Graduate education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison granted more doctorates than any other U.S. institution in 2017, rising from 2nd place the year before. The 844 awarded doctorates place the UW at the top of PhD-granting institutions, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates. Overall, U.S. institutions granted 54,664 doctorates, a decrease of about half a percent from 2016.
Researchers use all sorts of methods to collect their data. For one project on campus, that method takes the form of a cute, animal-shaped backpack. Graduate student Amy Schultz specializes in environmental epidemiology, which studies how environmental factors affect human health at the population level. She is a leading research assistant on a project called CREATE: Cumulative Risks, Early Development, and Emerging Academic Trajectories.
Fifteen graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been selected as recipients of the 2018 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards. UW–Madison employs over 2,000 teaching assistants (TAs) across a wide range of disciplines where they are an integral part of the Wisconsin Experience. Their contributions to the classroom, lab, and field are essential to the university’s educational mission.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is raising the minimum stipend for teaching assistants on campus by almost 9 percent for the upcoming 2019-2020 academic year. The increase of 8.99 percent brings minimum teaching assistant stipends up to $20,000 for a nine-month, 50 percent appointment, and places UW–Madison at or above the median stipend rate at its public peer institutions. Many departments pay stipends above the minimum rate in order to be competitive in recruiting top graduate students.
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 including a number of UW-Madison graduate students 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. Yao Liu, MD, 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.
Friendship is the first word that comes to Wayne Minogiizhig Valliere’s mind when asked about a partnership between UW–Madison and the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. “It’s a really good collaboration between the university and our students,” said Valliere, an Ojibwe language and culture instructor, and former artist-in-residence at UW–Madison. The partnership he’s talking about includes a series of projects with the Lac du Flambeau public schools: bringing back the traditional Ojibwe Winter Games, building birchbark canoes, and inspiring similar projects across the state.
The AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows program has trained hundreds of scientists in the craft of clear science communication, and alumni have gone on to become leading researchers, science journalists and policymakers. For the program’s 45th year in the summer of 2019, the University of Wisconsin–Madison will support a graduate student from the university who is accepted to the program.
Attending conferences has a number of benefits for graduate students, from networking opportunities, to experience presenting research, to being inspired by new ideas. These testimonials from current graduate students illustrate what they gained from attending conferences in their fields this semester.
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.