As graduate students at UW–Madison, Katarina Braun and Gage Moreno were already working in research labs to better understand viruses. So when SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began spreading rapidly around the world, Braun and Moreno were ready to make a quick pivot to working on the coronavirus. Their work with sequencing the 2019 novel coronavirus has helped scientists better understand how the virus has traveled in Wisconsin.

Graduate students don’t always start their studies with the goal of becoming an inventor. But the numbers show a different outcome: over half of UW–Madison invention disclosures to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation include at least one graduate student who has conducted research on the project. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is the nation’s oldest dedicated patenting and licensing organization for any university, having organized in 1925.

There are two major collections of Korean American artist Nam June Paik’s work. Kyungso Min has already studied the collection at South Korea’s Nam June Paik Art Center. So, the natural next step for Min, a doctoral student in art history at UW–Madison, was to study the Nam June Paik Archive housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This summer, Min will have the chance to do just that as a Smithsonian Institution Fellow.

From February through June, we will be highlighting the ways that UW–Madison changes lives for the better throughout the state of Wisconsin. May’s theme is Jobs and the Economy. Watch for more at #UWChangesLives on social media. And here’s how you can help. Master’s degree programs at UW–Madison are addressing training needs and certification requirements in high-growth job fields across the U.S. and at home in Wisconsin.

Deep in the ice beneath the South Pole, an array of sensors in the IceCube detector picked up on something in September 2017 that hinted at a solution to a centuries-old mystery. In the following months, a team of international scientists scrutinized everything they knew about the cosmic event. They arrived at the conclusion that the subatomic, ghostly particle called a neutrino that entered the detector had come from a specific type of galaxy, far away from Earth.

The technology for an eye specialist to review a picture of a patient’s eye taken miles away to screen for eye disease has been around for decades. Yet, less than half of Wisconsin adults with diabetes, who are particularly vulnerable to vision-threatening diseases, get annual eye screenings. Dr. Yao Liu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, has been working to increase access to this technology.

When Kaivalya Molugu was considering graduate schools, she knew she was interested in stem cell research, but she had to decide where to apply. The answer soon became clear: the place where it all began. One of the main reasons she chose UW–Madison “is the strong stem cell research center here,” says Molugu, a biophysics research assistant at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and a trainee with the UW’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center (SCRMC).

Rivka Maizlish studies folk music, folklore, folk art, folk medicine – but she is not a folklorist. Maizlish is an intellectual historian, about to embark on a fellowship with the Smithsonian Institution to dive more deeply into the question, how did people in 20th century America define folk? A PhD student in the UW–Madison history department, she studies the folklorists who found meaning in folk traditions and folk culture, and a debate that reoccurs throughout history based on what “folk” means.

A new training program at UW–Madison is bringing graduate students from three departments together in a cohort to become leaders, teachers, and researchers on race, ethnicity, and inequality in education. The program, which launches in fall supported by a Collaborative Training Grant from the UW–Madison Graduate School, focuses on intensive mentoring and cohort-based training. The Graduate School grant supports four PhD students in the cohort for three years.