the college of letters & science: fueling discovery (wisconsin state journal special section)

FUELING DISCOVERY

Sunday, March 22, 2015madison.com/discovery

2 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

JOHN KARL SCHOLZSpecial to the State Journal

Discovery is the theme of this special section. As the heart of our great institution, the

University of Wisconsin–Madison, the College of Letters & Science (L&S) fuels discovery.

We do this in many ways.Our professors and instruc-

tors provide life-changing learn-ing experiences for our students who come to college for an intense period of self-discovery. Our research discoveries extend and sometimes redefine the boundaries of knowledge.

And all of us embrace a 111-year commitment to the Wisconsin Idea – the belief that our discov-eries are shared to improve the lives of our community and the world.

The following stories feature extraordinary minds from repre-sentatives of the arts and humani-ties, the social sciences, and the biological, mathematical and physical sciences. Collectively, the College of Letters & Science houses 38 academic departments, five pro-fessional schools and more than 70 interdisciplinary research centers. Many of our departments appear in the top 20 of world or U.S. university rankings, no small feat considering there are more than 2,500 four-year

institutions in the country.So the stories here are but a small

peek into the remarkably vibrant, diverse world in the College of Let-ters & Science. We introduce you to the L&S Career Initiative, a new, coordinated approach to prepar-

ing our students for careers and successful, rewarding lives. We also present remarkable teaching, research and innovation.

But the most exciting opportu-nity is to share these stories with you. Our scholars are making dis-

coveries about the physical world, the institutions that govern behav-ior, and what it is to be human. Many of the projects described here are based on decades of hard work.

These stories, and many more, are happening right here in the

College of Letters & Science at UW-Madison.

It is an honor to serve as Dean. The following pages dive into the essence of discovery – they inspire me. I hope they inspire you.

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Exciting, world-changing research happens dailyABOUT THE DEAN

John Karl Scholz is the dean of the College of Let-ters & Science. Before leading L&S, he was the Nellie June

Gray Professor of Economic Policy and chair of the Department of Economics.

Since becoming dean in 2013, Scholz has made student career preparation one of his top pri-orities. Last year, he launched the Letters & Science Career Initiative, a new, coordinated approach to helping UW-Madison’s liberal arts students use their diverse skill sets to contribute to today’s rapidly changing economy.

Scholz has been at UW-Madison since 1988, with brief breaks to serve as a senior staff econo-mist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President (1990-91) and the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department (1997-98).

William Aylward, Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies . 26

David Bethea,

Department of Slavic Languages and Literature ................... 21

Helen Blackwell, Department of Chemistry ...........................22

Harry Brighouse, Department of Philosophy .........................23

Ellen Damschen, Department of Zoology ................................ 6

Teryl Dobbs, School of Music ..................................................16

Greg Downey, College of Letters & Science Career Initiative .. 4

Jordan Ellenberg, Department of Mathematics ..................... 17

Sara Guyer, Center for the Humanities .................................. 20

Francis Halzen, Department of Physics ..................................14

Pamela Herd, La Follette School of Public Affairs/Department of Sociology .....18

Rob Glenn Howard, Department of Communication Arts ...... 12

William Jones, Department of History ................................... 24

Jonathan Martin,

Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences .............. 24

Jenny Saffran, Department of Psychology .............................16

Karu Sankaralingam, Department of Computer Sciences....... 8

John Karl Scholz, College of Letters & Science .........................2

Ananth Seshadri, Department of Economics ......................... 21

Jon Sorenson, University of Wisconsin Foundation .................3

Karen Strier, Department of Anthropology ............................10

Eric Wilcots, Department of Astronomy .................................. 9

Susan Webb Yackee,

La Follette School of Public Affairs .........................................12

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS

SECTION STAFF: Publisher: John Humenik, Wisconsin State Journal; Section editors: Megan Costello, UW-Madison Col-lege of Letters & Science; John Smalley, Wisconsin State Journal. Designer: Michael Donnelly, Lee Enterprises; Copy editing: Julie Shirley, Ann Langel, Wisconsin State Journal. Corporate relations: Kyle Buchmann, University of Wisconsin Foundation.

ON THE COVER: The cover image – intended to represent the many facets of the College of Letters & Science – is an original piece of artwork from Chiara Bautista of the Daily Star in Tucson, Ariz.

ABOUT THE SECTION: “Fueling Discovery” is a joint effort of the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science and the Wiscon-sin State Journal. No taxpayer dollars were used to create the section. The effort was financed through sponsorships and gifts from alumni and friends.

Bryce Richter / University of Wisconsin-Madison

John Karl Scholz, dean of the College of Letters & Science, talks with families during a Parents’ Weekend luncheon event in Tripp Commons at the Memorial Union.

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE • 3


UW-Madison students make their way along a sidewalk on Bascom Hill on the campus. Private support is now a critical part of positively changing the lives of students.

ABOUT THE DIRECTORJon Sorenson is the Managing Senior Director of Development at the University of Wisconsin Foundation, leading a team

of 10 development professionals working on behalf of the Col-lege of Letters & Science. He is a 1985 graduate of the college and returned to Madison more than nine years ago to raise funds on behalf of his alma mater. Jon led the $43 million dollar campaign to build the new Chazen Museum of Art and recently completed a $22.5 million dollar campaign for the forthcoming Hamel Music Center.

‘Private support is now a critical part of how we change lives and ensure the university’s, and our college’s, longstanding legacy of excellence.’

JON SORENSONSpecial to the State Journal

The pursuit of excellence is the hallmark of the College of Letters & Science. The

college’s excellence stems from a tradition of more than 125 years of path-breaking teaching, research and service.

This legacy is no accident.The state of Wisconsin, and

indeed citizens from all corners of the state, built an extraordi-nary treasure. It took decades of investments, remarkable dedica-tion and hard work to make our place among the world’s finest universities.

The university’s funding model is now a four-way partnership. We rely on support provided by state taxpayers, tuition paid by students and their families, and more than a billion dollars of external research support secured by remarkable faculty and staff through highly competitive grants.

And we rely on the philanthropy of generous friends and alumni. Private support is now a critical part of how the College of Let-ters & Science changes lives and ensures a longstanding legacy of excellence.

As you read these stories, please consider a gift, no matter its size, to the college. In return, Dean Scholz will invest these philanthropic dollars efficiently in the college’s most valuable resources – outstanding stu-dents and dedicated teachers and researchers.

With your support, the college will continue to positively change the lives of the students we have the privilege of serving. Educa-tion is critical to creating paths of opportunity. Together, we can continue to provide an exem-plary experience so graduates take advantage of all possible directions in life and work.

The College of Letters & Sci-ence will also continue to recruit and retain eminent faculty who not only change lives, but power the intellectual discovery and cre-ativity that puts UW-Madison at

the forefront of world universities. L&S faculty engage in studies that advance the boundaries of knowl-edge, spark economic develop-ment and help create the jobs of tomorrow.

With your support, the next generation of Letters & Science leaders will continue a rigorous pursuit and passion for teach-ing, learning, and discovery – the hallmark of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN FOUNDATION

Philanthropy invaluable to Letters & Science legacy

DISCOVER MORE Make a Gift

Consider making a gift to the College of Letters & Science by visiting go.wisc.edu/supportLS or contacting Jon Sorenson at [email protected] or (608) 262-7211.

