Dr. Vivek Murthy, a surgeon general under former President Barack Obama, spoke with Richard Davidson, the founder and director of UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, in an online fireside chat as part of this year’s IceBreaker event, which the chamber held through a video conference due to the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lennon Rodgers, director of the UW-Madison College of Engineering’s Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab, said that two weeks after UW Health asked him in early March if he could make 1,000 face shields, companies from around the country were contacting the university to use its design. “You think elastic is easy to get, or foam; it is, if you want to make 1,000 or even 10,000 (face shields),” he said. “But when you’re talking millions, it’s truckloads upon truckloads of material.”
But it’s an important role for journalists to advocate for public release of as much information as possible, said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin.
“I have no problem with a reporter telling an author that it’s in the public interest to see that the tapes are released,” Culver said.
But this could be the year that freshwater mussels get the attention that Jordan Richard, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Wisconsin, believes they’re owed.
After years of searching for a potential explanation for the mysterious and massive die-offs that have suddenly killed thousands of mussels in streams from Washington to Virginia, Mr. Richard and his colleagues have finally identified a potential “mussel-bola” culprit.
Malia Jones, of the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies how the places we spend time affect our health and how diseases spread in those places. She said while it’s difficult to pinpoint one culprit for the state’s spike in coronavirus cases, there is evidence that students returning to colleges and universities have contributed quite a bit.
“If you had to find a part of the country that is an example of white flight, Milwaukee would be a poster child,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Javornik said Wisconsin is a pioneer of the latest wave of educational video games, particularly because of research done by James Paul Gee, a former University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who wrote “What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy.”
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said farmers were already expected to receive $37.2 billion in direct government payments this year, according to projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But Ryan Owens, a political science professor and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, isn’t so sure.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism Professor Mike Wagner discusses what the future will look like.
“There’s a lot of suspicion among hard-core Trump supporters, and hard-core Trump opponents, about people trying to manipulate the voting system,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s just very tempting for people to believe that something nefarious has happened when the results don’t seem to be going in the way they expected.”
“This is something more that we can’t explain about Venus,” Sanjay Limaye, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Space.com. “Venus has got more questions [about it] than Mars, which is why we are suggesting that Venus should be considered an astrobiology target.”
Tiffany Green, an assistant professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has pointed out that physical distancing is difficult to achieve in some essential occupations and while using public transport.
Black young adults hold 10.4 percent less wealth, on average, than their white counterparts due to student debt, according to research by Fenaba Addo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Black and Latinx borrowers also have higher rates of default than white borrowers, and two in five Native American or Alaska Native borrowers have defaulted on a federal student loan.
Milwaukee is an “essential part” of the coalition any Democrat needs to win a statewide election, said Barry Burden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who runs the Elections Research Center. A small change in turnout in the city is more consequential for Democrats than it is for Republicans.
David Canon, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talked about the 2020 presidential campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
Ryan J. Owens, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the other author of the study, said its basic conclusion was that “knowing your former boss gives you a leg up.”
“When you clerk for a justice for a year, you come to know how that justice thinks very intimately,” he said. “You know the ins and outs of the justice’s thought processes.”
“People think a lot about how sleep is important for consolidating memory, but what they don’t think about is that sleep resets your brain for learning, meaning in order to take in information during the day, you need to have a rested brain,” said Dr. Stephanie Jones, the assistant director at the Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at UW-Madison.
The feature on Madison.com “10 things we’ve learned about COVID-19 in less than a year” is an excellent summary of what we’ve learned “about” COVID-19. But what have we learned “from” COVID-19 about ourselves and our systems?
Howard Schweber, a political science professor who also teaches law at UW-Madison, described how he saw the late justice interpreting the law. “Not only on issues involving women’s rights, [but] her dissenting opinions in the voting rights decision that stripped protections from minority voters in numerous jurisdictions. Her dissenting opinions in particular, rang with passion.”
Noted: The group will be co-chaired by inaugural members Dr. Tiffany Green, assistant professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Alia Stevenson, Chief Programs Officer with the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness.
