Almost every day for the last 24 years, my father and I have traded emails about Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day. We started the tradition when I was in fifth grade and he was 38, just a few years older than I am now. The rules are simple: Once we review the chosen word and its example sentences, whoever reads the email first forwards it to the other, including a short sentence typed up to put the day’s special word to use.
Infleqtion, a global leader in quantum sensing and quantum computing, announced research results from a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin–Madison that demonstrate a more reliable way to measure individual quantum bits, or qubits, without interrupting ongoing circuits. The work addresses one of the central challenges in quantum computing by enabling faster computation cycles while preserving fragile quantum states.
As students return to campus this semester, professors are once again evaluating how artificial intelligence can, and cannot, be a tool for learning in their classrooms.
Despite concerns about generative AI impeding learning, some professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are choosing to address and even integrate AI into their course syllabi.
Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman says artificial intelligence is no longer an abstract idea, but is now transforming how the state’s public universities operate.
Rothman penned an op-ed on the future of AI and higher education Monday ahead of the Thursday Board of Regents meeting where he said there will be a “robust discussion” on the topic.
Some students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are gearing up for a collaboration with national brands ahead of the 2026 Super Bowl.
Members of the student a cappella group Fundamentally Sound are getting flown out to San Francisco for a collaboration with the NFL, Marriott Hotels and a secret artist.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will send five current players from the women’s hockey team and seven past players, the most the school has ever sent to a single Olympics (UW-Madison sent 11 players to the 2022 Games in Beijing). Four of the current players will suit up for Team USA; one, freshman Adéla Šapovalivová, will play for Team Czechia.
Two locations have been added to the list of possible exposure to measles in Madison, Public Health Madison & Dane County announced Tuesday, after the county recorded its first measles case of 2026 Monday.
A UW-Madison student living in an off-campus apartment tested positive for measles, the university said Monday, and 4,000 people who may have been exposed have already been notified.
UW-Madison is seeking approval to increase the budget for its Lakeshore Nature Preserve visitor and research facility by $4.7 million, citing setbacks from higher tariffs and inflation on building materials.
The UW Board of Regents on Friday will consider raising the budget for the Frautschi Center, named after the late UW-Madison alumnus and Madison philanthropist W. Jerome Frautschi, who died Jan. 10.
“We’re working to gather a better-than-ever understanding of seasonal changes and how flora and fauna respond, not just in winter but year-round,” said Kyra Shaw, DNR research scientist and Snapshot Wisconsin phenology project coordinator.
Shaw, who holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped roll out this latest initiative of the project over the last year or so.
Our newest hire, as of mid-January, is Francesca Pica, a super-sharp graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a native of Rice Lake. You may recognize her byline. Last summer, she put her data skills to use on our investigative team, including work on an excellent story about the millions spent by state lawmakers on private attorneys.
In addition to the business closings, a student walkout and rally is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Library Mall, followed by a march and rally at the Capitol at 3:30 p.m.
She recalled the first time she did a drop-off. “I see a literal ice agent walking around, and he just walks right past me. I’m just not on his radar,” she said. She is white, and had on a red University of Wisconsin T-shirt. “But, yeah, I go up to this apartment, and this mom was on the verge of tears, who’s been at home with her kids in a stuffy apartment for, like, a month, you know?”
“Miracle on Ice” remains a lingering light over any American triumph in the winter games. A Netflix documentary called “Miracle: The Boys of ’80” debuts Jan. 30 to again stir up the emotions of that incredible victory for the USA men’s hockey team over the Soviet Union in the medal round of the 1980 games.
It’s a triumph that almost certainly doesn’t happen without major contributions from Wisconsin.
In October, Harvard indicated it would significantly reduce the number of new PhD students it admitted. Yale, Columbia, Brown, the University of Southern California, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania are examples of schools that also scaled back, rescinded, paused or stopped new admissions. Large public universities — such as the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University and the University of Washington— took similar steps.
IKEA has dozens of other pickup locations around the country, including at Loyola University in Chicago and near the campuses of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State University in East Lansing and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
For UBS, located on the eastern edge of the UW-Madison campus, it gets a flat fee from IKEA for each order.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison began its spring semester during the coldest stretch of the year, sending students back to campus bundled in layers.