Budget in Brief

Learn more about UW-Madison’s budget in the easy-to-understand Budget in Brief at go.wisc.edu/budgetinbrief


GREG DOWNEYSpecial to the State Journal

Looking back on the story of your own career, what do you wish you would have

known during your college years about yourself, your education, or the world of work that awaited you upon graduation?

I’m exploring that very ques-tion with nearly 250 undergradu-ates this semester, in the College of Letters & Science’s newest one-credit course, “Taking Initiative.”

Better known as “the L&S second-year career course,” we introduce students not only to the customary steps of the job search (preparing a resume, writ-ing a cover letter, and develop-ing an online persona), but also to the history of high-skill labor markets, the tools for discover-ing one’s strengths and goals, the importance of researching occupations and majors, and the advising and alumni resources available across UW-Madison — all so students can turn a simple “job hunt” into a comprehensive academic and career develop-ment plan.

I have to admit, my own 30-year career development path since first starting college in 1985 was anything but planned. My bachelor’s degree, taken at a pub-lic research university much like the one where I work now, was in computer science.

But it took several real-world jobs — and several years — before I realized that writing computer code was only part of what inter-ested me in the world. So, in my late 20s I returned to the univer-sity, first to earn a master’s degree in liberal studies, then to pursue a dual doctoral degree in two fields that might seem as far from com-puter science as possible: history and geography.

Yet, my resulting combination of deep training in technology and broad training in the humanities and social sciences has served me extraordinarily well for the past 15 years in my second career as a

teacher, researcher and author.Such stories of “planned hap-

penstance” drive my interest in teaching our career course. We’ll be guiding students through a structured process of critical reflection intended to demon-strate to them that the various components of their Wisconsin Experience — both inside and

outside of the classroom — pro-vide high-impact educational options that will prepare them for a wide variety of important and rewarding careers (includ-ing many that haven’t even been invented yet).

One of the secrets of turning academic curiosity and excellence into success in the job market, though, is being able to tell the story of your educational accom-plishments to a hiring decision-maker — convincing a for-profit, nonprofit or public organization that you can add value, energy and creativity to their mission.

That’s the secret punch line of my course: That a liberal arts and sciences education, focusing on transferrable skills like problem-solving, critical thinking and persuasive communication, is precisely the kind of “job train-ing” most valued by employers in a technological, globalized and dynamic marketplace of goods, services and ideas. Helping our students develop into creative and engaged “career entrepre-neurs,” no matter what their background or major, is a key part of the Wisconsin Idea. I’m proud to be a part of that effort.

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE CAREER INITIATIVE

Today’s students need more than a ‘job hunt’

Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW-Madison graduate Rachel Hershberger (B.A. 2014, environmental studies and political science) poses with her diploma cover as she sits in the lap of the Abraham Lincoln statue in front of Bascom Hall at UW-Madison last May.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Greg Downey is associate dean for social sciences in the College of Letters & Science. He is also the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the

School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Library and Information Studies. His research and teaching explore the history of information technology, geographies of communication and new media.

DISCOVER MORE go.wisc.edu/lsci

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ELLEN DAMSCHENSpecial to the State Journal

I m agine the ancient south-ern Wisconsin landscape as a mosaic of prairies, savan-

nas and forests shaped by fertile ground and the rhythms of natural fire.

Our presence has added tiles to this mosaic – cities, farms, roads – reshaping natural habi-tats into smaller pieces, spaced farther apart, and altering the tempo of fire. Today, more than 97 percent of our original prai-ries and savannas have disap-peared along with their inhabit-ants. As we speak, the monarch butterfly is teetering on the edge of extinction.

Wisconsin is not alone in this intermingling of human and natu-ral landscapes. Worldwide, habi-tat is being lost at alarming rates and species are moving toward the poles as the climate changes.

But these changes also raise opportunities. Committed citi-zens are working to restore land-scapes, plant new seeds, return fire to its old haunts, and enjoy the boundless diversity and services of nature. What else can polli-nate crops, cleanse water, regulate the climate and provide a daily respite?

In my research lab at UW-Mad-ison, we ask what happens when natural habitats are broken apart. We wonder how these remaining pieces will be affected by a chang-ing climate. And we ask what types of solutions will help sustain the species and natural services we enjoy and rely on. Can plants and animals survive in the future? Where will they find refuge? Can we bring back species and natural services we have lost? Can we find a better way to arrange landscapes so both people and organisms thrive?

Our lab tackles these questions using the world’s largest experi-ment of habitat corridors, thin strips of habitat connecting oth-erwise isolated patches of habitat. We determine how these connec-tions affect where plants and ani-

mals go and whether they survive.A careful study design is criti-

cal for pinpointing the effects of the corridors by themselves. Just as with other controlled experi-ments, we compare connected patches to unconnected patches of equal area and amount of “edge” habitat.

We also use historic data to understand changes over eras.

In 60 years, Wisconsin win-ters have become warmer, with less snow, and more unexpected freezes. We use data collected by UW-Madison’s Plant Ecol-ogy Lab to determine how plants have changed over 60-plus years. These rare datasets are critical for understanding change through time and we are grateful for the investment of our UW predeces-sors who recorded and preserved these data.

Looking forward, we perform experiments that mimic future winter conditions.

Interestingly, the natural fires that maintain prairies in our state may ensure against future

stresses like changing winters. Fires promote plants that toler-ate stress, which may buffer our natural communities against change. We partner with individ-uals, conservation managers, and restoration groups to determine the optimal amount and timing of fire for plant survival now and in the future.

Our succ ess depends on the phenomenal students and staff who are a part of our research group. We work together – explor-ing problems, fostering curiosity, generating opportunities – so that we might return information back to our community and the land-scape mosaic around us.

DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY

Research fits pieces into changing mosaic

Courtesy of Ellen Damschen

An aerial view of the world’s largest corridor experiment, located near Aiken, S.C., shows four “patches” of grassland habitat carved from pine plantation forest. The patches connected by a corridor (dumbbell) are compared to patches of the same size and shape but without the corridor connection.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Ellen Damschen is an associate professor of zoology. As an ecologist and conservation biologist, she studies how

local and regional ecological pro-cesses affect species diversity, as well as how human-induced global changes affect plant communities. Her lab has research projects in the southeastern United States, southwestern Oregon and the Midwest.

DISCOVER MORE https://damschenlab.zoology.wisc.edu


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KARU SANKARALINGAMSpecial to the State Journal

It’s no secret that students today love technology and embrace it in their daily lives, from their

ever-present smartphones to pop-ular fitness watches. My passion as a computer scientist is to teach students to be not just users of technology, but creators and inno-vators who will shape the future.

And to really learn computer science, you must build a com-puter — something even first-year students can do. What’s more, this hands-on approach to teach-ing has reaped rewards in my own research.

My students build and program real systems with computers in them. We can do this thanks to how cheap and powerful comput-ers have become. Instead of play-ing Angry Birds on their phones, my students build a physical game in which a spring-loaded system launches a plush bird, guided by ultrasonic sensors, at a target, all coordinated and controlled by algorithms they design.

Students also build robots that use infrared sensors to navigate mazes. While it may seem like just a game, this task is based on the same principle Amazon uses to have robots fetch items for ware-house employees who pack orders.

Through these projects, stu-dents have fun and learn better, discovering advanced computer-science principles on their own.

