The College of Letters & Science: Fueling Discovery (Wisconsin State Journal Special Section) by College of Letters & Science at UW-Madison

FUELING DISCOVERY

Sunday, March 22, 2015 madison.com/discovery

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Exciting, world-changing research happens daily JOHN KARL SCHOLZ Special to the State Journal

ABOUT THE DEAN

iscovery is the theme of this special section. As the heart of our great institution, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the College of Letters & Science (L&S) fuels discovery. We do this in many ways. Our professors and instructors provide life-changing learning experiences for our students who come to college for an intense period of self-discovery. Our research discoveries extend and sometimes redeﬁne the boundaries of knowledge. And all of us embrace a 111-year commitment to the Wisconsin Idea – the belief that our discoveries are shared to improve the lives of our community and the world. The following stories feature extraordinary minds from representatives of the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the biological, mathematical and physical sciences. Collectively, the College of Letters & Science houses 38 academic departments, ﬁve professional schools and more than 70 interdisciplinary research centers. Many of our departments appear in the top 20 of world or U.S. university rankings, no small feat considering there are more than 2,500 four-year

Bryce Richter / University of Wisconsin-Madison

John Karl Scholz, dean of the College of Letters & Science, talks with families during a Parents’ Weekend luncheon event in Tripp Commons at the Memorial Union.

institutions in the country. So the stories here are but a small peek into the remarkably vibrant, diverse world in the College of Letters & Science. We introduce you to the L&S Career Initiative, a new, coordinated approach to prepar-

ing our students for careers and successful, rewarding lives. We also present remarkable teaching, research and innovation. But the most exciting opportunity is to share these stories with you. Our scholars are making dis-

coveries about the physical world, the institutions that govern behavior, and what it is to be human. Many of the projects described here are based on decades of hard work. These stories, and many more, are happening right here in the

John Karl Scholz is the dean of the College of Letters & Science. Before leading L&S, he was the Nellie June Gray Professor of Economic Policy and chair of the Department of Economics. Since becoming dean in 2013, Scholz has made student career preparation one of his top priorities. Last year, he launched the Letters & Science Career Initiative, a new, coordinated approach to helping UW-Madison’s liberal arts students use their diverse skill sets to contribute to today’s rapidly changing economy. Scholz has been at UW-Madison since 1988, with brief breaks to serve as a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President (1990-91) and the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department (1997-98).

College of Letters & Science at UW-Madison. It is an honor to serve as Dean. The following pages dive into the essence of discovery – they inspire me. I hope they inspire you.

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS William Aylward, Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies . 26 David Bethea, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature ................... 21 Helen Blackwell, Department of Chemistry ...........................22 Harry Brighouse, Department of Philosophy .........................23 Ellen Damschen, Department of Zoology ................................ 6 Teryl Dobbs, School of Music ..................................................16 Greg Downey, College of Letters & Science Career Initiative .. 4 Jordan Ellenberg, Department of Mathematics ..................... 17 Sara Guyer, Center for the Humanities .................................. 20 Francis Halzen, Department of Physics ..................................14 Pamela Herd, La Follette School of Public Affairs/Department of Sociology .....18

Rob Glenn Howard, Department of Communication Arts ...... 12 William Jones, Department of History................................... 24 Jonathan Martin, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences .............. 24 Jenny Saffran, Department of Psychology .............................16 Karu Sankaralingam, Department of Computer Sciences....... 8 John Karl Scholz, College of Letters & Science.........................2 Ananth Seshadri, Department of Economics ......................... 21 Jon Sorenson, University of Wisconsin Foundation .................3 Karen Strier, Department of Anthropology ............................10 Eric Wilcots, Department of Astronomy .................................. 9 Susan Webb Yackee, La Follette School of Public Affairs .........................................12

SECTION STAFF: Publisher: John Humenik, Wisconsin State Journal; Section editors: Megan Costello, UW-Madison College of Letters & Science; John Smalley, Wisconsin State Journal. Designer: Michael Donnelly, Lee Enterprises; Copy editing: Julie Shirley, Ann Langel, Wisconsin State Journal. Corporate relations: Kyle Buchmann, University of Wisconsin Foundation. ON THE COVER: The cover image – intended to represent the many facets of the College of Letters & Science – is an original piece of artwork from Chiara Bautista of the Daily Star in Tucson, Ariz. ABOUT THE SECTION: “Fueling Discovery” is a joint effort of the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science and the Wisconsin State Journal. No taxpayer dollars were used to create the section. The effort was financed through sponsorships and gifts from alumni and friends.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN FOUNDATION

Philanthropy invaluable to Letters & Science legacy JON SORENSON Special to the State Journal

he pursuit of excellence is the hallmark of the College of Letters & Science. The college’s excellence stems from a tradition of more than 125 years of path-breaking teaching, research and service. This legacy is no accident. The state of Wisconsin, and indeed citizens from all corners of the state, built an extraordinary treasure. It took decades of investments, remarkable dedication and hard work to make our place among the world’s ﬁnest universities. The university’s funding model is now a four-way partnership. We rely on support provided by state taxpayers, tuition paid by students and their families, and more than a billion dollars of external research support secured by remarkable faculty and staff through highly competitive grants. And we rely on the philanthropy of generous friends and alumni. Private support is now a critical part of how the College of Letters & Science changes lives and ensures a longstanding legacy of excellence. As you read these stories, please consider a gift, no matter its size, to the college. In return, Dean Scholz will invest these philanthropic dollars efficiently in the college’s most valuable resources – outstanding students and dedicated teachers and researchers. With your support, the college will continue to positively change the lives of the students we have the privilege of serving. Education is critical to creating paths of opportunity. Together, we can continue to provide an exemplary experience so graduates take advantage of all possible directions in life and work. The College of Letters & Science will also continue to recruit and retain eminent faculty who not only change lives, but power the intellectual discovery and creativity that puts UW-Madison at

Bryce Richter / University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW-Madison students make their way along a sidewalk on Bascom Hill on the campus. Private support is now a critical part of positively changing the lives of students.

