Lena Vincent started her career as a graduate student with big questions: How did life begin? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe?
“Realizing that you can turn these existential questions that everyone asks themselves into a scientific career was really exciting,” said Vincent, a PhD student in David Baum’s lab at UW–Madison.
Geoscience graduate student Yihang Fang will test whether protein control is the mechanism helping leaf-cutter ants form a layer of mineral “armor” as a fellow at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History.
UW–Madison geography PhD candidate Allen Xiao has been awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Xiao’s dissertation explores how residents of Lagos, Nigeria, tell stories of and relate to their life experiences in the largest city in Africa.
Graduate student Katarina Braun and Gage Moreno’s work with sequencing the 2019 novel coronavirus has helped scientists better understand how the virus has traveled in Wisconsin and whether the protective equipment and safety protocols used in local hospitals are effective.
Art history PhD candidate Fernanda Villarroel has received two national fellowships that support her scholarship exploring the concept of the feminine through historical and contemporary art in Africa.
In her dissertation, anthropology PhD student Sarah Bruno uses bomba as a site and a method for exploring the emotions of Afro-Puerto Rican women on the island of Puerto Rico and throughout its diaspora. She has received a 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for this work.
Mathematicians use algorithms to identify cases of gerrymandering, but even computer-generated results can be biased. PhD student Lorenzo Najt’s work aims to identify the signatures of deliberate algorithm manipulation to prevent the extreme excesses of gerrymandering.
While scientists have studied the symptoms and behavior of snakes infected with snake fungal disease, few studies looked at whether the fungal pathogen responsible could spread to other species. That was the central question for Savannah Gentry, a botany PhD student in Anne Pringle’s lab, who wanted to find out whether snake fungal disease could affect other reptiles.
Dairy cows usually experience their lowest calcium levels in the first day or two after giving birth. As cows rapidly produce milk to feed the calf, low calcium levels in their bloodstreams can lead to a disease known as milk fever. Researchers at the UW–Madison Department of Dairy Science are exploring methods for regulating cows’ calcium levels in the days after calving, aimed at improving cow health.
When service members have gone missing around the globe, and when pieces of information about their life or disappearance are scattered, where do you start to bring someone home?
U.S. Army Captain Christopher Zaczyk, a second-year MBA student at the Wisconsin School of Business, starts with making sense of the information they have, and bringing it to a level where people can interact with it.
The UW Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project (UW MIA RIP) partners with the federal government to investigate cases of those who have gone missing during service and advance their recovery efforts.