But torching your regional roots was not the era’s only literary model. Consider the case of Pulitzer-winning writer Zona Gale 1895, MA1899.

As an only child in Portage, Wisconsin, Gale gazed at the wide Wisconsin River that flowed along Canal Street. In 1881, at age seven, she wrote her first story on sheets of wrapping paper and used a ribbon to bind the pages into a book. She read canonical works, including John Milton’s Paradise Lost and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and recorded each plot in a notebook. Clearly this was an author in the making, and her parents supported her literary efforts — unusual for her time and place, not to mention her gender. With her mother’s encouragement, she submitted a novel for publication at age 13 and received the first of what would be many rejection letters.

In 1891, Gale entered the University of Wisconsin and made a mark on the male-dominated campus. She achieved her first success as a writer, publishing in the college literary magazine. In her spare time, she even placed a story in Milwaukee’s Evening Wisconsin. When the newspaper mailed her first professional payment — a three-dollar check — she rode the train all the way from Madison to Portage to show it off to her parents. Following graduation, Gale headed straight for the Evening Wisconsin office, presenting herself to the editor every day for two weeks until he agreed to let her write another story. It was a trifling assignment — a report on a flower show — but Gale gave it everything she had. “I have never put so much emotion into anything else that I have written,” she recalled. Knowing a star when he saw one, the editor made a spot for her on staff.

After earning a master’s degree in literature from the UW, the ambitious writer applied herself to breaking down doors in New York City. She showed up at the New York World day after day with a list of stories she was prepared to write, until the skeptical editors finally relented. She secured a staff job, impressed the Manhattan literati, and — after a few more rejection letters — published short stories in prominent magazines.

In 1904, however, Gale made a career move that would have baffled Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe. She returned to Portage for the rest of her life.

The Home Folks and Neighbors

The small-town setting became the wellspring of Gale’s fiction: the courthouse, post office, churches, bakeries, twilight bonfires, holidays, funerals, young lovers, town gossips, wise elders, and, of course, the life-giving river. Birth, Miss Lulu Bett, and other best-selling books inspired by Portage made her a leading practitioner of literary realism. She drew on her journalistic skills to examine the pleasures and pitfalls of provincial life, particularly the obstacles to women’s fulfillment.

The plight of one such thwarted heroine is the subject of Miss Lulu Bett, which Gale turned into a daringly true-to-life play that won a 1921 Pulitzer Prize in the drama category — the first ever awarded to a woman or a UW alum. Gale sat in the audience with her Portage friends when a touring production of Miss Lulu Bett opened in Madison later that year. Cheered by the crowd, the author went on stage to thank “the home folks and neighbors.”

Gale used the substantial earnings from her books’ sales to build a Greek Revival–style house on Canal Street, with a study facing the beautiful Wisconsin River. She didn’t hole up there, though — not with a host of problems to solve in her city and state. Few writers have matched Gale in civic involvement. She spoke out for women’s rights, racial equality, education, and pacifism, and she put her time and money where her mouth was. Her advocacy for women students earned her a spot on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. She also joined the University of Wisconsin Board of Visitors, the American Union against Militarism, the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, the Woman’s Peace Party, and the National Woman’s Party, helping to draft the Wisconsin equal rights law in 1921. So greatly did she care about her hometown that she even advocated for saving a stately oak tree that was endangered by a new building.

Why would a rich, famous, critically acclaimed writer choose to spend her days in Portage? Gale put it simply: “I have my river.” •

When I was a journalism student at UW–Madison, I can’t say I ever looked at Vilas Hall’s Freedom of Communication for more than a few seconds. But I do know that the building’s exterior would have felt naked without it. And now when I return a decade older (and wiser), I appreciate the mosaic’s artistry and message.

Fortunately, public art is patient.

Wisconsin ranks 49th among states in public funding for the arts. It spends 18 cents per capita, compared to Minnesota’s leading $9.62, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. A major setback was the 2011 repeal of the state’s Percent for Art Program, which for three decades had funded artworks for new or renovated public buildings, including those at the UW.

But the university remains a sanctuary for public art, providing joy to passersby. Its collection grows every year and enlivens nearly every block of campus. Here’s a look at the UW’s most significant pieces and what makes them shine.

A Silent Teacher of Patriotism

Days after the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, Wisconsin governor Alexander Randall ordered the state fairgrounds in Madison to be converted into a training site for Civil War soldiers. Carpenters turned cattle sheds into cozy barracks, and over the next four years, Camp Randall welcomed three-quarters of the 90,000 Wisconsin troops who served the Union. When they left for the front lines, they marched through the same Dayton Street entrance where the monumental Camp Randall Memorial Arch now stands. The state dedicated the arch in June 1912 in front of hundreds of Civil War veterans. “This arch symbolizes the triumph of right over wrong, of freedom over oppression, the triumph of liberty-loving and freedom-enjoying citizens over those who enslave,” Col. Duncan McGregor said during an address. He added that the granite monument “fulfills all the demands of taste, solidity, and durability.” But not everyone agreed on that point.

In 1911, the state legislature had appropriated funds for the arch on the historic grounds owned by the UW. After a commission hired the Woodbury Granite Company of Vermont for the design and construction, the Wisconsin State Journal published a series of scathing editorials and critiques from national artists. The newspaper called the proposed design “inartistic,” “inappropriate,” and “a laughingstock.” Architect John Russell Pope wrote, “I do not remember of ever seeing anything anywhere that has less either sculptural or architectural qualities than this thing.”

In the face of public pressure, the commission announced that it would redesign the arch and work with architect Lew Porter, who was already supervising the construction of the state capitol. It’s not clear how much of the design was altered, as the final product closely resembled the earliest published plans of a roughly 30-foot-high monument.

Perched atop the monument is Old Abe, the bald eagle that served as mascot for the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry. Two statues, representing a young soldier and an old veteran, flank the arch. Interior plaques commemorate the regiments that trained there. And nearby, a marker for the Lincoln Heritage Trail honors the Union’s commander in chief. The marker ties the arch to another iconic work of the era: Adolph Weinman’s bronze Abraham Lincoln atop Bascom Hill. Today, the Camp Randall arch is widely cherished as both a historical symbol and a striking entrance to the stadium grounds. As a Civil War veteran who praised the monument wrote to his fellow soldiers: “Long may it stand, a silent teacher of patriotism.”

The Greatest Lumberjack

When the Memorial Union opened in 1928, its rustic Paul Bunyan Room on the first floor transported visitors to the logging bunkhouses of northern Wisconsin. Flagstone flooring, hewn oak furniture, and warm lighting imitated the quarters where workers passed time by telling tall tales of the greatest lumberjack of them all. And it’s in this room that a young UW artist brought the lore to life with the world’s first Paul Bunyan murals.

In James Watrous’s Paul Bunyan Murals, Babe the blue ox grows so fast that he busts out of his barn. Althea Dotzour

As part of the New Deal in 1933, the federal government established the Public Works of Art Project to employ artists and beautify buildings with American imagery. James Watrous ’31, MS’33, PhD’39, then a graduate student and later an art professor, earned a $25 weekly wage to fill the Paul Bunyan Room’s walls.

“It seemed a bountiful wage to a young, unemployed artist,” he later wrote.

Although funding dried up six months later, Watrous vowed to finish the 11 panels and two maps on his own dime. Each piece took considerable time to complete because of his finicky medium: tempera, an ancient paint mixture of powdered pigment, water, and egg yolk. The bygone technique gives the Paul Bunyan Murals a bright, distinctive luster, with blues and reds boldly emerging from earth-tone scenery. Watrous finished the set in 1936. The whimsical drawings cover a range of Bunyan legends: his dayslong fight with the big Swede Hels Helsen, which carved the Black Hills; his blue ox, Babe, who grew so fast that he busted out of a new barn every night; his blacksmith, Big Ole, who sank a foot deep in solid rock when he held the ox’s iron shoes. If you examine the murals closely, you can spot one with a slightly different styling and sheen. That panel tells the story of chief cook Sourdough Sam, whose “griddle was so big that his flunkies greased it with bacon slabs strapped to their feet.” Watrous re-created it in 1993; the original, which drew from folklore, depicted the workers in a racially insensitive way.

That same year, UW students formed the Multicultural Mural Committee at the Wisconsin Union. Their effort led to Chicano artist Leo Tanguma’s The Nourishment of Our Human Dignity and The Inheritance of Struggle in 1996. Neighboring the Paul Bunyan Room, those murals show representation in art at its best.

Watrous died in 1999, but his presence on campus still looms large. Shocked upon learning in 1939 that the UW was storing artworks in Bascom Hall’s basement, he tirelessly campaigned for a campus art museum to preserve the university’s collections. When the Elvehjem Art Center opened in 1970, Watrous was widely recognized as the driving force.

An Unspoken Bond

Outside the north end of UW–Madison’s Elvehjem Building sits Mother and Child. Stoic, protective mother stares into the distance; innocent, carefree child folds his arms into her chest, their two figures becoming one. Anyone can relate to their unspoken bond and unconditional love.

The life-size work is one of six authorized bronze casts made from William Zorach’s Spanish marble sculpture. The original Mother and Child won a show prize from the Chicago Art Institute in 1931 and found a permanent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Mother and Child: A vision of unconditional love. Jeff Miller

The UW acquired its Mother and Child in 1977 as an anniversary gift from the Class of 1927 to the fledgling Elvehjem Art Center (now the Chazen Museum of Art). The sculpture, originally installed by the south entrance on University Avenue, was envisioned as the first of several to surround the building. While such an ambitious sculpture garden never came to be, Mother and Child now anchors a courtyard of its own. The quiet, contemplative setting suits a work that Zorach described as his “finest piece of sculpture.”

He wrote: “There is nothing more emotionally significant than the relationship between mother and child. … Life exists through them and could not exist without them.”

Creative Problem-Solving

In 1994, UW–Madison transformed an unsightly parking lot in front of Engineering Hall into something of an actual park with green space and tree-lined walking paths. The centerpiece of this reimagined Engineering Mall is a 4,500-pound, 18-foot-tall stainless steel fountain that tends to overshadow it all — by design. Meet the mighty Máquina.