‘Private support is now a critical part of how we change lives and ensure the university’s, and our college’s, longstanding legacy of excellence.’ the forefront of world universities. L&S faculty engage in studies that advance the boundaries of knowledge, spark economic development and help create the jobs of tomorrow. With your support, the next generation of Letters & Science leaders will continue a rigorous pursuit and passion for teaching, learning, and discovery – the hallmark of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

DISCOVER MORE Make a Gift Consider making a gift to the College of Letters & Science by visiting go.wisc.edu/supportLS or contacting Jon Sorenson at jon.sorenson@supportuw.org or (608) 262-7211. Budget in Brief Learn more about UW-Madison’s budget in the easy-to-understand Budget in Brief at go.wisc.edu/budgetinbrief

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Jon Sorenson is the Managing Senior Director of Development at the University of Wisconsin Foundation, leading a team of 10 development professionals working on behalf of the College of Letters & Science. He is a 1985 graduate of the college and returned to Madison more than nine years ago to raise funds on behalf of his alma mater. Jon led the $43 million dollar campaign to build the new Chazen Museum of Art and recently completed a $22.5 million dollar campaign for the forthcoming Hamel Music Center.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE CAREER INITIATIVE

Today’s students need more than a ‘job hunt’ GREG DOWNEY Special to the State Journal

ooking back on the story of your own career, what do you wish you would have known during your college years about yourself, your education, or the world of work that awaited you upon graduation? I’m exploring that very question with nearly 250 undergraduates this semester, in the College of Letters & Science’s newest one-credit course, “Taking Initiative.” Better known as “the L&S second-year career course,” we introduce students not only to the customary steps of the job search (preparing a resume, writing a cover letter, and developing an online persona), but also to the history of high-skill labor markets, the tools for discovering one’s strengths and goals, the importance of researching occupations and majors, and the advising and alumni resources available across UW-Madison — all so students can turn a simple “job hunt” into a comprehensive academic and career development plan. I have to admit, my own 30-year career development path since first starting college in 1985 was anything but planned. My bachelor’s degree, taken at a public research university much like the one where I work now, was in computer science. But it took several real-world jobs — and several years — before I realized that writing computer code was only part of what interested me in the world. So, in my late 20s I returned to the university, first to earn a master’s degree in liberal studies, then to pursue a dual doctoral degree in two fields that might seem as far from computer science as possible: history and geography. Yet, my resulting combination of deep training in technology and broad training in the humanities and social sciences has served me extraordinarily well for the past 15 years in my second career as a

Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW-Madison graduate Rachel Hershberger (B.A. 2014, environmental studies and political science) poses with her diploma cover as she sits in the lap of the Abraham Lincoln statue in front of Bascom Hall at UW-Madison last May.

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teacher, researcher and author. Such stories of “planned happenstance” drive my interest in teaching our career course. We’ll be guiding students through a structured process of critical reﬂection intended to demonstrate to them that the various components of their Wisconsin Experience — both inside and

outside of the classroom — provide high-impact educational options that will prepare them for a wide variety of important and rewarding careers (including many that haven’t even been invented yet). One of the secrets of turning academic curiosity and excellence into success in the job market, though, is being able to tell the story of your educational accomplishments to a hiring decisionmaker — convincing a for-proﬁt, nonproﬁt or public organization that you can add value, energy and creativity to their mission.

That’s the secret punch line of my course: That a liberal arts and sciences education, focusing on transferrable skills like problemsolving, critical thinking and persuasive communication, is precisely the kind of “job training” most valued by employers in a technological, globalized and dynamic marketplace of goods, services and ideas. Helping our students develop into creative and engaged “career entrepreneurs,” no matter what their background or major, is a key part of the Wisconsin Idea. I’m proud to be a part of that effort.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Greg Downey is associate dean for social sciences in the College of Letters & Science. He is also the Evjue-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Library and Information Studies. His research and teaching explore the history of information technology, geographies of communication and new media.

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6 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY

Research ﬁts pieces into changing mosaic ELLEN DAMSCHEN Special to the State Journal

magine the ancient southern Wisconsin landscape as a mosaic of prairies, savannas and forests shaped by fertile ground and the rhythms of natural fire. Our presence has added tiles to this mosaic – cities, farms, roads – reshaping natural habitats into smaller pieces, spaced farther apart, and altering the tempo of fire. Today, more than 97 percent of our original prairies and savannas have disappeared along with their inhabitants. As we speak, the monarch butterfly is teetering on the edge of extinction. Wisconsin is not alone in this intermingling of human and natural landscapes. Worldwide, habitat is being lost at alarming rates and species are moving toward the poles as the climate changes. But these changes also raise opportunities. Committed citizens are working to restore landscapes, plant new seeds, return fire to its old haunts, and enjoy the boundless diversity and services of nature. What else can pollinate crops, cleanse water, regulate the climate and provide a daily respite? In my research lab at UW-Madison, we ask what happens when natural habitats are broken apart. We wonder how these remaining pieces will be affected by a changing climate. And we ask what types of solutions will help sustain the species and natural services we enjoy and rely on. Can plants and animals survive in the future? Where will they find refuge? Can we bring back species and natural services we have lost? Can we find a better way to arrange landscapes so both people and organisms thrive? Our lab tackles these questions using the world’s largest experiment of habitat corridors, thin strips of habitat connecting otherwise isolated patches of habitat. We determine how these connections affect where plants and ani-

Courtesy of Ellen Damschen

An aerial view of the world’s largest corridor experiment, located near Aiken, S.C., shows four “patches” of grassland habitat carved from pine plantation forest. The patches connected by a corridor (dumbbell) are compared to patches of the same size and shape but without the corridor connection.

DISCOVER MORE https://damschenlab.zoology.wisc. edu http://experts.news.wisc.edu/ experts/1208

mals go and whether they survive. A careful study design is critical for pinpointing the effects of the corridors by themselves. Just as with other controlled experiments, we compare connected patches to unconnected patches of equal area and amount of “edge” habitat. We also use historic data to understand changes over eras.

In 60 years, Wisconsin winters have become warmer, with less snow, and more unexpected freezes. We use data collected by UW-Madison’s Plant Ecology Lab to determine how plants have changed over 60-plus years. These rare datasets are critical for understanding change through time and we are grateful for the investment of our UW predecessors who recorded and preserved these data. Looking forward, we perform experiments that mimic future winter conditions. Interestingly, the natural ﬁres that maintain prairies in our state may ensure against future

stresses like changing winters. Fires promote plants that tolerate stress, which may buffer our natural communities against change. We partner with individuals, conservation managers, and restoration groups to determine the optimal amount and timing of ﬁre for plant survival now and in the future. Our success depends on the phenomenal students and staff who are a part of our research group. We work together – exploring problems, fostering curiosity, generating opportunities – so that we might return information back to our community and the landscape mosaic around us.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Ellen Damschen is an associate professor of zoology. As an ecologist and conservation biologist, she studies how local and regional ecological processes affect species diversity, as well as how human-induced global changes affect plant communities. Her lab has research projects in the southeastern United States, southwestern Oregon and the Midwest.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCES

Computer course mixes serious science with fun KARU SANKARALINGAM Special to the State Journal

t’s no secret that students today love technology and embrace it in their daily lives, from their ever-present smartphones to popular fitness watches. My passion as a computer scientist is to teach students to be not just users of technology, but creators and innovators who will shape the future. And to really learn computer science, you must build a computer — something even first-year students can do. What’s more, this hands-on approach to teaching has reaped rewards in my own research. My students build and program real systems with computers in them. We can do this thanks to how cheap and powerful computers have become. Instead of playing Angry Birds on their phones, my students build a physical game in which a spring-loaded system launches a plush bird, guided by ultrasonic sensors, at a target, all coordinated and controlled by algorithms they design. Students also build robots that use infrared sensors to navigate mazes. While it may seem like just a game, this task is based on the same principle Amazon uses to have robots fetch items for warehouse employees who pack orders. Through these projects, students have fun and learn better, discovering advanced computerscience principles on their own. These activities have also impacted my research. Looking at these very small computing systems, we observed they are far more efficient than modern data centers in power consumption and size, leading to new designs that significantly reduce energy use. A lively classroom and new discoveries can go hand-in-hand.

