New Kohler Fellows: Advancing Discovery Through Creative Collaboration

The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is pleased to introduce the newest cohort of the Kohler Fellows, a prestigious program that cultivates interdisciplinary collaboration at the threshold of science and the humanities. Each year, the Kohler Fellows program brings together exceptional graduate students from diverse disciplines to work with innovative research, public engagement, and creative exploration. Through shared inquiry and meaningful partnership, Fellows blend science, art, and the humanities to illuminate new perspectives, demonstrating that when discovery and imagination move together, transformative thinking follows.

“Each year, the Kohler Fellows stand out for their intellectual range and willingness to enter into cross-disciplinary collaborations” says Andrew Hanus, Director of the Illuminating Discovery Hub at WID. “The cohort this year has been quite engaging not only with the academic context of our conversations, but with the cultural and societal dimensions at play. Some of the fellows this year are still very early in their graduate programs, while prior years we’ve seen students that have been further along in their program.”

The Marie Christine Kohler Fellows program is designed to draw on the beauty of intellectual knowledge and translate into forms we can see, feel, and experience. Research outcomes in science are often interpreted through lines on a graph or points plotted on a data chart. By combining experimental evidence with alternative forms of expression, scientists can reveal something profoundly human, trace curious patterns, understand resilience within a system, and reach useful insights. Likewise, artists seeking to express that same humanity and wonder may turn toward scientific inquiry to deepen the truthfulness of their work and ground imagination in evidence and understanding.

Fellows come from a myriad of academic programs, nearly always strangers to one another. “I find it surprising that, regardless of their background, they form trust quickly amongst each other,” says Hanus. The program has evolved to elicit as much rapport building as possible early on in the formative weeks of the cohort year. “The best surprise of the program, year after year, is how well this idea demonstrates how well art and science can work together.”

Each year, an artist is paired with a scientist, and each pair receives a stipend to collaborate on innovative projects over the course of the year. This year’s fellows include: