Noted: Cellectar was founded in Madison in 2003 by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jamey Weichert. Following a 2011 merger with a public company, Novelos Therapeutics, the corporate headquarters was moved to Massachusetts. The company moved back to Madison in 2014.
Noted: A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who learned the business through the Credit Unions Executives Society and gained experience in various credit union executive roles, Sponem is one of the industry’s most visible leaders in the state.
Noted: Let’s get philosophical for a minute: Is the best price always the best deal? A recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business suggests that shoppers consider a retailer’s reputation as well as its prices. Savvy shoppers will think twice before buying from a less reputable merchant.
Noted: In 1974, the consortium included Indiana University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Rochester, the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, and Washington University in St. Louis. That year, those six schools graduated 63 black MBA students—more than had graduated from all U.S. business schools combined eight years earlier. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the consortium, which now includes 18 universities that have graduated more than 8,000 MBA students from minority populations.
Noted: The Madison store will be managed by Taren Mansfield, a UW-Madison graduate who most recently worked as an executive with Target on Madison’s Far West Side.
Noted: EatStreet, which supplies restaurants with software for handling online orders, is one of the state’s fastest-growing start-ups. Howard and his partners started EatStreet in 2010 when they were students at the Unveristy of Wisconsin-Madison. EatStreet raised $15 million of outside funding in late 2015, saying it planned to add 30 employees to its staff of 110 people.
Noted: Eventually, Greg Bothwell, Cambridge’s young vineyard manager and a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s horticulture program, plans to help with winemaking too.
Noted: Sean, 32, and Stacey, 29, are both UW-Madison graduates. They met in 2011 and married in 2014, and have taken over a business with a dedicated customer base and a strong stable of employees, one of which has been with the company since 1979. They had been contemplating buying a business for years but when Sean, who works as a broker connecting business owners with potential buyers, began talking with Bauer about the future of the business, the talks ultimately led to the Scannells making an offer.
Noted: For more than 20 years, Cook was a research scientist at UW-Madison, specializing in allergic and infectious eye diseases. Cook, 59, retired in late 2013 and was awarded emeritus status in 2014, which allowed her to continue her affiliation with the university.
Retired UW-Madison plant pathologist Vaughan James probably did not realize he was planting seeds for a small business when he put in gardens at his home in 2000. The 1,100 perennials provide a profusion of inspiration and photography subjects for his silk screening and sublimation printing business, R.V. James Designs.
UW-Madison spin-off organization Stemina Biomarker Discovery is attempting to create a biological method to diagnose autism by screening blood samples.
CEO Elizabeth Donley and UW-Madison professor in the Department of Animal Sciences Gabriela Cezar founded the company in 2006, according to a university release.
Noted: The founder of the company, Gregory Piefer, studied at UW-Madison. The company performed a national search for places to locate their new facility, but Pitas said keeping the local company in Wisconsin brings the company full circle.
“The idea that work that goes on at the university should help people throughout the state. So, this is a great example of technology coming out of the university and helping people in Janesville with great-paying jobs,” she said.
Also quoted: Richard Steeves, professor emeritus of human oncology.
Noted: Piefer was in the UW-Madison’s nuclear engineering Ph.D program, and after getting his degree, he developed the technology, he said, and forged a partnership with the private, nonprofit Morgridge Institute for Research on the UW campus.
Op-ed by Jaime Luque, Assistant Professor, Real Estate & Urban Land Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is one of three schools working with non-profit research institute SRI International under a $5.3 million federal grant to develop technology to thwart particularly costly cyberattacks.
Next Thursday is decision day for SHINE Medical Technologies. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Rockville, Maryland, will decide if SHINE will get a permit to build a plant in Janesville that will manufacture a radioisotope crucial for the health care industry.
Noted: Kubicek has a graduate degree in atmospheric science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also has undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering from UW-Madison and in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Noted: According to a UW study, nearly 90% of Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are from Mexico. Some of them have come here from other states, such as Arizona, that have passed laws cracking down on undocumented workers.
Low oil prices are restraining the ability of renewable energy technologies to compete, but work forges ahead on alternatives to petroleum-based fuels.
Quoted: “Medical education and nursing education is really grappling with: ‘How do we train the health professionals of the future to care for the patient and not for the electronic health records?’” says Katharyn May, a professor and the dean of the UW School of Nursing.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin School of Business student has collaborated with Askar Choudhury, James Jones and Raquiba Choudhury of Illinois State University, using an innovative statistical approach to analyze data by finding a trigger point that would initiate payment for crop loss through a simplified, index-based insurance policy. The approach is designed to be less costly than traditional agricultural insurance policies.