Spanish for “machine” and alternatively called the Descendant’s Fountain, Máquina marries art and engineering. Saint Louis–based sculptor and UW alumnus William Conrad Severson ’47 — who donated the piece in memory of his father, Edwin 1921 — wanted it to represent “engineering tools and the engineer’s role in creative problem-solving.” The fountain’s pair of half-disk pieces appear suspended in air, perpetually on the verge of interlocking. Their C-like shape resembles precision measuring tools. For years, Máquina’s internal jets produced steady streams of water that traveled down the sculpture and along a channel to a reflecting pool on the opposite end of the mall. The fountain was connected to computers that could synchronize the mall’s lights, speakers, water patterns, directional stream, and compressed air functions. The fountain’s winter mode produced hanging icicles; in warmer months, “Westminster Chimes” and UW school songs rang out as jet streams pulsated to the melody.

The College of Engineering and Dean John Bollinger ’57, PhD’61 long championed Máquina as a hands-on laboratory for students. As late as 2009, student groups met in an underground control room to maintain it and design new features. These included motion-sensor columns that could manipulate water patterns with a wave of the hand; an internet livestream that allowed viewers to remotely control the fountain; and a touch screen in the Engineering Hall lobby with similar functions.

But the water stopped flowing over the last decade. With outdated technology and patchwork programming, simply running the fountain became a challenge of its own. The control room no longer meets modern safety regulations, and the water pipes and pump system likely need to be replaced. The college has instead turned its attention to a new engineering building, for which it secured funding this year.

Máquina may have met its functional demise. But as an art piece, it still fulfills the original vision that Severson outlined three decades ago: to be “a provocative image that is imprinted upon the mind and experience.”

Overwhelmed with Light and Color

Legendary glass sculptor Dale Chihuly MS’67 has often credited water as a source of his creativity, with a custom plastic clipboard and wax pencil next to his shower as proof. While studying at the nation’s first studio glass program at the UW in the mid-1960s, he chose to live in a small cabin on the shores of Lake Mendota.

“I remember the sparkle of the lake,” Chihuly said in 1997, the same year he was commissioned for an art installation at the new Kohl Center on campus.

That lake view inspired The Mendota Wall, all 1,284 blown-glass pieces. Their radiant greens, blues, reds, and yellows reflect the colors of sunlight hitting the water. The 140-foot wall installation — Chihuly’s largest at the time — greets visitors as it spans the Kohl Center’s curving main concourse. More than 100 spotlights, each carefully positioned, brilliantly illuminate the glass. “I want people to be overwhelmed with light and color in some way that they’ve never experienced,” the Seattle-based artist has famously said. And by that measure, The Mendota Wall delivers.

If you try, you can identify around 50 clusters of glass in varying shapes and sizes. But as with counting waves, the number turns arbitrary. Scattered, onion-like bulbs sprout coils and tendrils that intersect and curl over each other. Chihuly considered the installation part of his series of “anemone walls,” and indeed, the tentacle glass forms look like they could have come from the bottom of the sea. The state paid $144,000 for The Mendota Wall. Chihuly’s proposal read simply: “A wall of light. A wall of effervescence. A wall of color.” By the time it was done, Chihuly estimated that the piece was worth close to $1 million. He considered the balance a gift to the university “that was seminal in my career.”

Harvey Littleton, the late UW art professor and the pioneer of studio glass, applauded his former student’s “riot of color” in The Mendota Wall.

“It brings joy to the building,” he said.

The Holy Trinity of Nature

UW–Madison’s Botany Garden on University Avenue boasts more than 500 species of plants from around the world. But one flower stands far above them all: a saucer magnolia, carved in limestone as part of the three-piece Essence sculpture that dots the garden’s winding paths. The Flower joins the The Seed and The Fruit in honoring fundamental stages of the plant life cycle. Susan A. Falkman’s works were commissioned in 2004 during an expansion that doubled the Botany Garden’s footprint.

Precise detailing and intricate textures unite the limestone pieces, but each can stand on its own. The Seed captures the intimacy of a plant emerging from the earth and into the light as a chrysalis wrapped by tender leaves. The Flower, placed near the garden’s magnolia family, lives up to the natural beauty of full bloom through its delicate rendering. And The Fruit, sited by the Newton Apple Tree, provides a playful note with its half-eaten state and exposed core. A lone seed dangles from the apple’s core, leaving us with the promise of new life.

The Seed captures the intimacy of a plant emerging from the earth and into the light as a chrysalis wrapped by tender leaves.

The Flower lives up to the natural beauty of full bloom through its delicate rendering.

The Fruit provides a playful note with its half-eaten state and exposed core. Ingrid Jordon-Thaden (3)

Falkman, a Wisconsin-based sculptor who refined her craft in Greece and Italy, wanted the work to stay true to “the essence of a botanic garden — the holy trinity of nature,” she says. But for the close observer, she left other secrets to discover. The apple’s uneaten back side, for example, takes the shape of a female torso. From a certain angle, The Seed looks like a caped monk figure on the move.

Still, Falkman’s chief interest is the purity of the magnolia blossom.

“The streaming of life’s energy,” she says. “I love carving that.”

The Threshold to the Rest of Your Life

As you enter Nancy Nicholas Hall, home of UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology, Threshold greets you across the main foyer. The giant mosaic proves the ultimate statement piece, spanning 20 feet across the wall and sparkling with vivid color. Appropriately, Threshold commands the connection point between the old building and the large new addition, which opened in 2012. But Chicago-based artist Lynn Basa drew inspiration from what lies behind the mosaic’s wall: Observatory Hill. A series of spherical onyx orbs — originally aglow with LED backlighting — invite observers into a new dimension.

“If you looked all the way through the hill that it’s against, you’d see the lake on the other side,” Basa says. “The idea of the glowing onyx was students being able to see into their future through these tunnels or openings.”

Human ecology explores the interplay between people and their environments, so Basa also played with motion, flow, and connectedness. Threshold features dramatic changes in scale: the massive onyx orbs; the medium-sized, bean-shaped slabs of brown marble; and the tiny pieces of Byzantine glass, smalti, and ceramic tiles. Strings of tesserae drift from one end to the other, linking all parts to the whole. Dominant greens are joined by mesmerizing blues, browns, and gold. A sprinkling of reflective tiles project an even broader range of color.

The backlighting has since burned out, but the mosaic still glows under skylights and stands as a remarkable technical feat. “You don’t see any other mosaics where people use all those materials,” Basa says of the painstaking process, “and now I understand why.”

The title Threshold represents more than just the piece’s physical location. It also speaks to the students who pass by it every day.

“College is one of the most significant, formative times in any person’s life,” Basa says. “You’re not the same person coming out as you were going in. You’re on the threshold to the rest of your life.”

“We Will Survive”

In September 2023, Effigy: Bird Form found its way home. The Truman Lowe MFA’73 sculpture, first displayed at the White House a quarter century prior, secured a rightful resting spot on UW–Madison’s Observatory Hill near the Native burial mounds that inspired it.

Lowe, the prominent Ho-Chunk artist and longtime UW professor, was commissioned for the Honoring Native America exhibition that opened at the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden in 1997. It was the first collection of contemporary Native fine art to be shown at the White House, earning the praise of First Lady Hillary Clinton for “truly express[ing] our millennium themes: to honor the past and imagine the future.”

Before the UW acquired it, Effigy was on display for more than 20 years at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The sculpture is made of dozens of two-inch aluminum rods, curved and welded together to form the skeleton of a bird. Its lattice outline gives “a sense of invisibility of the entire form,” Lowe said, to honor “those mounds that have disappeared.” The bird hovers just above the ground with wings fully spread, posing almost like a fighter jet. The horizontal design was intentional: Lowe wanted Effigy to be visible from the presidential helicopter at the White House.

Lowe, who died in 2019, was particularly inspired by a bird mound on Observatory Hill with a wingspan of 50 feet. Effigy now keeps watch over the mound and its neighboring two-tailed water spirit. Dozens of other mounds are extant on campus, which occupies the ancestral land of the Ho-Chunk.

Tragically, many mounds in the area have been destroyed by agricultural and urban development over the last two centuries. And so Effigy’s permanence may be its most powerful message.

“This is my attempt to pay my respects, to celebrate the longevity of our history and our traditions,” Lowe said of the sculpture. “We have endured, and I know we will survive.” •

From top to bottom are: Song Kue, Eloise Gerry, Leo Butts, Marguerite Davis, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, and Miyoshi Ikawa. Their work had key impacts on modern marvels such as computers, blood-thinner medications, and vitamins. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DANIELLE LAWRY. Marguerite Davis image courtesy National Archives, all other images courtesy UW Archives.

In subjects ranging from medicine to ecology, engineering to computer science, the University of Wisconsin’s top-ranked research program has made valuable innovations for the past 175 years. Just a few examples: Harry Steenbock 1916 revealed the benefits of vitamin D; Karl Paul Link 1922, MS1923, PhD1925 discovered the blood thinner warfarin, and James Thomson was a trailblazer in stem-cell research.

But what about some of the lesser-known UW scientists, often overlooked in their time, who made key discoveries? Science is a team effort, even if that isn’t always reflected in the history books. While the following scientists aren’t household names, the research they did and the training they received from UW–Madison helped advance their fields and improve the world.

Warfarin Warrior

Although most people haven’t heard of Miyoshi Ikawa MS’45, PhD’48, they probably have heard of warfarin, the medicine used as a blood thinner.

The story of warfarin, which was patented in 1947, began at the UW in 1933, when a farmer sought the help of biochemistry professor Karl Paul Link. The farmer’s cows, who were eating moldy sweet clover hay, began mysteriously dying from internal bleeding. The animals’ blood wasn’t clotting, so Link and his research team decided to find out why.

Once they discovered the chemical compound responsible for the cows’ thin blood, the researchers worked in the lab to create new variations of the substance, each with slight modifications to its chemical structure. Their goal was to maintain the compound’s blood-thinning effect.

Ikawa, a graduate student in the Link lab; fellow lab member Mark Stahmann PhD’41; and Link created analogue 42, the version that would become what we know today as warfarin. The researchers found the compound was useful as a rat poison. Later, they realized it could also be used as a drug to help people with blood-clotting disorders, a pivotal discovery that has saved countless lives.

Ikawa’s studies here, however, were linked to a darker part of our nation’s past. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, anti-Japanese sentiment was rampant in the United States. Ikawa was studying at the California Institute of Technology in 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the West Coast a military zone and authorized the forced evacuation and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. With the help of his CalTech graduate adviser, Ikawa was able to relocate to Madison and find a position in Link’s lab.

After finishing his graduate studies at the UW, he returned to the West Coast for postgraduate research at CalTech and UC–Berkeley and became a professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Computer Visionary

The first woman in the country to complete a doctorate in computer science was a UW–Madison grad — and a nun.