These activities have also impacted my research. Looking at these very small computing systems, we observed they are far more efficient than modern data centers in power consumption and size, leading to new designs that significantly reduce energy use. A lively classroom and new discov-eries can go hand-in-hand.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCES

Computer course mixes serious science with fun

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Students Alejandro Puente, left, and Peter Procek, center, worked with Professor Karu Sankaralingam, right, to build and program a tiny computer based on the Arduino board that can navigate a maze using infrared sensors.


Student Peter Procek sets up a tiny computer that can navigate a maze using infrared sensors.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Karu Sankaralingam is an associate professor of computer sciences and electrical and computer

engineering. He leads the Department of Computer Sciences’ Vertical Research Group, where he explores microarchitecture, architecture and software issues for massively parallel computation systems. Last year, he was one of 10 recipients of a UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award.

DISCOVER MORE http://vertical.cs.wisc.edu/DiscoveringCS

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/people/karu


KAREN STRIERSpecial to the State Journal

During this past winter break, I worked 12-hour days in one of the last

remaining fragments of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. This 2,400-acre protected forest reserve is situ-ated on a coffee plantation near the Brazilian city of Caratinga. It is also one of the only places where the critically endangered northern muriqui monkey can still be found.

When I first came here to study muriquis more than three decades ago, virtually nothing was known about their behav-ior or ecology, or what it would take to ensure the species’ sur-vival. It took years of observa-tions to decipher their excep-tionally peaceful, egalitarian society, which distinguishes the northern muriqui from nearly all other primates.

Muriquis are the largest New World primates (except for humans), and they live corre-spondingly long lives. Some of the original individuals present at the start of my study are now in their late 30s, if not older. There are grandmothers and even some great-grandmothers; I have known them for more than half of my life.

Their long lifespans put a pre-mium on survival over repro-duction, at least in terms of the population’s resilience to local environmental fluctuations. Yet it is still a great thrill every time an infant is born.

The birth of any infant, and especially a female, bodes well for the future of the population, which has grown from 50 to 361 over the past 32 years, and now represents more than one-third of the entire species.

Such a rapid population recovery could be regarded as a rare example of a conservation success. However, forest regen-eration in areas surrounding the reserve has not kept pace with the muriquis’ expansion, and they now live at one of the high-

est densities known.By studying the muriquis’

responses to these natural pop-ulation pressures, we are gain-ing insights into their behavioral flexibility and ability to adapt.

One of the muriquis’ first responses was to expand their use of vertical space by spend-ing increasingly more time

on the ground. Here, they can benefit by supplementing their diets with fallen fruits and other food sources they can’t reach from the trees, as long as the risks from terrestrial preda-tors, such as ocelots and pumas, remain low.

We know that human ances-tors made a more permanent shift from a tree-dwelling to ground-dwelling way of life. Although muriquis are quite distantly related to us, the same kinds of pressures driving the muriquis’ ground use might have also been involved in our own.

An even more extreme

response by the muriquis to the increasingly crowded condi-tions has been the emigration of females into a neighboring forest fragment outside the pro-tected reserve.

Over a four-year period, at least six females risked their lives by crossing open fields to reach another, unpopulated for-est. These females are showing us that they need more forest, and are leading us to the areas they have chosen. We now know where to establish the connect-ing corridors that will provide safe passage for other muriquis into the new forests, so their numbers can continue to grow.

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Primates’ behavior, ecology give hints to their survival

Carla B. Possamai

A northern muriqui mother perches in a tree with her new infant and juvenile son. More than three decades ago, virtually nothing was known about the species behavior or ecology. Their long life spans put a premium on survival over reproduction. New insights help us better understand their behavioral flexibility.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Karen B. Strier is the Vilas Research and Irven DeVore Professor of Anthropology. She studies primate social

evolution and conservation biol-ogy, with a focus on the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Strier has led field graduate study and research projects in Brazil for more than 32 years, and is internationally recog-nized for her conservation work.

DISCOVER MORE http://experts.news.wisc.edu/experts/1436

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ROB GLENN HOWARDSpecial to the State Journal

My research seeks to understand the effect the Internet has on the

choices we make. When I began studying network communica-tion back in 1994, I thought that it would make our world fairer by giving us all direct access to the information we need to make good choices.

After 20 years of doing this research, I find that as more and more of us have access to more and more information, it may be harder than ever to make the best choices for ourselves and those we love.

Over the years, I have researched everything from online Bible study groups and parenting forums to gun bloggers and wannabe rock stars trading guitar licks on YouTube. Using software to make maps of who is talking to whom about what, my research suggests that Internet use can elevate a sense of every-day lay authority over that of experts such as ministers, teach-ers, lawyers, or doctors.

While we are all better off because we can share experiences

and information online, having access to so much information from so many sources also puts a lot of responsibility on us. We can’t all be experts on everything, and yet we still have to choose whose advice to take or what information to believe.

In the end, my research points to the necessity of trusting in the authority of others. In our digital age, the one thing we all need to be an expert on is how to choose what and whom we trust.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION ARTS

Variety of choices abound in the digital ageThis graphic illustrates roughly 122,000 posts from an online parenting forum that use one of 16 ways to say “vaccine” over the 2011 calendar year. The visualization was compiled using the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) ORA tool, a dynamic meta-network assessment and analysis tool developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Robert Glenn Howard is a professor of communication arts and chair of the Department of Compara-tive Literature

and Folklore Studies. He is also the director of the Digital Studies Certificate Program, designed to better prepare students for life and work in a fast-changing digital environment. He studies the social impacts of Internet use, as well as online folklore and apocalyptic or “end times” religious belief.

DISCOVER MORE http://rghoward.com/


SUSAN WEBB YACKEESpecial to the State Journal

With three children at home, I know first-hand how voices com-

pete to be heard. My kids — like all kids — lobby

to stay up late and to eat candy. But, what’s different about me, is that I try to learn from this lobbying: I’m a political scien-tist, and I study whether and how interest groups get their voices heard by government. In particular, my research focuses on the lobbying of industry,

public interest groups, and citizens during the writing of federal and state government regulations.

Regulations are all around us. They control the quality of air we breathe and water we drink; regulations affect banking,

transportation, health care and schools.

Most people know that regu-lations “matter,” but what few people know is that government agency officials — not elected legislators — develop these reg-ulations, and that letters and comments to agencies, even by citizens, have to be taken into consideration when most rules are written.

My research demonstrates that interest groups — not pri-vate citizens — are the most fre-quent participants during the

writing of regulations. However, my work also finds that “rule making” is not just for experts and insiders: I find that par-ticipation by citizens also mat-ters, especially when many citi-zens lobby together to get their voices heard.

In short, my research shows that rule making does not have to be one-sided. Indeed, at home and at work, I’ve found that we can have both a fair pro-cess and a fair outcome when it comes to the rules that shape our society.

LA FOLLETTE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Interest groups experts in getting voices heardABOUT THE SCHOLAR

Susan Webb Yackee is a professor of public affairs and political science and the director of UW-Madison’s La Follette School

of Public Affairs. Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, admin-istrative law, and interest group politics. She is currently studying regulatory policymaking at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.


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FRANCIS HALZENSpecial to the State Journal

Matter is made of particles: protons and neutrons, electrons and neu-trinos. Neutrinos are the most

common, but it is likely that your high school teacher never mentioned them.

