“We need really, really high vaccine coverage in order to protect a community from a measles outbreak,” said Malia Jones, a public health researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It is the most infectious disease on Earth. Nearly everyone who is exposed to measles and has not been vaccinated will get it.”
Charles Raison, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been experimenting with having people sleep through their trips, as a way to understand how much a conscious psychedelic experience matters. Two volunteers received psilocybin while in a deep sleep with a sedative, and 1 week later both “swore they got placebo,” Raison says. He is now developing a larger study in which people with self-reported reduced emotional well-being will be randomized to get psilocybin or placebo while either awake or asleep, to tease out how the trip influences longer term effects on emotional state.
A few birds have already started to arrive in the state for the spring, such as robins and red-winged blackbirds, according to Anna Pidgeon, a professor of avian ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Though hummingbirds are a little further behind, there are a few steps you can take in the coming weeks to encourage them to your yard later in the spring.
Tariffs will cause lumber and other construction staples to become more expensive, and home prices and rents will follow, said Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at UW-Madison.
“If you increase the costs of construction, you will increase the cost of housing, even existing housing,” Paulsen said.
“In theory, you should be able to freeze and thaw something forever,” said Allison Mahvi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The only practical limit is the lifespan of the batteries’ pumps, valves and heat exchangers, which can last for decades.
“What we have in Wisconsin Supreme Court races are teams without uniforms,” said UW-Madison journalism and mass communications professor Michael Wagner. “The donation networks are partisan, the political elites who endorse are really just from one side or the other, and the issues they talk about are really about core concerns of one party or the other.”
“There’s about a six month process to go from selection of the strains to then start manufacturing the vaccine to then scaling up and distribution,” said Ajay Sethi, a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So the timing is critical in order to sort of make the deadline of getting the flu shot.”
“We have this independence from government, this independence from industry, and it provides a background of individuals who have a lot of expertise on the topic,” said Dr. Jon Temte, a UW-Madison professor of family medicine.
But he said the committees simply make a recommendation that federal officials can choose whether or not to adopt. He said the FDA commissioner could still make a decision about next year’s flu shot in the coming months.
Written by Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sources included: Email, Andrew Reschovsky, UW-Madison, Feb. 18, 2025.
Written by Jonathan Patz, the Vilas Distinguished Professor & John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment at the Nelson Institute & Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jonathan Pauli, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has observed by systematically capturing, collaring and monitoring carnivores and their prey across the state and comparing their historical numbers to current-day ones. He said his team has observed a “relatively fast range contraction” of snowshoe hares, moving northward as climate change increasingly turns them into “white lightbulbs” highly visible to their predators in the winter.
Co-authroed by Susan S. Engeleiter Professor of Education Law, Policy and Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Traffic Operations and Safety (TOPS) lab have found liquid brine in water highway maintenance cleared the state’s highways faster, provided better friction on roadways and reduced overall salt usage.
“The data tells a very positive story for winter highway safety in Wisconsin,” says Andrea Bill, associate director of the TOPS Lab, which is housed in the UW-Madison College of Engineering. “Liquid brine is an effective tool, and along with training, education and technology, our storm fighters are making effective reductions in the amount of chloride on our roads and improving the performance of winter roads.”
“Even lowering the legal age of marriage to 18 will do nothing to boost the fertility rate now that people have become accustomed to marrying young and having children later,” said Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who conducts demography research. “China’s age of first marriage in 2020 was 29.4 years for men and 28.0 years for women, and it will continue to be delayed, following along the same path as Taiwan and South Korea.”
School districts across the country are struggling to hire and retain enough special education teachers to meet the growing need for them. A new partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is working to bridge the gap.
An announcement from the National Institutes of Health earlier this month said the agency would slash support for indirect research costs paid to universities, medical centers and other grant recipients.
The change could leave research institutions like the University of Wisconsin-Madison scrambling for millions of dollars from other sources to support labs, students and staff.
“This is clearly a loophole which is now used to stall the reviews,” said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The impact of the postponement won’t be felt immediately, she said. But if the meetings can’t continue, it will have an impact in coming months.
“At the minimum, a delay. At the most extreme case, maybe funding won’t happen,” Grejner-Brzezinska said. “At the moment, we hope that it is just a delay. And are watching what’s going to happen next.”
It’s a sign of an increasingly negative campaign environment, said Michael Wagner, an expert on political communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“One thing that we’ve seen in our politics over the last several election cycles is an increasing willingness to take the shot, even if the candidate isn’t sure that the shot is accurate,” Wagner said. “The rush to get on air with negative ads, the appetite some audiences seem to have for them, all kind of contribute to the environment where mistakes like this can happen.”
There are several reasons for Wisconsin’s low and declining measles vaccination rates, said Jim Conway, a pediatric infectious disease professor at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school. A “recency phenomenon” is one of them, he said.
“These ‘old-fashioned diseases,’ as one parent said to me a couple weeks ago, just aren’t as concerning,” he said. “Because they’re considered diseases that affected all our parents, but they don’t see them as a current threat.”
