Cats can get the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and pass the virus on to other cats, according to a study led by a UW-Madison researcher.
“It’s not always going to be monkeys,” says Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. He works with the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, which, like Tulane, is part of a network of primate research centers jointly supported by the NIH and university hosts around the country. The centers are now diverting most of their focus to coronavirus research.
The University of Wisconsin pulled off an awesome move for recent graduates.
With everybody needing to take online classes because of the coronavirus pandemic, students were robbed of the chance to enjoy a proper commencement.
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross says campuses will provide extensive COVID-19 testing for students, faculty and staff in hopes that campuses can resume in-person classes this fall.
Graduates and their loved ones tuned into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s first ever virtual commencement ceremony Saturday.
This was the weekend it begins: The celebratory season in which thousands of proud family members traditionally descend on campuses statewide to witness and revel in what for most is the academic accomplishment of a lifetime.
But this year, the campuses are largely empty.
Nearly 8,500 University of Wisconsin-Madison students graduated Saturday, when a commencement video was published online at noon in lieu of the annual pomp and circumstance at Camp Randall Stadium.
Graduating seniors said an abrupt and socially distanced goodbye to their campuses in March when classes moved online in a matter of days. The pandemic stripped much of the pomp and all of the in-person options from commencement ceremonies. And the graduates now enter a job market in which unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression.
University of Wisconsin System leaders are working on safety protocols that could enable students to return to campus if the COVID-19 pandemic stretches into fall, System President Ray Cross told Regents Thursday.
Thousands of UW-Madison students in the Class of 2020 imagined the culmination of their college career to end at Camp Randall Stadium. They pictured the moment they’d throw their mortarboards high into the sky and sit in Abe Lincoln’s lap for the quintessential photo opp.
The leader of the University of Wisconsin System will unveil Thursday a three-part plan that radically re-imagines the network of schools that has been in place for a half-century.
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross sounded a warning Thursday about ending some academic programs and layoffs as campuses brace for coronavirus-related budget cuts in the coming years.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there are questions about what a college football season will look like — if one happens at all. Will fans be allowed in stadiums? How many? What kinds of distancing practices will be in place, and how would they impact capacity?
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross directed campuses Thursday to quickly identify signature programs worthy of preservation and brace for layoffs as the coronavirus pandemic deepens the system’s financial losses.
ACT testing requirements will be temporarily suspended at all University of Wisconsin System campuses except UW-Madison under a proposed policy change aimed at easing college entrance requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the end of the 2019-2020 school year approaching during this unprecedented pandemic, The Badger Herald interviewed University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank on issues relating to COVID-19 and the UW community.
Eleven UW System schools including LaCrosse, Oshkosh and Milwaukee announced furlough plans last week. The University of Wisconsin-Madison ordered furloughs for nearly 16,000 employees this week in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Center for Health Enhancement Systems Studies in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering received a $470,000 grant for the project through the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the School of Medicine and Public Health. CHESS collaborated with faculty, staff and students at the journalism school’s Center for Communication and Civic Renewal, which received a $140,000 subcontract.
To most fairly assess a semester that has been far from normal, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are taking liberties with final exams and projects.
Faculty and staff at UW-Madison put together a new website and app to help people navigate through COVID-19.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has announced campus-wide furloughs for faculty, and academic and university staff to help address a $100 million budget deficit caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
State campuses in Milwaukee and Madison unveiled more information on their plans to furlough employees this week, with the aim of mitigating the mounting financial fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and staff will be taking three to six unpaid furlough days over the next six months, which Chancellor Rebecca Blank said Wednesday will save the university up to $30 million.
UW-Madison is ordering most of its employees to take varying amounts of unpaid time off over the next six months and university leaders will take a 15% pay cut over that same time as COVID-19 costs grow and the campus remains mostly closed.
Karl Martin, who has served as interim dean and director of Extension since June 2018, will lead the division, which has more than 700 faculty and staff located in 72 county offices.
“There may be some things we simply cannot do in the fall,” UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said Monday to the University Committee, a small group of professors representing faculty members on campus. “It is quite possible that 80,000 people cannot gather in Camp Randall.”
Election of six faculty members in a year is a record for university
No Frisbee-flying on Bascom Hill. No sunset-watching on the Terrace. No bar-hopping on the weekends.
In the earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s biggest priority was making sure UW-Madison finished its spring semester. As the university works to make that happen, Blank said it is taking the opportunity to tackle immediate concerns — including $100 million in losses — but also prioritize campus safety and prevention moving forward.
Chancellors of UW campuses, where the bulk of the System’s 39,000 employees work, are making their own decisions on whether to furlough employees. UW-Milwaukee became the first to say it will “most likely” impose a campus-wide furlough for its roughly 3,700 employees. UW-Madison, which is bracing for the largest loss among the campuses with an estimated $100 million shortfall, expects to announce details by the end of the month.
