The University of Wisconsin could receive nearly $1 million for need-based scholarships within the next several years as a result of the combined efforts of the University of Wisconsin Credit Union and the UW Foundation.
The University of Wisconsin Credit Union announced Wednesday it is making an outright gift of $215,000 to need-based scholarships at UW-Madison.
“I think everyone knows that need-based financial aid is one of my highest priorities,” UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin said during a Wednesday press conference at the Mechanical Engineering building to announce the gift. “I couldn’t be happier about this announcement.”
In addition, the UW Credit Union will match contributions from its members through the end of 2008.
It’s called the biggest dairy event in the world. And it no doubt is.
The name World Dairy Expo describes it well because it is truly a worldwide event. And for five days, Tuesday through Saturday, nearly 70,000 people from dozens of countries, 2,500 dairy cattle from North America and 1,600 commercial exhibits will be centered at the Alliant Energy Center.
When the World Food and Agricultural Exposition opened its doors for the first time in 1967, it was anything but famous or worldly.
Madison-based Stratatech Corp. announced Monday the successful completion of a clinical trial of its StrataGraft human skin substitute. The company said the trial showed StrataGraft performed comparable to the current standard of care.
The clinical trial was designed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of StrataGraft in patients with major skin trauma that required temporary skin replacement before “autografting” — the transplantation of live skin tissue from one part of a patient’s body to another.
….The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Michael J. Schurr was the trial’s principal clinical investigator.
A progressive watchdog group is taking the state’s largest business lobby to task for failing to disclose lobbying activity concerning the University of Wisconsin’s budget.
One Wisconsin Now filed a complaint Tuesday with the state Government Accountability Board alleging that Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce didn’t disclose lobbying activity a WMC official referred to in an Aug. 20 memo.
The memo, from WMC Vice President for Government Relations James Buchen, was in response to an article in Madison Magazine written by recently retired UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley that was critical of WMC’s support of uncomprisingly partisan Republican legislators.
For a half-dozen or so Saturdays each fall over the last 15 years, Jim Luedtke has been at the epicenter of one of Madison’s great traditions — a University of Wisconsin football home game.
As the owner of two popular bars in the shadow of Camp Randall Stadium during that span, he has come to one conclusion.
“There’s no such thing as a bad football day — rain, shine, whatever,” Luedtke said. “It’s to what degree of how good they are, is how I look at it.”
Congress whiffs on a proposed financial bail out plan, and Wall Street responds with a plummeting market.
A panel of UW-Madison business experts believe the developments should not lead to panic.
The panel of experts used terms such as “historic,” for what’s going on in our economy at the moment. And during more than an hour forum for alumni and students at the UW School of Business, “recession,” not “depression,” was as far as any of the experts would go, as they looked down our economic road.
Recently they met to try and explain the current state of our economy and more importantly where we go from here.
It was a busy day on Wall Street.
The House rejected a $700 billion bailout plan, stocks fell about 770 points and everyone is left wondering what’s next?
A panel of UW experts came together to try and explain what all this talk of financial crisis means to you.
One expert says, ” There were serious discussions starting back in 2002 about whether or not this was a bubble.”
Madison, Wis. – Relentless innovation is considered by many business gurus to be America’s only remaining edge in a global marketplace marked by labor arbitrage and the competitive threats posed by exploding economies in China and elsewhere.
While some progress is being made on the innovation front, too many U.S. companies still are underperforming when it comes to driving the type of sustained innovation needed to meet this competitive threat, according to Tom Koulopoulos, an internationally recognized management consultant and author of the forthcoming book The Innovation Zone.
A controversial beer pong display at a local Walgreens came down over the weekend after leaders said it promoted binge drinking.
In April, UW-Madison’s Jewish student community will be able to gather at the new, four-story, $14 million, 30,000-square-foot Barbara Hochberg Center for Jewish Student Life.