In 1932, at 18 years old, Mary Kenneth Keller PhD’65 entered the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Soon after taking her religious vows, Keller began a teaching career and, during summer break, pursued a math degree. She was teaching high school math on the west side of Chicago in the early 1960s when she began to realize the rising importance of computers as a tool in mathematical computation. Intent on learning more, she attended a summer program at Dartmouth College, where she and other high school teachers learned how to operate computers and write simple programs.

Later, when Keller was in her 50s and teaching math during summer school at Iowa’s Clarke College, the school’s president sent her to UW–Madison to pursue a PhD in computer science. In her dissertation, “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns,” Keller explored the ways computers could be used to mechanize tasks and solve problems.

After earning her doctorate, Keller established the computer science department at Clarke College and gave lectures on computer science at other institutions whenever she could.

She was an avid proponent for women seeking higher education and for working women in general, especially mothers. She was even known to encourage her college students to bring their children to class.

Grade-A Scientist

We know that vitamins exist today thanks in part to the dedication of Marguerite Davis ’26.

Davis, a Wisconsin native, grew up inspired by the women’s rights movement in the late 19th century. She also had an interest in science and began pursuing higher education at the UW before transferring to the University of California to complete her bachelor’s degree. Called back to Wisconsin to help look after her father’s house, Davis hoped to continue her work in science.

Enter: Elmer McCollum, a professor in the UW Department of Agricultural Chemistry. In the early 1900s, McCollum was attempting to create a mixture of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that could replace the standard feed given to animals and optimize their diets. But the animals fed on McCollum’s experimental diet experienced stunted growth, sickness, and even blindness. Something was missing.

With Davis’s help, McCollum began tedious and time-consuming studies to uncover what that something was, helping to feed, care for, and take detailed observations of lab rats.

Some rats were fed a dairy-based fat while others were fed olive oil or lard. The rats fed oil or lard became sick and failed to grow properly, but those who consumed dairy fat continued to grow. Realizing there must be important compounds in the dairy fat, McCollum and Davis extracted those compounds and added them to the oil and lard.

Their hypothesis was confirmed when rats fed the fortified oil or lard were as healthy as those fed dairy fat. In 1913, McCollum and Davis identified the important compound as vitamin A. The two guessed that other foods must also hold these vital nutrients, launching subsequent experiments to pinpint these substances and their benefits.

Each year Davis worked in the lab, McCollum requested a salary for her, but it wasn’t until her sixth year that he finally received the funding. Davis continued to make vital contributions, changing the field of nutrition as we know it.

Trailblazing Pharmacist

Leo Butts 1920 was the first African American to graduate from the UW School of Pharmacy. Butts grew up in Madison, where he was active in civil rights in high school. He became the first African American to play for the UW varsity football team and enlisted in the Students’ Army Training Corps.

But arguably his most important accomplishment at the university was his groundbreaking senior thesis researching the status of African American pharmacists. Butts pieced it together despite limited documentation in the UW libraries. He reached out to prominent African American pharmacists and pharmaceutical organizations, collecting anecdotes and statistics on the number of existing African American pharmacists and drugstores.

In his thesis, he also demonstrated the benefits of increased cooperation between African American doctors and pharmacists: improvements in the health of Black communities and their sense of connection.

After graduating, Butts worked as a pharmacist in Gary, Indiana, but he lost his job during the Great Depression and worked for a time as a mail carrier. Eventually, he returned to his chosen profession, operating a pharmacy until he passed away in 1956. He provided both care and a gathering place for his community.

Unfortunately, the sparse information on African American pharmacists persisted into the 1980s, when James Buchanan ’43, the School of Pharmacy’s second known African American graduate, found himself wondering if he had been the first.

She Saved Trees before It Was Cool

The nation’s first woman microscopist was a UW graduate and professor. Eloise Gerry PhD1921 moved to Madison in 1910 to join the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s then-new Forest Products Laboratory. The lab conducted innovative wood and fiber-use research that contributed to the sustainability of forests. Gerry also continued her education, studying botany and plant pathology. Later, she became a professor at the UW.

In 1916, she started her own research program to help conserve pine trees in the American South. Traveling around the region to collect data, she showed that the lumber industry was cutting down trees at an unsustainable rate. Her research helped to preserve local ecosystems and stabilize the pine-related turpentine industry by enabling more productive and longer-lived trees.

Gerry was proud to be a woman in her field. When she was hired at the Forest Products Laboratory, she recalled that “there wasn’t any man willing to come and do the work.” After earning her doctorate, she was sure to sign her full name, “Dr. Eloise Gerry,” rather than just her first initial and last name so that people would know she was a woman.

She made a point of being active in numerous professional associations, most notably serving as the president of Graduate Women in Science, a global organization that still works to inspire and support women in science. The organization established a fellowship in Gerry’s name that continues to offer research funding to selected fellows.

Education Advocate

Song Kue ’82 was UW–Madison’s first Hmong graduate. His electrical engineering degree made him a highly sought-after employee, and he was recruited by the electronics company E-Systems, where he designed technologies that improved the ability of fighter jets to detect military movement.

Kue and his wife, See, came to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as Vietnam War refugees in 1975. He spoke some English and was encouraged to pursue higher education at UW–Green Bay’s Sheboygan campus. Kue had experienced limited access to communications while living in Laos, so he decided to apply his interest in computers and mathematics to electrical engineering with hopes of improving communication technology.

He soon transferred to UW–Madison to finish his bachelor’s degree. The Hmong community in Madison was small at that time, and his college career at a primarily white institution didn’t come without challenges. But as an avid soccer player, he was a strong supporter of the university’s soccer team and was proud to be a Badger.

Math was an equalizer to Kue. He saw higher education as a path to success and instilled that belief in his children and among the growing Hmong community in Madison, whom he often tutored in math. He encouraged them to pursue higher education, and several of his children, numerous nieces and nephews, and some of his grandchildren have since attended college, almost all of them at UW–Madison. •

Crane is a professor of the practice in metals at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her unique take on sgraffito lends her work a meticulous level of detail and a mesmerizing clarity in design that, along with her pedagogy, earned her a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship.

Sgraffito is a fitting technique for an artist whose body of work chronicles memories and the passage of time. As a sharp tool gradually reveals a concealed layer and, eventually, a complete design, the stories embedded in Crane’s art slowly come into focus.

“I’m really interested in the stories [of the Great Migration] and particularly my family’s story,” she says. “I’m also interested in these old buildings that surround me [in Boston]: the remnants of the textile industry and the detritus that they’ve left behind.”

Crane’s work chronicles memory and the passage of time. Greta Rybus

Her work also considers the concept of home. Crane currently resides in Rhode Island, the latest stop in her own sgraffito-like movement across the country that started with an artistic childhood in Los Angeles and took her to Seattle, New York, Wisconsin, and now New England, her path gradually revealing itself.

Here are just a few of the stories she’s soldered into museum-worthy memory.

Statement Piece

The word jewelry often brings to mind wedding rings, dainty necklaces, and other precious ornaments that fall into the category of “fine jewelry.” The pieces that Crane creates are notably bolder than these delicate objects.

“When you go to a university to learn jewelry, you’re going because you want to make small sculpture,” she says. “Everything I make is a sculpture … and all the sculptures speak about the body. They speak about adornment, about being worn, and about the viewership of jewelry.”

As a graduate student under the mentorship of UW art professor Lisa Gralnick, Crane crafted statement pieces: necklaces that are intentionally large and attention-grabbing. Perhaps none makes a bigger statement than Big Pimpin’ (2014), a pendant comprising five 24-karat-gold-plated, enameled medallions suspended on a thick, gold-plated chain. The medallions are coated in black-over-white enamel, and each is etched with a unique sgraffito design. Crane notes that the piece was inspired by both the adornment of ancient African kings and the necklaces, or “bling bling,” worn by contemporary celebrities to connote wealth and status.

“That is maybe the most pivotal piece in my oeuvre,” Crane says. “It encompasses my history, it encompasses my research, and it encompasses the lineage of my journey through making.”

Cocktail Hour

Crane’s work often involves etching, but not all her stories are concealed beneath an outer layer. Growing up as a mixed-race child in the 1970s and 1980s, Crane split her time between her mother’s home in a predominantly white Los Angeles suburb and visits with her father in the city’s more diverse neighborhoods. The divide was obvious, but her place in it was not.

“You always feel like you’re not Black enough or you’re not white enough,” Crane says. “You’re told that.”

In her work, she captures these stark contrasts and the liminal space in which she exists by pairing natural materials, like stones, with handmade ones, like her enameled forms.

“Elementally, these materials are the same,” Crane says. “Enamel is glass. There’s glass in stone, so there’s crossover, but when you look at the surface of these two items, they look totally different.”

This juxtaposition is evident in pieces like Crème de Violette (2020) and The Pink Squirrel (2020), brooches that combine cholla bark and driftwood, respectively, with a tapered, enameled tube.

“I like to pair things to kind of ask, how do we exist?” she says. “Where are the similarities? Where are the differences?”

As for the cocktail-oriented naming conventions for these brooches: “I’m thinking of them as works that could bring people together,” she says, “and we come together over drinks.”

Miguel’s Story

A rare departure from her focus on jewelry, Crane’s most personal piece is a vessel that captures a personal history.

Miguel’s Story (2023) is a copper bowl coated in black-over-white enamel. The outside of the bowl features a series of tally marks; the inside bears the text of an interview conducted with her father’s brother, Miguel, which she transcribed in sgraffito.

Miguel’s Story (2023) includes the text of an interview Crane conducted with her father’s brother, which she transcribed in sgraffito. Courtesy of Tanya Crane

“My father passed away in the ’80s — he had ALS — and I was born in the ’70s, so I only know little snippets of his story,” Crane says. By interviewing his brother and sister — some of his last living relatives — Crane evokes a more complete picture of a man she didn’t get a chance to know. She hopes to tie her family’s stories to those of the Second Great Migration, the period from the 1940s through the 1970s that brought so many Black settlers to the American West and that influences the region to this day.

Miguel’s Story is part of the Enamel Arts Foundation Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Crane gifted the proceeds to Miguel when the piece was purchased.) But perhaps her most intimate piece — and her most unconventional — has yet to be put on public display.

What’s His Worth (2023) is a vintage men’s urinal coated with black-on-white enamel and a gold-leafed interior. The enameled surface features the same sgraffito tally-mark design as Miguel’s Story.

What’s His Worth (2023) is Crane’s most intimate and unconventional piece. Courtesy of Tanya Crane

“Because my dad had ALS, I knew him as being paralyzed,” Crane says. “He had needed assistance with everything, and until maybe the ’80s, all the things in hospitals were made out of enamel.”

