Like many cities in the United States, Milwaukee faces complicated decisions about how to prioritize the replacement of lead pipes. That’s where a powerful tool built by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has become indispensable.

The Area Deprivation Index, or ADI, connects millions of data points related to employment, education, income, and housing quality to U.S. Census data to provide a user-friendly map of American neighborhoods ranked by their relative advantage — or disadvantage. The free online tool helps hundreds of organizations like Milwaukee Water Works target their limited resources in addressing public health challenges.

The ADI is a project of the Center for Health Disparities Research, a federally funded program at UW–Madison that promises to improve policy decisions and transform how health care is delivered across the nation. The center’s researchers are also hard at work untangling the complex reasons why people in more disadvantaged areas tend to be sicker and die earlier.

The Air You Breathe

The principle underpinning the Area Deprivation Index is that people’s health is determined not just by their genes but also the environments where they live and work.

“It’s the whole nature-versus-nurture idea — and the real answer is that it is both,” says Amy Kind ’96, MD’01, PhD’11, a geriatrician in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center for Health Disparities Research. Founded in 2021, the center houses an interdisciplinary team of researchers. Its aim is to better understand how people’s unique circumstances and environments affect their health and to improve policy and health care decisions based on those findings.

“We know that diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer are partly determined by your genetics, but a whole bunch of it isn’t,” says Kind. “Things like your lifestyle, the air you breathe, and the world around you play a huge role.”

While residents in urban neighborhoods face challenges like noise that disrupts their sleep and more days of poor air quality, Kind points out that rural life can carry its own health risks — ones that she herself may have been exposed to during her childhood deep in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in the tiny village of Niagara.

“Depending on where you live or where you grew up, you might be exposed to toxins like arsenic from your well water or pesticides from farms,” she says.

Ultimately, everyone deals with certain environmental health risks, but those who live in so-called high-ADI areas contend with more risks or more serious ones.

The Center for Health Disparities Research, also known as CHDR (pronounced “cheddar” — this is Wisconsin, after all), specializes in the social factors that influence human health and disease, including transportation access, pollution exposure, and food security. CHDR has become the nation’s premier center for the study of these social factors. After years of combing through reams of public data with critical funding support from the National Institutes of Health, Kind and her colleagues published their first version of the Area Deprivation Index in 2014. It has since been updated and refined as new census data becomes available and is now the most commonly used measure of such social factors in the U.S. The ADI has thousands of users, from health care industry giants to tiny nonprofits to federal agencies such as the Department of Defense.

Available to anyone with access to the internet, the Area Deprivation Index has become a go-to resource for researchers, policymakers, and health care practitioners, some of whom stumble upon it while trying to make sense of patterns they see among their patients or within their communities. And the applications they’ve found for it have been extraordinary.

“A Very Useful Tool”

One such user is Shauna Lively, a nurse and project director for the West Virginia Perinatal Partnership. The organization’s mission is to improve health outcomes in the state for expecting and new mothers and their babies.

“I’m not super technically sophisticated, but I do know how to Google,” says Lively, who found the Area Deprivation Index while searching online for a tool that could help explain social drivers of health in West Virginia for a course she was teaching.

While Lively knew from experience that the state’s poorer and more rural communities had health care challenges, she says the ADI showed this relationship in a clearer and more detailed way than she had seen before.

“Looking at that map really helped me explain some of the issues we have in the state with maternity care and access to care,” says Lively. She then used the Area Deprivation Index to make the case for funding to improve access to health care providers in central West Virginia, where poverty and remoteness have long been barriers to quality health care. The West Virginia Perinatal Partnership was awarded a grant in 2021 and has since employed the ADI to prioritize maternal care resources in an eight-county region with historically poor perinatal health outcomes.

“We’ve found the ADI to be a very useful tool in trying to understand where we are with resources, or lack thereof,” says Lively. “We’re using it to see where we can target our outreach. We have so much appreciation for the folks who built the tool — I think it was very forward-thinking.”

The ADI’s uses are as varied as the health challenges its users are trying to address. Researchers have incorporated it into an algorithm for targeting neighborhoods in Chicago for rat extermination. The U.S. Social Security Administration uses the ADI to better understand the relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and participation in its child supplemental income program. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas has used it to assess pediatric airway surgery patients for additional interventions.

And then there are the lead lines in Milwaukee.

A Eureka Moment

The Milwaukee water utility began incorporating the Area Deprivation Index into its strategy for replacing lead lines in 2024. That followed guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources that municipalities should include disadvantaged neighborhoods in their criteria for prioritizing replacement work.

