UW-Madison entomologist PJ Liesch returns to talk about the bugs we love and hate. Then we talk to another researcher on campus, Sathya Chandra Sagar, about his work on a global study of bird calls.
Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said that the resurgence is partly due to the erosion of public confidence in science and public health systems, fueled by misinformation.
“It really is made more difficult when you don’t have an intact public health system, when you don’t have a population that believes in evidence-based science and is wracked with concerns about conspiracy, and you have people who basically profiteer off misinformation,” Temte said.
In April, Wisconsin’s Keith Bechtol was in the remote Andes mountains of Chile waiting for the world’s largest digital camera to turn on and take a photo of the night sky.
“I was very focused to the task at hand,” he said. “I was selecting the target that we would use for the very first images.”
Fortunately, many of the mammals in the U.S. being reported ill or dead with avian influenza are of common species. Infected red foxes, coyotes and raccoons, for instance, are appearing relatively frequently—but not at nearly the scale of the marine mammal mass mortalities. And these are plentiful species, says David Drake, an urban wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so he isn’t too concerned.
One study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found there are “no official statistics on the number of unauthorized immigrant dairy workers.”
“Estimates range from 46 percent; to as high as 90 percent, with the most used estimate being 70 percent,” the report said on Page 11.
A grave long marked only as “Unknown Soldier” in a quiet corner of Restlawn Memorial Park in Wausau was opened last month, as part of a statewide effort to identify missing service members through DNA technology.
The exhumation, carried out June 6, is part of the Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. That project works to identify remains of service members declared missing in action, many of whom still have living relatives.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, created in 1978, supports the public and local county extension offices by receiving and analyzing several thousand insect samples each year. Every year, about two or three non-native insect species are discovered in Wisconsin. Some are only annoyances; others bring serious trouble. The latter is the case with the viburnum leaf beetle.
In Wisconsin, the beetle was first discovered in 2014 in counties west of Milwaukee. In 2019, UW-Madison entomologist P.J. Liesch, on a walk with his family, found an infested shrub. This spring, Liesch fielded dozens of questions from gardeners asking about it, as did Lisa Johnson, a Dane County Extension horticulture educator.
“They’re weird,” Prashant Sharma, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison specializing in the genomics and development of ancient invertebrates, says in a statement. “Sea spiders are just incredibly cool and understudied animals. So, that’s what draws us to them.”
In the 1980s, progressive undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded the Democratic Organization of Progressive Engineers and Scientists (DOPES), an anti-war science ethics group dedicated to challenging militarism — and particularly, student and graduate involvement within it.
40 years later, DOPES alumni hope to continue those conversations amid escalating tensions between the Trump administration and the science community. DOPES will host a town hall Friday July 11 at 2:30 p.m. at the Pyle Center. A moderated panel of DOPES members hopes to tackle questions on modern technology issues, like climate change and artificial intelligence.
“We know that COVID — and the isolation related to COVID and the stress and strain of unemployment — was a cause,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, emeritus professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We also know that there’s a mental health crisis in our nation … alcohol can be used to self-medicate. It’s an attempt to really blunt the pain that comes from depression and or anxiety.”
“[Cloud seeding] campaigns usually focus on just a few target clouds and would not have the ability to impact a large area,” Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email. “The amount of energy required to create a complex of thunderstorms and heavy rain is so high that it outweighs the small addition of silver iodide or other seed material.”
Data on the long-term health effects is limited, because vapes are relatively new and constantly evolving. Many people who use them are in their teens or 20s; it might take a while before further effects become apparent.
Even so, “common sense tells you — your mom would tell you — that a superheated chemical inhaling right into your lungs isn’t going to be good,” said Dr. James H. Stein, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. Increasingly, research is pointing to the reality that while vapes do not contain the same dangerous chemicals as cigarettes, they come with their own harms.
Jim Conway, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, says health providers in the state are watching the situation closely.