When Crane found the urinal in a Wisconsin antique store, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, but as her family’s story has revealed itself over time, it became an appropriate artifact on which to preserve a history that she continues to uncover. •

Through each of those experiences, Obma has come to understand that making one’s way in Hollywood requires diligence, tenacity, and a winning attitude. He may not be famous quite yet, but he’s been a gainfully employed actor for 15 years. With optimism intact, Obma continues pursuing his big break. And he has real-world role models in actors like Steve Carell, Kathy Bates, Bryan Cranston, Viola Davis, and Morgan Freeman, who were all in their 40s when they made it big.

Now, with a new series project he’s put together himself, he’s that much closer to joining their ranks.

ACT ONE: BACKSTORY

One of four children, Obma — who grew up in La Crosse and Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — felt early on that he didn’t have much to offer, leading to a fair amount of self-doubt.

“All of my siblings were more successful athletes than I was, which is quite revered in small towns,” he says. “I also come from a family of rather exceptional people — my brother is an orthopedic surgeon, my younger sister is an anesthesiologist, and my older sister is an immigration attorney. I just didn’t relate to being the perfect doctor or lawyer. Instead, my throughline for how I can understand the characters that I’ve so naturally been able to play is if the characters are quite flawed.”

Though Obma’s talents weren’t necessarily valued where he grew up, things began to shift when his high school Spanish teacher, Julie Proffitt, recognized that he had a gift for languages. “The fact that Mrs. Proffitt so openly shared her belief in me encouraged me to apply myself in a whole new way, and now I fluently speak a variety of languages,” he says. He not only speaks flawless Spanish, but he also knows French, Russian, German, and his most recent challenge — Welsh. He found Russian and Welsh the most difficult to learn.

His aptitude for accents rises to the level of a superpower. “Accents are something I really enjoy — they bring me to life,” Obma says. “When putting together an accent, I find that I change the way my mouth is shaped, which then causes me to carry myself differently — it’s all connected.”

Obma’s talent for languages and accents has boosted his career. “You’ve got to find out what your essence is and give that to the world,” he says. Courtesy of Hans Obma

Zeroing in on what one wants in a career can be an arduous venture. Despite his own ups and downs, Obma recognizes that not everyone gets the opportunity to go after the life that they’d always wanted. “Early on, I heard someone say that you’ve got to figure out what your essence is and give that to the world,” he says. “More and more, sharing the core of who I am is central to my work as an actor: to speak my truth.”

Justin Markofski ’02, Obma’s college roommate and close friend of 22 years, has a clear vision of what makes him a standout in the sea of celebrities. “Hans takes a special interest in others and goes out of his way to remember things about people that will make them feel seen, special, and cared for. … He is teachable and pragmatic. This combined with his diligence has helped to cultivate his skills as an actor within a unique niche.”

Obma consistently receives high marks from most anyone he interacts with. Kathleen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99, director and professor at the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication, got to know him when he was a student double majoring in journalism and Spanish, and they remain in contact to this day.

“I first met Hans when he took our introductory boot-camp class, Mass Media Practices,” Culver says. “I remember him being a fan favorite of his classmates. Hans has a joyous soul, a big heart, and tremendous talent. He’s someone who gets along with everyone and always strives for the best outcomes for all, which is so important in fields like ours, because they so often rely on teamwork.”

ACT TWO: GETTING INTO CHARACTER

Relocating from Wisconsin to Los Angeles in 2008 was a culture shock and a career gamble. But Obma knew that if he didn’t try, he would regret it. “Once in LA,” he says, “I felt like I’d gotten to this place where there really were thousands of doors to opportunity, but so many of them were closed with signs that said, ‘Don’t knock.’ It wasn’t a welcoming feeling.”

If you’ve ever watched Vampire Diaries, The Rookie, Narcos: Mexico, or For All Mankind, you’ve seen Obma playing a variety of characters. And getting those roles took time and hard work. Arriving in LA with no acting credits, he soon realized that he needed help defining the areas where he had something unique to offer. “While specializing in foreign roles, I also worked out how to play criminals and found that I have the capacity to play mentally ill characters quite naturally,” he says.

Finding a renowned acting coach was key to acquiring the confidence and skills necessary to move forward. “Working with David Rotenberg was a foundational time for me,” he says. “I would send him tapes of different monologues, to which he would offer notes. For several months, I did villain after villain, and he told me that I need to play bad guys. And now, I know how to approach those types of roles in a way that I didn’t before.”

Shortly after working with Rotenberg, Obma booked a handful of roles in close succession. First, he got to portray a Revolutionary War hero on TURN: Washington’s Spies, which was a French-language role. Around that same time, he was in an episode of NCIS: New Orleans playing a German master villain, quickly followed by a Hungarian bad-guy role in Get Shorty.

Another one of Obma’s early successes was booking a prime-time role on Criminal Minds. He found being on set exhilarating. In 2018 and 2019, he earned a role in the fourth and fifth seasons of the Breaking Bad spinoff, Better Call Saul. “Even though my character, Adrian, was rather secondary,” he says, “that job helped pay for a couple years of life.” He also enjoyed the opportunity to interact regularly with lead actor Jonathan Banks, who played hitman and fixer Mike Ehrmantraut.

Meaningful experiences, career wins, and good friends kept Obma in LA full-time for 12 years before he moved back to Wisconsin in 2020. Among those friends was fellow actor and mentor Shun Lee, who helped him recognize that he didn’t have to apply everyone’s advice or have every social media account. And he didn’t have to accept every role.

“When I first moved to California, I had the rather erroneous thought that anyone who’d been here longer had something to offer that I ought to consider,” he recalls. “But many of those I interacted with were coming from a place of defeat and jadedness. Through my time with Shun, I came to recognize that if you have wisdom and apply it consistently, that is what will likely lead to positive results. The best advice tends to focus on the possibilities and how to pursue them effectively.”

As Obma’s career began to take off, so did his confidence and reputation, earning him a place in the final season of the comedy series Grace and Frankie. He was a Norwegian candy smuggler — Hummer Von Vuckinschloker — opposite Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. That same year he portrayed an evil scientist in WandaVision with Elizabeth Olsen and Kathryn Hahn.

“Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda were gracious and complimentary, which meant a lot, and I now carry myself differently because of the way things went on that set. The same holds true for WandaVision, which was a victorious experience where they kept giving me more and more to do because they were happy with what I was creating with my character.”

Most recently, Obma played a principal role in May December, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Natalie Portman. “Both Natalie and Todd were gracious, and it gave me an opportunity to firmly plant my feet and work with an Oscar-winning actress and an Oscar-nominated director,” he says. “I could have walked into that film and fallen flat on my face, but working with Todd and Natalie, instead of falling, I flew.”

ACT THREE: SILVER LININGS

When the pandemic began in early 2020, it offered opportunities to slow down and look at things from an entirely different angle — adopt a pet, make your own sourdough, learn how to knit. For Obma, it was a chance to delve deeply into practicing languages and accents. He also read The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron, which inspired him to write.

“I came up with an idea for a television series that would feature a main character, Joseph Gard, who’s a sensitive man from Wisconsin,” Obma says. “He’s an MI6 interpreter who speaks many languages and uses different accents, which is perfect for me — a dream role.”

Once he felt he had written a successful pilot — A Question of Service — Obma decided to go a step further and fund the entire project himself, all during COVID. What came after is something he couldn’t have predicted.

After submitting his 20-minute proof-of-concept film to 11 film festivals across the U.S. and the UK, he came away victorious, winning eight times in his category. For a first-time writer, it’s an incredible feat.

So, how do these triumphs translate into a series getting picked up by a streaming platform?

“Once I’m ready to start reaching out to producers, I’ll share all that we’ve achieved thus far,” he says. “Then, I’ll pair that with the excellent bookings I’ve had as an actor. My hope is that it will all add up to something they may want to invest in. I’m eager for a 10-episode series, to avoid making choices that don’t ring true, and to work with people who are passionate about crafting quality stories.”

Obma maintains a generosity of spirit in everything he does, including how he views his college experience as a key to his career. He is a fourth-generation Badger, which is a great source of pride for him.

“I love the idea of people from the Badger state succeeding,” Obma says. “I like that the UW has been part of the experiences for so many important people in my life, too. I love that a person can come from Wisconsin, attend UW–Madison, and go do anything in the whole wide world. I think that’s very exciting.”

Almost as exciting, perhaps, as being on the verge of the role of a lifetime. •

The tie that binds all of these groups, even the most unconventional, is the Wisconsin Idea.

“Student organizations are where classroom teachings meet students’ interests and real-life issues,” says Madeleine Carr MS’23, communications coordinator for the Wisconsin Union, a hub for beyond-the-classroom learning and leadership opportunities. “They help students find career paths and places to make change.”

These clubs also dare students to view themselves in a new light: as innovators, risk-takers, or simply adults ready to take on the world. Here are six organizations that allow them to leave their comfort zones and embrace experiential learning, whether by donning a princess dress or hugging a bee.

Attempt a Blind Date

Sidesplitting stories are common by-products of blind dates, but what if humor drove the matchmaking process? Datamatch aims to answer this question at nearly 50 universities, including UW–Madison. It began at Harvard in 1994, and the local chapter debuted in 2019.

Armed with an algorithm and a silly survey, the organization matches thousands of Badgers each Valentine’s Day. Questions referencing pop culture and campus traditions reveal clues about each respondent’s personality and sense of humor.

In a recent survey, participants were asked who wears the Bucky costume at campus events. The answer they chose — “the soul of Barry Alvarez,” “a really big Starship [food-delivery] robot,” “What do you mean it’s a costume?” or “a clan of smaller Badgers” — helped the algorithm determine their matches.

According to club president Johanna Mejias ’24, respondents receive perks such as restaurant coupons they can use for dates or friend outings. In 2023, Datamatch also organized a game night, a sketch-comedy show, and a prom at Memorial Union.

“Our goal is to enrich the college experience by encouraging students to make new friends, find love, or both,” she says. “Basically, we want students to have fun and enjoy some good deals while they’re at it.”

Mejias, a computer science major interested in game design, joined Datamatch her freshman year, when the COVID-19 pandemic made socializing difficult. The sign-up instructions were vague, so she figured her match would be revealed at one of the club’s meetings. Instead of meeting a potential love interest there, she found a group of future friends.

“I didn’t realize I was joining the committee behind Datamatch,” she says. “I was apprehensive since it was run by these guys who were older than me and had been friends for a while, but they welcomed me with open arms.”