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Students Alejandro Puente, left, and Peter Procek, center, worked with Professor Karu Sankaralingam, right, to build and program a tiny computer based on the Arduino board that can navigate a maze using infrared sensors.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR

DISCOVER MORE http://vertical.cs.wisc.edu/ DiscoveringCS http://www.cs.wisc.edu/people/ karu

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Student Peter Procek sets up a tiny computer that can navigate a maze using infrared sensors.

Karu Sankaralingam is an associate professor of computer sciences and electrical and computer engineering. He leads the Department of Computer Sciences’ Vertical Research Group, where he explores microarchitecture, architecture and software issues for massively parallel computation systems. Last year, he was one of 10 recipients of a UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Primates’ behavior, ecology give hints to their survival KAREN STRIER Special to the State Journal

uring this past winter break, I worked 12-hour days in one of the last remaining fragments of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. This 2,400-acre protected forest reserve is situated on a coffee plantation near the Brazilian city of Caratinga. It is also one of the only places where the critically endangered northern muriqui monkey can still be found. When I first came here to study muriquis more than three decades ago, virtually nothing was known about their behavior or ecology, or what it would take to ensure the species’ survival. It took years of observations to decipher their exceptionally peaceful, egalitarian society, which distinguishes the northern muriqui from nearly all other primates. Muriquis are the largest New World primates (except for humans), and they live correspondingly long lives. Some of the original individuals present at the start of my study are now in their late 30s, if not older. There are grandmothers and even some great-grandmothers; I have known them for more than half of my life. Their long lifespans put a premium on survival over reproduction, at least in terms of the population’s resilience to local environmental fluctuations. Yet it is still a great thrill every time an infant is born. The birth of any infant, and especially a female, bodes well for the future of the population, which has grown from 50 to 361 over the past 32 years, and now represents more than one-third of the entire species. Such a rapid population recovery could be regarded as a rare example of a conservation success. However, forest regeneration in areas surrounding the reserve has not kept pace with the muriquis’ expansion, and they now live at one of the high-

Carla B. Possamai

A northern muriqui mother perches in a tree with her new infant and juvenile son. More than three decades ago, virtually nothing was known about the species behavior or ecology. Their long life spans put a premium on survival over reproduction. New insights help us better understand their behavioral flexibility.

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est densities known. By studying the muriquis’ responses to these natural population pressures, we are gaining insights into their behavioral flexibility and ability to adapt. One of the muriquis’ first responses was to expand their use of vertical space by spending increasingly more time

on the ground. Here, they can benefit by supplementing their diets with fallen fruits and other food sources they can’t reach from the trees, as long as the risks from terrestrial predators, such as ocelots and pumas, remain low. We know that human ancestors made a more permanent shift from a tree-dwelling to ground-dwelling way of life. Although muriquis are quite distantly related to us, the same kinds of pressures driving the muriquis’ ground use might have also been involved in our own. An even more extreme

response by the muriquis to the increasingly crowded conditions has been the emigration of females into a neighboring forest fragment outside the protected reserve. Over a four-year period, at least six females risked their lives by crossing open fields to reach another, unpopulated forest. These females are showing us that they need more forest, and are leading us to the areas they have chosen. We now know where to establish the connecting corridors that will provide safe passage for other muriquis into the new forests, so their numbers can continue to grow.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Karen B. Strier is the Vilas Research and Irven DeVore Professor of Anthropology. She studies primate social evolution and conservation biology, with a focus on the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Strier has led field graduate study and research projects in Brazil for more than 32 years, and is internationally recognized for her conservation work.

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12 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION ARTS

Variety of choices abound in the digital age ROB GLENN HOWARD Special to the State Journal

y research seeks to understand the effect the Internet has on the choices we make. When I began studying network communication back in 1994, I thought that it would make our world fairer by giving us all direct access to the information we need to make good choices. After 20 years of doing this research, I ﬁnd that as more and more of us have access to more and more information, it may be harder than ever to make the best choices for ourselves and those we love. Over the years, I have researched everything from online Bible study groups and parenting forums to gun bloggers and wannabe rock stars trading guitar licks on YouTube. Using software to make maps of who is talking to whom about what, my research suggests that Internet use can elevate a sense of everyday lay authority over that of experts such as ministers, teachers, lawyers, or doctors. While we are all better off because we can share experiences

This graphic illustrates roughly 122,000 posts from an online parenting forum that use one of 16 ways to say “vaccine” over the 2011 calendar year. The visualization was compiled using the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) ORA tool, a dynamic meta-network assessment and analysis tool developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Robert Glenn Howard is a professor of communication arts and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies. He is also the director of the Digital Studies Certificate Program, designed to better prepare students for life and work in a fast-changing digital environment. He studies the social impacts of Internet use, as well as online folklore and apocalyptic or “end times” religious belief.

and information online, having access to so much information from so many sources also puts a lot of responsibility on us. We can’t all be experts on everything, and yet we still have to choose whose advice to take or what information to believe. In the end, my research points to the necessity of trusting in the authority of others. In our digital age, the one thing we all need to be an expert on is how to choose what and whom we trust.

DISCOVER MORE http://rghoward. com/ http://experts. news.wisc.edu/ experts/1225

LA FOLLETTE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Interest groups experts in getting voices heard SUSAN WEBB YACKEE Special to the State Journal

ith three children at home, I know firsthand how voices compete to be heard. My kids — like all kids — lobby to stay up late and to eat candy. But, what’s different about me, is that I try to learn from this lobbying: I’m a political scientist, and I study whether and how interest groups get their voices heard by government. In particular, my research focuses on the lobbying of industry,

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public interest groups, and citizens during the writing of federal and state government regulations. Regulations are all around us. They control the quality of air we breathe and water we drink; regulations affect banking,

transportation, health care and schools. Most people know that regulations “matter,” but what few people know is that government agency officials — not elected legislators — develop these regulations, and that letters and comments to agencies, even by citizens, have to be taken into consideration when most rules are written. My research demonstrates that interest groups — not private citizens — are the most frequent participants during the

writing of regulations. However, my work also finds that “rule making” is not just for experts and insiders: I find that participation by citizens also matters, especially when many citizens lobby together to get their voices heard. In short, my research shows that rule making does not have to be one-sided. Indeed, at home and at work, I’ve found that we can have both a fair process and a fair outcome when it comes to the rules that shape our society.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Susan Webb Yackee is a professor of public affairs and political science and the director of UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, administrative law, and interest group politics. She is currently studying regulatory policymaking at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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14 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

