While looking at a graph about fruit, it may seem intuitive to associate a bar of blue to blueberries and yellow to bananas, but are there connections between color and abstract concepts such as driving, comfort, efficiency, or reliability?   Understanding how people absorb meaning from visual features, and predicting the meaning they attribute to color in any context is filled with possibility.

In Faces of Data Science, we meet members of the data science community in fields from business, engineering and medicine to limnology, geography and biology, including WID faculty,Stephen Wright and Michael Ferris.

Through a series of lab studies between 2010 and 2017, Karen Schloss, PhD and her collaborator, Stephen Palmer PhD, a researcher at UC Berkeley, set out to find out why we like certain colors more than others. They hypothesized the Ecological Valence Theory (EVT), which they describe in their 2017 paper as the theory that "...people like/dislike a given color to the degree that they like/dislike all of the objects and entities that they associate with that color."

In a new study, the John Denu lab has learned that the fatty acids butyrate and propionate also activate p300, a crucial human enzyme that promotes the unspooling of DNA. This unwound DNA allows more genes to become active and expressed, which ultimately affects human health.

While studying the three-member model microbial community, nicknamed The Hitchhikers of the Rhizosphere (THOR), researchers from professor of plant pathology and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Jo Handelsman and professor of biomedical engineering and Discovery Fellow David Beebe’s labs noticed cells moving in unexpected, unique ways under the microscope.

Srikanth Pilla (former postdoc in the Turng Lab) works closely with automotive suppliers, helping them get more mileage from, secure safer rides for and enhance the sustainability of the products they put on the road.

WID Director, Jo Handelsman speaks to Science Friday's Ira Flatow about the value of soil and her upcoming book A World Without Soil.

Astrobiologist Lena Vincent's TikTok Reaches More Than 50K Followers

Claudia Solís-Lemus reveals a clearer picture of the evolutionary interconnectedness of organisms by modeling data, both big and small

WID researcher, Michael Ferris, John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences and Corey Jackson, assistant professor at the UW–Madison Information School in CDIS, are developing a vaccine fairness recommendation engine that will support equitable decision making about vaccination.

WID Director Jo Handelsman on WID's support for Pride month and LGBTQ+ members of our community.

A new application of nanomedicine from Shaoqin Gong's lab, published in Advanced Materials, may be a potent tool in the fight against antimicrobial-resistant infections.

WID Director Jo Handelsman writes in Scientific American about the threat of soil erosion.

A new lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is mobilizing the entrepreneurial ecosystem by working to identify the conditions that foster student entrepreneurship.