Mejias sharpened her communication skills by applying for grants and building partnerships with local businesses, and running the organization has instilled confidence.

“I used to be afraid to take charge, but I’ve seen a change in myself over the years in the club,” she says. “I believe this will help me in any career I pursue.”

Plunge into an Icy Lake

The Wim Hof Club, whose members are known as Hoffers, gather at the Memorial Union, have a meditation session, and jump into icy Lake Mendota. This combo is thought to promote health and vitality: the colder the water, the bigger the benefits.

“Our meditation involves a lot of breathwork: big inhales, short exhales, and breath holds designed to activate the sympathetic nervous system and promote a sense of calm awareness when you encounter a stressor,” says Prabvir Kukreja ’24, one of the club’s leaders.

The stressor, of course, is the lake. Hoffers say its frigid embrace can help the body’s immune system thrive. This theory springs from Wim Hof, a Dutch athlete who became fascinated with Tibetan breathing techniques. He’s known for his ability to tolerate extreme temperatures and for his method of combining breathwork with cold exposure. Kukreja also points to research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who has found that cold exposure can reduce inflammation and elevate dopamine levels for prolonged periods.

Kukreja started experimenting with cold exposure as a high school student in New Jersey. The COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging people’s mental health, and he’d heard that cold showers could help quell anxiety. When he discovered the Hoffers at UW–Madison, he knew he had to take the plunge.

“I fell in love with it, and I met other people who are interested in holistic health practices,” he says.

The club has shown him how much discomfort he can handle, too — and how that discomfort can produce resilience. This lesson applies not only to physical challenges but also to academic and social ones.

“When the club meditates, we often include a gratitude component that involves sending out love to others,” Kukreja says. “When you experience a stressor, it’s important to remember that you’re not alone and to take care of yourself afterward.”

Hug a Queen Bee

Bees don’t get many hugs, but they should, says Bees Please president Audrey Braun x’25.

“At least half of the foods we eat rely on pollinators, especially bees,” says the conservation biology and environmental studies major. “But bees are being killed by insecticides, diseases, and climate change, and they’re being overworked in the agricultural sector.”

Bee burnout has dire consequences not only for crops, but also for plants that produce shade, shelter, and oxygen. After learning facts like these from a documentary film in high school, Braun knew bee advocacy was in her future. Then, as a college freshman, she made a beeline for pollinator-protection projects.

“The longer I’ve been in Bees Please, the more I’ve wanted to do,” she says, noting that the organization has helped her develop public speaking and networking skills. “As president, I want to encourage the campus to do more bee-friendly landscaping.”

Braun sees opportunities to add biodiversity to grass-heavy areas of campus and incorporate native pollen sources into rooftop gardens. Discussing these ideas with the Office of Sustainability and other potential partners is the next step.

Bees Please members have visited local elementary schools to share bee facts and tracked pollinators at Allen Centennial Garden. The club also organizes apiary field trips where students can observe hives and meet their inhabitants. Braun even got to cradle a queen bee.

“It was a cold March day, so the beekeeper said we had to keep the queen bee warm,” she recalls. “I held her in my hands, with my mittens on, and he told me to breathe on her. I was terrified I’d inhale her, but that didn’t happen. She and her royal court didn’t sting me, either. They trusted me, and I trusted them.”

Build a Human-Powered Vehicle

The need for vehicles that run on renewable power has never been greater, and UW–Madison’s Human-Powered Vehicle Challenge (HPVC) team builds prototypes that harness the body’s energy.

“The goal is to revolutionize transportation,” says team leader and future engineer Teekay Kowalewski x’25. “There’s an infrastructure problem in cities, especially for parking single-commuter vehicles. Four human-powered vehicles can fit in a car-size parking spot. Plus, they don’t use fossil fuels.”

More sophisticated than the average bicycle and more practical than Fred Flintstone’s foot-powered car, the HPVC team’s vehicles are designed with speed, endurance, and ease of use in mind. They range from recumbent three-wheeled buggies to sleek two-wheelers that look like racing bikes with windshields.

“We have to consider steering geometry and other complicated stuff you’d have to figure out for a larger vehicle, but basically, we’re making a bike you can ride to work without getting wet,” Kowalewski says.

The UW team consists of 10 students who apply classroom knowledge to real-world problems as they cultivate technical skills in product design, manufacturing, and testing. Many are mechanical engineering majors, but students from any academic discipline can participate.

Most years, the team enters a newly designed vehicle in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Human-Powered Vehicle Challenge, where students from across the country flaunt their innovative thinking, design skills, and racing abilities. In 2023, the team created a vehicle suited for wintry conditions and tested it on Lake Mendota. It won an innovation award and the endurance race, whose half-mile course featured a speed bump, a hairpin turn, rumble strips, and other obstacles.

The club gives Kowalewski valuable practice defining problems and devising design solutions. And it’s a chance to create collaboratively, building pride through teamwork.

“I just love making stuff,” he says, “and this is an opportunity to do that with an awesome team.”

Make Change with Art

Amelia Bader x’25 couldn’t find a student organization that married art and activism, so she and a friend founded one in 2022. Art for Change creates “safe spaces for UW students to come together, express themselves as artists, and use those artistic abilities to fuel positive change.”

Service projects take the form of consciousness-raising murals and fundraisers for other change-making organizations.

“Figuring out why an issue matters to you is important, and making art is a good way to do that,” Bader says. “We organize events where students paint their own stories and explore issues that they really care about, whether it’s gender rights, environmentalism, or something else.”

Bader’s ethnic and religious heritage informs her own art making. Participating in Fanana Banana, a Milwaukee-based collective for Muslim women artists, has helped her connect with her peers. It also inspires her to make Art for Change as inviting and interactive as possible.

“Fanana Banana helped me find my voice as an artist and realize that I want to use my art to spread positive, powerful messages,” Bader says.

The club’s public art projects encourage the whole campus to wrestle with social-justice questions. One of them explored the benefits of divesting from fossil fuels, and an interactive piece at the Wisconsin School of Business’s Chalk the Block event encouraged passersby to leave notes for strangers.

“One person writes a nice note, and the next person who comes by takes that note and replaces it with a note they’ve written,” Bader explains. “It’s a way to connect with people you don’t know and promote a sense of belonging, which is something all of us need.”

Become a Princess

Before many Badgers become doctors, lawyers, and teachers, they dream of becoming princesses and superheroes. A Moment of Magic helps UW students live out these fantasies as they delight hospitalized children.

Part of a national volunteer project founded in 2014, the UW–Madison chapter sends Cinderella, Moana, Spider-Man, and other beloved characters to patients at children’s hospitals in Madison and Milwaukee, as well as events hosted by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Gilda’s Club, and the Down syndrome charity GiGi’s Playhouse.

President Gracey Niedzielak x’25 portrays Princess Elizabeth, a character created by a little girl the organization visited in its first year. This princess doesn’t have the star power of Frozen’s Elsa, but she melts hearts just the same.

“Children don’t care if you’re a popular character; they see a princess, and their eyes light up,” explains Niedzielak. “I get to give Princess Elizabeth a story and personality.”

Plus, wearing a poofy purple dress now may help her don a lab coat later.

“I’m premed and interested in becoming a pediatrician,” she says, “so I joined A Moment of Magic to make a difference in kids’ lives while gaining skills I could use for working with kids.”

The club has about 30 active members, many of whom plan to work in schools or pediatric health care settings. Some play characters and others make the rest of the magic happen, striking up conversations with patients’ families and partnerships with hospitals and charities.

Serving the community with others is magical in its own way.

“I’ve found lifelong friends in this group,” Niedzielak says.

Barb Kautz-Wittwer of the UW Center for Leadership and Involvement, which connects students with opportunities to make a difference on campus, says friendships like these are reason enough to join a student organization.

“They help make a big campus feel smaller.” •

Enter a commencement speaker, a person who has successfully navigated the real world and whose duty it is to deliver a charge to fresh graduates so they may also succeed. Since the late 1980s, a steady stream of prominent alumni and national figures have stridden to the podium, with a noticeable uptick in star power over the past decade. What other stage has been graced by both celebrity journalist Katie Couric and football giant J. J. Watt x’12?

Here’s your chance to relive some of the most memorable commencement speeches in UW history — this time, no cap and gown required.

Stop This Insanity
May 1979

Vice President Walter Mondale preached against nuclear weapons. U.S. Senate Historical Office

It’s not every day that the vice president of the United States comes to tell you about the risk of nuclear annihilation. But such was the state of the Cold War when Walter Mondale was invited to speak at the UW’s commencement ceremony in 1979.

As a policy wonk, Mondale seized the opportunity to pitch the Camp Randall crowd on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviets. He compared the threat of nuclear warfare to living in a “volcano’s shadow.”

“No other danger jeopardizes so completely the legacy of our civilization. No other peril threatens to trivialize so utterly the hopes and dreams that this commencement symbolizes,” he said.

Mondale unpacked arguments for and against a truce with an untrustworthy foe.

“The stark reality is that neither of us can win an all-out arms race. … Sheer sanity, common sense, and a decent respect for mankind call upon our generation to do something to stop this insanity before we are destroyed,” he said.

While the college graduates found his arguments compelling, as evidenced by several standing ovations, the U.S. Senate did not. President Jimmy Carter signed the treaty the following month, but it was never ratified by Congress.

Fight All the Way
May 1997

CBS’s Rita Braver shared the emotional story of a UW friend. John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images

As a national correspondent for CBS News, Rita Braver ’70 could have shared plenty of fascinating anecdotes with the UW’s Class of 1997. After all, she had covered Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Iran-Contra affair, and a Cold War spy ring. But instead, Braver shared the emotional story of a college friend and fellow UW alumna, Elizabeth Glaser ’69.

“[She] lit up every room she walked into,” Braver said.

When the two reconnected years after graduation in Washington, DC, Glaser shared that she had received a blood transfusion after giving birth to her daughter in 1981. She learned four years later — when her daughter developed mysterious symptoms — that the blood was tainted with HIV. She had unknowingly passed the virus to her daughter through breastmilk and, later, to her son in utero.

“Now her daughter was dying,” Braver said, “and my friend had come to Washington to try to convince the doctors at the National Institutes of Health to allow her daughter and other children to have access to AZT and other experimental drugs.”

Glaser became a leading AIDS activist, pushing for more research funding and better access to novel treatments. It was too late for her daughter, who died in 1988, but not for her son.

