College of Letters & Science
Kristina Young joined the UW–Madison faculty in January 2026 as an assistant professor of climate change ecology. As an ecologist, she studies how human land use reshapes ecosystems, with an eye toward sustainable land management and methods to halt and reverse land degradation. Before joining the College of Letters & Science, she worked for the …
A paper by Nathan Kiel (PhD iBio ’24), undergraduate student Eileen Mavencamp (’23), and Professor Monica Turner has been awarded the W.S. Cooper Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Geobotany and/or Physiographic Ecology. Their paper, “Sparse subalpine forest recovery pathways, plant communities, and carbon stocks 34 years after stand-replacing fire“, emphasizes that post-fire …
PhD candidate Tymofii Sokolskyi and professor David Baum published a new paper that investigates pre-biotic chemical reactions in vesicles to better understand the origins of life. Read more.
Department of Biology graduate students Hannah Ashe, Jillian Neece and Shaneya Miriyagalla have received Arboretum Research Fellowships. These graduate fellowships support early career scientists doing work that aligns with the Arboretum’s mission and advances a long tradition of research in restoration ecology and conservation. Read more.
Answers to frequently asked questions about the new Department of Biology. Read more.
Botany graduate student Aishwarya Veerabahu, discusses her research and outreach efforts around the golden oyster mushroom that’s pushing out native fungal biodiversity in this article for the Spring 2026 College of Letters and Science Magazine.
In Green Lights, an article for the Spring 2026 College of Letters and Science Magazine, a Botany PhD grad is featured for her environmental restoration work in Wisconsin.
The new Center for Botany is a research hub for botanical sciences at UW–Madison housed in the Department of Biology. Members of the center will discover, archive and communicate knowledge of basic plant, fungal and algal biology across scales, from genes to ecosystems using both established and new approaches. We asked Center for Botany Faculty …
A message from Mary Halloran, Chair of the Department of Biology. Hello all, Today, July 1, 2026, marks the first day of the Department of Biology in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Bringing together botany and integrative biology (formerly zoology), two departments that have been around since the earliest …
Three University of Wisconsin–Madison juniors have received 2026 Goldwater Scholarships, the premier undergraduate scholarship in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences in the United States. The students are juniors Aletta Bergman, Krithi Gopinath and Eva Stafne. Both Bergman and Gopinath are students in the Department of Biology. Read the full article.