Patrick Pauly, superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works, recalls learning about the Area Deprivation Index as a eureka moment. He was attending a conference for water utility professionals, and representatives of the Washington, DC, utility described how they were incorporating the ADI into their strategy for replacing lead lines.

“So we did some research, and the ADI provided exactly what we needed,” says Pauly.

That’s because its scoring system is simple and intuitive and based on factors the city needed to account for, including housing, income, and education level. Built around census blocks, the Area Deprivation Index is also granular enough to provide actionable information about individual neighborhoods.

The Area Deprivation Index connects millions of data points to provide user-friendly maps of American neighborhoods ranked by their relative advantage or disadvantage. Will Buckingham

The ADI came into play as the utility worked with the city’s elected officials to change an ordinance that had previously required property owners to share the cost of replacing lead service lines — a prospect that was simply unrealistic in neighborhoods riddled with the old pipes.

In addition to changing that ordinance, the city adopted a new prioritization system built largely around the Area Deprivation Index. It significantly expanded the replacement program from around 1,100 replacements in 2023 to a goal of 5,000 in 2026 and beyond. The primary benefit of the ADI, Pauly says, is that it provides an evidence-based approach to expanding replacement work from individual homes to entire neighborhoods.

“Coming from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and being online where people can look it up made the conversations so much easier,” says Pauly. “It was a very trusted, respected, simple, and easily explained method that provided us a huge benefit.”

While the Area Deprivation Index shows where deprivation can worsen health risks, scientists at the Center for Health Disparities Research are also hard at work to understand how social factors interact with biology to cause disease.

Writing Your Future

Kind says that living in adverse environments actually gets under the skin and leads to worse health.

“A lot of the work that goes on at CHDR is trying to figure out why that happens, and then how we can change it.”

These questions have opened doors to innovative studies, particularly in understanding the aging brain and how social factors affect the risk for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. CHDR is leading a $38 million national study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to examine how lifelong social exposures shape the brain.

“One of the interesting things about the brain is it interacts with the environment like no other organ,” says Kind.

Scientists at 23 sites across the U.S. begin with tissue from individuals who donated their brains to research after their deaths. Some of the samples go as far back as the 1980s.

A team of historians pieces together each person’s life history through obituaries, military records, and census records, back to the point of birth.

“We can connect an entire lifetime of experiences to where they’ve lived and then link that to exposures,” says Kind. “We can understand what air you were breathing during certain periods of your life. We can understand what water you were probably drinking, what schools you were going to, where you were deployed if you were in the military.”

These reconstructed life histories are then linked with neuropathology, genomics, and imaging data. The result is a robust dataset connecting lived experience to biological outcomes, and CHDR scientists are drawing some sobering conclusions about the risks of social deprivation to brain health. For instance, childhood exposure to adverse environments increases the risk of cerebrovascular disease eight to twelvefold.

“These are exposures in your childhood writing your future 50 years from now,” says Kind.

These findings underscore the biological weight of disadvantage, she adds, and the potential impact of interventions that incorporate the Area Deprivation Index.

But while the Center for Health Disparities Research is already making an impact across the U.S., its reach is being supercharged by a partnership closer to home.

Where It’s Harder to Be Healthy

Verona, Wisconsin’s Epic Systems, founded by Judith Faulkner MS’67, is the nation’s largest provider of electronic health record software. Epic’s Cosmos dataset contains more than 300 million anonymized patient records, enabling insights into patient outcomes to improve care and advance medicine. Many organizations started participating in Cosmos during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the need for up-to-date data became more urgent. Cosmos has evolved into a powerful engine for rapid research and clinical pattern-finding, according to Jackie Gerhart ’04, Epic’s chief medical officer. Recognizing the importance of geography to health, Gerhart says Epic wanted to incorporate data that could help researchers identify patterns based on life circumstances.

“We realized that we had a couple of different ways to measure disparities, but the ADI work being done at UW was the most in-depth,” Gerhart says.

While that depth requires more data entry, it also translates into better insights. So far, ADI metrics have been incorporated into around 130 million patient records. Gerhart sees a future where the Area Deprivation Index reshapes how organizations spot and support patients whose needs extend beyond their visit to a clinic.

For Kind, it’s personal, given her roots in rural Niagara.