For most of my professional life, Iâ??ve felt that one of the most underappreciated â??lawsâ? of economics was J.B. Sayâ??s maxim that supply creates its own demand. It seems that in projecting where the economy will go next, too many people focus on the trees that make up demand and not the forest that is supply.
Peak Ridge Capital has launched what it said is the first private equity fund to focus exclusively on agricultural and clean technologies in Wisconsin.
“The AgTech Fund is poised to be one of the nation’s largest private equity funds focusing exclusively on agricultural technologies,” Peak Ridge President Jason Smith said in a statement.
(The fund’s board of advisers includes Dr. Molly Jahn, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at UW-Madison and Hector DeLuca, famed UW-Madison Steenbock Research Professor)
Milwaukee, Wis. – The professionals of Ernst & Young, LLP, together with the Ernst & Young Foundation, have announced a donation of $840,000 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The donation will be used to create a new Accounting Student Computer Lab in the School of Business and complete the funding of the Ernst & Young endowed chair in the Accounting department.
The University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics is one of the 100 best places for working parents to work, according to the annual “best of” list released by Working Mother magazine.
The hospital was the only Dane County company to be so honored, but Kraft Foods, owner of Madison-based Oscar Mayer, is also on the list.
This is the second year in a row UW Hospital and Clinics is on the Working Mother best places to work list.
To many scientists, those promoting what is sometimes referred to as “stem cell tourism” are nothing more than the 21st century’s version of the snake oil salesman.
Fueled by sometimes desperate patients who are willing to travel the globe for cures, dozens of companies around the world are marketing injections of stem cells as life-changing treatments, or even cures, for everything from Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, to heart failure, spinal injuries and other tough-to-treat conditions.
“Medical tourism for stem cells is very controversial,” said Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetics Policy Institute and the driving force behind the World Stem Cell Summit, which concluded its two-day run at the Alliant Energy Center’s Exhibition Hall on Tuesday.
University Book Store is expanding into the Milwaukee area.
The venerable 114-year-old institution (founded in 1894) will open its newest store in the Brookfield Square Mall on Moorland Road in Brookfield on Oct. 1, the third city and sixth location for the store.
Quoted: “Commercial credit is getting much harder to find, especially real estate related credit because of the fallout in the mortgage markets,” said James Johannes, director of the UW-Madison Puelicher Center for Banking Education. “It is still available for the right price and security, just not at yesterday’s terms.”
“There is no question that these cells might serve as a new area of medicine — human regenerative medicine,” said Dr. Gabriella Cezar, noted UW researcher and chief scientific officer of Stemina, a biotech start-up based in Madison.
“There are 150 people on campus working on stem cell research,” Cezar told a summit audience, “and we’re doing the science to benefit patients.”
“Like an out-of-control forest fire” â?? that’s how Scott Anderson, senior economist with Wells Fargo Economics in Minneapolis describes the nation’s financial crisis that mushroomed this week.
Anderson said while he has qualms about the federal government “running our financial system,” the Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson were right to step in.
Two groups said Friday that they have appealed the federal government’s decision to uphold a stem-cell patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
The two biggest research institutions in the state, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin, each have large portfolios in the biological and medical sciences.
Madison is one of the world’s leaders because of its patents in stem cell research, and the Medical College has staked out areas of expertise such as diagnostic imaging. These large research budgets inevitably lead to patents, licenses and start-ups in Wisconsin.
Sean Grossberg closed the textbook for his financial derivatives class and sank into the couch.
If all went according to plan, a year from now he’d be finished with school and working on Wall Street. But now he needed a break.
The University of Wisconsin senior hit the remote control and the second half of a Sunday afternoon football game filled the 100-inch screen.
Frustrated with studying for class, two UW-Madison graduates are setting out to make life easier for students across the country.
They’re gaining worldwide attention by the day, finding out a life changing business was just a click away.