Seven executives met for a recent roundtable discussion at Wisconsin State Journal offices, one year after they gathered for a similar exchange, to see if conditions in the area’s tech industry have improved or slid backward.
Noted: Badgerloop, the University of Wisconsin’s largely undergraduate team, laid claim to one of the event’s most impressive booths. Throughout the weekend, team members, who were clad in matching red-and-black polo shirts and khakis, built an Oculus Rift-like headset out of cardboard to help explain their pod’s unique technology to the steady throng around their eye-catching display.
Noted: BluDiagnostics was formed in 2015 by Katie Brenner, a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It raised $600,000 of the money in January, when it said it was trying to raise $800,000. That goal has been amended to $1.2 million, according to the recent filing.
A UW-Madison team that designed a pod for transporting people at futuristic speed finished third in SpaceX’s first worldwide Hyperloop competition, hosted at Texas A&M University Jan. 29 and 30.
Noted: Author Robert Misey is chair of the International Department at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren S.C. and adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Law. He previously worked for the IRS Chief Counsel (International) in Washington.
Noted: Field Day Lab is continuing to develop some of the ideas that were born in the workshop into free, open-sourced video games. The game designers said they aim to further engage students with an interactive learning environment.
“By engaging science teachers right from the start, we want to build games that will actually be used in classrooms,” said David Gagnon, the director of Field Day Lab, in the release. “Too many games languish because they do not fit what teachers want. With the teachers’ help, we want to build them right—right out of the gate.”
We’ve already got robot receptionists, who respond to human interactions — now we have a robot that changes how it looks depending on your personality. This robot, designed by Sean Andrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been developed to respond to ’social gaze’ — essentially the social context in which we look at one another. The robot uses social cues, which it processes via a bespoke algorithm, to figure out what kind of personality you have and respond accordingly.
Students who are part of the University of Wisconsin’s BadgerLoop team took third in the world for their Hyperloop design in Texas yesterday.
Noted: Howard started the company with two friends when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. EatStreet provides more than 15,000 restaurants in 250 cities across the country with around the clock support.
Quoted: And, according to Andra Ghent, associate professor in the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at UW-Madison’s School of Business, baby boomers will be flooding the market in five to 10 years, creating even more demand.
A Delaware federal judge has dismissed a patent royalty lawsuit filed by Washington University in St. Louis against a foundation affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, ruling that its claims were barred by the statute of limitations.
Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are tasked with protecting data from some of the nation’s most prolific science research programs, and they’ve just gotten a financial boost to bolster their efforts.
Students part of University of Wisconsin’s BadgerLoop are preparing for a national SpaceX competition that challenges them to bring transportation technology to life.
The BadgerLoop team is creating their version of SpaceX’s Hyperloop concept, a new technology that uses air pressures to propel a transportation pod down a tube for fast travel.
Madison tech companies that get acquired don’t need to close up shop if they can convince their buyers there’s more benefits from the acquisition than the technology itself, leaders of life sciences companies said at a WARF panel.
Quoted: Those consumers just might be one of the answers to investors’ woes, said David Silberman, who is pursuing a master’s degree in finance and participating in the Applied Security Analysis Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(Video) Last year, Space X and Tesla announced an exciting engineering competition for university students. The goal of the competition is to come up with a mode of transportation that is faster, safer, less expensive and more sustainable than planes, cars or trains. A team from the University of Wisconsin is in the competition this year.
Noted: BluDiagnostics was formed by Katie Brenner, a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The app, called the BluDiagnostics Fertility Finder, analyzes hormones found in saliva and displays results through the app.
Tom Still column on campus innovation: “UW-Madison remains one of the nation’s research powerhouses and was ahead of the curve in offering pathways for entrepreneurs. But even that campus has experienced a post-2000 explosion in programs for students and faculty who want to convert ideas into businesses or other ventures. Across the rest of the UW System, most four-year campuses have committed to undergraduate research, industry connections and entrepreneurship training and built support systems to match. The same goes for many of Wisconsin’s private colleges and universities, notably many in the Milwaukee region, as well as the state technical college system.”