Chasing neutrinos: Life at the South Pole FRANCIS HALZEN Special to the State Journal

atter is made of particles: protons and neutrons, electrons and neutrinos. Neutrinos are the most common, but it is likely that your high school teacher never mentioned them. Fred Reines, who discovered the neutrino in 1956, once told me that with the realization that the particle actually existed, literally everybody came up with the idea that one could do astronomy with neutrino beams. Neutrinos, unlike light, go through walls, through the Earth, through everything … and this opens the prospect for using neutrinos to look out to the edge of the universe and peer into the hearts of black holes. In 1960, pioneering articles appeared defining the field of neutrino astronomy. They had some minor flaws, though, in that their estimate of the size of the telescope, 1.5m per side, required to conduct the science was low by a factor of 10,000. These scientists also anticipated success within several years, but here we are more than half a century later. Who could have anticipated in 1960 a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector made of 100,000-yearold Antarctic ice? This is exactly what the IceCube project delivered. Our neutrino detector is made of a cubic kilometer of ice, one mile below the geographic South Pole, where the National Science Foundation operates a scientific station that made the project’s construction possible. The neutrino detector is the ice itself; we instrumented it with light sensors that map the telltale light patterns made by the occasional neutrino that stops in the ice. It is an eye with neutrino vision that has recently recorded the first baby pictures of the extreme neutrino universe. My late IceCube collaborator John Bahcall played a critical role in the discovery of neutrinos emitted by the nuclear reactor in the sun. When he addressed the public, he would tell the audience that there were two things the public did not know, fortunately perhaps, about science. The first secret is that scientific discoveries do not flow from a logical, straight path. Typically, results emerge after following meandering paths, dead ends and plain mistakes. This was certainly the case

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Francis Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics and the principal investigator of IceCube. He was a recipient of a 2014 American Ingenuity Award from Smithsonian magazine, presented by famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. IceCube’s 2013 discovery of cosmic, high-energy neutrinos won a Breakthrough of the Year award from Physics World magazine.

DISCOVER MORE http://go.wisc.edu/cj6r3j https://icecube.wisc.edu/

when we developed the IceCube concept and built the detector. A very diverse group of people contributed to IceCube by making critical contributions at its many critical junctures. I have found it extremely rewarding to work with these talented and passionate people at UW– Madison, the lead institution of IceCube, and elsewhere. The second secret is that we would do science even if we were not paid for it. Science is an addiction, and the thrill is to learn, to solve; it is a daily rush to understand concepts, from small and technical to sweeping and fundamental, that you never imagined within your reach. It is not the thrill of discoveries, which are few and far between. Discovery comes with panic and sleepless nights from the fear of having been fooled, by nature or your apparatus. Students in the College of Letters & Science have been an integral part of this adventure. I have had the good fortune of having a few graduate students walk into my office who taught me physics well before their Ph.D. exam. I also remember sending an undergraduate to the South Pole carrying a good fraction of that year’s equipment as his personal luggage. When he went to the airport, he told me he had never before left the state or even been on an airplane. Maybe that increased the risk, but in the end the equipment arrived safely, and one student received a crash course in the enterprising side of science.

Courtesy of IceCube/NSF

The deployment of each of the 86 IceCube strings lasted about 11 hours. In each one, 60 sensors (called DOMs) had to be quickly installed before the ice completely froze around them.

Felipe Pedreros / IceCube/NSF

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica, hosts the computers collecting raw data. Due to satellite bandwidth allocations, the first level of reconstruction and event filtering happens in near real-time in this lab. Only events selected as interesting for physics studies are sent to UW-Madison, where they are prepared for use by any member of the IceCube Collaboration.

A POWERFUL PARTNERSHIP The College of Letters and Science (L&S) provides the ideas. The Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) turns up the power.

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Launched in L&S two decades ago, the CHTC harnesses massive computing power to answer questions once thought unapproachable. Today, with added support from the Morgridge Institute for Research, CHTC reaches hundreds of UW-Madison researchers and generates 200-plus million hours of computing time annually. Our partners in L&S use CHTC to: • Optimize growth rates of com varieties • Search for neutrinos in the South Pole • Test the accuracy of economic models * Analyze cancer pathways in the human genome We are proud to collaborate with colleagues in L&S — and campus-wide — in putting computing power to work on scientific discovery.

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16 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Infants give strong clues to language learning JENNY SAFFRAN Special to the State Journal

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jenny Saffran is a professor of psychology and leads the Infant Learning Lab at the Waisman Center, an

magine that you’ve been dropped into an unfamiliar country. People are speaking all around you. But you don’t recognize the sounds or objects surrounding you. You don’t even hear words; all the sounds are mushed together. It is very confusing. This is the infant’s world. And yet, to babies, this situation doesn’t appear to be confusing in the least. How do they make sense of it all? As any parent can tell you, most infants begin to understand language long before they can produce words themselves. In the Infant Learning Lab, my students and I aim to discover how infants learn to understand. Each year, more than 1,000 Dane County infants visit our lab at the Waisman Center. They don’t have to say a word! We are able to measure what they know by tracking their eye gaze while they view pictures on a screen, or by timing how long they listen to familiar sounds. Using these simple methods, we have learned a great deal about how infants come to understand their native language (or languages). Infants are remarkably

internationally recognized center for research spanning the biological, behavioral and social sciences. Saffran focuses on infant and toddler learning, language acquisition, and the relationship between music and language learning. She was a 2009 recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

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Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison Jenny Saffran, right, professor of psychology, talks with mother Rebecca Cuningham and her 15-month-old daughter, Arella Wedell- Cuningham, at the Infant Learning Lab in the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The facility, led by Saffran, specializes in studies involving language development and music research.

good at detecting patterns of sounds, allowing them to ﬁgure out where words begin and end. They are also highly skilled at

mapping these sounds onto meanings, which is the basis of learning words, and at discovering patterns of words that form sentences.

Not all infants are equally skilled at language learning. For infants with developmental disabilities, the linguistic world may

http://experts.news.wisc.edu/ experts/63 http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/ infantlearning/Welcome.html https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=upMfun48euc

be particularly confusing. By working with infants of diverse abilities, we hope to better understand both how language learning typically unfolds, and how to help infants for whom learning is especially challenging.

SCHOOL OF MUSIC

Making music in times of stress can ease suffering TERYL DOBBS Special to the State Journal

y research takes me to some very difficult spaces: the Holocaust, disability, traumatic memories. What I seek in these spaces is to understand a shred of a valued cultural practice that we ﬁnd in every culture on this planet: making music. Making music during times of incredible oppression and stress provides individuals — especially children — a place of normalcy,

DISCOVER MORE http://www.music.wisc.edu/ faculty/teryl-dobbs/

safety and community, if only for a short time. My teachers are survivors who as children sang, played, danced and listened to music while imprisoned during the Holocaust. Why does this matter? The survivors entrust their stories to me so that I — eventu-

ally we — might learn from them, what it means to experience tough times by making music. It means that at some point, children need a place where, as one Holocaust survivor said, “music, really, [can make] us forget, [make] us forget hunger, and [make] us forget all the troubles that we [have].” Scholarship in humanities disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, history, and sociocultural studies supports what I am learning, and further, allows me to make relevant and criti-

cal connections for my music education students. The future music educators and graduate students with whom I work will need to know how to create similar music-making spaces for all children, places where I sincerely hope all children’s voices are embraced, heard, honored and cherished. How do we accomplish such a thing? Through my research and guided by some very wise and experienced teachers — survivors of the Shoah — I am learning.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Teryl Dobbs is an associate professor of music education in UW-Madison’s School of Music. She studies musical representations of trauma and pedagogies related to the Holocaust. She teaches music teacher preparation and ability/disability studies, as well as other current issues in music education. Dobbs is an active wind band clinician and guest conductor, often with middle school ensembles.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS

New math needed to explore new networks JORDAN ELLENBERG Special to the State Journal

e live surrounded by networks: social networks, the wireless and cellular networks that make our magical phones possible, infrastructure networks of power lines and traffic, and of course the oldfashioned networks of friendship and inﬂuence. How do we know what’s happening in a network, which we might have only partial knowledge about, and which might have millions or billions of moving parts? Suppose you’re the CIA, and you have access to a huge database of cellphone contacts, and you want to identify a small group of “subjects of interest” who contacted each other more than you might expect. Or suppose you’re Facebook, and you want to make good guesses about which pairs of people are actually friends but haven’t yet revealed that fact to Facebook. To a mathematician, those two problems are actually the same: ﬁnding “communities” of tight connections in a massive network. I’ve been studying these problems at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a new interdisciplinary institute at UW-Madison where researchers in math, electrical engineering, computer science, statistics and economics get together to talk about the new math we’re going to have to create in order to understand the new universe of information we’re now encountering. Yes, there’s such a thing as new math! The way we teach things in school, you’d think mathematics stopped growing around the time of Isaac Newton. In reality, new circumstances require new mathematical tools; and circumstances are changing fast. There’s more math being made in the United States in the 21st century – in public and private universities, in federally funded institutes and in corporate labs like Microsoft Research — than at any time or place in the rest of human

Jeff Miller / Uuniversity of Wisconsin

Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics at UW-Madison, says there is more math being made in our country in the 21st century — in public and private universities, in federally funded institutes and corporates labs than any time or place in the rest of human history.

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history. Recently, we had a visit from Quentin Berthet, a young star from Cal Tech. He’s interested in questions about computational complexity. In a nutshell, that means: can we tell which problems are hard to solve? The ultimate goal is to classify problems into related

families, just as biologists classify organisms into species and kingdoms. Someday, we hope to understand the landscape of computational problems as well as biologists understand goldﬁnches and viruses. The difficulty is that the modern world is deeply uncertain; when we say a problem is “hard,” what we mean is, it’s very probably hard given our limited knowledge about the problem and our lack of precision about what we do know. Berthet explained how the problem of ﬁnding communities

in an uncertainly known network fits into the landscape; when I heard his talk, I got very excited, because what he was doing fit very naturally into a framework from number theory, the field I’m trained in, where the problems are of the form “does a random system of equations have a solution or not?” Quentin and I are almost finished writing a paper joining the two ideas. We’re filling in the gaps in the map, getting a better picture of the whole dark continent of computation. Time to make more math.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jordan Ellenberg is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics and a Discovery Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. He is the author of How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, as well as a novel titled The Grasshopper King and a column called “Do the Math” in Slate.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

LA FOLLETTE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS/DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Decades later, benchmark study yields data on human condition ABOUT THE SCHOLAR

PAMELA HERD Special to the State Journal

Pamela Herd is a professor of public affairs and sociology and a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty. She is also the principal investigator of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a groundbreaking long-term study of the life courses of a cohort of Wisconsin men and women. Her work focuses on aging, policy, health and inequality.

hat makes us prosperous, healthy and happy across our lives? Since 1957, UW-Madison has been tracking the lives of 1 in 3 Wisconsin high school graduates to answer this very question — which makes the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) one of the longest running studies of its kind. This has been possible only because more than 10,000 graduates, and many of their siblings and spouses, have been such willing and wonderful participants. The WLS has also brought to the state more than $35 million in federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the last five years alone. So what have we learned? The study began during the Cold War’s scientific competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Working with state government, UWMadison’s School of Education surveyed all high school graduates statewide in 1957 to learn their post-graduation plans. The conclusions drawn were the basis for the statewide expansion of Wisconsin’s colleges and universities—what is now one of the best public university systems in the country. During the 1960s and 1970s, the late UW-Madison sociology professor William Sewell and Emeritus Professor Robert Hauser extended the project to explore how adolescent experiences are related to success in adult life. We learned that one’s own aspirations and parental support mattered more than IQ in determining who went to college and had

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Courtesy of Pamela Herd

The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is the longest running cohort longitudinal study in the United States. It started with a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The study has since expanded to include data from siblings, spouses, widowers, and other members connected to the graduates. The data provides valuable insight into the life course, intergenerational relationships, family functioning, physical and mental health and well-being, in addition to information about social background, youthful aspirations, schooling, military service and retirement.

later career success. Our study participants are now in their 70s but the lessons we’re learning from them are more important than ever. We’re learning how work, family and friends influence our well-being in later life. While access to quality medical care is critical, our broader social environment is just as, if not more,

important. The WLS has also been creatively incorporating cuttingedge changes in science. We are in the process of adding genetic data that will make the WLS one of the most promising ways of examining how genetics influences our well-being. Another innovative new

project focuses on the human microbiota. Humans are an amalgamation of cells, both human and microbial, with the number of microbial cells largely exceeding our H. sapiens cells. We are more microbial than human. There is already evidence that microbiome-based treatments offer dramatic breakthroughs

for colitis and some bacterial infections, and we are just beginning to understand the broader implications for human health. Everyone’s microbiome is different, shaped by our environment — the food we eat, the people we interact with, the houses we live in. The WLS is the first study to link data on the human microbiota to comprehensive, longitudinal data on the broad array of environmental characteristics that shape the gut microbiota. This gives researchers the opportunity to better understand how the microbiome influences human health — and ultimately, how we can use it to improve human health. It offers one more example of the pathbreaking research that occurs every day at UW-Madison.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Great World Texts program links students, scholars SARA GUYER Special to the State Journal

hat would you ask a Nobel Laureate? Teachers are familiar giving fictional assignments like these in which students imagine a conversation with an author. Over the past 10 years, the Great World Texts project at the Center for the Humanities has turned this hypothetical question into a real one. Just last year, 15 students – from Kohler, Osseo-Fairchild, and Southern Door high schools (among others) – interviewed Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in front of an audience made up of their classmates, teachers and scholars from UW-Madison. Pamuk was visiting Madison for the Great World Texts high school student conference, the culminating event in a Center for the Humanities program that connects UW’s extraordinary scholars in languages and literatures, history and politics with teachers and students from across Wisconsin. These teachers and students are partners in a bold challenge: read a major work of world literature that most would find too difficult to include in a high school setting, such as “Don Quixote” or “The Brothers Karamazov.” We provide the resources of the College of Letters & Science: A graduate fellow and faculty adviser work closely with librarians and scholars to develop a thorough, sophisticated curriculum. The UW Libraries provide each school with copies of the books, ensuring that the curriculum developed in 2015 can be taught again and again. And we have the support of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which has recognized Great World Texts in Wisconsin as a program that cultivates creative, critical thinking in a flexible curriculum that meets the letter and spirit of Common Core State Standards. Each year, Great World Texts culminates in an exceptional day

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Participants in the Great World Texts program gather at UW-Madison for a student conference to show their projects, view the work of other students across the state, and hear remarks from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, whose novel “Snow” was the focal point of the 2013-14 program.