Fred Reines, who discovered the neu-trino in 1956, once told me that with the realization that the particle actually existed, literally everybody came up with the idea that one could do astronomy with neutrino beams. Neutrinos, unlike light, go through walls, through the Earth, through everything … and this opens the prospect for using neutrinos to look out to the edge of the universe and peer into the hearts of black holes.

In 1960, pioneering articles appeared defining the field of neutrino astronomy. They had some minor flaws, though, in that their estimate of the size of the tele-scope, 1.5m per side, required to conduct the science was low by a factor of 10,000. These scientists also anticipated success within several years, but here we are more than half a century later. Who could have anticipated in 1960 a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector made of 100,000-year-old Antarctic ice?

This is exactly what the IceCube project delivered.

Our neutrino detector is made of a cubic kilometer of ice, one mile below the geo-graphic South Pole, where the National Science Foundation operates a scientific station that made the project’s construc-tion possible. The neutrino detector is the ice itself; we instrumented it with light sensors that map the telltale light pat-terns made by the occasional neutrino that stops in the ice. It is an eye with neu-trino vision that has recently recorded the first baby pictures of the extreme neutrino universe.

My late IceCube collaborator John Bahcall played a critical role in the dis-covery of neutrinos emitted by the nuclear reactor in the sun. When he addressed the public, he would tell the audience that there were two things the public did not know, fortunately perhaps, about science.

The first secret is that scientific discov-eries do not flow from a logical, straight path. Typically, results emerge after fol-lowing meandering paths, dead ends and plain mistakes. This was certainly the case

when we developed the IceCube concept and built the detector. A very diverse group of people contributed to IceCube by making critical contributions at its many critical junctures. I have found it extremely rewarding to work with these talented and passionate people at UW–Madison, the lead institution of IceCube, and elsewhere.

The second secret is that we would do science even if we were not paid for it. Science is an addiction, and the thrill is to learn, to solve; it is a daily rush to under-stand concepts, from small and technical to sweeping and fundamental, that you never imagined within your reach. It is not the thrill of discoveries, which are few and far between. Discovery comes with panic and sleepless nights from the fear of having been fooled, by nature or your apparatus.

Students in the College of Letters & Science have been an integral part of this adventure. I have had the good fortune of having a few graduate students walk into my office who taught me physics well before their Ph.D. exam.

I also remember sending an under-graduate to the South Pole carrying a good fraction of that year’s equipment as his personal luggage. When he went to the airport, he told me he had never before left the state or even been on an airplane. Maybe that increased the risk, but in the end the equipment arrived safely, and one student received a crash course in the enterprising side of science.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

Chasing neutrinos: Life at the South Pole

Courtesy of IceCube/NSF

The deployment of each of the 86 IceCube strings lasted about 11 hours. In each one, 60 sensors (called DOMs) had to be quickly installed before the ice completely froze around them.

Felipe Pedreros / IceCube/NSF

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica, hosts the computers collecting raw data. Due to satellite bandwidth allocations, the first level of reconstruction and event filtering happens in near real-time in this lab. Only events selected as interesting for physics studies are sent to UW-Madison, where they are prepared for use by any member of the IceCube Collaboration.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Francis Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Pro-fessor of Physics and the principal investigator of IceCube. He was a recipi-ent of a 2014 American Ingenuity Award from

Smithsonian magazine, presented by famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. IceCube’s 2013 discovery of cosmic, high-energy neutrinos won a Breakthrough of the Year award from Physics World magazine.

DISCOVER MORE http://go.wisc.edu/cj6r3j

https://icecube.wisc.edu/

A POWERFUL PARTNERSHIP The College of Letters and Science (L&S) provides the ideas.

The Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) turns up the power.

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CHTC

Launched in L&S two decades ago, the CHTC harnesses massive computing power to answer questions once thought unapproachable. Today, with added support from the Morgridge Institute for Research, CHTC reaches

hundreds of UW-Madison researchers and generates 200-plus million hours of computing time annually.

Our partners in L&S use CHTC to:

• Optimize growth rates of com varieties

• Search for neutrinos in the South Pole

• Test the accuracy of economic models

* Analyze cancer pathways in the human genome

We are proud to collaborate with colleagues in L&S — and campus-wide — in putting computing power to work on scientific discovery.

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JENNY SAFFRANSpecial to the State Journal

Imagine that you’ve been dropped into an unfamiliar country. People are speaking

all around you. But you don’t rec-ognize the sounds or objects sur-rounding you. You don’t even hear words; all the sounds are mushed together. It is very confusing.

This is the infant’s world. And yet, to babies, this situation doesn’t appear to be confusing in the least. How do they make sense of it all?

As any parent can tell you, most infants begin to understand lan-guage long before they can pro-duce words themselves. In the Infant Learning Lab, my students and I aim to discover how infants learn to understand.

Each year, more than 1,000 Dane County infants visit our lab at the Waisman Center. They don’t have to say a word! We are able to mea-sure what they know by tracking their eye gaze while they view pic-tures on a screen, or by timing how long they listen to familiar sounds.

Using these simple methods, we have learned a great deal about how infants come to understand their native language (or lan-guages). Infants are remarkably

good at detecting patterns of sounds, allowing them to figure out where words begin and end. They are also highly skilled at

mapping these sounds onto mean-ings, which is the basis of learning words, and at discovering patterns of words that form sentences.

Not all infants are equally skilled at language learning. For infants with developmental dis-abilities, the linguistic world may

be particularly confusing. By working with infants of diverse abilities, we hope to better under-stand both how language learn-ing typically unfolds, and how to help infants for whom learning is especially challenging.

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Infants give strong clues to language learning


Jenny Saffran, right, professor of psychology, talks with mother Rebecca Cuningham and her 15-month-old daughter, Arella Wedell- Cuningham, at the Infant Learning Lab in the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The facility, led by Saffran, specializes in studies involving language development and music research.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jenny Saffran is a professor of psychology and leads the Infant Learning Lab at the Wais-man Center, an internationally

recognized center for research spanning the biological, behavioral and social sciences. Saffran focuses on infant and toddler learning, lan-guage acquisition, and the relation-ship between music and language learning. She was a 2009 recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.


http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/infantlearning/Welcome.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upMfun48euc

TERYL DOBBSSpecial to the State Journal

M y research takes me to some very difficult spaces: the Holocaust,

disability, traumatic memories. What I seek in these spaces is to understand a shred of a valued cultural practice that we find in every culture on this planet: making music.

Making music during times of incredible oppression and stress provides individuals — especially children — a place of normalcy,

safety and community, if only for a short time. My teachers are survivors who as children sang, played, danced and listened to music while imprisoned during the Holocaust.

Why does this matter? The survivors entrust their

stories to me so that I — eventu-

ally we — might learn from them, what it means to experience tough times by making music. It means that at some point, children need a place where, as one Holocaust survivor said, “music, really, [can make] us forget, [make] us forget hunger, and [make] us forget all the troubles that we [have].”

Scholarship in humanities disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, history, and socio-cultural studies supports what I am learning, and further, allows me to make relevant and criti-

cal connections for my music education students. The future music educators and graduate students with whom I work will need to know how to create simi-lar music-making spaces for all children, places where I sincerely hope all children’s voices are embraced, heard, honored and cherished.

How do we accomplish such a thing? Through my research and guided by some very wise and experienced teachers — survivors of the Shoah — I am learning.

