Jordan Siegler has been named Executive Director of Wisconsin Public Media (WPM), a division at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that delivers the services of PBS Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) to statewide audiences.
The appointment was announced today by UW-Madison Provost John Zumbrunnen.
“There is no prize for second place,” said Greg Keenan of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “It is critical that the U.S. win the race for quantum technologies. Fortunately for us, UW-Madison is home to some of the world’s most significant breakthroughs in quantum science.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison students, alumni and professors who came to Washington to lobby for more research funding got schooled on just how important that funding is.
University researchers explained how federally funded work in quantum physics and mechanics led to the invention of GPS, lasers and MRI technology.
About a dozen people stood on the steps of Bascom Hall Tuesday. They chanted together and held a banner that said, “No ICE on campus!”
“No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” Bradley Keenan, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said into a megaphone.
Each year, to recognize their contributions to teaching, research and service, the faculty divisions honor four University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty members with the Hilldale Award.
Faculty members representing the arts and humanities, biological sciences, physical sciences and social sciences are selected from nominations submitted by department chairs. The winners will be recognized at the April 6 Faculty Senate meeting.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison will award an honorary doctorate degree to Tia Nelson, an internationally recognized champion for environmental stewardship and conservation.
“Tia Nelson embodies the Wisconsin Idea in its fullest sense. Through her lifelong dedication to environmental stewardship and public service, she has helped shape both conversation and action around global sustainability efforts,” says Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin. “Her work reminds us that environmental stewardship is both a shared responsibility and a profound opportunity. It is a privilege to recognize her unwavering commitment that stands as an inspiration for us all.”
Civil rights activist Ruby Bridges will be on the University of Wisconsin campus for “A Fireside Chat With Ruby Bridges,” according to the Wisconsin Union Directorate. The event will take place at Memorial Union in the Shannon Hall April 8 at 7 p.m. as part of the Wisconsin Union Directorate Lecture Series.
The “Fireside Chat” consists of a 60-minute moderated Q&A and a 30-minute audience Q&A, according to the Wisconsin Union. Prospective attendees can submit questions for Bridges through the Wisconsin Union website.
Only a small fraction of those who showed up Monday evening to see former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speak in the Great Hall at the Memorial Union, which seats about 300, were able to get in.
But those who arrived at least 90 minutes early experienced a freewheeling, good-natured lecture on world affairs. He defended the Trump administration’s recent aggressive foray into foreign policy, including the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.
When considering the expansion, Westby sought advice from the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Greenwalt commented that in Europe, cottage cheese is made in closed vat systems, but it isn’t commonly done that way in the United States. The CDR helped the co-op to find the right systems for its expansion.
It can be difficult to remove rodents once they’re inside your home. To keep them out, the University of Wisconsin’s rodent and pest bird management guide recommends sealing any exterior entry points larger than a quarter-inch.
Her path to us is fascinating. A native of the New York City area, she came to Madison as a poetry fellow with the Wisconsin Institute of Creative writing at the University Wisconsin-Madison. Eilbert has written books of poetry and taught creative writing.
Morning workouts. Skills training. The weight room. Watching game tape. They’re all part of the program for college athletes.
University of Wisconsin-Madison athletes have one more item on their training list: meditation.
Chad McGehee tells athletes that meditation is “strength and conditioning for the mind.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s McBurney Disability Resource Center has seen an almost 250% increase in the number of students receiving accommodations over the past 10 years, according to their director Mari Magler.
Nearly one in 10 UW-Madison students was affiliated with the McBurney Center between summer 2024 and spring 2025, with 5,791 students connected to the center and a fall 2024 enrollment of 51,791.
Following the sports and money theme, the Senate will also consider a bill that would give more than $14 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for athletic facility costs in order to offset the money the school pays student athletes in NIL deals.
West Bend has been working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Lab, which found the district’s enrollment changes are primarily driven by demographic trends, particularly declining birth rates not made up for by new arrivals. The report also notes that kindergarten classes have not replaced the number of graduating seniors in recent years.
Daniella Molle, an education researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is challenging incumbent Blair Mosner Feltham, a former Madison school teacher seeking her second term in the Seat 6 race.
Before she was commissioned by the Obamas, she made her mark in Milwaukee contributing work to Shepard Fairey’s “Voting Rights are Human Rights” mural on the north side of the Colby Abbot building, 759 N. Milwaukee St.
In 2010, she received her master’s in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Two years later, she became the first Black woman to win the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for individual artists. In 2015, she won the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Love of Humanity award.
“The World According to Allee Willis” will be screened as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival on April 10 at the Chazen Museum of Art. Fenton, an award-winning creative visualist and writer (she’s won three Emmys and a Grammy) and Willis’ longtime partner, will lead a discussion after the screening.
Willis grew up in Detroit in the 1950s during the height of Motown and was heavily inspired by the music coming out of the city. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to Los Angeles.
