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.
Avtar Roopra’s research has effectively stalled since President Donald Trump started his second term and upended the federal research funding landscape. Agencies have cut projects, delayed grant reviews, fired thousands of federal employees who offer guidance to researchers and reduced the number of new projects getting funding.
“This is like the Holy Grail of epilepsy, what we’ve been looking for for hundreds of years,” Roopra said. “All of it is on hold. It’s extremely frustrating.”
Experiments by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison show that viruses and bacteria behave differently in near-weightless conditions. In space, they develop genetic changes not typically seen on Earth.
Lead study author Dr. Phil Huss, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, noted that interactions between viruses that infect bacteria — known as phages — and their hosts play an “integral” role in how microbial ecosystems function, per the SWSN report.
Parents of transgender children in the Madison region are scrambling for alternatives after two of Wisconsin’s largest pediatric hospitals halted gender-affirming care for minors, leaving scarce options in the state.
Madison-based UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee confirmed this week that they are pausing gender-affirming care for those under 18 years old. The health systems’ decisions follow pressure from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement on Dec. 18 of new rules and a warning that the federal government could pull funding from hospitals if they offered gender-affirming care to minors.
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.
The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff.
Now in its second century, the nonprofit faces challenges, though. The Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal research funding could limit the number of discoveries coming to WARF.
To better understand how microbes may act differently in space, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria, also called phages — in identical settings both on the ISS and on Earth. Their results, published recently in the journal PLOS Biology, suggest that microgravity can delay infections, reshape evolution of both phages and bacteria and even reveal genetic combinations that may help the performance against disease-linked bacteria on Earth.
“Studying phage–bacteria systems in space isn’t just a curiosity for astrobiology; it’s a practical way to understand and anticipate how microbial ecosystems behave in spacecraft and to mine new solutions for phage therapy and microbiome engineering back home,” said Dr. Phil Huss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the study’s lead authors.
Children’s Wisconsin and UW Health have stopped providing gender-affirming care treatments to minors, citing recent federal policy changes.
Both are among the state’s largest pediatric hospitals. Advocates fear the lack of access to gender-affirming treatments could lead to negative mental health effects for transgender youth.
Red light therapy, sometimes called photobiomodulation, applies specific wavelengths of light (usually around 630 nanometers) onto your skin. These wavelengths can penetrate two to three millimeters below the skin, and cause positive reactions in the cells just under your skin, says Dr. Apple Bodemer, a board-certified dermatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
There aren’t a lot of high-quality scientific studies available, and many of the red light therapy studies are funded by companies that make red light products, which should be taken with a grain of salt, says Bodemer. But there seems to be enough evidence that red light therapy may be helpful for some people, she says.
Co-authored by Tony LoSasso, the Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Written by Maryellen MacDonald, a professor emerit of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.”
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.”
Donahue said the funding has been the result of years of working with people at all levels of government, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey experts.
“This has come after years of immense collaboration,” she said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have unlocked a potential new treatment to target an incurable form of childhood cancer with the help of a fast-reproducing pest known for swarming kitchen produce.
Professors Melissa Harrison and Peter Lewis used fruit flies to to study how cellular pathways are misregulated by a cancer-causing mutant protein. The pesky bugs were perfect lab subjects for the project because two-thirds of the cancer-causing genes in humans are shared by fruit flies.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dramatically reducing the number of vaccines it recommends to all American children, taking six off the list that have been considered routine for decades.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have unlocked a potential new treatment to target an incurable form of childhood cancer with the help of a fast-producing pest known for swarming kitchen produce.
Professors Melissa Harrison and Peter Lewis used fruit flies to to study how cellular pathways are misregulated by a cancer-causing mutant protein. The pesky bugs were perfect lab subjects for the project because two-thirds of the cancer-causing genes in humans are shared by fruit flies.
The flu season is now fully underway, and Dr. James Conway, professor in the Department of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, is worried that this year will be a challenging one. That’s in part because a new strain of the virus called the “K subclade,” is circulating and people may not have the immunity to easily fight it off.
“We’re looking at another bad season. Last year was pretty brisk … But this one really seems to be picking up,” Conway told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “This new K clade of the H3N2 influenza A is really kind of a novel and really rapidly expanding virus, and so we’re seeing a lot of disease related to that particular strain.”
UW–Madison psychologist Shilagh Mirgain shares five strategies for making and keeping New Year’s resolutions.
As the new year approaches, a survey from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine shows that half of American adults plan to start new diets. Dietitians, however, caution against extreme restrictions and unrealistic goals.
Registered dietitian Brianne Thorton of UW Health said, “Dieting has not changed much. It just looks different with a different name on top.”
Better bike lanes, electric buses and more charging stations for electric cars – these are all ways cities can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change.
But for those who think curbing the planet’s warming is a lofty goal, two Wisconsin researchers are trying to show how these actions can improve human health – and perhaps prevent Milwaukee residents from scoring worst in the nation in one key measure.