“When we look at Niagara on the ADI, it’s one of the most disadvantaged places in Wisconsin,” she says. “When I’m writing a research grant for the National Institutes of Health, I am thinking about towns like Niagara, where it’s harder to be healthy. It’s my mission as a professor at UW–Madison to advance research that improves their lives.”

After the students weighed in, Assistant Professor Dantiel Moniz MFA’18 gave her take.

“A short story is a slice of something that represents the invisible whole around you,” she told them. “You are suggesting an entire world, an entire life, that goes beyond this last page. I love a story where the ending is more like a window than a door. It allows me, as the reader, to never really leave the story.”

The students nodded, aware that they were learning from a top practitioner of the craft. In 2021, Moniz’s debut short story collection, Milk Blood Heat, was published to great acclaim, earning a raft of industry awards and anointing Moniz an up-and-coming literary star. Her highly anticipated first novel is scheduled to be published next year.

The 11 stories in Milk Blood Heat are set in Moniz’s home state of Florida and give rich voice to the interior lives of Black women and girls.

“From meticulously executed twist endings to striking imagery, Moniz has an impressive handle on all aspects of the short story,” wrote the Berkeley Fiction Review. The Washington Post said reading one of Moniz’s stories “is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing.” The Chicago Review of Books found it difficult to imagine the book as a debut “given that the stories read with the ease of an author well into an established career.” Moniz was named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly and Apple Books, and Milk Blood Heat was chosen as a “must-read” by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, O, BuzzFeed, and others. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and it was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Story Prize.

“It’s rare for a first book to make the kind of splash Milk Blood Heat did with both critics and readers,” says Amy Quan Barry, the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at UW–Madison and herself an acclaimed novelist, poet, and playwright. The fact that Moniz’s book is a short-story collection only amplifies the achievement, Quan Barry says. Publishers tend to favor novels, viewing them as easier to market to the public.

“When a book like Milk Blood Heat has so much success, it demonstrates that readers are hungering for engrossing and carefully crafted work regardless of length,” Quan Barry says, adding that she’s excited to have Moniz, her former student, as a faculty colleague now.

How Moniz came to be a Badger is a tale that surprises even Moniz, though it speaks to something she’s trying to do more of — trust her gut.

“A Little Voice Inside of Me”

Moniz had never visited Wisconsin and knew no one in the state when she moved to Madison alone in 2016 at age 26. She was looking to pursue a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and had been accepted to several programs, including the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. For many aspiring writers, the reputation of the Iowa program would have shut down any further considerations. But Moniz couldn’t shake the feeling that UW–Madison was a better fit for her.

She liked the deliberately small size of the UW’s MFA program. It typically admits just six students each year, alternating between fiction one year and poetry the next. “I was drawn to the intense level of personal mentoring here,” Moniz says.

She appreciated the UW’s generous financial aid offer and felt an immediate connection with Professor Judith Claire Mitchell, who helped found the UW’s graduate program in creative writing in 2003.

“The acceptance letter she wrote me made me feel so seen,” Moniz says. “She wasn’t even trying to sell me on the program. She just let me know that she was already proud of me as a writer.”

And then there was the intangible. “I have a little voice inside of me that is very clear,” Moniz says. “It’s not coming from my head. It’s coming from the center of me. Whenever I’ve listened to that gut feeling, it’s never led me wrong.”

“A Great First Paragraph”

That voice told her she was supposed to be at the UW. She’s never looked back. The UW enveloped her in a robust writing community, something she’d been craving since her youth in Jacksonville, Florida, where she attended an arts magnet school and fell in with a creative writing crowd. Schoolmate Sabrina Enders befriended Moniz as a freshman — she calls her Dee. Enders remembers the two furiously sharing journal entries, engaging in sometimes “brutal” critiques of each other’s work, and creating a faux fashion magazine together.

“We were playing at being writers, always imagining what our lives could be like if we pursued it as a career,” says Enders, a social worker who remains Moniz’s close friend. “Dee stuck with it, and I’m not surprised. She’s very intentional. She sees what she wants and focuses on it.”

The magnet school chose students through a competitive portfolio process. “It was the first time I had to audition for something I really, really wanted,” Moniz says. “When I was accepted, people couldn’t believe I would be attending a high school that didn’t even have a sports program. Writing was our extracurricular activity.”

Still, it would be a few years before Moniz landed on the idea of trying to earn a living by writing. And there were detours along the way. She tried Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg, then a community college before briefly moving to Washington state and working at an Abercrombie & Fitch store. Broke, she returned to Jacksonville and tended bar and waitressed. Of this period, she says, “The life experiences were happening.” The struggles provided grist for some of her early fiction.

