UW In The News

Soyeon Shim is a big picture entrepreneur at the School of Human Ecology

When Soyeon Shim was young, she wanted to be a teacher.

“I’d come home and gather all the kids in the neighborhood and play like we were at school and I was the teacher,” she says.

For a girl growing up in South Korea, there weren’t many other options. “Teacher or nurse,” Shim says. “But in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.”

Coronavirus Group Testing Can Help Fight the Pandemic

There is no test fairy. Keeping the curve flat, having gone through so much pain to flatten it, is going to require a level of infection reconnaissance we don’t yet know how to achieve. We’ll need improvements in manufacturing, we’ll need more people to do the tracing work a test can’t, and we’ll need to get more out of the materials we have.For the last of those goals, group testing is a promising way forward.

Jordan Ellenberg (@JSEllenberg) is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and the author of “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.”

How not to lose the COVID-19 communication war.

COVID-19 has put science in a tricky spot. The good news, as National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt explains, is that scientific expertise is back in high demand: “When the chips are down and everything is on the line and you can be the next person in the hospital bed, it’s the experts that you want to listen to.”

DIETRAM A. SCHEUFELE, NICOLE M. KRAUSE, ISABELLE FREILING, and DOMINIQUE BROSSARD

Dairy Cows Are Being Sent to Slaughter as Demand for Milk Plummets

“It looks like cow numbers are still going up and milk production is still going up, so there’s countervailing forces,” Jared Hutchins, a researcher in dairy economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said by phone.

Primatologists work to keep great apes safe from coronavirus

Seven years ago, a respiratory virus swept through the 56 chimpanzees in the Kanyawara community at Kibale National Park in Uganda, where researchers have studied chimp behavior and society for 33 years. More than 40 apes were sickened; five died. “Chimpanzees looked like limp dolls on the forest floor,” coughing and sneezing and absolutely miserable, recalls disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was just horrendous.”

Zoom celebrations, speeches, lights display: UW-Madison gets creative with commencement amid COVID-19 pandemic

No Spike, but No Certainty on Fallout of Wisconsin Election

“It’s safe to say (the election) didn’t help,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical arm. “But whether it actively hurt people, it’s very likely but not possible to really prove it.”

How colleges and universities are producing PPE for health-care workers

For the team at USF, the process started by leveraging open-source design materials from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and making adjustments according to feedback from their local hospitals. Now, Celestin has shared all that he and his team have learned about producing face shields online including directions, 3-D printing details and instructional videos.

Wisconsin Milk Production Held Steady In 2019, Despite Fewer Farmers, Cows

Bob Cropp, emeritus professor of agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the trend has already continued into 2020 despite price improvements at the end of 2019.

New strain of coronavirus: Researchers hypothesize that a highly contagious strain is spreading; other experts remain skeptical

David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, said the most interesting feature of the Los Alamos research is that the same pattern was seen in multiple locations. But he said “significant caution is warranted” because the data was not collected randomly. The vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 genomes in online databases come from Europe and North America, meaning strains from these regions are overrepresented in research

University of Wisconsin virologist Thomas Friedrich, who has spent years studying the evolution and transmission of the Zika virus, said a virus that makes its way into a highly susceptible population — for example, Europe in January — will spread like wildfire, quickly becoming the dominant strain in the region

During COVID-19 Crisis, Some People Opt To Delay Other Medical Care

UW Health in Madison is treating patients who are a lot sicker, said Dr. Joshua Ross, executive vice chair of the BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

No shortage expected, but meat supply could see new constraints

Andrew Stevens, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said shortages could happen because the meat supply chain is complex and relies on refrigeration in transport and production facilities.

The One Thing We Can Be Sure of if Kim Jong-un Dies

Report AdvertisementWe do not know what will happen on the Korean peninsula if Kim Jong-un should die suddenly, but we do know that the American response will be hampered by erratic executive leadership, intense political partisanship, a contracting economy, an antagonistic relationship with China, and a strained relationship with South Korea. For all these reasons, the United States is in its weakest position in decades to handle such a crisis.

David Fields is the author of Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea and the editor of The Diary of Syngman Rhee, 1904–34, 1944,  published by the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. Fields is currently the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison​.

Nebraska Will Open Voting Sites for Primary Despite Concerns

Quoted: “If you’re asking me as a public health official whether this increases the risk of transmission, the answer is definitive — yes,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Preventative Medicine Residency Program. “That is a scientific fact, no matter how much protective equipment people wear.”