One UW Ph.D. student from South India said the frigid temperatures made her feel “like an onion,” layered again and again to stay warm. Her friend from Kentucky said she was not used to wearing boots or layering so much clothing.
As energy-hungry data centers pop up all across Wisconsin and the nation, fusion startups, including one in partnership with UW-Madison, are working to bring a new energy source to market to meet the colossal need.
The village will be named for Madison philanthropists Ellen and Peter Johnson, who helped Agrace expand two decades ago and created an endowed professorship at UW-Madison dedicated to improving palliative care. They’re the lead donors with a $7 million donation, as they view the dementia village as a “kinder approach” to memory care.
Dane County’s drug task force seized a sedan as part of a narcotics investigation, while Madison police seized $7,700 in cash in another case.
The task force is a collaboration of the Madison Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department with a focus on dismantling and disrupting drug trafficking.
Former University of Wisconsin basketball player Freddie Owens is preparing to release a memoir next month that traces his path from Milwaukee’s North Side to the NCAA tournament and, eventually, a long career in coaching.
The book, “Echoes of Stark Park,” draws its name from the Milwaukee park where Owens spent much of his childhood and where he says basketball became both a refuge and a guide.
Multiple states, including California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, have implemented similar “converse-1983” laws, according to the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Anderson is a professor at UW-Madison and Edgewood College. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Oregon Area Food Pantry.
Nonprofit conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed a federal complaint against UW-Madison for what it claims are race-based scholarships.
The organization filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Education under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, claiming UW-Madison operates 22 race-based scholarships for the 2025-2026 academic year that exclude students based on their racial background according to claims by the organization.
A national conservative student group has filed a civil rights complaint against UW-Madison, asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate the university’s use of race-based scholarships.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, on behalf of its client Young America’s Foundation, filed the complaint on Monday with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, alleging UW-Madison is offering at least 22 illegal race-based scholarships during the current school year.
John H. Van Vleck, who grew up in Madison and attended and taught physics at the University of Wisconsin, won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on magnetism. In his Nobel lecture, amid a discussion of rare earth elements, one sentence leaps out:
“Miss Frank and I made the relevant calculations.”
Who was Miss Frank? Van Vleck credits her with key work on the quantum mechanics of magnetism, but she is almost absent from the history books.
The other proposed amendment would prohibit governmental entities from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting or public administration, according to the resolution memo.
Bill author David Murphy, R-Hortonville, said the proposed amendment was meant to bring “merit, fairness and equity back to the state of Wisconsin.”
The first shipment of 29 wild turkeys was flown to Wisconsin on Jan. 21, 1976.
It was received at the La Crosse airport by about a dozen people, including DNR wildlife biologists Carl Batha and Ron Nicklaus, a few members of local conservation clubs and Tom Yuill, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specialized in wildlife diseases.
In addition to his day job as a laboratory manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Corbett spends about 40 hours a week talking with other collectors, photographing plates and trying to grow the community on YouTube. His long-term project is writing a coffee-table book with every Wisconsin plate ever made.
The Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame has selected William Lunney, Keith McCaffery and Neil Paine as its 2026 induction class.
Payne grew up in Sheboygan County and was the first of his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor of arts in zoology in 1961 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, master of science from Virginia Tech in 1964 and a doctorate in wildlife science from Utah State University in 1975 (dissertation on beaver).
Berndt received his MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. Since then, he’s traveled and lived in several different places and had several different jobs, including one as a taxidermist at the field museum in Chicago.
To prove whether its methods work, the demonstration school would be required to participate in longitudinal studies through the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The school must also share its practices with other schools.
A charter school would be eligible for the designation as a demonstration school only if it is authorized by the Universities of Wisconsin’s Office of Educational Opportunity, which would select the demonstration school. Wittke said lawmakers chose the Universities of Wisconsin as the sole authorizer because it already has the infrastructure to support new techniques and conduct studies through UW-Madison’s education department.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she came to Milwaukee with seven years of journalism and communications experience, entering into a role that champions local communities and participatory news media.
