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.”
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.
Vacant properties are often seen as remnants of the housing crisis or vestiges of industries that are no longer as present as they once were in U.S. cities. But graduate student Elsa Noterman sees more in these vacant properties, including current uses and important histories.
A PhD student in the UW-Madison Geography Department, Noterman was recently awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) for 2018-19 for her dissertation exploring the conflict that arises over use and ownership of spaces in the urban commons.
When PhD candidate Michelle Pizzo joined the Pharmaceutical Sciences program, she didn’t know what, exactly, she would be researching. Since then, she has made advancements in the field of pharmaceutical science and discovered a new direction she is excited to pursue.
Joining the Thorne lab in 2012, Pizzo came on board at a time when a new project was developing. Researchers already believed that the perivascular spaces – the tubular spaces around blood vessels – in the brain could take on waste clearance role, but the Thorne lab wanted to see if those routes could also be used to deliver drugs to the brain, Pizzo said.
The way Reynaldo A. Morales tells it, his research is the story of knowledge, and the peoples who have preserved complex ways of knowing how to communicate with Earth.
A joint PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Morales explores Indigenous knowledge systems, and how their exchange is essential to sustainability around the world.
The idea of riding an autonomous shuttle around campus on the regular seems closer to reality after the Wisconsin Automated Vehicle Proving Grounds shuttle demonstrations last week. But before autonomous vehicles can become mainstream, the people who will commute in them have to be comfortable with the technology.
For graduate student Hannah Silber, that entails closing the gap between an autonomous vehicle’s “brain” and the human one.