Category: UW Experts in the News

The experience taught camps “what you don’t want to do,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health who has been working to develop Covid-19 protocols for camps, including one in Wisconsin.

“A massive vaccine rollout certainly creates new jobs — from clinic clerks and managers to nurses, medical assistants/techs and pharmacists,” said Dr. Christine B. Whelan, a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin. “There are the truck drivers to transport the vaccines and the computer folks to create the sign-up portals.”

This idea is controversial. “I’ve always felt that people don’t do enough to prevent cold and flu, and so in a sense many of these changes have been healthy,” says Jo Handelsman, an infectious-disease researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says it’s unclear whether shaking hands or spending time in crowded places meaningfully contributes to microbiome health, and so avoiding such risky practices may be all upside — a view that many infectious disease experts share.

“It’s one case out of thousands of cases involving police use of force, so we shouldn’t read too much into it,” said Keith A. Findley, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “But it’s nonetheless very important, because it is one in which, with the whole world watching, the justice system stepped up and acted to hold the police officer responsible for an unlawful use of deadly force.

But research suggests that even if you don’t actually meet up with someone or send them an email or text, it can be enough to simply send good thoughts their way. “You can start with a simple appreciation practice,” Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, previously told HuffPost. Just bring a friend or loved one into your mind, then consciously focusing on the things you really cherish about them.

Advocates for reopening have pointed to data showing significant learning losses during the pandemic, particularly for students of color. But parents of color are far more concerned with loss of life, said John B. Diamond, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

There’s good reason to use it, Dr. Murray and others said. “We’ve had clear difficulties figuring out what works best, when, and in what contexts,” said Adeline Lo, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who was an author on the international study. “This at least puts another fact on the table that may be helpful.”

“Mace’s claim is a complete non sequitur. A state will always have at least one congressional seat no matter how small it is,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and another redistricting expert.

And yet, despite violent backlash from Southern planters, Black growers managed to gain a toehold. The key was collective action, University of Wisconsin sociologist Monica White explains in her book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880–2010. Launched in 1886 to organize landless Black farmers and to pool money to buy land and tools, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union boasted 1.2 million members at its peak. At the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama land-grant college founded by Booker T. Washington and other formerly enslaved people, agricultural scientist George Washington Carver pushed crop diversification, composting, and other proto-­organic methods to help sharecroppers “make enough profit to purchase their land, feed their families, and achieve economic autonomy,” White writes. Carver toured Alabama in an “agricultural wagon,” delivering lectures and demonstrations of his techniques.

“It’s one case out of thousands of cases involving police use of force, so we shouldn’t read too much into it,” said Keith A. Findley, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. “But it’s nonetheless very important, because it is one in which, with the whole world watching, the justice system stepped up and acted to hold the police officer responsible for an unlawful use of deadly force.

Children rarely develop severe forms of COVID-19, and deaths from the disease are rarer still. On rare occasions — one estimate1 puts it at around one case in 1,000, although it could be even lower — kids who’ve experienced even mild infections can later develop a sometimes deadly condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). “I’m tired of seeing sick kids. I want to see them protected,” says James Conway, a paediatric infectious-disease specialist and vaccine researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

More people may yet decide to get vaccinated as it becomes clear how much protection it provides, said Ajay Sethi, a professor of population health studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I try to be an optimist,” he said. “I don’t want to write off rural areas saying they’re forever going to be the communities refusing vaccination. Over time, that will change.”

To discuss Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador and the current state of US-Mexico relations, I reached out to Patrick Iber, a professor of Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Miss Carson” was Rachel Carson, who would later make history with her book “Silent Spring,” about the dangers of the pesticide DDT. Stanley Temple would become Dr. Temple, a well-known bird conservationist and a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

But visualizing or trying to understand “how many” a billion dollars is doesn’t really help us understand any better how much money a billionaire has. Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else,” said thinking about “how much” a billion dollars is is more useful. Basically, how rich is a billionaire?

Steven Wright, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said second-degree manslaughter is a charge for offenses that are not planned — one example in the statute specifically addresses hunting accidents, not uncommon in Minnesota.

“From a social science perspective, the decision from the governor to not go towards a lockdown I think is a sensible one,” said Dominique Brossard, chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin. “You need to work with what you have as far as people’s psychological state.”

If this new and perplexing reality has added to your stress, you’re not alone. “It has really produced a ton of new anxiety, this process of reopening, re-engaging with social interactions after a year trying to avoid them,” said Malia Jones, a community health scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The vaccines seem to have provided a promising path out of the pandemic, she said, “but also, oh my God, we have to renegotiate every single one of these situations.”

It’s tricky to predict how long the rest of the clinical trials and approval processes will take, but Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who oversees vaccination programs there, said that it’s likely that vaccines will be available for 12- to 15-year-olds this summer, for 5- to 11-year-olds in late 2021, and for babies over 6 months old, toddlers and preschoolers in early 2022.

“This paper will drive people to look at the importance of butterflies as pollinators,” says Karen Oberhauser, a butterfly biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the research. If the results hold up in other crops, butterflies might be added to a short list of commercially important pollinators including honey bees, bumble bees, hoverflies, and beetles.

“In the whole global accounting of Crispr [gene editing] therapies, somatic cell genome editing is going to be a large fraction of that,” says Krishanu Saha, a bioengineer at University of Wisconsin-Madison who is currently part of a consortium investigating the technique’s safety. “I mean, that’s certainly the case now, if you look at where trials are, where investment is.”

“It’s a nice, clean demonstration” of movement’s benefits, says Martha Alibali, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies gesture in education and was not involved in the study. A model, she says, is “a super important concept, a really foundational statistical concept.”