She was previously based in Kansas City, working at Kansas City PBS, and her work can be found in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison Magazine, Kansas City Star and more.
The awards are given annually to community members who embody “the values of service, equity, and justice that Dr. King championed.” Gift Akere, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, will be honored with an MLK Humanitarian Award in the category of “Youth Leader.”
Carrie Coon – a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad who performed with the Madison Repertory Theatre, American Players Theatre and Renaissance Theaterworks – was nominated for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role on Television for her role as Laurie Duffy in “The White Lotus.”
The HBO program led all shows with six nominations, including best drama series.
Donahue said the funding has been the result of years of working with people at all levels of government, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison and U.S. Geological Survey experts.
“This has come after years of immense collaboration,” she said.
According to the Badger Institute, Wisconsin has less than a handful of driverless vehicles for testing and research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Gateway Technical College in Racine.
UW-Madison leadership says the university will be forced to cut programs or hire fewer top international employees and researchers to afford the Trump administration’s new lofty fees on H-1B visas.
Better bike lanes, electric buses and more charging stations for electric cars – these are all ways cities can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change.
But for those who think curbing the planet’s warming is a lofty goal, two Wisconsin researchers are trying to show how these actions can improve human health – and perhaps prevent Milwaukee residents from scoring worst in the nation in one key measure.
Four Wisconsin universities reported hazing incidents on their campuses in the wake of a new federal law mandating disclosure of hazing violations.
“Banking” DNA from endangered regional animals is under consideration by UW researchers. Then we talk to another researcher on campus, Sathya Chandra Sagar, about his work on a global study of bird calls.
Gabby Mullally, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is applying for residencies and plans to specialize in anesthesiology. She knows she would be working with patients during times of heightened anxiety, namely right before someone undergoes surgery.
That’s why she took an improv theater class this past semester.
Years living with an autoimmune disease meant it was a matter of when, not if, Adam Barnes would need a liver transplant.
That time was approaching after he was hospitalized for a blocked bile duct in 2024. The idea of seeking a living donor came up but there was something about it that turned him off.
As uncertainty around federal funding for researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin is expected to continue into the new year, their new discoveries will, too.
From a new eco-friendly way to create plastic to meeting the person behind the state’s insect research, the findings across the UW system didn’t slow down in 2025.
The “Old Timer” is gone.
Jerry Apps told the Wisconsin stories of barns, cheese, one-room school houses and circuses. He encouraged children to eat rutabagas, made regular appearances on Wisconsin Public Television and Radio and, when he was not writing from his home in Madison or teaching at UW-Madison, could be found on his farm property in Waushara County, where deer roamed and he grew potatoes in his garden.
Apps, an award-winning author and one of the most prolific storytellers in Wisconsin history, died Tuesday at Agrace Hospice in Fitchburg. He was 91.
Starting Jan. 1, Wisconsin will have a film incentive program and film office, both efforts to attract moviemakers to the state.
This means we might get a few more iconic big-screen moments in familiar places, akin to seeing downtown Madison in 1994’s “I Love Trouble,” Milwaukee County Stadium in 1989’s “Major League,” the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus in 1986’s “Back to School,” the many Wisconsin backdrops in 2009’s “Public Enemies” or the car chase scene filmed near Daniel Hoan Memorial Bridge in Milwaukee in the 1980 classic “The Blues Brothers.”
In the Midwest, Indiana, Purdue, and Illinois show similar bottlenecks. In the Northeast, Northeastern’s combined engineering-CS programs have become harder to crack than many Ivy divisions. Even the University of Wisconsin, once known for broad access, now reports sharply lower admit rates in engineering and data science.
For parents and students, the message is sobering: the real competition may not be “between” colleges, but “within” them.
As the Journal Sentinel reported, one UW-Madison study found 40 percent of species changes in northern Wisconsin and Michigan forests were tied to over-eating of plant life by deer, from stunting native tree regeneration to wiping out some plants altogether.
A group of local planning and demography specialists known as the Regional Data Group estimate the county will have 887,000 residents by 2050, an increase of roughly 58% from the 2020 census count of 561,504.