Moniz returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Florida State University in 2012. By this time, she had amassed tens of thousands of words of unpublished fiction and felt in need of further mentoring. She used an eight-page short story titled “Outside the Raft” to apply to the UW. The story follows two young girls during a pivotal day on a beach that illuminates their differing paths. It would later end up in Milk Blood Heat. There were more than 600 applicants for six fiction spots at the UW the year Moniz applied. She learned years later that she was far from a shoo-in. The initial screener who read her short story submission placed her application in the “no” pile. Moniz says it’s important for other writers, especially young ones, to hear such stories, as fiction is a subjective art form requiring great perseverance.

Mitchell, who was director of the MFA program at the time, rescued Moniz’s application.

“Sometimes people miss things, they’re tired, they’re reading for their own taste,” says Mitchell, who retired in 2018. “I made it my business to go through the submission folders at the end of the screening process just to look at everyone’s first paragraphs.”

She pulled out Moniz’s short story, and “to my shock, holy moly, this is a great first paragraph,” Mitchell remembers thinking. “And by the end, I thought, ‘This is the best thing I’ve read in years.’ It was my prerogative as director to put it forward, and I did.”

“I Had This Deep Sense of Fear”

Moniz describes her two years as a UW graduate student as nearly ideal — once she got over an initial period of imposter syndrome.

“I felt super-supported here,” she says. “I got a lot of work done — numerous short stories, the first draft of a novel — and I learned how to teach creative writing.” (MFA students teach courses in creative writing and English composition and are provided a semester of teacher-training and support.)

While a student at the UW, Moniz acquired an agent and began attracting national attention for her short stories, earning publication in Ploughshares, Tin House, Pleiades, and Apogee Journal, among others. Back in Jacksonville after graduation, she entered into conversations with multiple publishers for Milk Blood Heat, choosing New York-based Grove Atlantic. It was another trust-your-gut moment. Though larger publishers were showing interest, she liked Grove Atlantic’s reputation for cultivating and sticking with young talent.

The night before Milk Blood Heat came out, Moniz barely slept.

“Writing is a solitary practice until it isn’t,” she says. “I had this deep sense of fear — oh, no, everyone is going to read it and I’ll be exposed. This thing I created will have its own life and I will no longer be able to control it.”

She had little to fear.

“To get the kind of recognition her book received — well, it’s the jackpot. She hit it big,” says Mitchell, who remains close to Moniz. “And to have it happen to such a nice person made it even sweeter.”

A writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books praised Moniz’s command of language, saying, “Her sentences are something I want to hold up to the light and study in detail to understand just how they do what they do.” Elle magazine said Moniz addresses “charged subjects of racial identity, family obligation, romantic entanglement, and wholehearted friendship, always lingering on fragile moments that are quotidian in scale but existential in meaning.”

Moniz says the response from critics and readers has been gratifying, though “there comes a point where you have to detach yourself from it. The book is just out there having its own life now, and I can’t be attached to that life because I still have things to do.”

“The Most Fun Thing on Earth”

Those things include teaching and keeping her own writing going. After earning her MFA, Moniz taught for a semester at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton as a visiting assistant professor, then began a two-year lectureship at the UW in the spring of 2021. The lectureship turned into her tenure-track professorship in English.

“Because I had such a positive experience here, I want that for my students, too,” she says. “Seeing them come into their own or understand something about their own process — that is the most fun thing on earth.”

Senior Jamie Restieri x’26, a double major in film and creative writing from Greenwich, Connecticut, took Moniz’s advanced creative writing course last fall. Prior to the course, he read the first story in Milk Blood Heat and was so impressed he immediately bought a copy of the book for his mom.

“When I found out I could take a class with her, I had to do it,” Restieri says of Moniz. “She’s already a master of what she does. It’s insane that we have a chance to get to learn from someone like that.”

“It’s Part of Being Human”

Moniz devotes Mondays through Thursdays to students and university work, then tries to carve out writing time for herself on long weekends. “Has that gone perfectly? No,” she says, laughing. “But I am writing.”

She is not an early riser or a write-every-day kind of writer, but once she focuses, she can write for hours, especially at a coffee shop.

Moniz is most interested in writing about the things people don’t say, especially those things that have shame or guilt or “badness” attached to them.