SCHOOL OF MUSIC

Making music in times of stress can ease sufferingABOUT THE SCHOLAR

Teryl Dobbs is an associate professor of music education in UW-Madison’s School of Music. She studies musical representa-tions of trauma and pedagogies related

to the Holocaust. She teaches music teacher preparation and ability/dis-ability studies, as well as other current issues in music education. Dobbs is an active wind band clinician and guest conductor, often with middle school ensembles.

DISCOVER MORE http://www.music.wisc.edu/faculty/teryl-dobbs/


JORDAN ELLENBERGSpecial to the State Journal

We live surrounded by networks: social net-works, the wireless and

cellular networks that make our magical phones possible, infra-structure networks of power lines and traffic, and of course the old-fashioned networks of friendship and influence.

How do we know what’s hap-pening in a network, which we might have only partial knowledge about, and which might have mil-lions or billions of moving parts?

Suppose you’re the CIA, and you have access to a huge database of cellphone contacts, and you want to identify a small group of “sub-jects of interest” who contacted each other more than you might expect.

Or suppose you’re Facebook, and you want to make good guesses about which pairs of peo-ple are actually friends but haven’t yet revealed that fact to Facebook.

To a mathematician, those two problems are actually the same: finding “communities” of tight connections in a massive network.

I’ve been studying these prob-lems at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a new interdisci-plinary institute at UW-Madison where researchers in math, elec-trical engineering, computer sci-ence, statistics and economics get together to talk about the new math we’re going to have to cre-ate in order to understand the new universe of information we’re now encountering.

Yes, there’s such a thing as new math! The way we teach things in school, you’d think mathematics stopped growing around the time of Isaac Newton. In reality, new circumstances require new math-ematical tools; and circumstances are changing fast.

There’s more math being made in the United States in the 21st century – in public and private universities, in federally funded institutes and in corporate labs like Microsoft Research — than at any time or place in the rest of human

history.Recently, we had a visit from

Quentin Berthet, a young star from Cal Tech. He’s interested in ques-tions about computational com-plexity. In a nutshell, that means: can we tell which problems are hard to solve? The ultimate goal is to classify problems into related

families, just as biologists clas-sify organisms into species and kingdoms.

Someday, we hope to under-stand the landscape of computa-tional problems as well as biolo-gists understand goldfinches and viruses. The difficulty is that the modern world is deeply uncer-tain; when we say a problem is “hard,” what we mean is, it’s very probably hard given our limited knowledge about the problem and our lack of precision about what we do know.

Berthet explained how the problem of finding communities

in an uncertainly known network fits into the landscape; when I heard his talk, I got very excited, because what he was doing fit very naturally into a framework from number theory, the field I’m trained in, where the problems are of the form “does a random system of equations have a solu-tion or not?”

Quentin and I are almost fin-ished writing a paper joining the two ideas. We’re filling in the gaps in the map, getting a better pic-ture of the whole dark continent of computation. Time to make more math.

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS

New math needed to explore new networks

Jeff Miller / Uuniversity of Wisconsin

Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics at UW-Madison, says there is more math being made in our country in the 21st century — in public and private universities, in federally funded institutes and corporates labs than any time or place in the rest of human history.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jordan Ellenberg is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics and a Discovery

Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, as well as a novel titled The Grasshopper King and a column called “Do the Math” in Slate.

DISCOVER MORE http://www.math.wisc.edu/~ellenber/

http://www.jordanellenberg.com

http://go.wisc.edu/roy66t


PAMELA HERDSpecial to the State Journal

What makes us prosper-ous, healthy and happy across our lives?

Since 1957, UW-Madison has been tracking the lives of 1 in 3 Wisconsin high school gradu-ates to answer this very question — which makes the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) one of the longest running studies of its kind.

This has been possible only because more than 10,000 graduates, and many of their siblings and spouses, have been such willing and wonderful participants. The WLS has also brought to the state more than $35 million in federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) fund-ing in the last five years alone.

So what have we learned?The study began during the

Cold War’s scientific competi-tion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Working with state government, UW-Madison’s School of Education surveyed all high school gradu-ates statewide in 1957 to learn their post-graduation plans. The conclusions drawn were the basis for the statewide expan-sion of Wisconsin’s colleges and universities—what is now one of the best public university sys-tems in the country.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the late UW-Madison sociol-ogy professor William Sewell and Emeritus Professor Rob-ert Hauser extended the proj-ect to explore how adolescent experiences are related to suc-cess in adult life. We learned that one’s own aspirations and parental support mattered more than IQ in determining who went to college and had

later career success.Our study participants are

now in their 70s but the lessons we’re learning from them are more important than ever.

We’re learning how work, family and friends influence our well-being in later life. While access to quality medical care is critical, our broader social envi-ronment is just as, if not more,

important. The WLS has also been cre-

atively incorporating cutting-edge changes in science. We are in the process of adding genetic data that will make the WLS one of the most promising ways of examining how genetics influences our well-being.

Another innovative new

project focuses on the human microbiota. Humans are an amalgamation of cells, both human and microbial, with the number of microbial cells largely exceeding our H. sapi-ens cells. We are more micro-bial than human. There is already evidence that micro-biome-based treatments offer dramatic breakthroughs

for colitis and some bacte-rial infections, and we are just beginning to understand the broader implications for human health.

Everyone’s microbiome is different, shaped by our envi-ronment — the food we eat, the people we interact with, the houses we live in.

The WLS is the first study to link data on the human micro-biota to comprehensive, lon-gitudinal data on the broad array of environmental char-acteristics that shape the gut microbiota.

This gives researchers the opportunity to better under-stand how the microbiome influences human health — and ultimately, how we can use it to improve human health. It offers one more example of the path-breaking research that occurs every day at UW-Madison.

LA FOLLETTE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS/DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Decades later, benchmark study yields data on human condition

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Pamela Herd is a professor of public affairs and sociology and a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Research on

Poverty. She is also the principal investigator of the Wisconsin Lon-gitudinal Study, a groundbreaking long-term study of the life courses of a cohort of Wisconsin men and women. Her work focuses on aging, policy, health and inequality.

DISCOVER MORE http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/


Courtesy of Pamela Herd

The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is the longest running cohort longitudinal study in the United States. It started with a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The study has since expanded to include data from siblings, spouses, widowers, and other members connected to the graduates. The data provides valuable insight into the life course, intergenerational relationships, family functioning, physical and mental health and well-being, in addition to information about social background, youthful aspirations, schooling, military service and retirement.


SARA GUYERSpecial to the State Journal

What would you ask a Nobel Laureate?

Te achers are familiar giving fictional assignments like these in which students imagine a conversation with an author. Over the past 10 years, the Great World Texts project at the Center for the Humanities has turned this hypo-thetical question into a real one.

Just last year, 15 students – from Kohler, Osseo-Fairchild, and Southern Door high schools (among others) – interviewed Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novel-ist and 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in front of an audience made up of their class-mates, teachers and scholars from UW-Madison.

Pamuk was visiting Madison for the Great World Texts high school student conference, the culmi-nating event in a Center for the Humanities program that con-nects UW’s extraordinary scholars in languages and literatures, his-tory and politics with teachers and students from across Wisconsin.

These teachers and students are partners in a bold challenge: read a major work of world literature that most would find too difficult to include in a high school setting, such as “Don Quixote” or “The Brothers Karamazov.”