Santa Monica, Calif. – In a brief filed with the U.S. Patent Office’s board of appeals and interferences, consumer watchdog groups have cited two legal errors allegedly made by a patent examiner in confirming a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patent on human embryonic stem cells.
On July 18, 2008 the California-based and renamed Consumer Watchdog (hereafter â??Watchdogâ?), reexamination requester of three of related Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s (WARF) stem cell patents, filed a Notice of Appeal in the United States Patent Trademark Office (â??the PTOâ?) relating to one of those patents. That Notice and the concurrent press release brought back to the public eye the stem cell reexamination process which was initiated in July 2006 when Watchdog filed its reexamination requests. This is to update and revisit that dispute.
MATC Credit Union, which serves Madison Area Technical College employees and their families, plans to merge Dec. 1 with UW Credit Union, pending approval by the state’s Office of Credit Unions.
The Dane County Board voted Thursday night to require companies that work for the county on contracts worth $5,000 or more to offer health benefits to their employees’ domestic partners. The county already offers domestic partner benefits to its own employees.
The ordinance, which passed on a voice vote, also creates a registry for same-sex or other non-married domestic partners, a registry the city of Madison has had since 1990 but no other county in the state offers.
Domestic partners need to have been in a committed relationship for at least 90 days to register.
Dane County is the first county in Wisconsin to require contractors and service providers to offer domestic partner benefits.
The rule passed last night by the County Board only applies to employers who currently offer spousal benefits.
It also creates a domestic partnership registry for heterosexual and homosexual couples in Dane County.
One major hurdle still needs to be cleared before the University of Wisconsin can fully celebrate a new performance facility announced on Tuesday.
The Big Ten Network was a small footnote in News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch’s speech at an industry conference Wednesday but it was a choice nugget for those who’ve followed the channel’s tumultuous year-plus of existence.
As the city approaches the state-issued quotas on liquor licenses for bars and restaurants, members of Madison’s Alcohol License Review Committee voted Wednesday night to take a closer look at the economic benefits of granting new licenses.
The committee formed a subcommittee that will address ways to maximize the economic gain of a license, including considering whether a license is necessary or merely beneficial to a business, reserving licenses according to geographical area to save some for developing parts of the city and reserving licenses for particular purposes, such as for major hotels.
MADISON, Wis. — College students typically study beer drinking, but a new class could soon help them brew their own.
MillerCoors is donating $100,000 worth of equipment to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences for a beer brewing program.
A course on the science of brewing and fermentation will start this spring, beer experts from Miller’s Milwaukee brewery will help implement curriculum.
Earning credits for making beer is enough to make quite a few 40 hour per week employees think about heading back to school.
A new partnership between UW-Madison and MillerCoors is creating quite a buzz.
On the surface something like this begs a lot of questions about promoting drinking or what underage students could do with the knowledge but faculty at UW say that’s missing the point.
Washburn University agreed to modify its athletic logo Friday after UW-Madison filed an unprecedented federal trademark-infringement lawsuit against the school last year.
The University of Wisconsin has reached an agreement with Washburn University, a collegiate institution comprised of 7,200 students located in Topeka, Kan., after claiming the school had infringed upon UWâ??s â??Motion Wâ? logo.
In response to several missing checks that may have been lost in the mail, the Bursarâ??s Office of the University of Wisconsin sent out an e-mail to affected students this week.
University of Wisconsin music faculty expressed excitement Tuesday in the wake of the announcement of a $20 million donation from anonymous donors to support a new campus music center.
Eight Madison-area companies â?? several of them spinoffs from UW-Madison technology â?? are among the recipients of $7.3 million in state grants and loans for clean-energy projects, Gov. Jim Doyle announced Tuesday.
Two anonymous donors have given $20 million to UW-Madison’s School of Music for building two performing venues in a prominent campus location, next to the Chazen Museum of Art and three blocks north of the Kohl Center, by early 2013.