“I want to lift up the rock and see all the little albino creatures crawling underneath there, even if it’s a little gross or makes people uncomfortable. I want to know that stuff because it’s part of being human. We would do a lot less harm to ourselves and to others if we understood that the very temporary feelings we all have that might be thought of as wrong or bad are really just natural and human. It doesn’t make you a bad person.” Moniz had a realization about her writing after the death of her mother in 2022 from complications of COVID-19.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you lose someone who means so much to you,” she says. “I really didn’t know that motherhood and daughterhood were major themes for me. But now I realize that even the stories that aren’t about that are about that.”

Her mother’s voice continues to speak to Moniz. It helps her process all the things that have happened to her since moving to Wisconsin. And it helps her to keep trusting her instincts.

“At one point, I told my mom, ‘I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s happening too easily. What’s the catch?’ And my mom said, ‘Maybe there is no catch. Maybe there doesn’t have to be one when you’re on the right path.’ ”

For 17 years, Matthew Becker ’96 has called the Luangwa Valley home. As CEO of the Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP), he leads one of Africa’s longest-lasting efforts to safeguard large carnivores and ecosystems. The program has a team of nearly 100 people working in five ecosystems to protect more than 1,200 carnivores each year — big cats, wild dogs, and hyenas — from snaring, poisoning, poaching, and other threats. Becker’s path to Zambia began in Bozeman, Montana, where he grew up with academic parents who’d met in graduate school at the UW. Michael MBA’64, PhD’71 and Stephanie Becker ’63, MA’64 raised their son to be curious and to feel a personal connection with the natural world.

“I think my parents, who learned this in part from their time at Madison, really emphasized the importance of education and also the importance of doing something bigger than yourself and making a contribution in the world,” Becker says. “I was one of those kids who knew from around age five what I wanted to do. I always wanted to work with wild animals.”

Deciding where to attend college was easy for Becker, thanks to his family’s connection — and thanks to the fact that the UW happened to have one of the top-ranked programs in wildlife ecology. But he didn’t enroll immediately after high school. Instead, he did several internships at wildlife refuges across the United States, and by the time he moved to Madison, he was ready to take his coursework seriously.

Becker knew from the time he was five that he wanted to work with wild animals. Marcus Westberg

As an incoming freshman, Becker met Robert Garrott, then an assistant professor of wildlife ecology, at a department social. “[Garrott] stood out as someone who was very enthusiastic and helpful, who genuinely enjoyed assisting young people just starting out in the field,” he says.

A year later, Becker saw a flyer for a field assistant position in Yellowstone with Garrott and graduate student P.J. (Patrick) White PhD’96. “It pretty much read like a litany of how you could get killed during backcountry fieldwork: freeze to death, drown in icy rivers, get buried in an avalanche, fall in geothermal pools, bison goring, grizzly mauling in the spring, etc.,” Becker says. “Starry-eyed, I was immediately sold and promptly marched into Bob’s office and declared my interest in the job.”

The Making of a Conservationist

He didn’t get it. But he did get a mentor who offered an independent study instead, also in Yellowstone, and Becker jumped at the chance. He describes the first season working with Garrott as one of the most enjoyable of his career. It set the stage for several decades of work. Garrott encouraged Becker to get a wide variety of experience and not to be in a hurry to get to graduate school or start a professional job. “ ‘Enjoy these years,’ he would say. ‘There’s no rush.’ ”

Becker graduated in December 1996 with a triple major in wildlife ecology, entomology, and biological aspects of conservation. With those credentials, he ventured to Antarctica to manage what was at the time the longest-running penguin project on King George Island. He spent five months at a time monitoring Adélie, chinstrap, and gentoo penguins, along with flying seabirds. He also traveled to Alaska and the Arctic to work on various seabird-related projects.

Eventually, Becker landed a job as project manager for the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, a long-term effort to study chimpanzees at the base of the Rwenzori Mountains, along the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was there in 1999 when armed rebel groups roamed the mountains and attacked communities and parks. After rebels targeted Kibale National Park and started moving toward the project area, Becker and his colleagues were quickly evacuated. He was only two months into what was supposed to be a yearlong job. “It was really sad,” he says. “Ugandans are wonderful people, and it was a great project.”

But the chimp project had opened his eyes to a wide range of opportunities in Africa. He moved to the Okavango Delta in Botswana to volunteer for a wild dog project that would eventually evolve into what is now the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Becker only planned to stay for a couple of months, but he fell in love with wild dogs, captivated by their social bonds and cooperative hunting. He spent nearly two years there, becoming an expert at fieldwork and running projects. But he realized that he didn’t have the training needed to become a scientist. By then, his undergraduate mentor, Garrott, was a professor of ecology and the director of the fish and wildlife management program at Montana State University. And so, Becker went back to his hometown of Bozeman — and back to work with Garrott in Yellowstone.

