“There’s still a little uncertainty about that, and so to be voting on it (in April) could be additionally confusing to voters,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said.
Prisons, hospitals, nursing homes and other “congregate facilities” can accelerate the spread of respiratory illnesses due to overcrowding, said Ajay Sethi, associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“People aren’t always able to control how much space they can have around others, and so that that is one of the ingredients for the spread of a respiratory virus,” Sethi said.
Greg Wiercioch, Wood’s longtime lawyer and a University of Wisconsin law professor, said 150 pieces of evidence remained untested, telling the Guardian in an interview on Monday: “It’s incomprehensible why the state is opposing additional testing … They shut it down I think because they’re afraid of what they’ll find out. We have DNA testing, the most powerful crime-fighting tool ever developed, and we’re not using it.”
“It’s tempting to take these great figures of history, these creative and brilliant individuals, and see in them what we want to see,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” and a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With Rembrandt, it’s not just tempting, it’s also comforting, to see him as a friend of the Jews at a particular historical period when Jews did not have a lot of friends in many places.”
“When it comes to predicting outcomes that could harm people, you have a moral obligation to share that information,” University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Andrea Lopez Lang said.
Lang — who formerly did consulting work for hedge funds and commodities traders — said she was recruited for at least one high-paying job since leaving the private sector, where she translated weather forecasts into actionable guidance ahead of cold weather outbreaks and other weather phenomena.
The manufacturing sector lost about 75,000 jobs as a direct result of the metals tariffs, according to a 2020 study by University of California, Davis economics professor Kadee Russ and University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Lydia Cox for Econofact.
John Hawks, chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved in the study, called it a “really cool paper.” He added, “It’s always great to see a new fossil, of course, but in this case the fossil helps add something to our knowledge of how some of the first human relatives in Europe were connected to other places.”
While these duties may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper. Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote. These spillover effects hurt other sectors of the economy, ultimately costing jobs.
“It appears that there are forces intent on destroying our existing vaccine enterprise,” says Dr. Jonathan Temte, a professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin who studies vaccine hesitancy. “Defunding research on vaccine hesitancy is the latest example of this effort.”
“What we want is animal sheltering organizations to maximize their life-saving potential, and also to help the community help them with their mission,” said Dr. Sandra Newbury, director of the University of Wisconsin Shelter Medicine Program.
There isn’t even the slightest hint of a domestic energy crisis, especially when compared to actual crises that occurred in 1973, 1979 and 2022, Gregory Nemet, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin’s Energy Institute, told ABC News.
“Prices for gasoline are mid-range over the last, say, 20 years,” Nemet said. “There’s plenty of supply. We’re not having electricity outages. We’re not having lines of gas stations.”
“This order is fairly vague and attempts to touch on multiple areas that an administration could potentially oppose,” said Taylor Odle, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies federal education policy.
UW-Madison professor Mariel Barnes conducted research into how and why the “manosphere” took political hold, and described her findings and its impacts on politics.
University of Wisconsin Law School professor Zoe Engberg explains why campaigns for state Supreme Court release attack ads that focus primarily on crime and sentencing decisions of their opponents.
Donna Friedsam is a researcher emerita who has been studying health care policy and reform for decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Friedsam told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that changes at the federal level could have significant ripple effects at home.
“Many people who are on Medicare, who are low-income, also duly rely on Medicaid to cover things that Medicare does not cover,” Friedsam said. “So, Medicaid is actually quite a wide-ranging program and reaches over a million Wisconsin residents who rely on it.”
Four days before Rick Lindroth planned to leave Madison and fly to Argentina, he received an email saying his Fulbright award had been rescinded.
“That was a head spinner,” said Lindroth, a professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s entomology department.
While tariffs’ protection may “relieve” struggling U.S. industries, it comes with a cost, Lydia Cox, an assistant economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and international trade expert, wrote in a 2022 paper.
Tariffs create higher input costs for other industries, making them “vulnerable” to foreign competition, Cox wrote.
As the Journal Sentinel reported, quoting Sedona Chinn, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at University of Wisconsin-Madison, folks who were frustrated started doing their own research, but it also “led to more misinformation and more anti-expert bias, making it all the much harder for solid science to break through.”
