Category: UW Experts in the News

“She was a connector,” said Ethelene Whitmire, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of a 2014 biography of Andrews, who retired from the library system in 1966. “She wasn’t there to take credit, but to work behind the scenes.”

That slight overlap does not necessarily mean the two broods will breed with one another. “Is there a possibility of interactions and hybridization? That could occur—but given the long life cycles, it’s really hard to study,” PJ Liesch, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab, tells TIME.

The study caught the attention of Megan Moreno, professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and co-director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. Moreno, whose expertise is in the field of adolescent health and digital media, says she has been troubled by the widespread message — “almost to the edge of moral panic” — that social media use is causing adverse mental health outcomes for adolescents. “That has been a narrative I’ve been really interested in because I’ve really been wanting to see: Where is that evidence?” she says. “And it hasn’t been there.”

Wetlands aren’t the most eye-catching ecosystems. They include swamps, bogs, fens and other places where soil is covered by water most of the time. But they perform a huge range of valuable services, from soaking up floodwaters to filtering out pollutants and providing habitat for thousands of species of mammals, fish, reptiles, insects and birds.

–Steph Tai Professor of Law and Associate Dean, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In November 2020, in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, Calarco, who is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the writer Anne Helen Petersen, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

“A lot of people don’t realize how exposed they are,” says John P. Gross, a University of Wisconsin, Madison law professor and former public defender who’s seen social media play a big part in criminal cases. “That’s all stuff the government can find and gain access to.”

“I used to think that no matter what an individual or a group does, it makes no difference,” Wang Jing, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “But now my feeling is that, regardless of what this can achieve, I have this anger and I want to express it.”

“This study gives us the most accurate picture showing how some Neanderthals joined into the modern human gene pool, and then what happened to their genes afterward,” John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not involved in the research, told Business Insider.

“A lot of the assumptions were that this former cropland had a lot of overlap with formal conservation programs,” Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment who co-authored the study, said in a news release. “But we saw that they’re almost entirely distinct pools.”

P.J. Liesch, director of UW Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained that the fungus does “really interesting things” to the cicadas it infects. “The fungus can do some nefarious things,” he told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. “It can produce some amphetamine-like compounds, which end up affecting the behavior of these infected cicadas.”

“The problem is now urgent, and we can’t say we need to do something about it in the future, we need to take action now,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The earlier we start making big cuts to emissions, the earlier we can start making a difference.”’

Not long after having her second child, Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, started a project in 2017 investigating how parents’ best-laid plans for raising their children go awry.

“Choosing to act on climate has become a political talking point but this report should be a reminder to people that in fact it is fundamentally a choice to save human lives,” said University of Wisconsin climate scientist Andrea Dutton, who wasn’t part of the international study team. “To me, that is something worth fighting for.”

Yoshihiro Kawaoka put into words a question that worries many scientists watching this situation, the worry that underscored Fouchier’s insistence that this outbreak must be stopped as quickly as possible. “We do not know whether the bovine H5N1 virus will become established in cattle,” wrote Kawaoka, a flu virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If it does, will it evolve to adapt more towards ‘mammalian-like’ influenza viruses? … Will it pose a risk to human health?”

Article co-authored by Melissa Skala, professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the fall of 2020, Jessica Calarco encapsulated what so many families were experiencing during the pandemic in a memorable phrase: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. At the time, Calarco, now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (her promotion to full professor takes effect later this summer), was studying how parents were navigating the pandemic, a project that included two national surveys and hundreds of hours of interviews

Calarco, who’s previously published A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (2020) and Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (2018), began researching what became Holding it Together prior to the pandemic, while an associate professor of sociology at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The pandemic changed the scope of her work somewhat (go figure), and she’s also switched institutions, to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She agreed to chat about her process and findings, and their implications for student success.