Big-Picture Thinking

In the 1940s, wolves were destroyed in the Yellowstone area as part of a nationwide predator-eradication program. But in 1995, the National Park Service reintroduced wolves, and scientists were eager to understand how that affected the region. Intermittently over the years, Becker had visited the park to help with fieldwork and training on Garrott and White’s project. He’d witnessed the work grow from an elk-monitoring initiative into a 20-year, multidisciplinary effort to understand large mammal dynamics and the impacts of snow, vegetation, geothermal features, and more in addition to the effects of wolf reintroduction.

The National Science Foundation provided a fellowship for Becker’s dissertation, which evaluated predator-prey dynamics among wolves, elk, and bison in central Yellowstone. The work helped him learn how to design and implement long-term, integrated projects in arenas with a lot of controversies and differing values, which struck him as similar to working with lions in Africa. Becker also took note of the broader effects of climate on the species he studied. “We need to align and protect the areas that wolves and elk evolved to coexist in,” he says. This sort of urgent, big-picture thinking would soon become a hallmark of Becker’s vision as a researcher and leader.

As his graduate studies wound down, Becker found himself dreaming of starting his own long-term project somewhere new, and he caught wind of one based in Zambia called African Wild Dog Conservation, which was the first of its kind in that country. Becker was hired on a two-year contract and left Montana for the Luangwa Valley. Seventeen years later, he’s still there. Under Becker, African Wild Dog Conservation expanded into the Zambian Carnivore Programme, which now encompasses a sprawling network of projects across the country involving 15 populations of large carnivores. The work includes reducing conflict between lions and humans in Luangwa; saving carnivores from illegal snares in Kafue National Park; supporting the recovery of carnivore populations in Liuwa Plain National Park after decades of heavy poaching; and monitoring wild dogs across several regions.

“The most important thing is that ZCP is multi-species, multisite, and integrated — we do the same thing in each area for the long term,” Becker says. “We don’t just look at lions, for example. We look at their competitors, their prey, their habitat, and the human influences and drivers.”

Riding Till the Wheels Fall Off

Scott Creel, a distinguished professor of letters and science at Montana State, has worked with ZCP for nearly 15 years as its senior scientist and graduate student adviser. Creel wrote the first scientific book on African wild dogs, based on his work in Tanzania, and he was on Becker’s dissertation committee. “Matt is an exceptional blend of scientist, NGO leader, and diplomat, and I do not know anyone who could have done a better job of building the Zambian Carnivore Programme,” he says. Creel remembers the early years of ZCP, when the team relied mostly on grit and improvisation to get things done. “Sometime around 2012, when we were a small group working on a shoestring, I was meeting up with Matt at our research camp in central Kafue. Shortly after I arrived, Matt came rolling in from Liuwa in an old Land Cruiser that we’d brought down from our research in Kenya. After 10 hours on the road, they pulled up … and a front wheel promptly fell right off,” Creel says. “Lacking any alternatives, we collected the fragments of the wheel bearing from the dirt, cobbled it back together, and carried on.”

For 30 miles, the Land Cruiser limped along with a failing wheel bearing, so slowly the team was able to count the tsetse flies they killed along the way: 1,228, a record that still stands among ZCP scientists.

“The first four years I can confidently say virtually nothing went right,” Becker says. “There were so many daunting challenges, and we had so little money to start these additional projects, like spending three to five thousand dollars for a vehicle, and it was just a complete crucible.”

When ZCP began, there were more important things than the Land Cruiser (which Becker still drives). For example, they weren’t able to provide many opportunities for local Zambian conservationists within the organization. But they persisted, and in 2011, one of the team’s Zambian members received a Fulbright award to pursue a doctorate with Creel at Montana State. The next year Creel received a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to study predator-prey dynamics at ZCP’s sites.

“The grant was ambitious and challenging, but that was the start of things really moving upward fast, and all the work we had put into building the foundation started to pay off,” Becker says. “As we’ve grown, we’ve gotten to a point where now we have some of the largest and longest-running projects on the continent, and there’s a growing interest and opportunity for people across Africa who want to get involved in this work.”

The Resilience of Wild Dogs

The Zambian Carnivore Programme currently partners with nearly 50 organizations, agencies, and institutions, including Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife and several universities around the world. The data its teams collect have informed government policies and dozens of wildlife ecology research papers and projects.