Gabby Mullally, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is applying for residencies and plans to specialize in anesthesiology. She knows she would be working with patients during times of heightened anxiety, namely right before someone undergoes surgery.
That’s why she took an improv theater class this past semester.
Years living with an autoimmune disease meant it was a matter of when, not if, Adam Barnes would need a liver transplant.
That time was approaching after he was hospitalized for a blocked bile duct in 2024. The idea of seeking a living donor came up but there was something about it that turned him off.
Using fruit flies, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are uncovering a new way to think about treating an aggressive and deadly form of childhood brain cancer.
By understanding how different proteins affect genetic mutations in the flies’ wings and eyes, the researchers say it could lead to new ways to silence genes behind the disease
Research suggests that even if you don’t actually meet up with someone or send them an email or text, it can be enough to simply send good thoughts their way. “You can start with a simple appreciation practice,” Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, previously told HuffPost. Just bring a friend or loved one into your mind, then consciously focusing on the things you really cherish about them.
Nedergaard and her colleague Prof Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the US, decided to explore the potential effects of lacking inner speech, recruiting people who scored low on a questionnaire with statements such as “I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.”
By coining the term ‘anendophasia’ – from the Greek an (lack), endo (inner) and phasia (speech) – Nedergaard and Lupyan hope to create a similar keyword that will help to catalyse research into those lacking inner speech.
UW Health’s Med Flight also started a whole blood transfusion program last year. Dr. Ryan Newberry, assistant medical director for UW Health Med Flight, said around 90 patients have been given over 160 units of whole blood in the first year of the program.
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.
“Living donation is the gift of a lifetime because a kidney from a living donor often lasts longer than a kidney from a deceased donor,” said Dr. Dixon Kaufman, the director of the UW Health Transplant Center and a professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We see the urgent need for more donors every day, which motivated us to launch this initiative.”
“It’s still early in the season, but we’re starting to see things start to go up,” said Dr. James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute. “We fortunately seem to be later than some areas of the country, which is good, but our immunization rates are well below where they need to be.”
A group of local planning and demography specialists known as the Regional Data Group estimate the county will have 887,000 residents by 2050, an increase of roughly 58% from the 2020 census count of 561,504.
The Regional Data Group includes staff from the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission and the Greater Madison Metropolitan Planning Organization, along with the city, county and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Its projections take into account local development patterns and expects much more room for population influx.
The American Red Cross of Wisconsin is extending heartfelt thanks to blood and platelet donors for their role in helping the University of Wisconsin-Madison secure $1 million through Abbott’s “We Give Blood” competition.
The campaign by Abbott highlights the critical need for regular blood donations. The $1 million award will support health initiatives at UW-Madison, showcasing the power of community action for lifesaving causes.
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.
“Between our child life specialists talking with siblings with our social workers’ help with identification, that was absolutely critical,” said Dr. Nicholas Kuehnel, vice chair of clinical operations for UW Health’s Dept. of Emergency Medicine. “Even our environmental services teammates that worked to help us turn the room over, get beds into place, get the linens on. None of this would be able to happen as smooth as it does without these individuals really helping each step along the way.”
Oscar Rennebohm — who would go on to a magisterial career that included serving as Wisconsin governor and president of the UW-Madison Board of Regents — opened his first Madison pharmacy in 1925. There were eventually more than two dozen Rennebohm’s that were purchased by Walgreens in 1980.
Across the years, major beneficiaries have included the UW School of Nursing, Edgewood University, Access Community Health Centers, the Henry Vilas Zoo — the list is long.
Dr. Earlise Ward is faculty director for the Cancer Health Disparities Initiative (CHDI) and co-director of the T32 Primary Care Research Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She conducts community-engaged clinical intervention research focused on African American adults’ mental health and culturally competent mental health services. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Baruch College, master’s degree in counseling and Brooklyn College and PhD in counseling psychology at UW-Madison.
Donald Dantzler is an alder for the City of Fitchburg, candidate for Dane County Board, and a Survey and Research Specialist for the Madison Metropolitan School District. He was previously faculty and adjunct faculty for UW-Whitewater, and has also worked as a research associate at Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory and a project assistant for the UW System Administration Office of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Success. He earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UW-Whitewater and is a doctoral candidate in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis program at UW-Madison.
UW-Madison student Nai’Taija Williams McMorris is eyeing what’s next. Set to graduate from her nursing program next year, Williams McMorris aspires to enter the master’s program she needs to complete to become a nurse practitioner.
But new federal loan caps going into effect in July may reduce her and other Wisconsin students’ options to enter careers that require a graduate-level degree. The new law lowers the amount of money students seeking some advanced degrees, including nursing, can borrow in federal loans.
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.
