Graduate education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
To Keishla Rivera-Dones, chemical engineering is about more than dealing with chemical reactions; it’s about understanding the building blocks of everything. A PhD student at UW–Madison in the Dumesic and Huber Research Groups, Rivera-Dones works with supported metal catalysts and applies them to promote and improve the efficiency of chemical reactions.
The Graduate School is gearing up for the next academic year, but not without a proper welcome for new and returning students alike. Welcome Week kicks off Monday, August 27 with a keynote speech by School of Human Ecology Dean Soyeon Shim. Dean Shim will share her unique perspective on designing one’s life for success, followed by a reception and refreshments. Check out this year's Welcome Week highlights!
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? “I got interested in that from a number of angles,” said Maizlish, a PhD student at UW–Madison, “but the main thing is I just really love Bob Dylan.”
Graduate students play a key role in research across campus. The Graduate School is telling just some of their stories with a new series of profiles featuring the graduate students working on UW2020 grant-funded projects.
Say you’re given a list of six random words. You hear them once, and after a short delay, you have to repeat as many as you can remember. Your recall ability is based on what’s known as your working memory span. But it’s limited by constraints that vary from person to person and may be based on an individual’s experience with language.
As new technologies have opened doors for dairy farms to harness more data from their herds than ever before, farmers around the state have embraced these innovations. That leaves farmers with vast amounts of data – on cows, herds, farms, the market, crops, and soils – but, as of yet, no way to integrate the entirety of that data into farm management.
Imagine a future where robots at home are more than just disc-shaped vacuum cleaners – a future where they are autonomous agents that can perform our everyday tasks. Though we may not always realize it, these tasks require a lot of physical responsiveness to the environment that is natural for humans but a core challenge of robotics.
With a background in engineering and environmental science, alumnus Paul Schramm had the perfect mix of skills to work on a water quality measurement project that brought new possibilities into the field of limnology.
Arezoo Movaghar earned her master’s degree in computer science and artificial intelligence. She built models based on the plentiful data found in medical records. So, when she came to UW–Madison as a PhD student and joined a research group, it surprised Movaghar to find out just how much data researchers in other fields collect.
UW–Madison will continue to lead the national conversation on graduate careers this month when it hosts the Graduate Career Consortium’s annual conference. The conference, held June 26-29, brings together more than 200 deans, directors, program managers, and career advisors from the U.S. and Canada to share best practices for graduate student and postdoctoral scholar professional development.