The organization also makes a concerted effort to share its work with the public. The team collaborated with the BBC for five years to produce Kingdom, a documentary released in November 2025 and narrated by David Attenborough. The series follows the real-life sagas of four predator families in Zambia, including wild dogs, lions, leopards, and hyenas. In 2021, ZCP began tracking a wild dog tagged EWD 1355 and her two sisters as they embarked on the longest recorded journey for the species — 1,300 miles across Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique over the course of nine months. A year later, the New York Times published a “dog log” of their travels.

Though Becker says he has a “great appreciation for all creatures, great and small,” he holds a special passion for endangered African wild dogs. Smaller and far less famous than Africa’s other carnivores, they are intensely social and astonishingly resilient. Unlike lion prides, in which the females hunt so the males can eat first, wild dog packs ensure puppies are the first to feed. And they’re cooperative breeders, meaning one female and male pair will produce puppies that are supported by the other adults.

African wild dogs are intensely social and astonishingly resilient. Marcus Westberg

“With all the natural threats and human impacts around them, it’s a miracle they’re able to make a go of it,” Becker says. “They’re amazing animals to watch. They look out for each other and take care of each other. We just had a dog that almost died in a snare this weekend, but our partners were able to rescue it. She basically has no use of her front leg, but she’s alive, and she’ll survive because she can keep up with her sisters, and they’ll feed her and they’ll protect her.”

The resilience of wild dogs carries a lesson for the human conservationists who monitor them. “This is very challenging work,” Becker says. “You never finish, and you never do enough because there are so many challenges for them. But it’s rewarding work.”

Wildlife ecologists, as a professional species, tend to be as peripatetic as wild dogs, and Becker is no different. Yet he seems to have found his home territory in the Luangwa Valley. He lives with his partner, Rachel McRobb, who runs the nonprofit Conservation South Luangwa. “I think it was a combination of working on species that I really was passionate about and being able to start and design long-term projects [that has kept me with ZCP for so long],” he says. “That was always my dream, but I never imagined we’d be doing it at this scale. It can be difficult to accomplish things here, but when you do accomplish them, it can be pretty significant.”

These days, Becker finds himself offering younger conservationists the same advice that Garrott once gave him: start every project as if you’re going to run it for 20 years, and enjoy every season in the field.

Welcome to Wisconsin

Varsity Welcome instruction booklet.

Today’s Wisconsin Welcome spans several weeks and gives incoming students many ways to connect. While Badgers now use an app to plan out their first few weeks and line up for free T-shirts, earlier generations had different methods of exploring campus, meeting new people, and scoping out complimentary refreshments.

In 1913, Scandinavian studies professor Julius Olson 1884 (who later wrote the lyrics to “If You Want to Be a Badger”) proposed a campuswide event to help foster a sense of community and class spirit. Thousands of students, from freshmen to seniors, crowded into the Red Gym for speeches, songs, and fruit punch. By 1920, the gathering had outgrown the indoor space and the Varsity Welcome moved to Bascom Hill. Each class would line up along the grassy slope and, led by the University Regimental Band, seniors would escort incoming freshmen to the Lincoln Terrace for a program and more pageantry. By the 1930s, university officials shifted to a convocation more in line with today’s format. Orientation Week planning was handed over to student leaders and campus organizations to coordinate tours, information sessions, and entertainment, along with smokers (for the men) and teas (for the women). For decades, the Memorial Union hosted a fall kickoff resembling a county fair, com-plete with caramel apples and hot dogs roasted in the Rathskeller fireplace, as well as palm readers, casino games, and film screenings.

Amid all this activity, women were carving their own traditions. From the early 1900s through the 1960s, the UW hosted a separate Women’s Convocation. Usually held under the guidance of the dean of women and other female campus leaders, the event offered incoming women their own dedicated welcome to the university. Residence halls and independent houses also organized welcome events. For students living off campus, Associated Women Students (AWS) sponsored the Big Sister program, pairing first-year “little sisters” with more seasoned students who offered advice on study habits, extracurriculars, and making friends.

AWS produced Wiscetiquette, a pocket-sized guidebook that began as a satirical feature in the Octopus humor magazine — practical advice with a wink. (From the 1956 edition: “Tradition has it that a girl isn’t really a coed until she’s been kissed while Music Hall clock is chiming midnight!”)