The financial gift will shift up to 300 concerts each year by UW faculty and students from the hard-to-find Mills Hall and Morphy Hall â?? both built in 1969 and tucked in the Mosse Humanities Building â?? to the new building at the northwest corner of University Avenue and Lake Street.
Sconnies wanting to ferment their knowledge about how their favorite brewskies are made will actually get to earn credit for it next spring, thanks to the second-largest brewery in the country giving beer making gear to UW-Madison.
MillerCoors is donating $100,000 in brewing equipment to the UW College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the keystone for a new brewing and fermentation course to be offered for the first time in the spring semester.
Chalk one up to a win â?? with a capital W â?? for UW-Madison’s Motion W logo.
Washburn University has agreed to tweak its logo as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit that UW-Madison filed against the Topeka, Kan., school late last year, according to a UW-Madison official.
The nation’s economy has probably hit its low point and should start improving in the next six months.
That’s what speakers told about 80 people at the semi-annual Economic Outlook Conference at the Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus Friday.
“I think improvement in the economy is imminent,” said Clare Zempel, founder of Zempel Strategic in Milwaukee and former chief economist for Robert W. Baird & Co. “The slowdown should be in the process of slowing down.”
The home in which Brittany Zimmermann and her fiance, Jordan Gonnering, were living at the time she was stabbed to death in April was lacking in security, and her boyfriend had complained to the management firm about the lack of secure doors and locks, according to a lawsuit filed in Dane County Circuit Court by Zimmermann’s parents.
Wisconsin School of Businessâ?? entrepreneurship program is one of the best in the country, according to a national survey published recently by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.
The Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at UW-Madison ranks 13th nationwide in the â??Top 50 Entrepreneurial Graduate Colleges in the U.S.â? out of more than 2,300 undergraduate and graduate schools surveyed for the list. The center stands seventh among public universities.
MADISON — Kikkoman Corp. Chairman Yuzaburo Mogi figures he has been to Wisconsin at least 200 times in the past 35 years.
So he was on familiar ground Tuesday when he dedicated his company’s new research-and-development lab at the University Research Park on Madison’s west side.
Mogi said he has high hopes that Kikkoman scientists and UW-Madison researchers can collaborate on new food and other products in coming years. The lab will open early in 2009.
Quoted: Barry Gerhart, management professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Compensation.
If the Big Ten Network doesn’t broadcast enough Big Ten sports for you, it’s about to provide even more via its Web site.
BTN announced Wednesday that it would expand its Web streaming initiative to include more than 100 events, many of which would not otherwise be produced.
While some conferences charge a fee, the games streamed on www.BigTenNetwork.com will be free, the network said.
The latest in healthy, soy-based foods could someday sprout from a lab here in Madison.
Japanese dignitaries came to University Research Park on Tuesday to dedicate the Kikkoman USA Research and Development Laboratory, to be created at the MGE Innovation Center, 505 S. Rosa Road.
The lab will be Kikkoman’s fourth worldwide and the first of its kind in the U.S.
UW-Madison undergraduate students are not paying enough for the quality education they’re getting here, School of Business Dean Michael Knetter told a women’s leadership organization Tuesday.
“We dramatically undercharge for a (UW-Madison) degree,” said Knetter. Of the Big Ten schools, only the University of Iowa charges less than UW-Madison for state resident undergraduate tuition and fees last year, a comparison by UW-Madison officials shows.
The government did the right thing by bailing out mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their finances deteriorated any further, a UW-Madison School of Business professor says.
“If we learned anything from the savings and loan (crisis of the 1980s and 1990s), it’s that firms have incentives to take big risks if they’re near bankruptcy,” said Morris Davis, assistant professor of real estate and urban land economics.
Slowly but surely, tenacious Ogg Hall is coming down.
After clinging to life for longer than expected, the UW-Madison dorm that students lovingly disparaged for its small and austere rooms seems finally on a clear path to demolition.