The dry spell is a swift reversal from back-to-back blockbuster years for concerts at American Family Field in 2023 and 2024.
It’s also happening as another Wisconsin stadium has entered the concert picture.
Camp Randall Stadium, home of the University of Wisconsin Badgers football program, hosted its first concerts since 1997 last year with Wallen and Coldplay, and has an AC/DC concert scheduled July 19. On top of that, Lambeau Field is back in the live music business – hosting its first concerts since 2019 with Luke Combs May 15 and 16 – with the Green Bay Packers’ new CEO and President Ed Policy vowing to book more events.
A new report by Alex Tahk, director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reveals the results of an important survey of UW Madison faculty. But there are serious problems with the survey questions, and we need to be careful not to adopt Tahk’s claims about “ideological imbalance and its consequences” uncritically.
Ada Deer was an esteemed Native American leader from Wisconsin and the first woman to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
She grew up in the Menominee tribe and graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in social work, later establishing the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program.
“As I argue in a new essay for Inquisitive magazine, institutional neutrality as originally formulated by the University of Wisconsin in 1894 is a concept that protects academic freedom by prohibiting colleges from punishing or condemning faculty for their political views. The issue of affirmative institutional statements is a much later, and more minor, concern. But when a university condemns certain political stands, it inevitably creates the danger of suppressing those ideas.”
“Universities ought to return to the 1894 University of Wisconsin approach to the opinionated university, where academic freedom is so important that even denouncing a professor violates standards of neutrality. But when the concept of institutional neutrality is abused by politicians and administrators to silence faculty, then it becomes a cure worse than the disease. Soucek’s book recognizes these dangers and provides a thoughtful approach to trying to address the problems inherent in the inevitable opinions of a university.”
Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University whose research focuses on poverty, housing insecurity, public policy and urban inequality. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2015.
Wisconsin native JJ Watt will be forever enshrined in the place where he became an NFL superstar. Watt was named the first member of the Houston Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2026 Thursday, the Harris County Sports Authority announced.
CILC’s legal director, Aissa Olivarez, grew up in the Rio Grande valley near the U.S.-Mexico border. After five years teaching first grade, she attended law school at UW-Madison with the intention of practicing immigration law. She has stayed in Wisconsin because she saw a greater need here than in her home state of Texas, where there’s already robust infrastructure to assist immigrants.
Eighteen of the 700 companies on Forbes’ “Best Large Employers” 2026 ranking were headquartered in Wisconsin. Here are the businesses that made the list:
5. University of Wisconsin-Madison (rank No. 251; Madison)
The 2026 report is an update to the group’s more comprehensive 2021 assessment of climate change impacts on Wisconsin. Formed in 2007, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts is a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department’s Chief of Police Brent Plisch spoke with University Committee members Monday about the presence of eight Flock Safety cameras on campus, addressing their privacy concerns.
After a nine-month search to replace the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s second-highest academic official, three finalists — Anna Stenport, John Zumbrunnen and Charles Martinez Jr. — are presenting their visions for the future of campus this week.
The All–Campus Leadership Conference returns this year for an event with several professional and networking opportunities along with leadership skill building.
Imagine getting into a car, putting the directions into your phone, then just sitting back with ease while no one is behind the wheel. That is now reality as self-driving/autonomous cars are now fully operating on busy roads across the U.S.
Kirsten Simms and Ava McNaughton were eager to get back on the ice less than 12 hours after the end of their journey from Milan to Madison. Laila Edwards and Caroline Harvey were eager to give themselves a day off before getting back into the routine with the University of Wisconsin women’s hockey team.
As a group of University of Wisconsin–Madison students made their way from campus to the Madison Municipal Building earlier this month, they walked on sidewalks, crossed downtown streets and rode the bus.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s sustainability-focused hiring and research initiative will have a new home at the Wisconsin Energy Institute led by professor of plant and agroecosystem sciences Chris Kucharik.
The RISE-EARTH initiative is one of several hiring and research priorities from campus administration across disciplines like artificial intelligence and human health.
The visit follows a partnership announcement between the Public Service Commission and UW’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics to study nuclear energy opportunities in the state.
Inside the University of Wisconsin Nuclear Reactor Tuesday morning, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers peered over the shoulders of student operator Nick Tierney, a senior majoring in nuclear engineering, to eye the array of instrumentation on the reactor control panel, then climbed the stairs to look down into the reactor’s cooling pool.
The Morgridge Institute for Research’s leader, Brad Schwartz, is retiring after more than a decade, the UW-Madison-based nonprofit announced Tuesday.
The Morgridge Institute is a private biomedical research hub housed in the taxpayer-supported Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
While serving as CEO for 13 years, Schwartz expanded its research footprint in partnership with UW-Madison and recruited top scientists.
Attention is also put on the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The university is noted for its First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Scholarship Program, which provides a four-year, full tuition scholarship for incoming students for artistic programs.