“Frankly, a lot of people when hit with the kind of tragedy that fell upon Elizabeth would have withdrawn, given up, become bitter, angry, or completely immobilized,” Braver said. “Elizabeth fought all the way.”

Glaser died in 1994 at age 47. But her legacy carries on with the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

“So there you have it,” Braver told the UW Field House crowd, “the story of a University of Wisconsin graduate who faced adversity, and, in the process, became a hero. And that brings me to my last bit of advice: look for heroes.”

How to Think, How to Speak
May 2016

Every commencement speaker has nice things to say about the host university. It’s part of the gig. But when it comes to the UW, there might be no bigger — or more boisterous — booster than former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson ’63, JD’66.

Former governor Tommy Thompson delivered a stirring tribute to the UW. Bryce Richter

Thompson arrived at the podium without any notes and delivered a stirring, from-the-heart endorsement of the university’s value to the state.

“You’re at the greatest university in the United States. … A university that taught me how to think, how to speak, how to be a citizen,” he said at the ceremony for doctoral graduates.

Never one for modesty, Thompson ticked off the many campus buildings he helped to fund from the capitol. (“You name it, and we built it.”) The lifelong Republican also supported faculty retention initiatives, through which he convinced biochemistry professor Michael Sussman to turn down a job offer elsewhere.

“He was a Democrat, never voted for me. But he came in and said, ‘I’m leaving to go to New York.’ And I said, ‘The heck you are! You’re staying in Wisconsin!’ We raised the money, and we kept those professors here.”

Then-chancellor Rebecca Blank, visibly delighted throughout Thompson’s speech, followed with the perfect summation: “Now you know why he was governor.”

Turning No into Yes
May 2016

Russell Wilson drew lessons from his turbulent college football career. Jeff Miller

Perhaps the UW’s most controversial commencement speech — at least if you polled the state of North Carolina — belongs to former Badger quarterback Russell Wilson MSx’13. By the time Wilson returned to Camp Randall Stadium, he had reached the heights of his NFL career as a Super Bowl champion. But his speech focused on the adversity he had overcome, including the turbulent end to his playing career at North Carolina State before transferring to Wisconsin for his senior season in 2011.

In Wilson’s telling, he had planned to return to NC State for his last year, but Coach Tom O’Brien spurned him, saying, “You’re never going to play in the National Football League. You’re too small. There’s no chance. You’ve got no shot. Give it up.”

Wilson’s lesson: “If you know what you’re capable of, if you’re always prepared, and you keep things in perspective, then life has a way of turning no into yes.”

North Carolina media aggressively questioned his account in the days following the speech, noting that Wilson’s side pursuit of professional baseball contributed to losing his starting quarterback spot. The Charlotte Observer published a story titled “Russell Wilson Rips Open Old NC State Wounds,” while a fan blog accused him of “carelessly vomit[ing] his revisionism to fit his mundane narrative.” (But who’s bitter?)

Perhaps Wilson had learned from other commencement speakers that you never let a little exaggeration get in the way of a good story. Regardless, it seems that time heals all wounds. In spring 2021, Wilson returned to the stage to give a commencement speech — at NC State.

Looking beyond Z
December 2016

Astronaut Jim Lovell refused to accept limitations. NASA

When someone like Jim Lovell x’50 tells you to dream, you should probably listen. The legendary astronaut and his Apollo 8 crewmates became the first people to orbit the moon in 1968. Two years later, the Apollo 13 commander immortalized the words “Houston, we’ve had a problem” while guiding a critically damaged spaceship some 200,000 miles back to Earth.

Speaking to UW graduates in December 2016, Lovell — who had enrolled at the university 70 years prior on a Navy ROTC scholarship — made an impassioned plea for a quality he saw lacking in contemporary America: foresight.

“Every major advancement of civilization has met with extreme resistance,” Lovell said, citing scientist Lee de Forest’s declaration that humans would never reach the moon just a decade before Apollo 8.

“Fortunately,” Lovell continued, “there were those in days gone by who refused to live in the ‘A to Z’ world.”

Lovell invoked Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! throughout his speech. In the book, the young narrator feels constrained by the traditional letters of the alphabet and invents new letters beyond Z. Lovell’s addendum for college graduates: keep looking beyond Z.

“You will be amazed at what you can do,” he told the captivated Kohl Center crowd. “My mother could hardly believe that I circled the moon in 1968, but today, my 50-year-old son doesn’t think it’s any big deal because, after all, we had done it as long as he can remember. Your generation will stand on a higher hill because of the mountains that we have climbed, and the whole world benefits from your ready acceptance of it.”

A Better Version of Yourself
December 2020

As the first class to spend an entire semester under COVID-19 restrictions, the winter 2020 graduates needed something — or someone — to believe in. And who better to believe in than Rose Lavelle ’17, especially after the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup?

Soccer great Rose Lavelle explained what to do when life knocks you down. UW Athletics

The star soccer player and Badger great had recently capped the U.S. national team’s championship run with a brilliant solo goal against the Netherlands, turning her into a national hero overnight.

“I always get asked in interviews how my life has changed since that moment, and I always have the same answer, which is — it hasn’t. … I feel about as normal as I could ever feel and as normal as I did before the World Cup, just now with a little bit more experience,” she told the graduates in a recorded video.

That experience on the world stage gave Lavelle, then 25, some wisdom beyond her years, as when she recounted a series of debilitating hamstring injuries that plagued her early career.

“What I’ve learned is no matter how many times life knocks you down, you get back up and you go again — a better version of yourself than you would’ve been had you never been knocked down in the first place,” she said.

It was the perfect message for an unprecedented time.

Look for That Mystery
May 2021

Actor André De Shields, speaking virtually, celebrated the imagination. Jeff Miller

André De Shields ’70 is no stranger to the stage — Broadway or commencement. The actor served as the UW’s commencement speaker in both 2007 and 2021, delivering singular speeches worthy of a showman.

De Shields is the rare commencement speaker who refrains from talking about himself — not a single word. It’s a remarkable fact when you consider his career started with a nude production of Peter Pan on campus and culminated in a Tony Award for his performance in Hadestown.

His latest address came at a time of civic turmoil with the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Along with bursting into song, De Shields acknowledged the troubled times. “Does it mean it is the end of the world? No. … It means that you have to make use of your limitless imagination and allow this old world that’s yearning to die — let it die. Use your imagination in helping this new world that’s eager to be born to come to life.”

And leave it to the one-and-only André De Shields to romanticize the process of getting a job.

“Don’t look for just a job,” he said. “Look for that horizon, that if you do not discover it, it will forever remain a secret. Look for that treasure, that if you do not uncover it, it will forever remain just X marks the spot. Look for that mystery, that if you don’t unravel it, it will forever remain a mystery.”

Make Yourself Uncomfortable
May 2022

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield explored the benefits of uncertainty. Bryce Richter

On February 23, 2022, UW–Madison announced that Linda Thomas-Greenfield MA’75, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, would serve as the spring commencement speaker. One day later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, dramatically disrupting our belief in the international order as well as transforming the role of one of America’s top diplomats.

The world had changed overnight. So it’s no wonder that Thomas-Greenfield’s speech to UW graduates a few months later centered on discomfort.

She began her address by noting how she felt on leaving her home state of Louisiana for the first time and arriving in Madison as a graduate student in 1974.

“Madison looked and felt like a foreign land to me,” Thomas-Greenfield told the crowd at Camp Randall. “I had no family here, no friends. And most of the people were white, and I was not. … [But] being uncomfortable here in Madison taught me how to adapt, improve, to learn.”

The UW also opened the world to her. Political science professor M. Crawford Young encouraged Thomas-Greenfield to travel abroad and conduct research in Liberia, a trip that would pave her journey to the Foreign Service.

“If you stay in your comfort zone, sticking to what you know, then you are making a bet,” she cautioned the graduates. “You are betting that your life and the world will stay the same. But let me tell you, you’re going to lose that bet every single time.”

Thomas-Greenfield highlighted the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war as world-changing episodes that the graduates had already experienced during their short time on campus.

“Shutting yourself off from the world, trying to hide from its problems, won’t serve you,” she said. “Because global challenges, even those in faraway places, are going to impact you.” • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUmUw0slkqc

Moviemaking hadn’t entered his mind. For a hard-working grocer’s son with little time for artistic pursuits, how could it? But the university offered its first courses in film history and theory in the early 1960s, giving Mann a look at German expressionism. The startling imagery rocked him back on his heels — and a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove delivered the knockout punch. He marveled at a film that could connect with a mainstream audience while also communicating an auteur’s singular point of view.

Mann’s existential quest had come to an end. As he walked down Bascom Hill after one of these screenings, he knew he would make movies. Personal and popular ones, like Dr. Strangelove. How many UW film students have had the same thought on the same hill? What distinguished Mann was his obsessiveness. With characteristic intensity, he tore through film school in London and wrote for the 1970s cop show Starsky and Hutch. He scored his first big success with 1979’s made-for-television prison movie The Jericho Mile, which introduced the world to a writer-director who would take no half measures in pursuit of a plot. Mann shot the picture on location in Folsom Prison and cast convicts in minor roles. The Jericho Mile won three Emmy awards and set the stage for Mann’s later cinematic triumphs, which stayed true to his long-ago vision on Bascom Hill. Like the directors featured in his UW film classes, he developed a style of his own — one that might be called Mann-ly, with aggressive editing and audio to evoke male protagonists on the edge. You know you’re in the Michael Mann universe when a car speeds down a dark city street, neon reflecting on the windshield, synthesizer and electric guitars pulsating in time with the driver’s dangerously elevated heartbeat. In his frequent tales of cops versus criminals (Miami Vice, Thief, Heat, Public Enemies, Manhunter, Collateral, Blackhat), the gunfights can rattle your dental fillings, thanks to Mann’s penchant for using raw sound captured on set. These scenes are hard to shrug off as superfluous violence. They involve you directly in the characters’ fateful conflicts with the powers that be. In the boxing epic Ali, Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) puts up his dukes against the entire U.S. government. In The Insider, a journalist (Al Pacino) defies both the tobacco industry and his own TV network. These are imperfect characters who strive for perfection in their work, whether a hit man (Tom Cruise in Collateral) or a hacker (Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat). They may yearn for a normal existence, but their obsessions usually consign them to life on the margins.

Mann will only take on projects that matter to him, so his filmography is relatively slim after a half-century’s worth of work. The 2023 release of the race-car saga Ferrari, his first production in eight years, is an occasion for revisiting a director who artfully combines mood, music, and moral concerns, rivaling his crime-focused peers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Here are five gems worth watching and rewatching. They’re sure to inspire future generations of moviemakers, just as that Madison screening of Dr. Strangelove inspired a young Michael Mann.