Child survivors of gun violence, and their parents, require special attention in the aftermath of a school shooting, said Janet Hyde, professor emeritus of psychology and gender and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Under the right circumstances, returning to school can be a form of exposure therapy, especially if schools can emphasize learning, social activities and have an open channel for students to express their feelings, Hyde said, who authored the book, “The Psychology of Gun Violence.” It can also build resilience, which helps kids cope and manage stress.
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.
Imposing the tax is “only logical,” said Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They used to control the population, but now they are encouraging people to have more babies; it is a return to normal methods to make these products ordinary commodities,” Yi said.
“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.
“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.”
“It’s intriguing because it’s from one place, and it’s spreading in another place,” Anne Pringle, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told NPR in September, pointing to Northern California as a death cap “hot spot.”
Rich Hartel, a food science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studies chocolate for a living. He said one of the most common ways manufacturers cut costs is removing a key ingredient from their chocolate.
“Cocoa butter’s probably the most expensive component in chocolate. So if you can replace some of the cocoa butter with a different, cheaper fat, then you’re saving money,” he said.
“I really saw a turning point during the pandemic when parents were really struggling, and moms in particular were really struggling,” said Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the division of labor in adult romantic relationships.
Daminger’s book, “What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life,” examines how gender shapes household duties and why women are more likely to carry the mental load.
Anne Pringle, a professor of mycology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there is a litany of poisoning cases in which people misidentify something because their experience is not relevant to a new region: “That’s a story that comes up over and over again.”
Rudolph Johnson, a toxicologist with experience working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, started in the top role at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene in November, the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health announced Monday.
Supporters of isocycloseram said it could help with a pest that’s long shown resistance to insecticides. Russ Groves, an entomology professor and Extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the insecticide has been evaluated in Wisconsin to gauge its effectiveness at controlling the Colorado potato beetle. The pest eats the leaves off potato plants, resulting in serious yield losses.
“We’ve evaluated this tool alongside others, and we see that it’s a very good fit,” Groves said. “It performs well in controlling the insect.”
The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene announced its new director, Rudolph Johnson, who brings national leadership experience to the role.
The laboratory, established in 1903, serves as Wisconsin’s public laboratory focused on clinical, environmental, and occupational health, as well as genetic testing, forensic toxicology, cytology, outbreaks, emergency preparedness, and epidemics. It is a key partner of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and reports to the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
The technology is ready to treat at least some of these diseases, though. “There’s a whole toolbox now that can target arguably any part of the genome pretty precisely,” said Krishanu Saha, a gene-editing researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers with a few more years of experience are more protected, but still facing setbacks. Fátima Sancheznieto is an associate researcher at the University of Wisconsin who studied biomedical sciences for her Ph.D., but now focuses on education and social science research. Before the Trump administration began cutting federal research funding, she was looking for faculty positions as an assistant professor — now she’s put that search on hold.
“You always have the — I don’t want to call it imposter syndrome, but — imposter phenomenon of, ‘Do I really belong here?’” Sancheznieto said. “When you start to notice maybe that you’re not getting as many job offers or career advancement opportunities and things like that — is it because I’m out and transgender?”
Leonard Polzin, dairy markets and policy outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, said whole milk has benefited from the diet craze around protein, driven in large part by health and fitness influencers online.
“The more protein, the better. Consumers are all about that,” he said. “The other portion is kind of a shift towards healthy fats too. So for example, cottage cheese is having a real moment right now.”
Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean of public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Friday’s vote was not based on new scientific evidence. And he believes it will have consequences for people’s health care.
“This creates a great deal of confusion for parents, for clinicians, for public health providers, for vaccine managers,” Temte said. “I believe there have been purposeful approaches to create as much havoc and a great deal of parental concern over safety when none of this is necessary.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison won the Big Ten “We Give Blood Drive” competition, earning $1 million that will go toward student or community health initiatives.
The competition, sponsored by Abbott, challenged all Big Ten schools to collect the most blood donations to help address the nationwide blood shortage.
The University of Wisconsin won in the second season of Abbott and the Big Ten’s We Give Blood Drive, overcoming Nebraska in a close contest.
Running from Aug. 27 through Dec. 5, the “We Give Blood” competition, was announced at the 2025 Discover Big Ten Football Championship Game in Indianapolis.
Dominique Brossard, a professor of life science communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research, says it’s likely the people who get the flu vaccine every year likely did so again this year but the public confusion might have dissuaded those who were undecided.
“People that are hesitant might actually become reluctant,” she said.
Rich Hartel, a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who teaches candy science to his students, wonders if freeze-dried candy “will just be a fad, but you never know if long-time customers will continue to come back to a type of sweet they didn’t really enjoy when it was chewy.”
he University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health has used improv classes to help medical students develop their interpersonal skills, combining performing arts and health-related fields into a six-week course.
Amy Zelenski, a professor of medicine at the school, teaches an elective class in improvisational theater. She is no stranger to the performing arts scene, as she has a background in theater.