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of student presentations and projects – videos, posters, and performances – ﬁlling Varsity Hall at Union South with vibrant creativity and energetic exchanges. Hundreds of students show the fruit of their study and hard work. And this is where the high school students participate in the interview that in most classrooms would

remain in the realm of ﬁction. For the keynote event, we invite the book’s author, if the work is contemporary — Pamuk in 2014 and Booker Prize winning author of “The God of Small Things” Arundhati Roy in 2013 – or in the case of earlier works, a translator, whether in a literal sense, like U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky who spoke about his verse translation of Dante’s Inferno one year, or a more imaginative one, like this year, when we invited MacArthur Award winning political theorist Danielle Allen. But this is not a traditional lec-

ture. Rather, a student from each participating high school asks a question of the author. At the end of the interview last year, Pamuk told the students they understood things about his novel “Snow” that professional critics often didn’t get. The experience of mutual surprise that a room full of high school students and a ﬁeld-shaping author held in common that day reﬂects the power of reading literature together and the possibility of the kind of humanities education that is at the core of the College of Letters & Science.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Sara Guyer is a professor of English, comparative literature, and Jewish studies and the director of the Center for the Humanities. She is a scholar of poetry and rhetoric, and her research focuses on exploring ways in which romanticism and poetry help us think about the major social and philosophical issues of our time.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

Life’s mission stems from passion for Pushkin DAVID M. BETHEA Special to the State Journal

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR

ussia is blessed, and cursed, with the most fascinating culture on the globe. That culture is a direct reﬂection of the equal parts epic conquest, bloody tragedy and cynical farce that is the thousandyear history of the Russian State. Winston Churchill’s famous phrase about Russia being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma still holds true today. Why this is so is what inspires me and my students. I have spent my adult professional life studying Russian writers and their ideas. My special passion has been Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. It is a journey that has carried me to archives and research libraries around the world and has eventuated in my books and articles. But for me, Pushkin is more than that; he is a solar-powered energy source, someone whose greatest poems and stories contain little cognitive “explosions” that teach the reader how to think in new and different ways. In fact, Russians refer to Pushkin as “our everything” and the “sun” of Russian poetry. Over the past decade, my mission has been to channel my Pushkin passion into ways that connect with underserved high school students who can learn by the poet’s

David Bethea is the Vilas Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature. He is an internationally recognized scholar on famed Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin and his era, and he leads the Pushkin Summer Institute, a six-week residential, pre-college enrichment program on the UW-Madison campus for rising high school juniors and seniors from underserved populations.

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example. Through our work in the annual Pushkin Summer Institute at UW-Madison, I see ﬁrst-hand how these young students are energized by studying a “difficult” foreign language and how they come to understand how Pushkin used his own creativity to turn personal failure into lasting monuments of unparalleled achievement. That the role model – Russia’s most “Russian” gift to the world – happens to be African on his mother’s side gives the process a real-world connection that is magical.

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Student Amairani Galeana, far left, realizes she’s flubbed her lines during a Russian language question-and-answer exercise. Amairani participated in the first Pushkin Summer Institute in 2012. The Pushkin program is designed to give high school students from traditionally underrepresented demographic groups access to a high-level language and cultural education.

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Human capital key to economic growth ANANTH SESHADRI Special to the State Journal

have been fascinated by factors that lead to economic growth across time and countries. These include patterns of schooling, fertility, the diffusions of technology, and socioeconomic policy. My work uses theory to identify hypotheses that can be examined with data. Economic growth is typically attributed to physical capital, technology or human capital (knowledge that individuals have). Contrary to conventional wisdom,

DISCOVER MORE http://www.ssc.wisc. edu/~aseshadr/ http://go.wisc.edu/u7yd5p

I ﬁnd that human capital plays a dominant role in understanding growth. Demographic factors, such as birth rates, also have an important inﬂuence on the well-being of societies. One hypothesis from my work is that higher tax rates reduce birth rates. Interestingly, the United States

and Europe had similar tax rates on labor income around 1970. Subsequently, European tax rates rose considerably relative to American tax rates. This rise explains a signiﬁcant part of the decline in birth rates in Europe. Along the same lines, the introduction of labor-saving devices such as washing machines saved time in households, which allowed American families to have more children. Technology and fertility interact in and across societies in fascinating ways. It is sometimes puzzling why some technologies take off, while

others are adopted only slowly. Using new data, I ﬁnd that the delayed adoption of the tractor in American agriculture was a perfectly rational response by farmers. Early tractors were low quality and wage rates of famers and farm help were low. With WWII, wages rose and this induced farmers to switch from horses to tractors. The key lesson from my work is that technological change, demographic change and human capital interact in ways that can have important consequences for the well-being of societies and individuals.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Ananth Seshadri is a professor of economics. He is a macroeconomist who has conducted research on the interaction between technological progress and demographic change, human capital and cross-country income differences, and the adequacy of retirement savings.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY

Bacteria talk to each other, and we’re listening HELEN E. BLACKWELL Special to the State Journal

acteria are some of the simplest, tiniest organisms on Earth. They have short life spans and are, well, small – so their individual impacts on our world are seemingly minimal. Or so I thought. I was amazed to learn about the ability of bacteria to work together as a collective group, to undertake actions that would be impossible as a singular cell. And, to unite as this community, they had to somehow determine that they had assembled sufficient cells in a given environment to, for example, attack an animal host and cause a life-threatening infection. Or to invade a plant and initiate a mutually beneficial – i.e. symbiotic – relationship. I learned that many bacteria use simple chemical signals to count themselves. As a chemist, I was fascinated. Could I make these signals in my lab? Could I alter these signals – making synthetic molecular “icebreakers” – so as to cause the bacteria to start different conversations? As many human pathogens use this cell-cell language, called quorum sensing, to initiate infection, I figured that my compounds could have value as alternate antimicrobial drugs. Or, they could constitute a probiotic approach – forcing bacteria to do good things for their hosts. My research group at UWMadison has been able to tinker with these signals and generate potent conversation blockers in bacteria. We are using them to explore the basic mechanisms of bacterial communication and decipher their role in the microbial world, and thereby, our human world. These tiny organisms have much to tell us. I’m listening.

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Professor of chemistry Helen Blackwell, right, discusses results with Kim Tyler, a graduate student researcher, last month in her lab.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Helen Blackwell is a professor of chemistry. Her research examines how bacteria communicate with each other through chemical signals, and how those signals can be blocked. Her work on compounds capable of disrupting serious bacterial infections won her a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Innovation Award in 2013.