The Regional Data Group includes staff from the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission and the Greater Madison Metropolitan Planning Organization, along with the city, county and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Its projections take into account local development patterns and expects much more room for population influx.
Deana Wright is the director of older adult programs for MTZ Charitable Organization, Inc., where she oversees programming and services for nearly 300 Black older adults in Madison, and is the founder and president of The Wright Place, a nonprofit focused on culturally responsive, participant-centered programming for aging adults. She previously served as diversity and inclusion manager at NewBridge Madison, where she expanded access to culturally responsive programming, and later worked in outreach with the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, supporting recruitment of Black older adults into brain health research studies. Wright is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and serves as an appointed commissioner on the City of Madison Equal Opportunities Commission.
With top grades, he was offered a scholarship to study in the United States.
After completing a preliminary course at the International Education College in Shah Alam, Akmal spent four years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science and economics.
This means Akmal is essentially equipped with the skills of a financial risk manager, trained to study the financial impacts of uncertain future events.
Roberta Ellen Fallon was born Feb. 8, 1949, in Milwaukee. She went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study sociology after high school and dropped out to explore Europe and take art classes in Paris. She returned to college, changed her major to English, and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1974.
Chuck Moore is executive director of Impact Christian Schools, a nonprofit supporting more than a dozen Christian schools in Wisconsin, including Abundant Life. Since the shooting at Abundant Life last December, Moore said most of the training received by the nonprofit’s members was initiated by Dane County Emergency Management.
“There have been so many strategies across the country, and every (shooting) seems to have a unique component,” said Moore, who holds a Ph.D. in education leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Every one has a new thing, and we’re trying to have best practices.”
Steve Stricker is playing with daughter Izzi, who plays at the University of Wisconsin.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling oversees the federal team. He has spent most of his career as a prosecutor. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School and working as a law clerk and in private practice, Frohling joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Milwaukee in 2000. He was Acting U.S. Attorney when the case was filed. He returned to his position as First Assistant U.S. Attorney when former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel was named interim U.S. Attorney in November.
Maurice Thomas is chief operating officer at Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy, a 4k-8th grade Christian school in Milwaukee. He is an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expects to earn a master’s degree in education leadership from Harvard in 2027.
Jerry Jordan is a nationally-known painter working in the style of contemporary realism. He counts the unsung artists of the Harlem Renaissance as his artistic role models. By day, Jordan is an academic and multicultural advisor with the UW-Madison School of Education. He holds a degree in art from UW-Whitewater.
Dr. Bashir Easter is founder of Melanin Minded, a company that aims to empower Black and Latino communities by culturally appropriate resources and support for individuals affected by Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. He began his career in elder care nearly 15 years ago with Milwaukee County as an elder abuse investigator, human services worker, and dementia care program specialist, and later served as associate director of the All of Us Research Program at UW-Madison.
Wright, who was born in Richland Center in 1867 and briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is famous for his pioneering work as an architect.
Born in 1947 on a dairy farm in New Holstein, Meyer’s asthma kept him from following the family path into farming. He earned a degree in economics at St. Norbert College in De Pere and a law degree in 1972 from UW-Madison.
Curry, then an artist in residence at UW-Madison’s School of Agriculture, took some liberties when he created “Madison Landscape,” a 7-foot-wide, 8-foot-high tempera and oil canvas mural that for more than three decades was a fixture behind the tellers at First National Bank on Capitol Square.
Today’s grants are in addition to the $1.3 million awarded to local nonprofits and the University of Wisconsin in June. All told, some 136 local nonprofits received Evjue help during the year.
Flagship universities are typically the oldest, largest, and best-funded public research institution in a state, and an examination of those schools across the country find a wide variation in the nonpayment rate on federal student loans. The highest rate is at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, at 19%. The lowest rate — 4% — is found at the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. On average, across the 50 states, the nonpayment rate is around 8.5%, or 1 in 12 attendees of flagship public institutions, according to government data. Among the Ivy League schools, some of the most elite universities in the country, the rate ranges from 3% to 5%.