Farmers may prevent blight by spraying their fields with fungicides, but if overdone, this practice has its drawbacks, University of Wisconsin professor of plant pathology Andrew Bent said. To prevent blight and overspraying, professor and Department of Plant Pathology Chair Amanda Gevens uses a tool called Blitecast to communicate to farmers the appropriate time to spray fungicides.
The Tribal Education Promise at UW-Madison, which provides financial aid to Indigenous students from Wisconsin’s Native nations, is intended to help address a history of coercion through treaties.
Yoshiko Herrera’s class uses the war as a backdrop for students to learn more about international relations and comparative politics. Current events used to be briefly covered in class, but lately they have occupied much more class time.
“If you have a mild to moderate illness, you can continue to exercise, but you should do less than you normally do,” said family physician Dr. Bruce Barrett, a professor and vice chair for research in the department of family medicine and community health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If you normally run 10 miles per week, maybe run 5 if you have a mild cold. Just tamp it down.”
Many fruits and vegetables, for example, are a key part of a healthy diet. They’re also high in fiber, which helps prevent constipation, says Chris Manakas, MD, a urologist at UW Health and an assistant professor of urology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
As of March 6, more than 100 domestic cats have been infected since 2022. Wild cats like lynx and captive tigers have also fallen ill. Considering the tens of millions of pet and stray cats in the U.S., confirmed cases remain exceedingly rare. “Just like in humans, the risk of pets contracting H5N1 is relatively low” outside of farm settings, says Peter Halfmann, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine.
The lead attorney, Greg Wiercioch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told her that during his 16 years on the case, he’d come to believe Wood hadn’t killed her daughter or anyone else. He pointed out that DNA testing of a bloodstain on one of the other victim’s clothes had matched a different, unknown male, who could have also killed Fulton’s daughter.
“Musk is as much a figure in the campaigns as much as the candidate at this point,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s school of veterinary medicine, has done research on visual perception for dogs. She said a show displayed on older televisions would appear like “old movie screens” to dogs with individual flickers and a low refresh rate. Modern televisions, though, offer more flow and smooth projection.
Randy Kimple, a professor of human oncology at UW-Madison, has two Ph.D. students in his lab supported by grants, called “supplements,” meant to promote diversity among researchers. The supplements fund not only students of color, but also first-generation college students and those from rural areas or low-income neighborhoods.
Kimple expects to lose that funding — roughly $150,000 — in the summer, given the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
In a press release, Professor Pickering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates that “this individual, probably a female, was only about a meter tall and 27 kg (60 lbs) when it died, making it even smaller than adults from other diminutive early human species, including those represented by the famous ‘Lucy.’”
“There is a lot of evidence that when judges are approaching an election, they sentence people more harshly than they do in other points in their term, said Zoe Engberg, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“And there’s also a lot of evidence that shows that negative campaign ads, in particular, have a large impact on how judges make decisions in cases,” she added.
PBS Wisconsin spoke with two plant specialists — Lisa Johnson, Dane County Horticulture Educator, and Brian Hudelson, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Plant Disease Diagnostic Clinic — to explore resources that are available to gardeners year-round.
Thursday afternoon, University of Wisconsin staff and various members of the scientific community gathered to address concerns of cuts in medical research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Life-saving work in biomedical research is on the line, University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison administrators said, if the National Institutes of Health makes cuts to its funding to the system.
“Taking a meat cleaver to this funding is simply wrong,” Universities of Wisconsin System President Jay Rothman said Thursday.
Researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin defended their work in medical research on Thursday as they face uncertainty amidst federal funding cuts.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin warned of the danger of “indiscriminate reductions in research funding,” and medical and scientific researchers argued that funding from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, is critical to their work.
“I’m probably most worried about the species that couldn’t even be included in the analyses” because they were so rare, said University of Wisconsin-Madison entomologist Karen Oberhauser, who wasn’t part of the research.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Sterling Johnson leads one of the world’s largest and longest-running studies of people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. His team aims to diagnose the disease years before people even develop symptoms and identify ways to slow its progression. He finds his work meaningful and rewarding.
But over the past seven weeks, as President Donald Trump’s administration proposes deep cuts to biomedical research, Johnson has encountered a new feeling. Something he’s never felt since he started studying studying Alzheimer’s in 1997.
In February, a UW-Madison teacher training program lost its funding from the federal government, citing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“It’s unfortunate that the approach toward sort of rooting out programs seems to have overlooked what the program is really doing and its value to the high need communities that are being served by those programs,” said program director, Kimber Wilkerson.