As More Wisconsinites Leave Home, Health Experts Warn Against Ending Social Distancing

ong Gao, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been aggregating cell phone data that shows how far Wisconsinites are traveling each day as a way to understand if residents are following the state’s “Safer At Home” order. Gao said residents’ mobility has been reduced significantly in the past month, especially in urban areas like Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Coronavirus: Companies offering virtual internships: Humana, Goldman

Quoted:  “It’s going to be tough for some companies,” said Matthew Hora, director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin. “Converting to working remotely requires quite a bit of forethought as to how to design meaningful tasks and how to supervise them in a productive way.”

Could asthma and allergy protect against severe COVID-19?

“We were surprised to learn that the COVID-19 pandemic in China did not seem to impact people with asthma as severely as we would’ve expected it to,” lead investigator Dr. Daniel Jackson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.

Meat shortages may be coming at grocery stores soon. Here’s why

“We definitely can see shortage of products in the grocery stores,” said Jeff Sindelar, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with an expertise in meat processing. If the larger processing plants continue to shut down or operate with limited capacity, certain products may be unavailable and others could get really expensive, he added.

Why Zoom Is Terrible

“Our brains are prediction generators, and when there are delays or the facial expressions are frozen or out of sync, as happens on Zoom and Skype, we perceive it as a prediction error that needs to be fixed,” said Paula Niedenthal, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who specializes in affective response. “Whether subconscious or conscious, we’re having to do more work because aspects of our predictions are not being confirmed and that can get exhausting.”

The Revolving Door Of Disease Between Humans And Animals

Charting the animal origins of human diseases like COVID-19 can be difficult and often leads to unexpected discoveries, explained Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. During a January 29, 2020 presentation at the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab lecture series on the UW-Madison campus, Goldberg recounted the growing body of research into pathogen transmission between animals and humans over the past three decades.

US marriage rates: CDC report says rate in 2018 at all-time low

Christine Whelan, Ph.D., professor in the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin – Madison, told TODAY she believes that the falling importance of religion in today’s society also plays a role, evidenced in part by more unmarried couples living together.

“The idea of first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby — it could be any order you choose at this point,” she said. “For the last couple decades, we’ve seen ’choose your own adventure’ when it comes to marriage patterns.”

Oldest evidence of a moving tectonic plate found in Australia

Quoted: “This is kind of the smoking gun,” says geochemist Annie Bauer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study. “This is the most important evidence we can get [of early plate motion].”

Vote-By-Mail Lawsuits Have Become ‘Nuclear Arms Race’ for Both Parties Ahead of 2020 Election

Quoted: “What groups will do is say to supporters, ’Our ability to win this election is threatened by some action or inaction that the government is taking.’ That’s a way to generate energy among core supporters, even if the law doesn’t successfully change,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Wisconsin’s Rural Communities Have Few COVID-19 Cases. Some Say They Should Reopen Sooner.

Quoted: Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined the term “rural consciousness” in her 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment,” which is built on conversations she had with rural Wisconsinites over years about how they saw their communities as both overlooked and dictated to by Madison and Milwaukee.

COVID-19 Is Driving A Dramatic Greenhouse Gas Decline, But How Is Renewable Energy Faring?

Quoted: Ankur Desai, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of atmospheric sciences, said while the emission declines may be dramatic, they won’t have an immediate impact on the climate or the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In live stream, Blank and Gard talk about navigating unprecedented disruptions at UW

Malaria Drug Led to More Deaths in Treating COVID: VA Study

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “I think we’re all rather underwhelmed” at what’s been seen among the few patients there who’ve tried it, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention.

Fox News Poll Shows Biden Leading Trump by 8 Points in Michigan and Pennsylvania

Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that while Trump flipped Michigan from blue to red during the 2016 election, the 2018 mid-term elections signaled a possible shift as Democrats swept the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races.

The $600 Unemployment Booster Shot, State by State

Just over half of workers in Arizona, which had a relatively high minimum benefit of $172 before the crisis, are estimated to make more on unemployment than if they were still working, according to Noah Williams, the director of Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

US Food Supply Strained Even as Farmers Keep Producing

“Seldom does a consumer go to a grocery store and want to buy a 5-pound bag of shredded cheese,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “They wanted maybe 1-pound bags at a time. You can’t just put 1-pound bags through a 5-pound line. Not possible. You have to have a different piece of equipment set up differently. We’ve had an industry that’s had to shuffle a great deal to move product from where it was produced before to where it needs to be today.”