The state’s new commerce secretary, Richard Leinenkugel, must navigate a political climate that lacks consensus on how much – if anything – the state should spend on incentives and subsidies to attract and retain businesses. That discord impedes the work of the 3-year-old Milwaukee 7 economic development agency, the M-7 conceded last week.
That disunity came to the surface last month when John Wiley, the outgoing chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a scathing criticism of the state’s ideologically split political landscape, which has stalemated tax and economic policy. Asked in an interview Friday what sort of economic climate Leinenkugel inherits, Wiley replied:
“The climate in Wisconsin is bad for a lot of reasons but the worst is the political partisanship,” he said.
When Yahoo! employees call for technical assistance this fall, the accent they hear may be “Cheesehead.” The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh announced Wednesday that tech giant Yahoo! will establish a student-staffed technical support center in Oshkosh.
The Yahoo! CareCenter, which is about two years in the making, will provide technical support to some of the company’s 17,000 employees.
Students staffing the Yahoo! CareCenter will be able to earn $10,000 or more per year working part time, UW-Oshkosh said in a news release. Twenty students will be recruited initially, with 20 more added as needed.
Madison police have a suspect in custody after a fatal stabbing Wednesday night in downtown Madison.
A 22-year-old Madison man was stabbed outside the Plaza Tavern, 319 N. Henry St., at about 11:40 p.m. following an in-bar dispute between two groups of men.
(According to police the victim was not a UW-Madison student)
A host of local politicians, UW officials and business development insiders will welcome the chairman of Kikkoman Corp. to Madison next week.
Gov. Jim Doyle, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and University Research Park Director Mark Bugher will host Kikkoman chairman Yuzaburo Mogi on Tuesday to mark the establishment of Kikkoman USA’s new research and development laboratory in the MGE Innovation Center at University Research Park.
….The Kikkoman Foundation is also granting $100,000 for scholarships at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
….To better monitor state subsidies to corporations, a UW-Madison think tank has called for a searchable database to track whether that money actually benefits the Wisconsin economy. Patterned after a system recently implemented in Illinois, the database would include how much companies pay in state taxes, how much business they do in the state and how much financial help they get.
In 2003, Illinois passed a Corporate Accountability Act, considered one of the most comprehensive corporate disclosure laws in the country. As part of that act, companies receiving state economic development money must also report on their progress in job creation, retention and wage promises.
“This level of transparency is key for policy makers and the public to better evaluate the tax system and see if it is truly working in the economic interests of the state,” said Kate Gordon, lead author of the report for the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
Like Jon Foley, I do environmental work. And just as he is leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a better opportunity at the University of Minnesota, I too left Wisconsin at the end of July.
In 1996 I received my doctorate from the UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. I own an 8-year-old environmental management consulting firm.
….Rep. Steve Nass might be driving some academics to leave with his disrespect for UW-Madison, but others in the state are proving remarkably effective at driving some of the rest of us away too — or at least not being very shrewd about how to keep us around.
The company was founded by Li and Bin Ran, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the university’s Traffic Lab. It has patented software and predictive models that collect data from about 350 sources, such as helicopter data, probes embedded in highway pavement and cell phone towers. The result is route-specific, real-time traffic information and travel time forecasts.
The Charter Communications/Big Ten Network agreement is bittersweet for many sports fans.
We’ll be the first to admit that it’s good news that Charter’s cable subscribers in southern Wisconsin will finally be able to see Badger football and basketball games that are exclusively carried on the Big Ten Conference-controlled network.
….There is a downside, however. Once again, big-time college sports and the television-connected outfits that enter into deals with them wind up putting the squeeze on the little guy.
Some of the kingpins in today’s athletic culture find it hard to believe that there may actually be people out there who can’t afford expanded basic service, much less the digital package that is increasingly being pushed. But, of course, there are and they’re big fans — as big as the high rollers who have taken hold of supposedly amateur sports today.