“We continue to sort of be on eggshells, and nervous, because obviously we’ve got some pretty substantial areas of the state that kids are under-immunized,” he said.
Richard J. Davidson, founder of the University of Wisconsin Center for Healthy Minds, reflected on the Dalai Lama’s influence on neuroscience.
“When I first met His Holiness in 1992, there were three scientific papers published on the effects of meditation,” he said. “Now there are thousands. This has been a legacy that will live on for many, many years and has transformed our understanding of the human mind and the human heart.”
The shape of a cloud, where water accumulates in the cloud, and how dry the air is between the cloud and the ground in different locations, are all factors that might influence how much rain hits the ground in a certain location, according to Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Getting those very precise measurements at those very precise locations is something that we’re still working on, improving that science,” Vagasky says. Progress hinges on more advanced computer modeling and a better understanding of how precipitation forms in clouds.
Jessica Calarco, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison whose research focuses on inequalities in family structures, says the disconnect between millennial dads’ intention and reality can be attributed to two things: “A mismatch of socialization and a mismatch in structure.”
As a society, we haven’t socialized fathers to be caregivers, she says. “We’ve only allowed gender to bend one way. We’ve told young girls they can be anything they want to be. But we’re not encouraging boys to embrace care identities. We’re not giving them baby boys dolls and tea sets.” As a result, “dads can feel underprepared or crowded out, like they don’t belong in caring roles.”
Two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are part of a new effort to improve understanding of how and why glaciers move the way they do — and to explore efforts to save glaciers and prevent drastic sea level rise.
We talk to a retired UW-Madison biochemist about how his discoveries led to Cologuard and other health screening technology. Then, we talk to a veteran county fair judge. Then, we revisit a conversation about the history of fairs in Wisconsin.
The Black Males in Engineering (BME) video series, led by UW-Madison School of Education faculty member Dr. Brian Burt, recently received a Silver Telly Award in the Campaign – Education & Training category. The honor recognizes non-broadcast video campaigns created for general educational purposes and underscores the series’ impact on addressing critical gaps in STEM education support.
Pablo Moreno-Yaeger, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, who led the research, said: “As glaciers retreat due to climate change, our findings suggest these volcanoes go on to erupt more frequently and more explosively.”
Pablo Moreno-Yaeger from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is presenting the research at the conference, said in a statement: “Our study suggests this phenomenon isn’t limited to Iceland, where increased volcanicity has been observed, but could also occur in Antarctica. Other continental regions, like parts of North America, New Zealand and Russia, also now warrant closer scientific attention.”
“While a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia understandably brings fear and uncertainty, we are living in a time of unprecedented knowledge and more comprehensive care for patients than ever before,” says Dr. Nathaniel Chin, medical director and clinical core co-leader of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
rofessor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Regardless of … where a baby is born, we want them to be able to have access to this genomic testing,” said genetic counselor April Hall, who’s an assistant professor of pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Written by Ph.D. student in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While the Wisconsin dairy industry is known to rely on unauthorized workers (it’s believed about 70% of the workforce is working illegally), the majority in the state actually work elsewhere, said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From Dresser’s perspective, undocumented workers are especially vulnerable when law enforcement agencies focus more on immigration status and less on violations of workers’ rights.
That culture of fear can create “incentives for some employers to find a way to drive wages and standards down,” Dresser said.
Since then, I’ve graduated from UC Davis with honors and am now a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research investigates how plants sense nutrients so we can grow healthier plants using fewer resources like fertilizers.
Michael Morgan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said precipitation forecasting remains “one of the most vexing problems” of his field.
But he said he believed the National Weather Service did its job by giving a general sense of the Texas storm and then providing more specific local forecasts as additional information became available to highlight the most serious potential threats.
“I think the [National] Weather Service forecasts were on point,” Morgan said. “Specifically targeting in locations that are going to receive the maximum rainfall is an incredibly challenging forecast problem.”