Noted: Gener8tor, which recently partnered with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to train more University of Wisconsin-Madison entrepreneurs, runs start-up training classes in Madison and Milwaukee. It made 17 investments in 2015, according to Pitchbook.
Quoted: And business students are in demand because they have a great balance of hard and soft skills, according to Amanda Earle, associate director of career advising at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Business students are trained to be able to dive into data, make meaning and connections with the data, and then tell a clear and concise story through written and oral communications to both internal and external stakeholders.” Earle says the ability to understand data and know how to effectively communicate it is crucial to helping businesses make important decisions for the bottom line.
Madworks Seed Accelerator, which operates in the heart of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, has begun taking applications for its sixth start-up training class.
Quoted: “For 2016, I think the consensus of the industry is there’s going to be downward pressure on prices,” said Brian Gould, an economist with the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Profitability.
Noted: Author Sybil Pressprich is a career and educational counselor for the Division of Continuing Studies at UW-Madison. Pressprich helps adults with career transitions and continuing education through individual sessions and workshops.
Companies less than a year old accounted for all of Wisconsin’s net new job creation in 2012, according to a new study conducted by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
Quoted: File your patent early or opt for secrecy. Martin Ganco, associate professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business, advises, “A small-business owner should consider filing a patent as early as they have a patentable technology. It can be in the early stages. It is a common mistake to think that a fully functioning prototype is needed to apply for a patent. In rare cases, if the patent provides weak protection, it may be better to opt for not patenting and opt instead for secrecy.”
Noted: Griffie graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in economics and spent three years training high school volunteers to do home repairs in Appalachia.
Noted: Phoenix was founded in 2005 by Greg Piefer, who received his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shine Medical Technologies Inc., a Middleton company that is seeking approval from federal regulators to build a medical isotope production plant in Janesville, was spun out of Phoenix in 2010.
Noted: Shine, which grew out of technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, signed a long-term agreement in 2014 to supply moly-99 to GE Healthcare. Tests conducted by the two companies in November showed that moly-99 made with Shine’s proprietary method worked with GE’s equipment and processes, proving its market viability.
Tessa Conroy and Steven Deller recently completed a study showing that Wisconsin job growth is fueled by newer, smaller businesses. But the report says state policies tend to boost larger, more established businesses.
Quoted: The technology behind the robots is mature and reliable, said Bilge Mutlu, associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So obstacles to more widespread use are the rate of adoption and infrastructure challenges, like WiFi coverage, he said.
Noted: AFIRE members are among the largest international institutional real estate investors in the world and have an estimated $2 trillion or more in real estate assets under management globally. The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2015 by the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate, Wisconsin School of Business.
Noted: The two UW-Madison graduates — Fernandez, with a degree in biomedical engineering, and Rusk, in electrical and computer engineering — had been trying to start a company for the last couple of years “in various forms and inclinations,” Fernandez said.
On a campus famed for its breakthroughs in biotechnology, engineering and agriculture, a much smaller department is exerting an outsized effect on the Wisconsin economy – and beyond.
HOUSTON — The original charter of Rice University, drafted in 1891, established a school here dedicated to the advancement of literature, science and art. These days, Rice seems equally dedicated to the advancement of the next Mark Zuckerberg.
A center that focuses on clean energy research will continue operating at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after a $3.5 million grant from the school’s research foundation.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s grant to the Wisconsin Energy Institute was announced Tuesday [Dec. 22].
Epic Systems will endow three faculty associate positions within the University of Wisconsin–Madison computer sciences department, the university announced earlier this month. The endowed faculty will teach software development, application design and user experience.
Founded by UW-Madison’s renowned stem cell pioneer James Thomson in 2004, CDI has been inking powerful deals and gradually adding staff as it has set about to become the premier source for stem cells in the world. In a meeting with the Wisconsin State Journal this week, Kazuyoshi Hirao, CDI’s new chairman and CEO, and Chris Parker, executive vice president and chief business officer, said the company, at 525 Science Drive, will stay in Madison and will continue to grow here.
Since taking office two years ago, University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank has championed the effort to make more resources available to members of the campus community who have ideas for new companies.
Noted: National security quite rightly has dominated our political debate in recent weeks, but I can’t think of a more important issue for Wisconsin and the nation than economic security. The Journal Sentinel opinion pages will focus on this concern as we close out 2015 and move into the presidential election year of 2016. That conversation begins Sunday in Crossroads when we will publish commentary on the Pew report by Salim Furth, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, and from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