“The Black Maternal & Child Health Alliance is comprised of Black women serving in important roles in health care, our community, and as decision-makers and knowledge experts. Our highest priority is to ensure that the health and wellbeing of Black mothers remains front and center,” says Co-Chairs Green and Stevenson in a statement. “As the Alliance moves forward, we are pleased to join the Dane County Health Council as we work together to advance the health of Black mothers, babies and their families in this county.”
As part of an ongoing lawsuit in Montana regarding whether completed mail-in ballots can be collected from voters and turned in to the elections office, Kenneth Mayer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was called to testify about a study he had conducted on mail ballots cast in Montana between 2006 and 2016.
Manufacturing employment continued to grow, albeit more slowly, in line with national trends, said Menzie Chinn, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Alejandra Ros Pilarz, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of social work, has found similar changes in behavior when studying children who changed child care providers frequently at a young age.
Formats and preoccupations change, but comics never lose their power to communicate, criticize and entertain.
“Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics,” presented through Nov. 22 by the Museum of Wisconsin Art in two locations, surveys our state’s role in the great hurly-burly of funny words and pictures, especially from underground and alternative points of view.
Howard Schweber, UW-Madison Political Science Professor, believe’s Green Party votes could be overlooked in this election when comparing the influence the party played in Wisconsin during the 2016 election cycle.
Ankur Desai, a climate science professor at UW-Madison, said well-meaning fire prevention efforts over the last century have also contributed to the worsening of west coast wildfires.
That’s thanks in part to Fenaba Addo, an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies debt and its role in racial wealth inequality. Addo’s research has shown, among other things, that the gap in student debt held by Black and white borrowers grows by 6.8% each year. As a result, Black young adults hold 10.4% less wealth on average than their white counterparts due to student debt.
Uncertainty can provoke a vicious cycle of anxiety, says Jack Nitschke, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Our brains help us get good at what we’re doing,” he says
“It’s not a fair election system when one side has such a severe election advantage, and it was done intentionally,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Prof. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that Mendelsohn’s prediction was unlikely.
“The backers of Jill Stein were young and disaffected from the political system,” said Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Typically, minor-party voters are looking for somebody that’s different from what the major parties are offering.” (The Libertarian candidate in 2016, Gary Johnson, received more than 106,000 votes in Wisconsin.)
It is not unusual for communications people within the CDC to be involved in an MMWR report before publication, said Dr. Patrick Remington, a member of the journal’s editorial board and a former CDC staffer.
That involvement, however, was previously restricted to officials within the agency who let political leaders know what was coming so they could be prepared with a communications strategy, said Remington, now associate dean for public health at the School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The state’s capacity for testing is very good and continues to increase,” Dr. Ajay Sethi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said via email.
Quoted: “We are in pretty uncharted economic territory,” said Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: In the last presidential cycle, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim found that Russian-linked disinformation campaigns focused ads on the swing states of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in particular, targeting both sides of the political spectrum with inflammatory posts on race, gun rights and increasingly, feminism.
“Everyone is rooting for them to succeed beyond anyone’s expectation, but it’s prudent to think about what happens if they don’t,” says Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We need to make sure we have back-up plans — and back-up plans to those back-up plans.”
Just days after moving ahead with a critical Phase 3 trial in the U.S., pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has hit pause, even as the nation tops 6 million coronavirus cases and 190,000 deaths. NBC’s Tom Costello reports for TODAY. (Dave O’Connor and Shelby O’Connor)
For as long as federal funding for school lunch programs has existed, the labor that makes those meals possible has been low-paid and underappreciated. “A lot of teachers were forming unions in the 1960s and ’70s, but there was a reluctance for cafeteria workers to do the same,” Jennifer Gaddis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, told me. “There was this idea that you’re taking money away from free-lunch programs for kids. But historically, there’s never been a lot of national or state-level support within school nutrition, until recently.”
More than a century ago, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology was the Department of Home Economics, students learned in a Practice Cottage, a house in which they were required to live for a period of time to apply and test what they had learned in their classes. Learning through doing expanded and amplified what happened in the classroom and reframed the home as a place of innovation, change and possibility.
Quoted: “That will really look different depending on the community resources and assets,” Paula Tran Inzeo, MATCH Director with the UW Population Health Institute said. “Whether there’s a place for folks to go depending on the system or if they’ll be sending folks home, but you’ll want to separate people.”
