The Latest

  • A woman sits crosslegged in front a painting with a person standing in a doorway.

Artist-in-Residence: Viviane Silvera with See Memory

Viviane Silvera joins UW–Madison as the Division of the Arts’ Spring 2026 Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence from April 13–24, in partnership with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Silvera is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work bridges painting, neuroscience, and mental health. Working across film, animation, and visual art, she explores how memory is formed, altered, and healed, translating complex scientific ideas into deeply human stories. Her residency activates collaborations across the arts, sciences, and health fields through public events, classroom engagements, and community-centered workshops exploring memory, caregiving, perception, and creative resilience.

  • Lucida logo representing starry night.Concentric layers in a circle that are gold with a dark background, words say Lucida Project

Researchers at UW–Madison Receive Major Grant to Study the Link Between Mental Health and the Microbiome

Long before science caught up, Vincent Van Gogh sensed a connection between melancholy and microbes. Now, 135 years later, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Center for Healthy Minds, PRECISE, and MIT have launched a project that investigates the microbiome’s central role in human well-being and the power of interdisciplinary research. Combining genomics, data science, behavioral health, and international collaboration, the research project is advancing a global understanding of how microbes shape the mind.

  • An immunofluorescence image of mice pancreatic cells (green) and immune cells (blue)

How disabling one gene protects mice against Type 1 diabetes

In collaboration with the Feyza Lab, Khagani Eynullazada, a grad student from Sushmita Roy’s lab identified gene regulatory networks capturing shared and perturbation-specific stress pathways in Type 1 diabetes using GRN inference tools on scRNA-seq data from in vivo mouse models.