We provide the resources of the College of Letters & Science: A graduate fellow and faculty adviser work closely with librarians and scholars to develop a thorough, sophisticated curriculum. The UW Libraries provide each school with copies of the books, ensuring that the curriculum developed in 2015 can be taught again and again.

And we have the support of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which has recognized Great World Texts in Wisconsin as a program that cultivates cre-ative, critical thinking in a flexible curriculum that meets the letter and spirit of Common Core State Standards.

Each year, Great World Texts culminates in an exceptional day

of student presentations and proj-ects – videos, posters, and per-formances – filling Varsity Hall at Union South with vibrant creativ-ity and energetic exchanges. Hun-dreds of students show the fruit of their study and hard work.

And this is where the high school students participate in the inter-view that in most classrooms would

remain in the realm of fiction. For the keynote event, we invite

the book’s author, if the work is contemporary — Pamuk in 2014 and Booker Prize winning author of “The God of Small Things” Arundhati Roy in 2013 – or in the case of earlier works, a transla-tor, whether in a literal sense, like U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky who spoke about his verse trans-lation of Dante’s Inferno one year, or a more imaginative one, like this year, when we invited MacArthur Award winning political theorist Danielle Allen.

But this is not a traditional lec-

ture. Rather, a student from each participating high school asks a question of the author.

At the end of the interview last year, Pamuk told the students they understood things about his novel “Snow” that professional critics often didn’t get.

The experience of mutual sur-prise that a room full of high school students and a field-shap-ing author held in common that day reflects the power of reading literature together and the pos-sibility of the kind of humanities education that is at the core of the College of Letters & Science.

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Great World Texts program links students, scholars


Participants in the Great World Texts program gather at UW-Madison for a student conference to show their projects, view the work of other students across the state, and hear remarks from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, whose novel “Snow” was the focal point of the 2013-14 program.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Sara Guyer is a professor of Eng-lish, comparative literature, and Jewish studies and the director of the Center for the Humani-

ties. She is a scholar of poetry and rhetoric, and her research focuses on exploring ways in which romanticism and poetry help us think about the major social and philosophical issues of our time.

DISCOVER MORE http://humanities.wisc.edu

http://www.english.wisc.edu/faculty-guyer.htm


ANANTH SESHADRISpecial to the State Journal

I h ave been fascinated by factors that lead to economic growth across time and countries.

These include patterns of school-ing, fertility, the diffusions of tech-nology, and socioeconomic policy. My work uses theory to identify hypotheses that can be examined with data.

Economic growth is typi-cally attributed to physical capi-tal, technology or human capital (knowledge that individuals have). Contrary to conventional wisdom,

I find that human capital plays a dominant role in understanding growth.

Demographic factors, such as birth rates, also have an impor-tant influence on the well-being of societies. One hypothesis from my work is that higher tax rates reduce birth rates.

Interestin gly, the United States

and Europe had similar tax rates on labor income around 1970. Sub-sequently, European tax rates rose considerably relative to American tax rates. This rise explains a sig-nificant part of the decline in birth rates in Europe.

Along the same lines, the intro-duction of labor-saving devices such as washing machines saved time in households, which allowed American families to have more children. Technology and fertility interact in and across societies in fascinating ways.

It is sometimes puzzling why some technologies take off, while

others are adopted only slowly.Using new data, I find that the

delayed adoption of the tractor in American agriculture was a per-fectly rational response by farm-ers. Early tractors were low quality and wage rates of famers and farm help were low. With WWII, wages rose and this induced farmers to switch from horses to tractors.

The key lesson from my work is that technological change, demographic change and human capital interact in ways that can have important consequences for the well-being of societies and individuals.

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Human capital key to economic growthABOUT THE SCHOLAR

Ananth Seshadri is a professor of economics. He is a macro-economist who has conducted research on the

interaction between technological progress and demographic change, human capital and cross-country income differences, and the adequacy of retirement savings.

DISCOVER MORE http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~aseshadr/

http://go.wisc.edu/u7yd5p

DAVID M. BETHEASpecial to the State Journal

Russia is blessed, and cursed, with the most fascinating culture on the globe.

That culture is a direct reflection of the equal parts epic conquest, bloody trag-edy and cynical farce that is the thousand-year history of the Russian State.

Winston Churchill’s famous phrase about Russia being a riddle wrapped in a mys-tery inside an enigma still holds true today. Why this is so is what inspires me and my students.

I have spent my adult professional life studying Russian writers and their ideas. My special passion has been Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. It is a journey that has carried me to archives and research libraries around the world and has eventuated in my books and articles.

But for me, Pushkin is more than that; he is a solar-powered energy source, someone whose greatest poems and stories contain little cognitive “explosions” that teach the reader how to think in new and different ways. In fact, Russians refer to Pushkin as “our everything” and the “sun” of Russian poetry.

Over the past decade, my mission has been to channel my Pushkin passion into ways that connect with underserved high school students who can learn by the poet’s

example. Through our work in the annual Pushkin Summer Institute at UW-Madison, I see first-hand how these young students are energized by studying a “difficult” for-eign language and how they come to under-stand how Pushkin used his own creativity to turn personal failure into lasting monu-ments of unparalleled achievement.

That the role model – Russia’s most “Rus-sian” gift to the world – happens to be Afri-can on his mother’s side gives the process a real-world connection that is magical.

DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

Life’s mission stems from passion for Pushkin


Student Amairani Galeana, far left, realizes she’s flubbed her lines during a Russian language question-and-answer exercise. Amairani participated in the first Pushkin Summer Institute in 2012. The Pushkin program is designed to give high school students from traditionally underrepresented demographic groups access to a high-level language and cultural education.

DISCOVER MOREhttp://pushkin.wisc.edu/

http://go.wisc.edu/6w8m15

ABOUT THE SCHOLARDavid Bethea is the Vilas Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature. He is an internationally rec-ognized scholar on famed Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin and his era, and he leads the Pushkin Summer

Institute, a six-week residential, pre-college enrichment program on the UW-Madison cam-pus for rising high school juniors and seniors from underserved populations.


HELEN E. BLACKWELLSpecial to the State Journal

B acteria are some of the simplest, tiniest organ-isms on Earth. They have

short life spans and are, well, small – so their individual impacts on our world are seem-ingly minimal.

Or so I thought. I was amazed to learn about

the ability of bacteria to work together as a collective group, to undertake actions that would be impossible as a sin-gular cell. And, to unite as this community, they had to somehow determine that they had assembled sufficient cells in a given environment to, for example, attack an animal host and cause a life-threat-ening infection. Or to invade a plant and initiate a mutu-ally beneficial – i.e. symbiotic – relationship.

I learned that many bacteria use simple chemical signals to count themselves. As a chem-ist, I was fascinated. Could I make these signals in my lab? Could I alter these signals – making synthetic molecular “icebreakers” – so as to cause the bacteria to start different conversations?

As many human pathogens use this cell-cell language, called quorum sensing, to initi-ate infection, I figured that my compounds could have value as alternate antimicrobial drugs. Or, they could constitute a pro-biotic approach – forcing bac-teria to do good things for their hosts.

My research group at UW-Madison has been able to tinker with these signals and generate potent conversation blockers in bacteria.

We are using them to explore the basic mechanisms of bacte-rial communication and deci-pher their role in the microbial world, and thereby, our human world.

These tiny organisms have much to tell us. I’m listening.