“Meteorologists have been launching weather balloons for almost 100 years now. We continue to do it because that is the only way that we get direct measurements of everything that’s going on above us in the atmosphere,” said Chris Vagasky, who manages the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet, or Wisconet, a network of weather and soil monitoring stations across the state.
Written by meteorologist and research program manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Badger Baby Network program was launched in 2024 by University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Medical College of Wisconsin. The two medical schools train neonatologists at NICUs to identify babies that need genetic testing, determine which genomic test to order, and interpret the complex results.
Sometimes genetic professionals recommend testing for newborns if they aren’t responding as expected to medications, have different behaviors, or are born with a congenital disorder, said April Hall, genetic counselor and assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.
Wisconsin’s only bilingual memory clinic is partnering with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health for a new elective course aimed at boosting doctor training, prevention and treatment to help with dementia in Latino communities.
Dr. Maria Mora Pinzon, an assistant professor of medicine at UW, leads the research team collaborating with the Latino Geriatric Center Memory Clinic. On WPR’s “Wisconsin Today,” Mora Pinzon highlighted the center’s over 17 years of experience of working with older Latino adults who are suffering from dementia.
Black women survivors also face an uphill battle to be believed. In a 2025 study conducted by Chloe Grace Hart, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she found that Americans were less likely to say they believed a Black woman describing a sexual harassment experience compared to a white women describing the same thing.
Biologists interested in reconstructing the family trees of spiders and their relatives have long sought a complete sea spider genome, said Prashant Sharma of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is an author of the new paper. Because sea spiders are members of a group that are siblings of arachnids on land, characteristics they share with modern land spiders could be traced to a common ancestor.
District projections from the state Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggest enrollment will continue falling to 8,700 students by 2034.
He graduated from Wauwatosa East High School in 1979 and earned a Bachelor of Science in Finance, Investments and Banking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He earned his Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation in 1989.
In the final weeks of Walter’s life, he and his family established a focused strategy to advance pancreatic immunology research at the UW Carbone Cancer Center. In lieu of flowers, the family invites memorial gifts to support this initiative.
A recent survey by the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison shows 90% of Wisconsinites, including those without kids, said finding affordable, high-quality child care is a problem in the state.
We talk about why UW-Madison will offer an Aging Studies Certificate starting this fall. Then, we’ll talk about the worrisome increase in U.S. deaths from alcohol-related liver disease. Then, the Weather Guys return after another widespread heat wave.
Written by ssociate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and tudent in computer science, both a the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed,” wrote Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, on social media earlier this spring after a round of major changes were announced.
Steve Ackerman and Jonathan Martin, professors in the UW-Madison department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, are guests on WHA radio (970 AM) at noon the last Monday of each month.
According to a June brief from the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, if all federal funding to Planned Parenthood was cut, Wisconsin community health centers would need to increase their contraception case loads by 144%, local health departments by 144% and hospitals by 142% to absorb Planned Parenthood patients — which the collaborative called “unrealistic, if not impossible” given current capacity.
The new Vera C. Rubin telescope in Chile that just started recording images of the night sky has 3.2 billion pixels – that’s billion with a “b” – making it the largest digital camera ever constructed. Interview with Keith Bechtol, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the systems verification and validation scientist for the Vera C. Rubin telescope project.
The grant-funded research will also send University of Wisconsin students to farmers’ markets in Marathon, Portage, Wood, Waupaca and Adams counties this summer through summer 2027 to collect data on things like where are people visiting from, how much money do they intend to spend at the market and other area businesses, and what they love about farmers’ markets, Haack said.
Materials engineering programs typically have dozens of students, not hundreds. To put this into perspective, however, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts an average of just 10 job openings per year for neurologists in Wisconsin. Hopefully, no one would suggest that UW-Madison should stop training neurology residents, since most of us recognize that medical specialists are essential to the kind of society we want to have.
Partnering with Forward BIOLABS — one of the many tenants that call the research park home — URP helped create a new shared coworking lab incubator in Madison. Forward BIOLABS offers turn-key life science labs, fully equipped, maintained and supported with networking, training and other growth services aimed at startups.