The University of Wisconsin La Follette School of Public Affairs is set to move into the historic UW Music Hall, set to be renamed Herb Kohl Hall in honor of the late Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., according to UW News.
According to UW News, Herb Kohl Hall is expected to open in 2029 and will represent Kohl’s legacy and honor the contributions he has made to the La Follette School and his commitment to furthering education.
The inspiration for one of four new public art proposals on the edge of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus came from a 6-year-old boy named Luke.
“We go birding when we’re in Madison,” said artist Jason Klimoski, who with his wife, Lesley Chang, founded the architecture firm StudioKCA. “When we go to the Arboretum or Vilas Park, robins make that ‘cheerio’ sound: ‘Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio.'”
Wisconsin’s state universities are set to have new policies on campaigning in residence halls for the first time in nearly 40 years.
The Board of Regents, which oversees the Universities of Wisconsin system, last reviewed and approved the schools’ policies in 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president, floppy disks were popular and the movie “Die Hard” was released in theaters.
It’s gearing up to be an action-packed summer at the Kohl Center.
UW Athletics and FPC Live announced this week that Shinedown and Phish will perform at the venue later this year. Shinedown is coming to town on May 16 while Phish will have shows on July 7 and 8.
Tickets for Shinedown will go on sale on Friday and tickets for Phish go on sale Feb. 27.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has required international students with partial or full teaching assistant appointments to prove their English fluency for decades, but now, amid heightened federal funding uncertainty, some international graduate students say departments are using the test to force them out.
Consequences for failing the language test differ by department and year, and this year, some students say those consequences have become increasingly punitive.
University of Wisconsin online master’s in Education and Engineering were ranked 8th and 11th best in the U.S., according to U.S News and World Report rankings.
The UW education program’s No.8 national ranking makes it the highest-ranked program in the Midwest. UW also ranked well in specific online master’s degree programs, including holding the No. 2 in Educational Administration and Supervision.
State utility regulators and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are partnering to explore potential nuclear energy projects in Wisconsin.
UW-Madison and the Public Service Commission will conduct a siting study to evaluate the suitability of various sites and the impact of projects on local economies. The study will also look at different reactor technologies, including both traditional nuclear power, advanced small modular reactors and fusion energy.
Rudin has incorporated lectures about EDS into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical school curriculum, hoping to expand awareness in academia. He’s also given lectures to various clinical departments to “sensitize” them to the condition and helped create an addition to UW Health’s electronic records that can help assess, diagnose and begin treatment for people with EDS.
Like most schools, UW started out small with just a couple of buildings – North Hall and South Hall – on Bascom, a hill in Madison where the campus was established. And though agriculture was part of the mission from the beginning, the School of Agriculture at the university we now take for granted began much later.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Alpine Team has been carving down slopes for more than a century, starting as ski jumpers in 1919 and evolving into today’s modern alpine squad.
Dozens of University of Wisconsin-Madison students, faculty and alumni marched from Library Mall up Bascom Hill Friday to demand stronger protections for immigrants and international students on campus.
University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty are raising concerns over new workload requirements set to begin next fall that were passed as part of Wisconsin’s latest state budget negotiations.
Volunteers gathered on Lake Mendota over the weekend to clean litter piles left on the ice following a party on the lake’s surface that took place in spite of the cancellation of Lily’s Classic, which was set to take place Saturday.
A party on Lake Mendota Saturday left the lake covered in garbage after the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a fraternity could not reach an agreement to host its annual hockey tournament fundraiser.
Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and past president of Purdue University, spoke Monday at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as part of the La Follette School of Public Affairs’ Spring Spotlight series.
Warner Park’s off-leash dog park is closed until further notice after it was reported that a dog got sick and died after visiting there, City of Madison officials said Monday. Madison park rangers called UW vet clinic and Public Health Madison & Dane County.
Madison-area hockey fans cheered on the Team USA women’s team Monday afternoon as they took on Sweden in the semifinals of the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Games.
The La Follette School of Public Affairs plans to move into one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s oldest buildings and rename the facility after former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl.
A 19-year-old UW-Madison student was arrested Sunday for recording videos of people using the restroom at his residence hall, UW-Madison police said.
Former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s foundation is donating $30 million to UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs to modernize Music Hall, which will be renamed Herb Kohl Hall in honor of the late politician and businessman.
The University of Wisconsin athletic department traditionally has been self-supporting financially, but that could change under a bill going through the state Assembly. Wisconsin would get $14.6 million annually from the state toward athletics facilities debt service under a measure that also would codify in state law name, image and likeness policies already in place at the school.
In addition to the UW-Madison hockey players competing in the Winter Olympics for the gold medal, five other Wisconsin athletes are competing. See how they’re doing.
A student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also tested positive for measles last week; an update from the university on Friday confirmed that the student was no longer contagious and provided a list of times and places, both on and off campus, “where they may have inadvertently exposed others to measles.” The university called for exposed unvaccinated students to quarantine for three weeks in accordance with local public health guidance.