Let’s move to pet perk number 2. This one’s a little bit quicker hitting. I was reminded that I got it from Jordan Ellenberg, the mathematician and the academic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who joined me for Authors in August in 2023. His book “How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” is where pet perk, number 2, comes from. I’m going to quote him in a sec, but here it is, essentially. As you get richer as a person, as you get richer as an investor, you’re able to take more risk and that is indeed a pet perk.
The federal education department abruptly ended a University of Wisconsin-Madison grant that pays for students to train as special education teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms.
Donald Downs is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin. He co-founded the Academic Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit that defends the rights of professors to speak, teach and publish without interference. He said courts aren’t the right place to settle grade disputes.
“These are matters of academic freedom and it’s usually best leave it up to the professors, because they’re the ones who know the subject,” Downs said. “If you take it out of their hands, then who’s going to do it? Our position is a strong presumption in favor of the faculty members’ academic right to have discretion over grades.”
“We weren’t trying to design the best protein bar ever.” said Audrey Girard, who is an assistant professor in food science at the university. “We were trying to figure out how these protein bars harden so that someone else could take this, and then design the best protein bar ever.”
Arnold Alanen is a professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he researched the history of sauna structures. Alanen told “Wisconsin Today” that as a Finnish American, sauna has been a way of life for him from the beginning. He said he was first brought into a sauna as a very young baby, and then he caught on to the ritual when he was about 8 years old, living on his grandparents’ farm in Minnesota.
“The weekly sauna tradition was something that we did on our farm, just without interruption. We would do it every Saturday evening,” he said. “It became such an integral part of my life, as well as of our family.”
Co-authored by Suzanne Eckes, the Susan S. Engeleiter Professor of Education Law, Policy and Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the nation’s top research institutions, are wary of potential cuts to funding under the Trump administration that they warn could slow their work and delay new treatments for cancer and other diseases.
“We’re right in the midst of it. There’s no glimmer at this point whatsoever that it’s starting to go down,” said Dr. James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute.
Written by Xueli Wang, the Barbara and Glenn Thompson Endowed Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With a focus on community colleges and postsecondary STEM education, her research examines educational practices, structures and policies that promote students’ holistic well-being and equitable access, experiences and outcomes.
“It’s going to be a blockbuster,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a state where a Democrat controls the governor’s mansion and Republicans hold the legislative majority, the state Supreme Court “is the center of the action,” he said. “It’s become a place where a lot of hot-button issues people care about get decided.”
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows the album better than the average listener.
That’s because he’s the mastermind behind the visualizers highlighting Puerto Rican history that accompany each track on the album. Bad Bunny’s team reached out to Meléndez-Badilloafter his book “Puerto Rico: A National History” published last year.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison became interested in this topic because they wanted to understand a puzzling contradiction. On one hand, many people express support for diversity and inclusion. On the other hand, discrimination and exclusion remain persistent problems in society. The researchers wondered if part of the problem might stem from inaccurate perceptions of what others believe.
The study, “Diversity and inclusion have greater support than most Americans think,” was authored by Naomi Isenberg and Markus Brauer.
Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted many judges previously worked as criminal prosecutors or defenders.
“It would be absurd to suggest that those judges must recuse themselves from any case involving a crime,” Schweber said.
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers is looking into how a better understanding of nitrogenase, and the origins of life on Earth, could help improve modern agriculture. And maybe even allow us to find life on other planets.
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Dean Robert Golden discusses impacts of a Trump administration action to shift National Institutes of Health rules for research funds.
Wearing a padded cover over a football helmet does not reduce the risk of concussions for high school athletes, according to a new study using data from Wisconsin.
The study was conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Orthopedics andRehabilitation during the 2023 football season. Its peer-reviewed findings were published on Jan. 28 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
“The act of naming is a way that presidents can reshape their vision of the nation,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies political rhetoric.
Trump’s choices in his second term send a clear message about his priorities too, she said. “It is elevating a very nationalist, imperialist vision of the United States,” Prasch said.
When this kind of data is taken away from journalists, researchers and the public, it can have big consequences for what we are able to learn, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communications professor Michael Wagner said.
“Being able to use public data to write stories that can hold the powerful to account is the lifeblood of good journalism and so journalists need to have access to public data to tell their audience how our leaders are using,” Wagner said. “And so to take these down and prevent journalists and researchers from using them, makes it a lot harder for us to hold power to account.”
“We really rely on NIH funding,” Jon Audhya, a professor and associate dean at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health said. “That reduction would have a huge negative impact on the institution. The university really couldn’t fill the gap.”
The Keck Foundation awarded UW-Madison researchers a $1.3 million grant to research nitrogenase, an enzyme in part behind the origins of life on Earth. We talk with the head researcher of the project for a review of humanity’s understanding of life’s origins.
We aren’t yet in a constitutional crisis, but we are in the middle of a constitutional revolution, says Howard Schewber, an emeritus professor of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Trump’s barrage of executive orders is radical, according to Schweber, because it denies Congress the authority of its power over the president.
