Category: News

News items and stories about department’s faculty, programs, research, students, staff, etc.

Associate Professor Grace Wilkinson receives 2024-25 Vilas Associates Award

Congratulations to Grace Wilkinson for receiving a 2024-25 Vilas Associates Award!

Hilary Dugan wins 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award

Thirteen faculty members have been chosen to receive this year’s Distinguished Teaching Awards, an honor given out since 1953 to recognize some of the university’s finest educators.

ESA 2024 Graduate Student Policy Award Cohort Named

Garret Knowlton, M.S. student in iBio, received the Ecological Society of America’s Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award (GSPA). Students in the 2024 cohort are engaged in advocacy with an interest in science policy. Along with other awardees, Garrett will travel to Washington, D.C., for policy, communication and career training followed by meetings with …

The Eyes Are a Gateway to Evolution… of Daddy Longlegs at Least.

Congratulations to Dr. Guilherme Gainett, former iBio graduate student, and Professor Prashant Sharma on their paper published last week in the Journal Current Biology. They report that a living species of daddy longlegs has two additional sets of underdeveloped eyes as embryos, implying that the species diversified earlier in the evolutionary tree than scientists believed. …

Community Highlight – Maggie Langwig & Katie Klier

In August 2023, Maggie Langwig and Katie Klier, PhD students in the Freshwater and Marine Science program, had the opportunity of a lifetime: A research cruise exploring hydrothermal vents near the Galápagos Islands. Not only did they obtain some of the first microbiological samples from this vent system, but they were also a part of …

These tomatoes are out of this world…or they will be soon

By sending tomato plants to the International Space Station, UW researchers hope to better understand how plants grow without gravity and whether there are ways to help plants cope with the stressors involved with growing in space flight. Read the full article at: https://news.wisc.edu/these-tomatoes-are-out-of-this-world-or-they-will-be-soon/

When Wildfire Makes the Forest Understory the Star

PhD candidate Nathan Kiel and Dr. Monica Turner explore what happens to Yellowstone’s understory plant communities when forests don’t come back after wildfire.

Community Highlight – Allia Lin

We love celebrating the success of our students! Today, we would like highlight Allia Lin, a senior in the Zoology Major. Allia found out about the summer sophomore apprenticeship program during the summer of 2021 and started studying Zebrafish larvae in Dr. David Ehrlich’s lab. Her work resulted in a publication in Current Biology, a …

Tomorrow’s Yellowstone: How a warming world is changing the places we love

Greater Yellowstone is just one ecosystem in one corner of the world. However, studying how one landscape responds as the climate heats up can help us understand what may happen in places around the world facing similar changes. And since so many people love Yellowstone, it’s a great place to help the public appreciate the …

Re-creation of the glass invertebrate models for teaching at UW–Madison

UW–Madison’s Zoological Museum was established at the very first UW Board of Regents meeting in 1848. After the first Science Hall burned, Edward A. Birge — professor of zoology, later UW–Madison president — started purchasing specimens to replace ones lost in the fire, including a collection of glass invertebrate models created by German glassblowers Leopold …