Thief (1981)

An independent-minded ex-con (James Caan) falls back on his safecracking skills for a final score — the one that will ensure a happily-ever-after ending with his new family. What could possibly go wrong when a local mob boss offers a helping hand? Displaying the mania for realism that would become his trademark, Mann employed professional criminals as consultants and even used their burglary tools for the spectacular break-in scenes.

Heat (1995)

In a cat-and-mouse game for the ages, Mann presents a master cop (Al Pacino) who’s not so different from the master criminal (Robert De Niro) he’s pursuing. Each is dedicated to his craft, and each pays a price for his professionalism. Healthy romantic relationships are forever out of reach for two alpha males focused on crimes, whether committing or solving them. Their only authentic relationship is with each other, evident in the classic diner scene where the antagonists meet for coffee and confessions.

The Insider (1999)

Like Ali, Ferrari, and The Last of the Mohicans, this fact-based drama finds Mann stretching beyond his favorite subject of perpetrators and police. But even in the confines of broadcast journalism, his scene-making is no less explosive. Journalist Lowell Bergman ’66 (Pacino, again at his very best) puts everything on the line to interview a tobacco-industry whistleblower (Russell Crowe) on 60 Minutes. As if tossed in a tempest, Mann’s whirling camera evokes the storm clouds in Bergman’s soul.

Ali (2001)

Mann puts conventional biopics to shame with his large-canvas portrait of Muhammad Ali (Will Smith), who taunts and transforms American culture in the fraught decade between 1964 and 1974. The director nimbly dodges the genre’s clichés by emphasizing offbeat moments rather than on-the-nose exposition. He uses every weapon in his filmmaking arsenal to bring the boxing matches to life, and his speedy, swirling, scrappy camera work matches his subject’s pugilistic style. But Mann’s greatest achievement in Ali — what distinguishes it in a crowded field of Ali books, articles, and documentaries — is going beyond the bluster to capture the champ’s complex inner life.

Collateral (2004)

While Heat is an epic clash of alpha males, this existentialist thriller pits alpha vs. beta — with surprising results. Vincent (Tom Cruise) is an assassin who arrives in Los Angeles with a hit list and a will to power reminiscent of Nietzsche’s superman. Max (Jamie Foxx) is an all-too-human cabbie who picks up Vincent and reluctantly takes the ride of his life through the city’s neon-lit underworld. Mann delivers all the cinematic pleasures he’s known for, including career-peak performances by top actors and stylish action sequences heavy on guns and gamesmanship. He also delivers something he’s not necessarily known for: humor, arising from the contrasts in this oddest of odd couples. •

Thanks to the proximity of major research universities like UW–Madison, the five Great Lakes make up one of the most studied and documented watersheds in the world. Yet even with so much attention from scientists and conservationists, animals in and around the Great Lakes are facing increased pressure from climate change, pollution, invasive species, and habitat loss due to land development.

The Kirtland’s warbler (above) and the American pine marten (below) are two of the candidates for a Great Lakes biobank that will store animal DNA to stave off species decline. iStock

It’s a not-so-slow-moving crisis, and the environmental outlook for the Great Lakes is part of the ongoing, massive decline in animal populations worldwide, with two million species at significant risk of extinction, according to the latest analysis by the United Nations. The situation has inspired UW researchers to explore a new way to stave off biodiversity loss in Earth’s largest freshwater ecosystem: a large-scale genetic biobank that could store animal DNA for decades, ideally without relying on subzero refrigerators.

Along with developing the new technologies to make a biobank of this scale possible, UW researchers are pioneering an ethical approach to animal DNA collection that will prioritize Indigenous community partners from the very beginning of the process. This combination of innovative science with a commitment to environmental justice is poised to fundamentally impact the emerging field of conservation genetics, which applies scientific tools to stave off species decline and extinction.

Take That to the (Bio)Bank

“Right now, we’re in a stage where we are very reactive when it comes to biobanking,” says genetics and medical genetics professor Francisco Pelegri, who is leading the new biobank initiative at the UW in close partnership with Paul Robbins, the dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and a professor of environmental studies and geography.

Currently, conservation geneticists tend to focus on projects that aim to bring species back from functional extinction, such as an effort in Kenya to save the northern white rhinoceros. Researchers there are creating embryos from the few remaining northern white individuals and implanting those embryos into female southern rhinos. While these techniques could succeed in bringing back several northern whites, Pelegri says that in these cases, even if the resulting offspring survive, there still may not be enough genetic diversity left to build a healthy population long-term.

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In populations that aren’t genetically diverse enough, the negative effects of inbreeding can occur within just a few generations. To prevent this, he says, a species needs at least 50 individuals (none of them clones). But that would only prevent immediate problems. To ensure genetic diversity over time, a population needs at least 500 individuals, and ideally 1,000 or more. That number is much higher than emergency efforts can produce — efforts such as the ones designed to save near-extinct species. The Tasmanian devil, the vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of California, and the Yangtze River dolphin in China all have only a few dozen individuals left, at best. When populations drop to such a severely low level, the species enters what’s known as the “extinction vortex,” where additional reproduction simply hastens the genetic consequences of inbreeding.

“Going forward, what we want is to be more proactive, where you basically have a lot of samples ahead of time while we can still find them,” Pelegri says. “This is why it’s important to biobank now.”

That’s one of the core lessons about bioconservation that Pelegri emphasizes both in the lab and in the classroom. In 2015, he launched an undergraduate course called Developmental Genetics for Conservation and Regeneration that offered an optional spring field trip to Costa Rica to give students some active experience with bioconservation projects. Four students enrolled in the pilot semester, but by 2020 the demand had grown to almost 100 students, and Pelegri began to teach the class year-round. Word also spread among faculty members, including Robbins.

Robbins is a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in Berkeley, California. Through the institute’s network, he met the geneticists who made headlines in 2021 by successfully cloning a black-footed ferret from 30-year-old frozen cells. The work reintroduced a genetic lineage to a “perilously narrow” species, and it inspired Robbins to explore how traditional conservationists like him could work alongside geneticists on high-impact, high-profile projects.

“The more I asked around, the more I realized there were already people hard at work thinking about this in Madison,” Robbins says. “When I suddenly realized the UW was in a leading position on this topic, as a dean of an institute that’s supposed to help people coordinate, I got excited.”

Robbins reached out to Pelegri to team up on a biobanking grant from the UW2020 initiative, which aimed to reward high-risk research ideas. The grant was originally connected to work Pelegri had planned for upcoming trips to Costa Rica with undergraduate students to collect blood from mosquitoes as an indirect way to gather DNA samples from various protected species, which are otherwise mostly off-limits to sampling. But when the COVID-19 pandemic halted university travel, the biobank partners began to think about research opportunities closer to home.

Pelegri has posted photos of endangered species in his office as a reminder of what’s at risk if we don’t prioritize animal conservation. Bryce Richter

“One of the things we were thinking about was how do you prioritize [conservation] from an ethical perspective?” says Pelegri. “We started working with Aldo Leopold’s land-based ethics of preservation.”

In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold, the former UW professor and legendary conservationist, argued that humans have a moral responsibility to the natural world and are uniquely called upon to care for the land and develop strong relationships with all parts of the earth.

Gradually, Pelegri and Robbins turned their attention north toward the Great Lakes Basin and to the possibility of biobanking all of the animal species there. They’ve also begun to build a cross-campus coalition of UW faculty from a wide range of disciplines to draft grant applications and explore other opportunities to start moving the Great Lakes biobank forward.

No Freezer? No Problem

The concept of animal biobanking sounds not so different from the large-scale plant seed banks that are now cropping up at universities around the world in an effort to protect native and endangered species for the future. But storing animal DNA is far more complicated and costly than storing plant seeds. Existing biobanks use subzero freezers to hold tissues for decades, which is a lot of time — there may be accidents, power outages, political instability, or human errors. Last summer, a freezer was mistakenly turned off at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and 25 years of animal cell cultures were lost overnight.

Keeping samples at subzero temperatures is also expensive, which tends to limit the kinds of research facilities that are able to work with tissues that require cold storage. “If you walk through any lab complex, you’re going to see loads of freezers and refrigerators, and we assume that’s essentially just the cost of doing business,” says biomedical engineering professor William Murphy, who is one of the primary collaborators on the biobank initiative. “But if there were alternatives [to subzero freezers], they could be quite transformative.”

For the UW2020 grant, Murphy’s and Pelegri’s labs partnered to explore several projects related to the challenge of preserving organic tissues long-term at room temperature. In particular, they studied the genetic profile of tardigrades, the highly resilient micro-animals that have the remarkable ability to desiccate themselves for long stretches of time and then rehydrate and carry on with no obvious effects on their health. Additionally, both labs are looking at model organisms such as zebra fish to study various gene transplant techniques.

Wood turtles have suffered substantial declines in the last century. iStock

Currently, Murphy is focused on work inspired by nature’s most effective form of extremely long-term storage: fossils. “What we’re mimicking in nature is the ability of fossils to stabilize biological molecules,” he says.

For the past few years, Murphy’s team has been generating a library of almost 100 minerals they can produce in the lab, and they’ve screened each one to identify whether and how it can work to stabilize biological molecules. For instance, Murphy sees potential in a class of fossilized minerals called calcium phosphates, which are the same kinds of minerals found in bones and teeth. The minerals can be useful as stabilizers of the proteins, DNA, and RNA that will form the building blocks of biobanked species. Recently, they’ve also been combining mineral ions with strands of therapeutic RNA, the same type of RNA used in COVID-19 vaccines. “We’ve been able to identify materials that stabilize the RNA for several months, even at room temperature,” he says.

It’s the first step on a long road, but it could have benefits beyond biobanking, making it possible to stock laboratories, hospitals, or even airplanes with “freeze-dried” biological tissues for a wide range of human medical uses (see sidebar).

You Don’t Biobank Somebody’s Family without Asking First

While some collaborators, like Murphy, focus on the groundbreaking technologies needed to make the biobank possible, Robbins is leading the conversation on how to ensure that the application of these innovations balances with broader ethical considerations.

“People need to know that we aren’t going mad-scientist on this,” says Robbins. “This is a very deliberate, very thoughtful, publicly engaged exercise that starts by listening, for example, to the tribes [in the Great Lakes region].”