DISCOVER MORE http://blackwell.chem.wisc.edu http://experts.news.wisc.edu/ experts/1504

Bacteria that cannot quorum sense (in red) can still grow and expand under some conditions. Studying the interactions between bacteria that can and cannot quorum sense is important for researchers who seek to interrupt bacterial communication as a method of treating infections. Kim Tyler, graduate student, Department of Chemistry

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE • 23

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Center focuses on decisions, data and values HARRY BRIGHOUSE Special to the State Journal

new catchphrase in education is “data-driven decision making.” We suddenly have more data than we know how to use, and we believe, rightly, that decisions will be better if based on better information. We recently founded the new Center for Ethics and Education at UW-Madison because we believe that decisions, while they must be informed by data, must be driven by values. The evidence produced by social scientists is essential for responsible decision-making, but so is careful and rigorous thinking about the ethical issues at stake. Our mission is to help people think more rigorously about what those issues are, and how values and evidence should interact in decision-making. Here’s an example. Boston Public Schools (BPS) recently introduced a new school choice system. All families have to choose schools. The new system guarantees that some good schools will be in the basket from which each family chooses. But it is designed so that middle-class families have more good schools in their baskets than do poor families; their children are, consequently, more than twice as likely to get into one of the good schools. The district has adopted a ﬂagrantly unequal system, pandering, deliberately, to the more affluent parents. Boston is unusual only in the transparent way it violates equal opportunity. I can think of several districts where one elementary school has a 60 percent poverty rate while a neighboring school has a 15 percent poverty rate and, under pressure from more affluent parents, districts have deliberately not redrawn the boundaries. Most Americans are committed to an ideal of equal opportunity, and if that were all that mattered, they’d be right to condemn the new system. So how could public officials justify pandering, deliberately and knowingly, to affluent families? Officials know that middle-class

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Philosophy Professor Harry Brighouse meets with undergraduate student Linnea Braaten during office hours. Brighouse has written extensively on the moral and ethical responsibilities of university professors as teachers and mentors.

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families are nervous about their children attending schools with large concentrations of poor children, which ﬁnd it hard to attract the best teachers and administrators. BPS officials know that when their children reach school-age, many middle-class families move to suburbs with cleaner, newer, betterkept buildings, fewer children with

problems and with less overworked teachers and administrators. Most commentators believe that when middle-class families leave school districts, the poor children left behind suffer. The tax base declines and it becomes still harder to attract the best teachers and administrators, so most districts try to keep them from leaving – but most ways of doing that involve some unfairness. The evidence tells BPS officials that middle-class families are more likely to leave the district only if they have an equal chance of going to a good school; and the BPS believes that equal chances within the dis-

trict are less important than inducing the middle-class families to stay; they want to keep the middleclass families because the evidence tells them that their presence benefits lower-income children. The value of benefiting the worst-off children might support the new system. It takes work to identify what values are at stake, and more to figure out which values are more important in the circumstances. Our job at the center is to help voters, parents, officials and practitioners understand what is really at stake, thus helping them make better decisions.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Harry Brighouse is a professor of philosophy. He studies ethical issues and values-related problems in the political and educational realms of public life. Brighouse recently received a $3.5 million grant from the Spencer Foundation to fund a new Center for Ethics and Education, which aims to advance understanding about inequality and access to education in our society.

24 • COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC AND OCEANIC SCIENCES

Snowstorm discovery brings ‘exhilaration’ JONATHAN MARTIN Special to the State Journal

honestly cannot remember a time when the weather did not hold my interest. Growing up in eastern Massachusetts, I had a particularly strong interest in snowstorms whose dramatic fury, coupled with the lilting delicacy of falling snow, inspired within me a deep curiosity about the natural world. Years later, through research conducted at UW-Madison, I created new understanding of the occluded stage of cyclones – the stage at which storms have nearly reached the end of their short lives on Earth. It had long been known that the heaviest snow in these storms occurs to the west of the storm’s path. The heavy snowfall occurs in association with a characteristic temperature structure that extends throughout the depth of the troposphere, the portion of the atmosphere that extends 6 miles up from the Earth’s surface. But no one knew why the snowfall and thermal structure were so intimately related. This meant that forecasting heavy snow accurately was often compromised. I set out to understand this prob-

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR Jonathan E. Martin is a Vilas

Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW-Madison professors and guest meteorology experts Steve Ackerman, left, and Jonathan Martin, also known as “The Weather Guys,” talk about climate and weather science during Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR)’s call-in show “Conversations with Larry Meiller.”

lem. The ﬁrst ideas I had concerning this relationship were utterly wrong. Their wrongness, however, alerted me to alternative possibilities and eventually the correct answer presented itself. It turns out that the very same

process that produces the upward vertical motion necessary to create the snow simultaneously creates the characteristic thermal structure in these storms. I can still remember the feeling of exhilaration at coming to

this understanding. It occurred to me that, for millennia, people had been dealing with heavy weather in occluded winter storms and only now was the connection between the weather and the structural evolution ﬁnally understood.

Distinguished Achievement Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. He is coauthor of the State Journal’s “Ask the Weather Guys” column and a regular guest on WHA radio (970 AM). He earned a spot in The Best 300 Professors, a 2012 guidebook compiled by The Princeton Review and RateMyProfessors.com.

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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Lessons from civil rights movement meaningful today WILLIAM JONES Special to the State Journal

istory is one of the few academic disciplines that reaches a broad audience outside of academia. As a historian of the 20th century United States, I strive to engage that audience, as well as my students, in a debate about the relationships between poverty and racial discrimination and the challenges that both present to our nation’s founding principles of equality and justice.

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My latest book was inspired by archival records and newspaper reports I read about the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. In contrast to the view of the demonstration I acquired from

recent media reports and even scholarly histories, which focus on King and emphasize the segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South, historical documents revealed a movement that spanned the entire country. That movement insisted that integration and voting rights would be meaningless without measures to ensure that all Americans had access to decent housing, education and jobs that paid a living wage.

It struck me that this perspective was particularly relevant at a time when Americans of all races and ethnicities see their standards of living threatened by declining wages and rising prices, and when the civil rights movement is seen primarily as a victory for AfricanAmericans alone. By publishing the book in 2013, during the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, I engaged a broad audience in a discussion of the memory and meaning of the movement.

ABOUT THE SCHOLAR William P. Jones is a professor of history. He focuses on African-American lives over the last century and teaches survey courses on labor and working-class issues in the United States, as well as the civil rights movement. He has written books on African-American industrial workers in the Jim Crow South and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Planting ideas for tomorrow At Badger Rock Middle School, students learn about local sustainability in the garden and solar energy in the classroom. MGE has installed two different solar technologies on the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rooftop. The students study the performance of the different solar technologies and compare energy production. Learn about MGEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s commitment to education at mge.com/educate.