“With millions of dollars of shared lab equipment, Forward BIOLABS is an ideal place to get started,” said Aaron Olver, managing director of the University Research Park. “And MERLIN Mentors creates customized volunteer mentor teams to help companies achieve liftoff.”
Housing financial stress has been rising among Wisconsin residents, and it is tied to an increase in negative health outcomes, according to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
The report found that housing instability is linked to worsened mental and physical health and may cause food insecurity, physical exhaustion, hypertension and lowered fertility. While this stress is more common among renters than homeowners, the consequential health impacts were linked more with older homeowners, co-author of the report and associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics Tessa Conroy said.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images this week.This is the most advanced telescope and camera system available, allowing scientists to study these incredible, high-resolution time-lapse images.
They include a Ph.D. in physics and a UW-Madison professor, Keith Bechtol.
Written by rofessor of Scandinavian Studies, Folklore, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They are expected to arrive from slightly below the horizon, where there is not much Earth for them to be absorbed,” Justin Vandenbroucke, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the research but peer-reviewed it, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Models predict these pulses would come in at angles of only one to five degrees below the horizon—these came through the ice at a much sharper 30 degrees, leaving researchers unable to identify their origins.
While rare, it’s important for people to be aware of meteotsunamis because they can be dangerous, said Chin Wu, a professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison who has expertise in meteotsunamis.
“The potential dangers are the water levels fluctuating back and forth, particularly once the water levels go up and go down as I see in the video. Once the water level goes down, they will drag the people out of the beaches and cause drownings.”
A true shift in what parenting means is more likely to come when raising kids isn’t categorized along the lines of “his” and “hers” at all, said Jessica Calarco, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Gender is more fluid than we give it credit for,” Calarco said. “Often these tropes become increasingly stereotypical the more they get used.”
“A lot of Wisconsin businesses have been struggling with finding employees, and they have been for a number of years, going back to before COVID,” said Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison and one of the report’s authors.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration had delayed grant review meetings at the National Institutes of Health and was calling for sweeping cuts to university research dollars. This left faculty scientists with limited funds to offer students.
Even though many of the review meetings are proceeding again, Wisconsin researchers said those delays have lingering effects. One of these is that fewer graduate trainees will be arriving on campus this fall.
“The whole idea for the (Rubin) observatory was so visionary when it was conceived (in the 1990s) that many of the technologies didn’t exist at that time” said Keith Bechtol, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Written by Anthony Hernandez, a faculty member in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (UW-Madison) who received a research award from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation for his study on leadership in Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
Keith Bechtol, an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved with the Rubin Observatory for nearly a decade, is the project’s system verification and validation scientist, making sure the observatory’s various components are functioning properly.
He said teams were floored when the images streamed in from the camera.
“There were moments in the control room where it was just silence, and all the engineers and all the scientists were just seeing these images, and you could just see more and more details in the stars and the galaxies,” Bechtol told NBC News. “It was one thing to understand at an intellectual level, but then on this emotional level, we realized basically in real time that we were doing something that was really spectacular.”
The experimental Next Generation Fire System was developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and its Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW-Madison. The tool detects and tracks wildfires in almost real-time using artificial intelligence to scan satellite images, helping firefighters nationwide to prioritize and quickly respond to blazes.
But delays with the institute’s five-year renewal and its fiscal year 2025 funding mean that work to develop, maintain and improve the system will pause, according to the institute’s director Tristan L’Ecuyer.
The excitement inside of a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecture hall Monday morning was comparable to a room full of sports lovers ready for the start of the Super Bowl.
ANITA was designed to search for the highest energy neutrinos in the universe, at higher energies than have yet been detected, said Justin Vandenbroucke, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The experiment’s radio antennae search for a short pulse of radio waves produced when a neutrino collides with an atom in the Antarctic ice, leading to a shower of lower-energy particles, he said.