The Karner blue butterfly and whooping cranes (below) are among the species facing threats from habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and other factors. iStock

More than 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is thought to be on lands that belong to or are actively managed by Indigenous communities. In the Great Lakes region, several tribes have federally protected comanagement authority of certain areas. That means scientists like the UW biobank partners not only should consult Indigenous partners on decisions related to sampling, storing, and using genetic materials from species on those lands — in many cases, they legally must.

To that end, Robbins and Pelegri recently coauthored a journal article, along with Hilary Habeck Hunt PhDx’25 and Jonathan Gilbert PhD’00, the biological sciences director at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which is the agency responsible for protecting the hunting, fishing, and gathering rights of 11 Ojibwe tribes across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Titled “Sovereign Genes,” the article was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science and outlines a set of principles for collaboration between scientists and Indigenous communities to employ genetic tools responsibly in wildlife conservation.

“The serious, historic mistakes made in human genetic biobanking and the way in which those efforts harm[ed] Indigenous communities provide lessons that can be used to plan for wildlife biopreservation in approaches that are responsible, respectful, and potentially collaborative,” the paper states, referring to poor practices by scientists in the past related to informed consent, compensation, and tribal sovereignty, among other issues. “By honoring Indigenous sovereignty and community autonomy, and by working to create or leverage existing formalized agreements, powerful genetic toolkits can be brought to bear in the protection and preservation of species of cultural and conservation significance.”

Robbins says that this unequivocal commitment to not only listening but also showing genuine deference to Indigenous partners is crucial to the biobank’s ultimate success. “Will it be fraught? Yes. But this is an opportunity for tribes to exercise their rights,” he says, adding the hypothetical example of someday obtaining DNA samples from wolves in ceded Ojibwe land in central Wisconsin. “For them, the wolf is kin. You just don’t go biobanking somebody’s family without asking them, especially in ceded territories where they have management rights. By talking to them, we hope to introduce this topic in a sensitive way.”

In time, Robbins and Pelegri also anticipate biobank-related collaborations with other major American and Canadian universities throughout the Great Lakes region. Yet they agree that the UW’s deep talent pool across multiple disciplines — from biomedical scientists and engineers to bioethicists, historians of science, and communication researchers — make it likely that Madison will emerge as the leading regional hub for conservation genetics in the coming years.

“The UW is so good at everything it’s going to take to do this right that we have a responsibility to lead,” says Robbins. “We can’t afford to wait for other people to do it wrong.”

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For Pelegri, the moral imperative of the biobank is also closely tied to the role of humans in climate change and biodiversity loss. When we think about “fixing” human-induced species loss, we often think in terms of de-extinction efforts. He cites new efforts to revive the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird species in North America, which died out in 1914 after a few decades of excessive hunting and habitat loss. But instead of looking backward at what we’ve lost, Pelegri says, “it’s important to change the narrative and say, [conservation genetics] technology is not just for that. In fact, it’s probably going to be more important for keeping alive what we have right now. … Anything can become extinct.

“If we can preserve genetic diversity now, then if we ever notice that a living population is being affected in the future, we can actively reintroduce that diversity to keep it healthy,” says Pelegri. “And it’s not just for that population — it’s for an entire ecosystem, because everything is related.”

An entire ecosystem like the Great Lakes, for example. And from there, Pelegri hopes to see a global network of interconnected biobanks that offer an extra layer of protection for animal species everywhere. •

Hundreds of years ago, Funmaker tells the group, thousands of Ho-Chunk people flourished on the land along the lakeshore. It was a thriving center for tribal resources and trade, with prosperous fishing, raised garden beds, maple tree stands for sap collecting, and nearly 1,000 effigy burial mounds.

“Imagine Ho-Chunk clan villages all over this area, their dwellings ringing Lake Mendota, which the Ho-Chunk called Waaksikhomik,” Funmaker says.

The stop was one of several that day on the First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour, a popular educational offering that began modestly two decades ago and has evolved into a campus institution. The walking tour of up to two hours examines the 12,000-plus years of human existence documented along the shores of Lake Mendota, particularly the history of the Ho-Chunk Nation, on whose ancestral land the university now sits.

Participants view the unique double-tailed water spirit burial mound near Agricultural Hall — one of dozens of mounds on campus. On another stop, they stand atop Bascom Hill and learn of the campus buildings constructed on mounds, including Bascom Hall and North Hall. And they visit more recent additions to campus, such as the fire circle at Dejope Residence Hall, with its bronze plaques representing the 11 federally recognized American Indian tribes in Wisconsin.

John Zumbrunnen, senior vice provost for academic affairs and vice provost for teaching and learning, says the tour is a deeply important learning opportunity for the campus community, one that combines expert scholarship and engaging storytelling.

Tour guides like Funmaker explain what it’s like to be Ho-Chunk at UW–Madison.

“So many people on campus and in the community are committed to honoring the Indigenous cultures that have long called this special place home. One way to do that is by learning about the land and its history.”

It is indeed a rich history. There are more Indigenous burial mounds in a greater variety at UW–Madison than on any other university or college campus in North America, says state archaeologist Amy Rosebrough MA’96, PhD’10. “These mounds are an extremely rare resource.”

For something so embedded in the campus terrain, the tour began informally and with little fanfare. Its genesis can be traced to the hiring of Aaron Bird Bear MS’10 in 2000 as the American Indian student academic services coordinator in the College of Letters & Science. His charge was to support the academic, cultural, and social needs of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students.

But not long after arriving, Bird Bear identified a shocking problem.

“I Didn’t Ask Anyone’s Permission”

Aside from the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program, there was hardly anything related to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians visible on campus.

“I was appalled at the complete lack of infrastructure — the complete lack of commitment — to Indigenous people in any sincere way, shape, or form,” says Bird Bear, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Diné Nations who is enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.

Bird Bear set out to change that. Along with the late Ada Deer ’57, a pioneering Native American activist and director of the UW American Indian Studies program at the time, he reactivated and cotaught American Indian Studies 150 and 151, courses that introduce students to current American Indian issues. At one of these classes, Deer invited Daniel Einstein MS’95 to give a guest lecture. Einstein, the campus historic and cultural resources manager, took the class on a walking tour of some of the campus sites with Native history, including the Ho-Chunk effigy mounds on Observatory Hill.

“I was astounded,” Bird Bear recalls. “I didn’t know that all of this history was here.”

Bird Bear took what Einstein had taught him, expanded on it, and stitched together a walking tour that “would lift the colonial veneer that obscures the Indigeneity of this space,” he says.

The result was the First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour. Bird Bear began giving tours in 2003 simply as a service to Indigenous students. He wanted them to feel a connection to the land and to know that they belonged on campus. Word spread, and soon many others were inquiring about the tour, including teachers-in-training, staff members seeking professional development, and instructors looking to expose their students to Native history. More than 25,000 people have now taken the free tour. It’s a remarkable outcome for an idea Bird Bear says he never officially pitched to anyone. He credits then-Chancellor John Wiley MS’65, PhD’68 with giving him the confidence to launch the tour.

“He told me, ‘Women and minorities too often wait for approval to do something. That’s not how this place works. Just go do something and tell me when it works.’ ”

So that’s what Bird Bear did. “I didn’t ask anyone’s permission,” he says. “I just started giving tours.”

“This Is a Sacred Place to Me”

Until recently, almost all the tours were led by Bird Bear and Omar Poler ’07, MA’10, the Indigenous education coordinator with the Office of the Provost. The two took on the role in addition to their official university duties, fitting in tours whenever they could. Bird Bear later became the university’s first tribal relations director. He retired in 2023, which underscored the need for a different approach to the tour, one that would ensure its long-term viability.

The tour is now offered through a partnership between Campus and Visitor Relations and the Office of the Provost, putting it on firmer footing. To meet demand, the university recently increased the number of tour guides from two to nine. For the first time, some of the tour guides are UW–Madison students, and several are Ho-chunk, including Funmaker, who studies in the School of Human Ecology. This adds another compelling aspect to the experience. Participants hear directly from current students about what it is like to be Ho-Chunk at UW–Madison.

Silas Cleveland x’25, a history major, says being a tour guide is helping him explore his own complicated feelings about the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Wisconsin and at the university. He is Ho-Chunk and often weaves personal stories into the tours he leads.

Being a tour guide helps Cleveland explore his own complicated feelings about the treatment of Indigenous peoples.

“It means the world to me to be part of these tours,” he says. “This is a sacred place to me. I want people — especially my fellow students — to understand that there is so much more to the history and culture of Wisconsin than beer and cheese.”

The guides bring a mix of backgrounds, interests, and personal histories, which enriches the experience for tour participants, says Poler, a member of the Mole Lake Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Faculty and staff members also lead tours, along with students.

“Each tour guide is going to bring something different to the role and share it in a different way,” he says. “Someone could go on this tour any number of times and see history and the land through a different lens each time.”

“A Counternarrative”

During the stop on Bascom Hill, tour guides point out the “Our Shared Future” heritage marker near South Hall. It acknowledges the circumstances that led to the forced removal of the Ho-Chunk from their ancestral home — a land they call Teejop — and pledges a shared future of collaboration and innovation between UW–Madison and the Ho-Chunk Nation. At a dedication ceremony in 2019, then-Chancellor Rebecca Blank said she hoped the marker would start a conversation that “moves us from ignorance to awareness.”

For Brenda Owen ’96, MS’99, PhDx’24, a doctoral candidate in nursing, it’s an apt description of her own journey at UW–Madison. Even though she is Ho-Chunk, she had little idea of the land’s history until taking the tour many years ago.

“I was sort of dumbfounded,” she recalls. “How could I hike up Bascom Hill every day but not know that North Hall and Bascom Hall were built on top of mounds?”

She took the tour a second time.

“It was as if the first tour revealed to me my ancestral and historical connections to the land,” Owen says, “and the second tour awakened an active relationship with the environmental elements.”

Bird Bear’s original intent has been realized, she says.

“As a First Nations student, I experienced campus through the lens of the First Nations Cultural Landscape Tour, and it provided me with a deeper sense of belonging and of fitting in.”

Owen is now a project assistant for the tour and a tour guide herself. She sees the tour’s impact daily. It is common for tour participants to applaud at the close of a tour and to send unsolicited emails and cards thanking the tour guides.

“My hope is that all students — not just First Nations students — be given the opportunity to experience the campus and Teejop from this perspective,” Owen says. “The tour is a counternarrative of sorts. There is a rich history of 12,000-plus years of human presence with this land. UW–Madison has been here less than 2 percent of that time. I’m glad our university is expanding the narrative to be more inclusive.” •