“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.
Average wages in Wisconsin reached a record high in 2024, according to a new jobs report. But job growth in the state fell behind the overall national average. We talk with Laura Dresser, the report’s co-author.
“Honeybees are like livestock,” Hannah Gaines Day, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies how pollinators interact with the environment and agricultural operations, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “They’re like little, tiny livestock that the beekeeper is taking care of, and so they have someone looking out for them and feeding them and giving them medicine if they need it if they’re sick. But the wild pollinators don’t have that.”
Labor Day offers a critical juncture at which to access the condition of workers in Wisconsin. For two decades, the High Road Strategy Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has produced comprehensive “State of Working Wisconsin” reports, which have set the standard for assessing where we are at.
The 2025 assessment features some concerning news.
Laura Dresser, a co-author of the report and High Road Strategy Center associate director, said in a statement that the 2025 data shows “some real strengths for working Wisconsin owing to the strong recovery from pandemic shutdowns.”
“Long-standing inequalities are still with us, and federal policy puts substantial clouds on the horizon,” Dresser said. “I’m especially concerned about the administration’s attacks on the integrity of federal economic data.”
“I think it is always hard to come down on the side of ‘no, this technology should not be used in this space,’” said Jeremy Morris, a professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think the more interesting question is ‘how do we use it and how does that come to define the things we listen to?’”
John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there’s no convincing evidence that raw milk offers tangible nutritional or health benefits when compared with the pasteurized product. But even with the best dairy practices and sampling of milk, the risk of illness is far greater, he said.
“A high percentage of the people who get sick are children,” he said. “That’s the thing that really disappoints me. And scares me.”
“I don’t think that the math adds up, because the tax reductions are very modest for people with low incomes,” said Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus of public affairs and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
Wisconsin has a record-high number of jobs and median wage, but there are signs that the economy is softening and changes in federal policy could negatively affect workers in the coming years.
That’s according to a new report from the High Road Strategy Center, a labor-focused economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On Friday, the organization released its annual State of Working Wisconsin report, which aims to provide insight into how workers are faring in the economy.
Stanke, a Wausau native with a nuclear engineering degree from UW-Madison, spoke from the stage in Rhode Island and is part of the nuclear fuels team and a spokesperson for Constellation, the nation’s largest producer of nuclear energy. During her tenure as Miss America, she was an outspoken advocate of zero-carbon nuclear energy.
Catalina Toma is a communication professor at UW-Madison and says that preventative measures like this are beneficial.
“By some accounts, amongst American teenagers, about a third have suffered some sort of cyberbullying victimization online. And about 15%, according to the latest reports, have engaged in cyberbullying. So these incidents do happen, and there’s a lot of evidence about how damaging cyberbullying can be,” said Toma.
Researchers from the UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology co-authored a study finding that cold plunge elicits a natural rush of dopamine, similar to what people experience using social media.
UW-Madison students and researchers find automation apps ripe for hacking and abuse. Then, we talk about the drop off in drinking by Americans. Then, we talk about the recent flooding in Milwaukee with the Weather Guys.
As more companies realize that they can’t keep absorbing the cost of import taxes, the impact on inflation could eventually start to snowball, said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“If everybody’s facing the same game, they know they all can’t keep prices low forever and take a hit to their profit margins, they’re going to start raising them more rapidly,” Chinn said.
“It’s an absolutely gorgeous church (with) great historic distinction,” said Barbara Copeland Buenger, a member of the church’s roof committee and a professor of art history emerita at UW-Madison. “To have something of such beauty and historical value is really magnificent given the modern character of the city.”
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently discovered a flaw in how NASA and other space agencies design and test rovers for exploring the moon and beyond.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that automation apps, like iPhone’s ‘shortcuts’, can be a vehicle potential abusers use to control their partner’s activities on their mobile device.
Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at UW and founder of the Madison Tech Clinic, said Madison Tech Clinic helps individuals who have been virtually stalked or harassed by their partners.
According to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Green County, where Monroe is located, has experienced a 229% increase in Latinos from 2000 to 2019. That growth has not been accompanied by a surge in murders, robberies, pet-eatings or any other crimes that the current administration has leveled against migrants. Instead Monroe has seen a rise in the number of Mexican restaurants and bilingual masses at the local Catholic church, as well as hardworking community members hoping to make a better life for themselves.
Dane Demo Farms, a collaboration between local farmers, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Dane County Land & Water Resources Department, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, provides opportunities for farmers to directly research local impacts of conservation practices.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that automation apps, like iPhone’s ‘shortcuts’, can be a vehicle potential abusers use to control their partner’s activities on their mobile device.
Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at UW and founder of the Madison Tech Clinic, said Madison Tech Clinic helps individuals who have been virtually stalked or harassed by their partners.
“The labor market has cooled and so companies now are starting to feel they have more leeway, more leverage with their employees,” said Barry Gerhart, a professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the U.S., about 1.5% of natural gas is converted into chemicals that are used to make plastics and other consumer products, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dietram Scheufele is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in misinformation, social media and AI. He told WPR the rise of artificial intelligence models has opened numerous legal and ethical questions that courts are left to grapple with.
On the technical side, Sheufele said, the question is how AI models are able to create lifelike images of child pornography. Another question is whether people or businesses that create the algorithm to assist the AI models that ultimately create the images would be liable.
“The same logic that applies to child pornography will apply to a whole bunch of other things — not in the sense of obscenity, but in the sense of responsibility and copyright, and all the other things that come that come along with that,” Scheufele said.
There is a strong foundation for growth. The UW-Madison College of Engineering has one of the nation’s few remaining teaching and research reactors. It ranks No. 2 among all U.S. public universities in undergraduate and graduate education in “engineering physics,” a term that captures most nuclear energy programs.
At UW–Madison, Faulkner took a course about computing in medicine that was taught by a pioneering physician, Dr. Warner Slack, one of the first people to recognize the promise of the technology within health care.
Menzie Chinn, a renowned economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has chronicled a wide array of Antoni’s basic misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and mistakes. In other words, Antoni would probably not get hired as a junior economist at the agency he’s now slated to run.
The top 50 schools for long-term career success:
50. University of Wisconsin-Madison
12. University of Wisconsin System – UW (education).
Tinder may be a surprising place to start looking for a job in wealth management, but it worked for Lillian Turner, who now runs her own firm, Daring Greatly Wealth. While a finance major at the University of Wisconsin, Turner struggled to find anyone who would talk to her about wealth management, so she turned to the online dating app.
Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, reviewed the claims and found them wanting.
“The conclusion that real GDP is lower as of 2024Q2 than it was in 2019Q1 is not backed up by any calculation using defensible deflators a sensible economist would use. Second, other non-deflator sensitive indicators of real economic activity do not exhibit a downward decline from 2022 onward,” Chinn said.
Kurt Paulsen, a UW-Madison professor who studies urban development and housing policy, says the region’s high rents and low vacancy rates spurred developers to build more housing: “We have had a lot of supply come online in the last year, and a lot in the pipeline in the last year. And you see that now in the fact that the vacancy rate has shot up.”
Still, Paulsen cautions that new construction will likely slow down as developers wait for these units to be absorbed into the market. High interest rates and tariffs on construction materials — the U.S. Department of Commerce recently announced it is tripling duties on Canadian lumber to 21% — pushed by the Trump administration are also likely to slow construction. And though rent growth has stagnated, Madison’s high prices are still pricing out many potential residents.