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Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICAL & ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

DNA meets archaeology in new ﬁeld of study WILLIAM AYLWARD Special to the State Journal

rchaeology is a discipline with one eye on the past and the other on the future. I engage students in hands-on, high-impact research experiences that take us on expeditions to the eastern frontier of the ancient Roman Empire, to strongholds of Byzantium, to the citadel of Troy, renowned for legends of heroes told in the epic poems of Homer. These educational adventures reveal archaeology’s interdisciplinary strengths, for they have produced student research publications on architecture, geophysics, X-ray fluorescence, bead making technology and Roman sculpture. I am now exploring the interface between humanities and science in the emerging field of archaeogenomics – the study of organic materials from archaeological digs that can help decipher the origins and evolution of ancestral populations of humans, animals, plants and bacteria. Biomarkers in the archaeological record present untapped opportunities for research in biology and chemistry, the environment and medicine. Advances in molecular techniques are also allowing scientists to write the first genomic histories of organisms that have shaped humanity from its very beginnings. For thousands of years, the saga of the Trojan War has inspired the humanities. We can now illuminate this legendary age of heroes by studying sequences of DNA written in the genomes of prehis-

‘Biomarkers in the archaeological record present untapped opportunities for research in biology and chemistry, the environment and medicine.’ ABOUT THE SCHOLAR William Aylward is a professor in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. He is an expert in classical archaeology, ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and Troy and the Trojan War. For the past several years, Aylward has led teams of graduate and undergraduate students on international fieldwork expeditions to Troy in modern-day Turkey.

DISCOVER MORE http://experts.news.wisc.edu/ experts/710 http://go.wisc.edu/k2eaf5 http://www.news.wisc.edu/21581

toric bones, food and ﬁber discovered at archaeological sites. Modern chemical capabilities are generating a new language for discovery of the past that can help us live in the present and plan for the future. Here is the place and now is the time.

Courtesy of William Aylward

Dr. David Meiggs, honorary fellow in the Department of Anthropology, standing, and Anthropology graduate student Geoffrey Ludvik study prehistoric human skeletal remains at Troy in 2012.

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Holmen, WI

le orking with multipr w in es liz ia ec sp An artist who rs, and dreams of sharing he photographic laye ld. work with the wor American Family Insurance Company, American Family Mutual Insurance Company, 6000 American Parkway, Madison WI 53783 © 2015 010268 – 3/15

Courtesy of Ellen Damschen

Sarah Morton / College of Letters & Science

Glow-in-the-dark seeds were created to determine if corridors affect where seeds go. The seeds were made to have similar physical characteristics to native plants at the study site, but have the advantage of being able to be found with a black light at night. The nickel shown for reference.

Undergraduate students in Professor of Zoology Tony Stretton’s neurobiology lab measure how fast a signal decays along a cell membrane using crayfish tails under a microscope. “This lab is a critical step from learning about science, to actually doing science,” says Stretton. “Science is based on experiments. To do experiments you have to learn the relevant techniques, if they exist, or devise new ones, if they do not. (Students) will develop competence and confidence.”

Ricardo Kriebel, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Botany, Winner: 2014 Cool Science Image contest

The image depicts a flower of Miconia friedmaniorum, a shrubby member of the family Melastomataceae that only exists in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. The image was taken with a scanning electron microscope. Because of its small size, some characteristics of the flower are not easily observed. In this case, a small “break” in the filaments of the stamens just below the anthers can be seen. Additionally, the fact that the style is exerted beyond the stamens indicates the flower is herkogamous, which means that it avoids self-pollination and promotes outcrossing by having the anthers and stigma separated in space within the flower.

Peggy Boone, graduate student, Department of Zoology, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest

Grant Petty, faculty, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Winner: 2012 Cool Science Image contest

Thunderstorm: Typically, the swirl of stormy weather obscures the cells at the heart of severe thunderstorms. This uncommonly clear view of an entire thunderstorm cell, with the top of the growing cumulonimbus tower topping out at 40,000 feet, reveals many interesting features, including “fall streaks” of what may be hail from the underside of the overhanging anvil portion of the cloud. Shortly after this photo was taken on May 22, 2011, near Madison, the storm pelted the Sun Prairie area with large, damaging hail.

Toxic Beauty: The larval form of the moth Automeris banus rests on a branch in Palenque National Park, Mexico, after releasing a large dose of toxins into the hand of an unsuspecting biologist. The field researcher subsequently snapped this image of the culprit with her rapidly swelling hand. This species of moth can be observed in tropical rain forests across southeastern Mexico, Central America, and South America.

COLLEGE OF LETTERS & SCIENCE

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

Bryce Richter / University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW-Madison students and members of the local community work at an archeological dig site at a residence in Trempealeau, Wis., in June 2014.

Undergraduate student and staff tour guide Michael Schiltz talks with first-grade students about bone fossils and replicas of several dinosaur skeletons on display at the UW-Madison Geology Museum in December 2013. The children were on a field trip from Midvale Elementary School. Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

Sunday, March 22, 2015 / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

Audrey Forticaux, graduate student, Department of Chemistry, Winner: 2014 Cool Science Image contest Pupa Gilbert, faculty, Department of Physics, Winner: 2012 Cool Science Image contest and the Science-NSF Visualizations Challenge. Image also published in Science in 2013.

Biomineral: The forming end of the tooth of the purple-spined sea urchin Arbacia punctulata, imaged with a scanning electron microscope and false-colored. One would never guess from their intricate and rounded shape, but these are single-crystals of calcite (CaCO3). They fill space, resist fracture and make the tooth hard enough to grind rock.

Dr. Mo Fayyaz, faculty, Department of Botany, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest

Hoodia gordonii: The center of a Hoodia flower is shown here. The flower is native to South Africa and Namibia. It is a succulent plant from family Apocynaceae and used in several botany courses for teaching aspects of plant geography and convergent evolution.

Falling Icebergs in the NanoOcean: Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), a common lubricant due its layered structure, has been recently used as a transistor and low cost hydrogen evolution catalyst which compares to platinum. After synthesis, the molybdenum precursor used to grow MoS2 also has a layered structure as depicted in this electron micrograph. This picture was made using electrons instead of photons because this material is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Interestingly, one nanoplate emerges at the center of this image which looks like a satellite view of Antarctic icebergs. Initially black and white, the image is false-colored to enhance the iceberg aspect of the features.

Felipe Pedreros / IceCube/NSF

The IceCube Laboratory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica is under starry skies. The laboratory hosts the computers collecting raw data. Due to satellite bandwidth allocations, the first level of reconstruction and event filtering happens in near real time. Only events selected as interesting for physics studies are sent to UWâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Madison, where they can be used by any member of the IceCube Collaboration.

With moonlight shining in an open slit of the Washburn Observatory dome at the UW-Madison on April 18, 2012, the general public takes advantage of a once-monthly opportunity for night-time public viewing of the stars using the observatoryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vintage telescope. Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison

Zinc-based Fall Flowers: These are nanoflowers made of a layered compound containing zinc and aluminum and derive from zinc oxide, an important semiconductor. Zinc oxide usually grows in a rod shape but on alumina, the same oxide that you can see on aluminum foil, the zinc solution reacts and forms flakes and flower shapes of a zinc-aluminum hydroxide compound. This image was taken by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which means that electrons bounce back to a detector after hitting the sample surface the same way light bounces back to our eyes after hitting objects around us so we can see them. These images are black and white so it was false-colored to highlight the flowers. Audrey Forticaux, graduate student, Department of Chemistry, Winner: 2013 Cool Science Image contest