The University of Wisconsin System may consider furloughing some of its 39,000 employees as financial losses related to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic mount and uncertainty looms over when campuses can return to normal operations.
The only female coach of a men’s collegiate basketball program has her name all over the University of Wisconsin record books.
The University of Wisconsin System forecasts a $170 million financial hit for the spring semester alone, an estimate that will likely grow as campuses grapple with the broader economic fallout associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
As with any college, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus functions like a miniature society. Home to a quarter of Madison’s population, it is governed by an intricate network of administrators and generations of tradition, a city within a city.
Skyrocketing unemployment, expected declines in tax revenue and other economic problems associated with the coronavirus crisis could spell trouble for Wisconsin’s public universities, which rely on state money to stay afloat.
The University of Wisconsin System is continuing to monitor and recoup financial losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, which President Ray Cross said Thursday are only just beginning but already “significantly greater than anything I’ve seen in my 42 years of higher education.”
UW-Madison researchers and the vaccine companies FluGen and Bharat Biotech are developing and testing a vaccine against COVID-19 called CoroFlu, they announced Thursday.
Researchers say vaccine could be ready for human trials by fall 2020.
Amy Shircel and three friends traveled to Portugal early last month in search of sun, sand and scenery. Coronavirus cut the trip short, and within days of returning to her Madison apartment, Shircel felt fatigued. She had a mild cough, but didn’t think much of it.
Police in Madison have made an arrest in the double homicide of a University of Wisconsin doctor and her husband.
A collaboration between virologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and vaccine companies FluGen and Bharat Biotech has begun developing and testing a unique vaccine against COVID-19 called CoroFlu.
The product is described as a nasal spray that would repurpose a regular flu vaccine candidate, M2SR, by inserting gene sequences from the coronavirus strain that leads to COVID-19 into the influenza virus it already uses, according to a statement from the University of Wisconsin.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Director of Admissions and Recruitment André Phillips said so far the number of prospective students confirming admission offers is close to where they were in 2019.
The isolation centers will be run by the State Emergency Operations Center. One center is at Lowell Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The other is a Super 8 hotel in Milwaukee near the airport.
On Thursday, University of Wisconsin-Madison Provost Karl Scholz announced the campus would offer a special pass/fail grading option for students. Students will have until May 22 — after they’ve received traditional grades in their classes — to decide if they would rather get a less specific passing or failing mark.
What began two weeks ago with a pair of scientists urging the use of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to rescue the sick has blown up into a national movement.
UW-Madison anticipates a $100 million loss because of the COVID-19 pandemic that has thrown its campus into chaos as dorms are emptied, classes moved online and students told to stay away.
UW-Madison is telling students who traveled over spring break to quarantine themselves for two weeks, whether or not they have symptoms of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
University of Wisconsin-Madison students will now have the option to finish their spring semester courses pass/fail, according to an email from Provost Karl Scholz on Thursday.
UW-Madison students can skip the letter grades this semester, one of several recently announced measures by the university to offer flexibility during the pandemic.
Over 400 people tuned into a virtual town hall Thursday to hear University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators discuss responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably a recent rise in hate and racist incidents.
Early last week, Lennon Rodgers, director of the Engineering Design Innovation Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an urgent email from the university’s hospital. Could his lab make 1,000 face shields to protect staff testing and treating Covid-19 patients? The hospital’s usual suppliers were out of stock, due to the spike in demand prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The university announced Monday that the springtime graduation ceremonies at Camp Randall and the Kohl Center will be postponed to sometime later this year. Officials are working with senior class officers on a “virtual commencement” to be held May 8, the day before the in-person event was scheduled to occur for most students.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has postponed its Spring commencement ceremony at Camp Randall and the Kohl Center, UW announced Monday. Graduation celebrations for schools, colleges, departments, and campus organizations will not happen in May either.
UW-Madison will not hold in-person commencement ceremonies May 8 and 9, instead offering a virtual ceremony with plans to hold an in-person event at a later date.
“Of all the decisions we’ve had to make in this extraordinary time, this one has been the most heartbreaking for me,” Blank said. “There is no better event at UW than commencement when we award degrees and celebrate the completion of school for our graduates.”
Virtual ceremony will be posted May 8 to celebrate class of 2020, Blank said in statement.
“Commencement is the best event of the year at UW, and I am deeply sorry about this decision,” Blank said in the video. “For the class of 2020, this is a painful loss. You should have a chance to celebrate with your teachers, friends and family, and that will not happen this May.”
UW-Madison’s biggest educational experiment begins Monday.
In his UW-Madison lab, Adel Talaat developed an experimental vaccine to protect chickens from coronavirus. When the pandemic of a different strain arose in people late last year, Talaat used his technique to create a vaccine candidate for humans.