Meanwhile, the price of conventional eggs is beholden to supply and demand, said poultry specialist Ron Kean of the University of Wisconsin Extension.
“The price of those really goes up and down according to national demand,” Kean said. “I like to think of it like gasoline prices, where it can really fluctuate a lot.”
Vanessa Sperandio, professor and chair of the medical microbiology and immunology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied how the connect between the intestinal system and the brain — called the gut-brain axis — plays into addiction. Sperandio explained that E. coli, the bacterium famous for making people violently ill, always lives in our guts. She found that when there’s an overgrowth of E. coli, a person becomes more susceptible to cocaine addiction.
“If you have an expansion of E. coli … you enhance … cocaine addiction behaviors, cocaine seeking behaviors, cocaine administration behaviors,” she said.
There are countless examples of gut bacteria influencing our lives. Maggie Alexander, an assistant professor of medical microbiology and immunology at UW-Madison, is studying how the gut-brain axis affects autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attacks healthy parts of the body.
“There’s been this really strong connection of microbiota and autoimmune conditions,” Alexander said,
“Ideally, parents should think about their child’s heart health even before their child is born,” said Dr. Amy Peterson, a professor of pediatrics in the department of pediatric cardiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Social media may be playing a role in pushing the birth rate down, in part by promoting the perception that people should really only have children if they can give those children what we might think of as ‘Pinterest-perfect’ lives,” said Jessica Calarco, an award-winning sociology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We really rely on NIH funding,” Jon Audhya, a professor and associate dean at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health said. “That reduction would have a huge negative impact on the institution. The university really couldn’t fill the gap.”
Dubbed his “most Puerto Rican album ever,” the record was released with 17 informative visualizers that outlined key moments in Puerto Rican history. Each installment was written by professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used his own academic book, “Puerto Rico: A National History,” as a reference.
“Sanitizing the facilities can be a very dangerous job in meat packing and poultry processing,” said Alexia Kulwiec, an attorney and an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers. “It’s bloody work. It’s dangerous work. Sometimes folks turn on the equipment to clean it, even though they should not. That’s an instance in which people will get harmed.”
Treatment for postpartum mental health issues is also important, said Kathleen Hipke, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She said suicide and overdoses are leading causes of postpartum death.
Two Republicans who chair state legislative committees on energy and utilities say they want to bring more nuclear power online in Wisconsin in the coming years.
To start that effort, they introduced a resolution calling on the Legislature to publicly support nuclear power and fusion energy.
A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed that soft-shell helmet covers do not reduce concussions for Wisconsin high school football players.
We learn how new restrictions on communications by federal health agencies could affect public health. Then, we look at how the ongoing bird flu epidemic is affecting farmers and whether it could surge. Then, we talk with a pianist inspired by Wisconsin’s landscape.
“They hit the jackpot,” says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. “We have been taking data with a much bigger detector for 10 years. We’ve never seen such an event.”
There is no human-to-human transmission right now, which is a good thing,” said Peter Halfmann, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Pathobiological Sciences in the School of Veterinary Medicine. “The one concern is that the virus likes to mutate.”
“This executive order raises a lot of issues over who really controls public education,” said Suzanne Eckes, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work focuses on K-12 legal issues and school policy. Public education has historically been a state and school board function, she said.
“Typically, the federal government isn’t saying, ‘You’re going to do this social studies curriculum, and you’re going to use this book, and everybody in the United States is going to learn about slavery or World War I or the American Revolution in this way,'” said Eckes, speaking from her perspective and not as a representative of the University of Wisconsin.
“It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades, that we are now gonna look at data on CDs, they’re gonna be mailed out across the country instead of stored securely in an online data platform,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies college access and success. “It’s gonna be a huge waste of my time and a huge waste of the department’s time to have to process all of these new applications.”
“We tend to be going more and more towards a real brutal capitalism, I think everywhere,” said Barbara Bowers, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing. “And it’s fine if it’s about the quality of your television set. But it’s a different issue when it’s the quality of somebody’s life. I think we treat this as any other commodity, which is really unfortunate.”
How safe is the personal information of millions of Americans while the computer systems of federal agencies are accessed by an outside team looking for waste and fraud? Then, we ask if personal devices purporting to track our fitness actually work.
“Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States,” says Jo Handelsman, who runs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.”
Soybeans is one of the major commodities purchased by USAID, according to agricultural economist Paul Mitchell at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But Mitchell said foreign food aid also includes shelf-stable foods that may be produced by Wisconsin farms and food processors. With the agency’s website largely down, he said it’s almost impossible to determine what products could be affected.
It’s unclear how long it will take for consumers to feel the impact and to what extent. That’s in part because it depends on how much steel or aluminum is used to make the product, said Lydia Cox, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It’s also on the businesses to decide what added costs they should pass along to their customers, she said: “If you had a 25 percent increase on 50 percent of your costs, that’ll be a pretty sizable [potential] increase” in prices.