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY

Bacteria talk to each other, and we’re listening


Professor of chemistry Helen Blackwell, right, discusses results with Kim Tyler, a graduate student researcher, last month in her lab.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Helen Blackwell is a professor of chemistry. Her research exam-ines how bacteria communicate with each other through chemical

signals, and how those signals can be blocked. Her work on compounds capable of disrupting serious bacte-rial infections won her a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Inno-vation Award in 2013.

DISCOVER MORE http://blackwell.chem.wisc.edu


Bacteria that cannot quorum sense (in red) can still grow and expand under some conditions. Studying the interactions between bacteria that can and cannot quorum sense is important for researchers who seek to interrupt bacterial communication as a method of treating infections.

Kim Tyler, graduate student, Department of Chemistry


HARRY BRIGHOUSESpecial to the State Journal

A n ew catchphrase in educa-tion is “data-driven deci-sion making.” We suddenly

have more data than we know how to use, and we believe, rightly, that decisions will be better if based on better information.

We recently founded the new Center for Ethics and Education at UW-Madison because we believe that decisions, while they must be informed by data, must be driven by values. The evidence produced by social scientists is essential for responsible decision-making, but so is careful and rigorous thinking about the ethical issues at stake. Our mission is to help people think more rigorously about what those issues are, and how values and evidence should interact in decision-making.

Here’s an example.Boston Public Schools (BPS)

recently introduced a new school choice system. All families have to choose schools. The new sys-tem guarantees that some good schools will be in the basket from which each family chooses. But it is designed so that middle-class fami-lies have more good schools in their baskets than do poor families; their children are, consequently, more than twice as likely to get into one of the good schools. The district has adopted a flagrantly unequal sys-tem, pandering, deliberately, to the more affluent parents.

Boston is unusual only in the transparent way it violates equal opportunity. I can think of several districts where one elementary school has a 60 percent poverty rate while a neighboring school has a 15 percent poverty rate and, under pressure from more affluent par-ents, districts have deliberately not redrawn the boundaries.

Most Americans are commit-ted to an ideal of equal opportunity, and if that were all that mattered, they’d be right to condemn the new system.

So how could public officials justify pandering, deliberately and knowingly, to affluent families?

Officials know that middle-class

families are nervous about their children attending schools with large concentrations of poor chil-dren, which find it hard to attract the best teachers and administra-tors. BPS officials know that when their children reach school-age, many middle-class families move to suburbs with cleaner, newer, better-kept buildings, fewer children with

problems and with less overworked teachers and administrators.

Most commentators believe that when middle-class families leave school districts, the poor children left behind suffer. The tax base declines and it becomes still harder to attract the best teachers and administrators, so most districts try to keep them from leaving – but most ways of doing that involve some unfairness.

The evidence tells BPS officials that middle-class families are more likely to leave the district only if they have an equal chance of going to a good school; and the BPS believes that equal chances within the dis-

trict are less important than induc-ing the middle-class families to stay; they want to keep the middle-class families because the evidence tells them that their presence ben-efits lower-income children. The value of benefiting the worst-off children might support the new system.

It takes work to identify what val-ues are at stake, and more to figure out which values are more impor-tant in the circumstances.

Our job at the center is to help voters, parents, officials and practi-tioners understand what is really at stake, thus helping them make bet-ter decisions.

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Center focuses on decisions, data and values


Philosophy Professor Harry Brighouse meets with undergraduate student Linnea Braaten during office hours. Brighouse has written extensively on the moral and ethical responsibilities of university professors as teachers and mentors.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Harry Brighouse is a professor of philosophy. He studies ethical issues and values-related problems in the

political and educational realms of public life. Brighouse recently received a $3.5 million grant from the Spencer Foundation to fund a new Center for Ethics and Education, which aims to advance understanding about inequality and access to education in our society.

DISCOVER MORE https://sites.google.com/site/harrybrighouse/



JONATHAN MARTINSpecial to the State Journal

I honestly cannot remember a time when the weather did not hold my interest. Growing up

in eastern Massachusetts, I had a particularly strong interest in snowstorms whose dramatic fury, coupled with the lilting delicacy of falling snow, inspired within me a deep curiosity about the natural world.

Years later, through research con-ducted at UW-Madison, I created new understanding of the occluded stage of cyclones – the stage at which storms have nearly reached the end of their short lives on Earth.

It had long been known that the heaviest snow in these storms occurs to the west of the storm’s path. The heavy snowfall occurs in association with a characteristic temperature structure that extends throughout the depth of the tro-posphere, the portion of the atmo-sphere that extends 6 miles up from the Earth’s surface.

But no one knew why the snow-fall and thermal structure were so intimately related. This meant that forecasting heavy snow accurately was often compromised.

I set out to understand this prob-

lem. The fi rst ideas I had concern-ing this relationship were utterly wrong. Their wrongness, however, alerted me to alternative possi-bilities and eventually the correct answer presented itself.

It turns out that the very same

process that produces the upward vertical motion necessary to create the snow simultaneously creates the characteristic thermal structure in these storms.

I can still remember the feel-ing of exhilaration at coming to

this understanding. It occurred to me that, for millennia, people had been dealing with heavy weather in occluded winter storms and only now was the connection between the weather and the structural evo-lution fi nally understood.

DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC AND OCEANIC SCIENCES

Snowstorm discovery brings ‘exhilaration’


UW-Madison professors and guest meteorology experts Steve Ackerman, left, and Jonathan Martin, also known as “The Weather Guys,” talk about climate and weather science during Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR)’s call-in show “Conversations with Larry Meiller.”

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jonathan E. Martin is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sci-ences. He is co-

author of the State Journal’s “Ask the Weather Guys” column and a regular guest on WHA radio (970 AM). He earned a spot in The Best 300 Professors, a 2012 guidebook compiled by The Princeton Review and RateMyProfessors.com.


http://www.aos.wisc.edu/

WILLIAM JONESSpecial to the State Journal

Hi story is one of the few academic disciplines that reaches a broad audience

outside of academia. As a historian of the 20th cen-

tury United States, I strive to engage that audience, as well as my students, in a debate about the relationships between poverty and racial discrimination and the challenges that both present to our nation’s founding principles of equality and justice.

My latest book was inspired by archival records and newspaper reports I read about the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

In contrast to the view of the demonstration I acquired from

recent media reports and even scholarly histories, which focus on King and emphasize the segre-gation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South, historical documents revealed a movement that spanned the entire country.

That movement insisted that integration and voting rights would be meaningless without measures to ensure that all Ameri-cans had access to decent housing, education and jobs that paid a liv-ing wage.

It struck me that this perspec-tive was particularly relevant at a time when Americans of all races and ethnicities see their standards of living threatened by declining wages and rising prices, and when the civil rights movement is seen primarily as a victory for African-Americans alone.

By publishing the book in 2013, during the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I engaged a broad audience in a discussion of the memory and meaning of the movement.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Lessons from civil rights movement meaningful todayABOUT THE SCHOLAR

William P. Jones is a professor of history. He focuses on African-American lives over the last century and teaches survey

courses on labor and working-class issues in the United States, as well as the civil rights movement. He has written books on African-American industrial workers in the Jim Crow South and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

DISCOVER MORE http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/jones.htm

http://go.wisc.edu/5bp325

GS2077 03/04/2015

At Badger Rock Middle School, students learn about local sustainability in the garden and solar energy in

the classroom. MGE has installed two different solar technologies on the building’s rooftop. The students

study the performance of the different solar technologies and compare energy production. Learn about

MGE’s commitment to education at mge.com/educate.

