Audrey Rothermel Bascom Professor of Design Studies Kevin Ponto and a team of fellow researchers have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue developing a new tool that uses augmented reality to help older adults and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.
“This platform has the potential to ‘dim’ genome editing in a wide variety of contexts,” says WID faculty, Krishanu Saha, “not only inside the body, but outside the body, and also has implications for fundamental studies of how genome editing occurs in cells, in tissues, and in animals.”
Anna Tommasi is a member of the Saha lab, which has worked closely with researchers at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health to advance CAR-T cell therapies that are modified at the genetic level. They aim to start new trials for brain cancers next year.
The newly formed Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Hub, aimed at strengthening entrepreneurial pathways, was approved by campus governance in May, and a search for its first executive director is underway. “UW–Madison has a long legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, from the discovery and patenting of the blood thinner warfarin to today’s spinoff companies pioneering modern solutions, such as fusion energy,” Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin says. “We have an opportunity to make this legacy even stronger.”
We celebrate WID faculty member, Rupa Sridharan as she receives a Romnes Award and Discovery Fellow, Tim Kamp who is named Craig T. January Professor of Medicine, Cell and Regenerative Biology.
Colors convey meaning, influence behavior and make us experience emotions. To explain why this is, Larry Meiller of WPR’s The Larry Meiller Show talks with Karen Schloss, associate professor of cognition in UW-Madison’s Department of Psychology and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
WID Discovery Fellow, Kris Sankaran of the Department of Statistics and Jacob Thebault-Spieker of the Information School—have received the 2025 College of Letters & Science (L&S) Distinguished Honors Faculty Award for the significant positive impact they have made on their students’ experiences at UW–Madison.
Election to FRSC status reflects Professor Turng’s sustained excellence, leadership, and impact in the field. A highly productive and respected scholar, he continues to drive the development of innovative processes, high-performance materials, and sustainable products that contribute to the well-being of society.
WID Discovery Fellow, Jim Luedtke created a course to build on students’ basic knowledge of optimization, teach them to apply more advanced modeling techniques and introduce them to real-world considerations like prioritizing computational efficiency. This course bridges the gap between introductory topics and real world applications.
Speaking to the Global Health Institute at UW–Madison, Saha notes, "Both locally and abroad, my sense is there are unknown questions we’re asking, and there’s a mutual interest in being able to solve them for advancing healthcare. The role of a public university is to try to answer those questions for public benefit and, yes, to help make a company that can produce it in a sustainable and safe way – to get that impact and employ people in the process."
The discussion, led by Professor Jon Eckhardt (leader of WID's Entrepreneurial Science Hub), special advisor to the chancellor for entrepreneurship, outlined a new vision for how UW–Madison can better support students, faculty, and alumni in launching businesses — and why that shift is critical for Wisconsin’s economy.
Ashton also noted that while the primary goal is to develop a cell culture model to detect whether someone has a genetic predisposition for Spina Bifida, it may also be possible to use this research to screen for potential ways to reduce the risk of SB in the patient’s progeny.
Cognitive Science Society is pleased to award the 2025 Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building to Timothy Rogers. This award, presented each year at the Annual Meeting, is given to mid-career cognitive scientists (individuals or teams) whose accomplishments exemplify the twin strands of scientific excellence and commitment to community-building and service that were so evident in Jeff Elman’s career.
With the goal of equipping a new generation of professionals to contribute to informed decision-making in government, the envisioned program would offer STEM fellows the unique chance to work directly with policy makers, state agencies, and legislators.
Piper Rawding, Postdoc in the Gong Lab won for her project “Optimizing non-viral vectors for retinal genome editing”
Del Pia specializes in mixed-integer linear and quadratic programming, as well as binary polynomial optimization.
Her article, Decoding Our Inner Universe: The Power of the Microbiome Network Alignment Algorithm was among the articles chosen for the honor.
She recently received the award to fund her work on stem cell tool development for pain circuitry.
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery fellow Bilge Mutlu (People and Robots Lab and INTEGRATE) will support Human AugmentatioN via Dexterity (HAND), an NSF-funded collaboration dedicated to improving robot dexterity.
Discovery Fellow, Laura Knoll and WID Affiliate Jerry Zhu have been honored with Kellett Mid-Career Awards to support those promoted to tenured positions seven to 20 years ago and who have made key research contributions in their fields.
Wright was chosen for his fundamental contributions to nonlinear optimization and for applying optimization techniques to such areas as control, compressed sensing, machine learning, and data science.
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