Category: UW Experts in the News

Birds found so far from their native range are considered “vagrants,” according to David Drake, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

Noted: Piloting an airplane is an intense job that requires physical stamina, excellent vision, concentration for significant periods of time and the ability to react quickly to new information. “For airline pilots there is a mandatory retirement age,” says Karen Holden, a professor emerita of consumer science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “The airline might move you to another job.”

Featuring Susan Paskewitz:

Mosquitoes like to have a good time like anyone else, which is why studies have shown they often target beer drinkers. “There’s possibly something different about the way they smell to a mosquito,” Susan Paskewitz, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told ABC News.

Noted: Daniel Huffman is a cartographer who lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, considered by many to be the cradle of academic map-making in the United States.

Noted: Sarah Van Orman, executive director of University Health Services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Complex over the phone, “I don’t think any of us that work in health in Wisconsin are surprised by this. There is other data that would support it. Wisconsin has the highest binge drinking rate among all adults in the country. Not just among students, but among our adult population in the state.”

Noted: When Simon F. Haeder of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues studied the plans sold on the California exchange, they found that they included 34 percent fewer hospitals than those sold on the open market and tended to exclude the priciest medical centers, like Cedars Sinai, a highly regarded hospital that runs the largest heart-transplant program in the country.

A University of Wisconsin law professor will give a lecture at the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We decided that the best thing for the community was that information be made available as widely as possible and freely available,” says David O’Connor, whose group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is furthest along in studying Zika infection of pregnant monkeys.

Quoted: “It’s hard to imagine it’s just this particular person that it happened to,” said Kenneth Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it happened twice to the same person in such a short time, it makes you wonder if there’s a significant problem in their system.”

Quoted: “A relatively high willingness to pay for quality drinking water” among Madison residents made the lead-removal project easier for officials to sell, said Greg Harrington, a University of Wisconsin engineering professor who served on the Madison water utility’s board during the project.

Noted: Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said he’s willing to take the job-loss trade-off that might follow an increase to $10.10. “But $15 is too high,” he said. “Job losses would be much higher and employment would fall for the lowest-skill workers.”

Interviewed: In a May 6 interview on Wisconsin Public Television’s “Here and Now,” University of Wisconsin-Madison agricultural and applied economics professor Brian Gould pointed to several factors driving the slumping prices. Most importantly, Wisconsin’s dairy production has increased about 30 percent since 2004, and dairy producers in the state have kept on increasing that after having a very good year in 2014. So, when supply outstrips demand, a lot of milk ends up sitting around in the form of cheese, butter, and in powdered form. More specifically, most of Wisconsin’s milk goes straight to cheese production, so as goes the price of cheese, so does the fortune of the state’s dairy industry as a whole.

Mark Stephenson, the director of the Center for Dairy Profitability at UW-Madison, told WPR’s “Central Time” in August 2015, when milk prices were already falling, that Australia and New Zealand also are increasing production, contributing to “a worldwide oversupply of milk.” The UW-Extension Dairy Team has also been tracking the falling prices, among other developments in the state’s dairy industry.

Quoted: Julie F. Mead, a law professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW-Madison, said the leading case on the issue of school districts being held liable for the sexual misconduct of an employee is from 1998.

Noted: The specifics, though, vary by state because each state makes its own election laws. So if there are problems with ineligible voters using same-day registration, it likely has more to do with how the state implements the program, rather than a problem inherent to the general concept of same-day registration, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Interviewed: Shawn Francis Peters, author of “The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era”

Quoted: But Robert Golden, dean at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said during a Wisconsin Health News event in Madison on Tuesday, that seeing patients face-to-face lends a personal touch.

(Video) Live at Four has some tips and tricks on how to get the best looking lawn on the block from the UW Turfgrass Diagnostics Lab. Interviewed: Bruce Schweiger, associate researcher in plant pathology.

Quoted: “There’s a necessary but not sufficient step to providing care for people with low English proficiency . . . having a good interpreter or health care provider who can speak to them in their language,” said Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study.

Quoted: Mark Sidel, the Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a consultant with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, said via email that “the new law indicates that certain academic exchanges and cooperation will be regulated by existing rules, not by this new law.