Planting ideas for tomorrow

26 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

WILLIAM AYLWARDSpecial to the State Journal

A rchaeology is a disci-pline with one eye on the past and the other on

the future. I engage students in hands-on, high-impact research experiences that take us on expe-ditions to the eastern frontier of the ancient Roman Empire, to strongholds of Byzantium, to the citadel of Troy, renowned for legends of heroes told in the epic poems of Homer.

These educational adventures reveal archaeology’s interdisci-plinary strengths, for they have produced student research pub-lications on architecture, geo-physics, X-ray fluorescence, bead making technology and Roman sculpture.

I am now exploring the interface between humanities and science in the emerging field of archae-ogenomics – the study of organic materials from archaeological digs that can help decipher the origins and evolution of ancestral popula-tions of humans, animals, plants and bacteria.

Biomarkers in the archaeological record present untapped opportu-nities for research in biology and chemistry, the environment and medicine. Advances in molecular techniques are also allowing sci-entists to write the first genomic histories of organisms that have shaped humanity from its very beginnings.

For thousands of years, the saga of the Trojan War has inspired the humanities. We can now illumi-nate this legendary age of heroes by studying sequences of DNA written in the genomes of prehis-

toric bones, food and fiber dis-covered at archaeological sites. Modern chemical capabilities are generating a new language for dis-covery of the past that can help us live in the present and plan for the future. Here is the place and now is the time.

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICAL & ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

DNA meets archaeology in new field of study

Courtesy of William Aylward

Dr. David Meiggs, honorary fellow in the Department of Anthropology, standing, and Anthropology graduate student Geoffrey Ludvik study prehistoric human skeletal remains at Troy in 2012.

DISCOVER MOREhttp://experts.news.wisc.edu/experts/710

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http://www.news.wisc.edu/21581

ABOUT THE SCHOLARWilliam Aylward is a professor in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. He is an expert

in classical archaeology, ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and Troy and the Trojan War. For the past several years, Aylward has led teams of graduate and under-graduate students on international fieldwork expeditions to Troy in modern-day Turkey.

‘Biomarkers in the archaeological record present untapped opportunities for research in biology and chemistry, the environment and medicine.’

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Grant Petty, faculty, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Winner: 2012 Cool Science Image contest

Thunderstorm: Typically, the swirl of stormy weather obscures the cells at the heart of severe thunderstorms. This uncommonly clear view of an entire thunderstorm cell, with the top of the growing cumulonimbus tower topping out at 40,000 feet, reveals many interesting features, including “fall streaks” of what may be hail from the underside of the overhanging anvil portion of the cloud. Shortly after this photo was taken on May 22, 2011, near Madison, the storm pelted the Sun Prairie area with large, damaging hail.


Undergraduate students in Professor of Zoology Tony Stretton’s neurobiology lab measure how fast a signal decays along a cell membrane using crayfish tails under a microscope. “This lab is a critical step from learning about science, to actually doing science,” says Stretton. “Science is based on experiments. To do experiments you have to learn the relevant techniques, if they exist, or devise new ones, if they do not. (Students) will develop competence and confidence.”

Ricardo Kriebel, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Botany, Winner: 2014 Cool Science Image contest

The image depicts a flower of Miconia friedmaniorum, a shrubby member of the family Melastomataceae that only exists in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. The image was taken with a scanning electron microscope. Because of its small size, some characteristics of the flower are not easily observed. In this case, a small “break” in the filaments of the stamens just below the anthers can be seen. Additionally, the fact that the style is exerted beyond the stamens indicates the flower is herkogamous, which means that it avoids self-pollination and promotes outcrossing by having the anthers and stigma separated in space within the flower.

Courtesy of Ellen Damschen

Glow-in-the-dark seeds were created to determine if corridors affect where seeds go. The seeds were made to have similar physical characteristics to native plants at the study site, but have the advantage of being able to be found with a black light at night. The nickel shown for reference.

Peggy Boone, graduate student, Department of Zoology, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest

Toxic Beauty: The larval form of the moth Automeris banus rests on a branch in Palenque National Park, Mexico, after releasing a large dose of toxins into the hand of an unsuspecting biologist. The field researcher subsequently snapped this image of the culprit with her rapidly swelling hand. This species of moth can be observed in tropical rain forests across southeastern Mexico, Central America, and South America.

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL


UW-Madison students and members of the local community work at an archeological dig site at a residence in Trempealeau, Wis., in June 2014.

Undergraduate student and staff tour guide Michael Schiltz talks with first-grade students about bone fossils and replicas of several dinosaur skeletons on display at the UW-Madison Geology Museum in December 2013. The children were on a field trip from Midvale Elementary School.


COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNALWISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

With moonlight shining in an open slit of the

Washburn Observatory dome at the UW-Madison

on April 18, 2012, the general public takes advantage of a once-monthly opportunity

for night-time public viewing of the stars using the observatory’s vintage

telescope.


Zinc-based Fall Flowers: These are nanoflowers made of a layered compound containing zinc and aluminum and derive from zinc oxide, an important semiconductor. Zinc oxide usually grows in a rod shape but on alumina, the same oxide that you can see on aluminum foil, the zinc solution reacts and forms flakes and flower shapes of a zinc-aluminum hydroxide compound. This image was taken by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which means that electrons bounce back to a detector after hitting the sample surface the same way light bounces back to our eyes after hitting objects around us so we can see them. These images are black and white so it was false-colored to highlight the flowers.

Audrey Forticaux, graduate student, Department of Chemistry, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest

Dr. Mo Fayyaz, faculty, Department of Botany, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest

Hoodia gordonii: The center of a Hoodia flower is shown here. The flower is native to South Africa and Namibia. It is a succulent plant from family Apocynaceae and used in several botany courses for teaching aspects of plant geography and convergent evolution.

Pupa Gilbert, faculty, Department of Physics, Winner: 2012 Cool Science Image contest and the Science-NSF Visualizations Challenge. Image also published in Science in 2013.

Biomineral: The forming end of the tooth of the purple-spined sea urchin Arbacia punctulata, imaged with a scanning electron microscope and false-colored. One would never guess from their intricate and rounded shape, but these are single-crystals of calcite (CaCO3). They fill space, resist fracture and make the tooth hard enough to grind rock.

Audrey Forticaux, graduate student, Department of Chemistry, Winner: 2014 Cool Science Image contest

Falling Icebergs in the NanoOcean: Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), a common lubricant due its layered structure, has been recently used as a transistor and low cost hydrogen evolution catalyst which compares to platinum. After synthesis, the molybdenum precursor used to grow MoS2 also has a layered structure as depicted in this electron micrograph. This picture was made using electrons instead of photons because this material is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Interestingly, one nanoplate emerges at the center of this image which looks like a satellite view of Antarctic icebergs. Initially black and white, the image is false-colored to enhance the iceberg aspect of the features.

Felipe Pedreros / IceCube/NSF

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica is under starry skies. The laboratory hosts the computers collecting raw data. Due to satellite bandwidth allocations, the first level of reconstruction and event filtering happens in near real time. Only events selected as interesting for physics studies are sent to UW–Madison, where they can be used by any member of the IceCube Collaboration.

the college of letters & science: fueling discovery (wisconsin state journal special section)

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