Thorough testing can also affect which bodies are autopsied at medical examiners’ offices, where resources and staff have been strained, said Dr. Erin Brooks, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Someone whose cause of death can be confirmed by a positive test for the coronavirus, for instance, might not need to be investigated further.
For all of the attention on voting by mail, perhaps four in 10 votes — 60 million ballots — are likely to be cast in person this fall, either early or on Election Day. Overall turnout could well reach 150 million for the first time, up from 137.5 million in 2016, according to Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “We’re trying to make policies for the collective good,” Paula Tran Inzeo, MATCH Group Director with UW Population Health Institute said. “No single decision is made by one person.”
“It’s really hard to persuade people … to convert or convince the disinterested, but it’s easy to suppress turnout if you target people who are marginalized, like non-whites and female and younger voters,” said Young Mie Kim, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied misinformation networks on social media. “All you need to do is make sure they don’t turn out to vote.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has set aside such housing for sick students to keep them in Madison. “The concern about sending all these college kids back home is that we potentially increase transmission in many communities,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, an emergency medicine physician who is the university’s chief quality officer.
“I welcome the commission’s report, which continues to add depth to the ongoing global conversation about the science of germline editing,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is part of a committee organized by WHO that is examining how to best govern this controversial arena.
These experiments follow a long history of scientists openly testing vaccines on themselves and their children, but they have become less common in recent decades, according to a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: As explained by Jeff Pothoff, the chief quality officer at UW Health, the herd immunity approach assumes that people who get infected with COVID-19 develop antibodies preventing re-infections. Currently, experts aren’t completely sure how long antibodies can last.
But UW-Madison law professor Keith Findley said civilians need help accessing the PFC’s process for disciplining officers because it’s complicated and officers usually have legal counsel while residents do not.
Quoted: “It is hard to find these causal relationships,” said Nasia Safdar, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
How are people going to figure out how students are doing in school this year?
“I can’t imagine how this isn’t going to be the most challenging year that we’ve ever had for answering that question,” said Brad Carl, an expert on the subject who is with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How are we going to tell?”
Quoted: UW-Madison Population Health Sciences Professor Ajay Sethi says it actually backs up what epidemiologists have been saying since March.
Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s consumer science department, calls this a “substitution effect.”
“It’s pretty clear people behave as if they have different pots of money,” he said. “Now I don’t eat out at all, so I have a couple of hundred dollars of new income not allocated to anything. I can substitute that money away from eating out and treat myself to other things.”
“Comorbidities” reported by the CDC include heart disease, obesity, diabetes and hypertension — conditions that can make a person more vulnerable to the virus. Each would be listed on a person’s death certificate, along with covid-19. Death certificates may also list sepsis, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or other conditions as the immediate cause of death, but those are caused by the infection. The virus remains the reason that they died, said Nasia Safdar, an infectious-disease professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The extent of the microbiome’s role in chronic wounds is “a really big question in the field of healing and repair,” notes Lindsay Kalan, a medical microbiologist and immunologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the study. While the paper’s results are “not immediately translatable” for patient care, she says, it is “definitely a step in the right direction.”
In the 1920s and 30s, cities and towns across the country built “serum depots,” says Susan Lederer, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These hyperlocal blood banks collected and helped distribute blood from disease survivors. While not much is known about these sites, Lederer posits they may have functioned similar to milk depots, responsible for the safe collection and distribution of milk in municipalities. Convalescent serum therapy was used to treat many feared diseases during this period, including pneumonia, measles, meningitis, plague, and scarlet fever. Serum therapy also formed the basis for state-led pneumonia control programs in the late 1930s, adds Podolsky.
There is a long history of scientists openly testing vaccines on themselves and their children, but in recent decades it has become less common, according to Susan E. Lederer, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What’s ethically and legally acceptable for testing and distributing your own medical product varies by institution and by country.
“Midwesterners don’t understand their history of racism, and so these things seem surprising. They seem to come out of nowhere or be new when they’re really a reflection of who we’ve always been,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Afro-American Studies. “It’s not terribly surprising to me what happened in Kenosha.”
Christy Clark-Pujara interview
