
The scribe who copied Phaenomena, which details how various constellations rise and set, onto the parchment integrated descriptions of the stars’ positions that were probably based on Hipparchus’ work. The celestial objects’ coordinate system and accuracy align with references to the ancient astronomer’s writings, reports Science News’ Adam Mann. “There’s an appendix which includes coordinates of the stars discussed in the poem, and then little sketches of the star maps,” Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who is working on the project, tells the outlet.
Growing up in a first-generation Indian household, Armaan Jain was thrown into activities from a young age — baseball, basketball, soccer and everything but football. The packed schedule forced him to learn time management early, a skill reinforced by parents who deeply valued education and structure.
“From elementary school onward, I had to have systems in place to succeed,” he said. “I learned early that motivation isn’t always there, so you need something that keeps you going anyway.”
As students return to campus this semester, professors are once again evaluating how artificial intelligence can, and cannot, be a tool for learning in their classrooms.
Despite concerns about generative AI impeding learning, some professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are choosing to address and even integrate AI into their course syllabi.
Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman says artificial intelligence is no longer an abstract idea, but is now transforming how the state’s public universities operate.
Rothman penned an op-ed on the future of AI and higher education Monday ahead of the Thursday Board of Regents meeting where he said there will be a “robust discussion” on the topic.
Minimum-wage hikes — depending on the size — can bring a mix of positive and negative economic consequences, according to Callie Freitag, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Social Work.
“The good thing is that earnings would go up for workers. Employers would raise wages and be able to pay workers more,” Freitag said. “But the money to pay workers more has to come from somewhere.”
“Because it’s not dependent on the wind or the sun, nuclear energy operates whenever we want it, pretty much,” said Paul Wilson, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But even if we have to shut it down for refueling, that is very, very infrequent. Nuclear power plants today around the country typically operate for 18 months without shutting off.”
At the top of the list for Wisconsin institutions was the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where median earnings four years out of school topped $93,000.
Coming in at No. 2 was Marquette University, where undergraduates earned nearly $80,000. Bellin College, a private nursing school in Green Bay came in third, with students earning about $79,000.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison ($75,084) and Viterbo University ($70,471) rounded out the top five.
Leaders in Wisconsin agriculture are warning the state’s farmers to brace for another tough year for trade and market conditions.
The discussion at the annual Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused both on the economic hardships weighing on farmers and what some producers are doing to try to get ahead.
The current executive director of Saint Louis University’s Chaifetz Center for Entrepreneurship will join the University of Wisconsin-Madison to lead the university’s first entrepreneurship center.
Lewis Sheats will become the Associate Vice Chancellor for Entrepreneurship and the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub on Feb. 2, a Jan. 20 release announced.
Josiah Hanna, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said AI tools can be valuable educational resources but are often misunderstood or misused.
“AI is a dual-use technology,” Hanna said. “You can do some really cool things with it, but yet unfortunately has this really unpleasant use case that people have found and exploited in a really harmful way.”
Hanna said AI-generated images can be particularly damaging because people tend to trust what they see, even when content is fabricated.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison and Immuto Scientific have teamed up to explore new therapeutic targets in colorectal cancer. According to the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, this collaboration aims to use Immuto’s AI-enabled platform to discover novel treatments for solid colorectal cancer tumors.
Dr. Dustin Deming, a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, leads the project. “Our collection of patient-derived colorectal cancer organoids enables exploration of tumor biology and therapeutic vulnerabilities in ways that traditional models cannot,” said Deming.
Within UW-Madison’s Department of Food Science, Professor Bradley Bolling has pioneered research of anthocyanins, natural pigments responsible for the vibrant hues in fruits like cranberries.
“We want to understand how the pigments in cranberry are stabilized,” Bolling said.
Bolling developed a patented process using lecithin, an emulsifier, to extract natural pigments from cranberries without using alcohol or acetone. This makes the process safer and more environmentally sustainable.
Partisan media and shoddy reporting have a long history in the U.S., but one parallel stands out: the era of the so-called yellow press, which got its name from a cartoon strip published in papers featuring a child in a yellow shirt.
“It was a moment before professional news values had really set in, before there were professional codes of ethics,” says Lucas Graves, distinguished researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The biggest newspapers, like the New York World and New York Journal, would run serious, reported news stories. But they “would also run stories to try to generate outrage and almost invent scandals in order to sell more newspapers,” Graves says.
“I think that there was absolutely a market decision behind selecting Bad Bunny,” says Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Wisconsin who has collaborated with Bad Bunny to incorporate Puerto Rican history into his shows and music videos. “The NFL wants to expand internationally, so they are looking to target a broader market beyond the United States. He has a huge following in the United States, but this stage will also be amplified internationally by having someone like him.”
Some analysis will have to wait until the new images can be processed, but the researchers are already able to decode text from many of the raw data. “It’s one of the rare examples in research where you know very quickly that you have gotten good results,” says Uwe Bergmann, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who is overseeing the experiment’s x-ray scanning.
Botulism spores are common in the environment and can be found in most foods at very low levels, said Kristin Schill, a botulism expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Healthy adults consume Clostridium botulinum spores every day without becoming sick. But babies have immature guts that may not be able to prevent the spores from germinating and growing. Once they do, the spores produce a toxin that can cause paralysis and death.
Spores can be found everywhere, including in milk, though typically at low levels, Schill said. Pasteurization doesn’t kill the germs. They can be present in the processing environment, too.
“Cracks can happen at anything below the freezing temperature, so 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius,” said Scott Bowe, a professor and wood products specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bowe clarified that the noises, known as frost cracks, are not caused by expanding sap.
“Some people have explained it as the sap is expanding like ice and causing the crack that actually is not what’s happening. It’s actually the drying of the wood that causes the crack to happen,” said Bowe.
Professor Laura Albert, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has studied EMS deployment and logistics for decades. She said many departments are being asked to stretch limited resources further than ever before.
“So often these public service agencies like EMS departments are asked to do more and more with less,” Albert said. “You can do that up to a point, but this is kind of hitting a crisis point.”
“In certain neighborhoods, perhaps in Atlanta or Philadelphia or Chicago, maybe you’re reaching a much higher market saturation point,” said Kurt Paulsen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies urban planning. “I’ve not seen any evidence of any even modest market penetration of that product in Dane County and Madison.”
Written by rofessor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
IKEA has dozens of other pickup locations around the country, including at Loyola University in Chicago and near the campuses of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State University in East Lansing and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
For UBS, located on the eastern edge of the UW-Madison campus, it gets a flat fee from IKEA for each order.
UW-Madison researchers argue undisclosed organizations targeted users based on race and location to discourage them from voting.
Young Mie Kim is a coauthor of the report and a media professor at UW-Madison. Kim was one of the first independent researchers to discover Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“It was just difficult just to surgically target these people, until now,” Kim said. “But with (today’s) data-driven, micro-targeted, algorithm-based information environment, it’s much more effective.”
“I am just a lot more concerned about how we design the digital landscape for kids than I am about whether we allow kids to use screens or not,” said Heather Kirkorian, an early childhood development researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I haven’t seen concrete evidence that convinces me that screen use itself is creating problematic behavior.”
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.”