Those efforts have increased first-time undergraduate enrollment by an average of 50 to 100 students per participating campus in Idaho, with the strongest gains at community colleges, according to a 2022 study of the state program. Taylor Odle, assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of the study, said the results show that states shouldn’t solely focus on high-achieving students when designing direct admissions programs.
“This behavioral nudge is going to be most effective for the people who didn’t know that college was an option for them, and those are most often students who fall further down the academic gradient,” Odle said.
Co-authored by Paul Wilson, the Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering and the chair of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s department of nuclear engineering and engineering physics, and Michael Corradinia, a former member of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, a former president of the American Nuclear Society and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
“I’m looking at whether we’ll get into a tit-for-tat type of trade war,” said Steven Deller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Wisconsin’s agricultural and manufacturing economy. “One of the things the Canadian Prime Minister was talking about is cutting off the electricity supply to the U.S. If we get into that kind of tit-for-tat, then things are going to start to deteriorate rapidly. So I’m just going to be watching how our trading partners respond.”
So far, Wisconsin’s bird flu outbreaks have been among turkey flocks, not hens, according to University of Wisconsin-Extension poultry specialist Ron Kean. Still, the state has felt the strain of egg shortages, with some Milwaukee grocery stores even setting egg purchase limits in recent weeks.
“Unfortunately, I don’t see prices improving in the near future,” Kean said. “We still don’t have a handle on stopping bird flu.”
Dr. Marcia Slattery, a physician and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focuses on anxiety disorders in patients between 5 and 18 years old. She could not speak to any of Kennedy’s claims, but offered her expertise on SSRIs and their role in children’s mental health.
Typically, once a signal is passed between neurons, serotonin is reabsorbed in those cells, a process called “reuptake.” SSRIs block this process of reuptake, which increases serotonin levels in your brain. That enables the brain to continue using serotonin to connect more dots as we go about everyday tasks.
It was March 2020 when Dr. Ajay Sethi got a call from his best friend in Maryland. His friend’s father had died from COVID-19, one of the earliest U.S. casualties of the virus.
“Because I’m an epidemiologist and I think about numbers, the emotions behind those numbers, how is it I know someone so early who’s died from COVID-19?” said Sethi, who serves as the faculty director of the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The odds are so unusual, I remember thinking then, it must be big.”
While the new ads seem clever in their deception, they probably won’t be effective in swaying many voters, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He noted the messaging is mild compared to attack ads that are hitting Crawford more harshly.
“The ‘Progress 2028’ ad has subtler messaging that requires the viewer to pay close attention to the content and connect the dots,” Burden said. “Voters who are aware enough to make these connections are probably already paying attention to the race and have enough independent information to offset any effect of the ads.”
About 20% of U.S. milk production is exported annually, with about 40% of that going to Canada, Mexico, and China, according to Chuck Nicholson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. If the domestic dairy industry gets only a little more milk than traders were expecting, prices drop as a result, Nicholson says. So if the dairy industry started trying to sell that 20% domestically instead of exporting it, prices would plummet, making it difficult for farmers to continue to operate.
“The police are not equipped to deal with a situation like this,” said Ion Meyn, an associate professor at the UW Law School who studies police use of force. “We’re dealing with an endemic kind of approach to people who are in serious emotional distress.”
Some people fail to find a psychedelic experience beneficial, said Dr. Charles Raison, a professor of psychiatry and human ecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
“Maybe one in 20 people report having ongoing difficulties they ascribe to the psychedelic technique,” said Raison, who was not involved in the new research.
The publishing industry was also influenced by Adichie’s style, says Ainehi Edoro, founder of literary blog Brittle Paper and associate professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Before her, African fiction often came packaged with a kind of ethnographic weight – expected to ‘explain’ Africa to a western audience,” she says. “But Adichie’s work wasn’t performing ‘Africanness’ for an outsider’s gaze; it was literary, intimate, contemporary. She helped shift expectations – both in publishing and among readers – so that the next wave of African writers didn’t have to over-explain, dilute or justify their stories.”
“You begin to see, especially under Obama’s second term, members of Congress thinking they can reply audibly, yelling ‘You lie’ and making it less about unifying the country and more about fracture and division within Congress itself,” said Allison Prasch, an expert on presidential rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It becomes this theater and stage for the opposition.”
“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.