Not-So-Warm Welcome

Collegiate class rivalries and initiation rituals date back to the colonial era, and the UW followed suit. Billed as class bonding and good-natured fun, many of these customs veered closer to harassment. As early as the 1870s, university leaders and campus organizations spoke out against hazing. UW President Thomas Chamberlin referred to the practice as “childishly inappropriate”; a student newspaper described hazing as “a meaningless, purposeless, idiotic legacy.”

But before the student body voted in 1909 to abolish hazing, freshmen might have found themselves abducted and stashed in agricultural barns or tied up in a train boxcar. The tradition of “baptizing” freshmen in a blast of bone-chilling water at the old pump in front of North Hall may have given rise to the annual lake rush. That chaotic contest to see who could throw the most opponents off the old boathouse pier ended only after a string of near-drownings and was replaced by the bag rush. For one raucous afternoon, the lower campus became a mud-soaked battlefield as freshmen and sophomores grappled for control of lines of giant straw-stuffed sacks, resulting in plenty of black eyes and broken teeth. Even after these rough-and-tumble rites ceased, freshmen laws lingered. In addition to the infamous green beanies (first-year men were expected to wear them at all times and tap the button on top of the cap when speaking to upperclassmen), male freshmen were forbidden to smoke or even carry a pipe in public; wear a “stiff hat” except to Junior Prom; sit on the gymnasium fence; or visit a saloon.

Women embraced more civilized expressions of class identity. First-year students wore funny outfits to dinner, baked cookies for older students, or carried upperclass students’ books across campus. Before long, female freshmen adopted green buttons as their own version of the beanie, a signal of solidarity that spread: sophomores took the name Red Gauntlets, juniors Yellow Tassels, and seniors Blue Dragons. These groups organized dances, sports contests, and social gatherings, cultivating class pride without the combat. Other rivalries persisted, though. The most notorious was the annual feud between law and engineering students, who debated, with mock sincerity, whether Saint Patrick was properly the patron saint of engineers or of lawyers. The feud began in 1912 and escalated from harmless pranks and a beard-growing contest to mascot kidnappings and pelting each other’s parade floats with insults, eggs, and rotten fruit. After a 5,000-person brawl in 1938, Madison police and UW officials stepped in to put an end to the nonsense. The feud faded, but a separate Law School ritual lives on: graduating law students attempting to toss their canes over the north goalpost at Camp Randall to forecast their luck in their first case.

Classroom Customs

While the cane-toss ritual has survived, most traditions that unfolded in classrooms, lecture halls, or labs have not.

In the 1910s, UW medical professor William Middleton created a lighthearted tradition centered on an old brown derby hat. Borrowing from a popular expression, “That takes the brown derby!” he would place a hat on students who answered questions incorrectly; they had to wear it until the next student erred.

A sound once ubiquitous in UW classrooms was the skyrocket cheer. Badger fans of today may recognize the familiar “Sss … Boom … Ah!” But long before it echoed at sporting events, students launched it across their lecture halls. First-year students learned the cheer during orientation, and for decades, Badgers used the skyrocket to salute favorite professors (especially when class ended early). It’s said that professors like “Wild Bill” Kiekhofer and Benjamin “Benny” Snow rarely made it through a day without receiving one. By the 1950s, the tradition had fizzled in the classroom, but the UW Marching Band has kept it alive by using the vocal salute, followed by a whistle, to mark transitional moments at football games.

Carnivals, Circus Acts, and Cattle Calls… Oh My!

Student life outside the classroom was just as full. Beginning in the 1940s, student organizations transformed the Stock Pavilion into a riot of color, music, and fun with the annual Campus Carnival, part of a yearlong fundraising drive sponsored by the Wisconsin Student Association to support the Campus Community Chest. Nearly every student group devised creative booths and attractions that included mock marriages, comedy skits, and pie throwing.

The carnival evolved from the much earlier Varsity Circus. First held in the Red Gym in 1901 to raise funds for athletics, the circus featured trick bicycle riding, tumbling, trapeze acts, and musical numbers. The final circus, in 1920, opened with a massive street parade leading to the fairgrounds, where sideshow tents and the big top covered the entire lower campus.

The Little International Livestock Show also flourished in the Stock Pavilion, debuting in 1909 shortly after the facility opened. The show-case inspired the creation of the Saddle and Sirloin Club and helped expand student involvement in hands-on animal training and public exhibitions with UW-owned livestock. The annual program, which ran through the late 1990s, typically included parades of beef and dairy cattle, sheep exhibitions, horse-jumping demonstrations, showmanship contests, and student emcees. One year, a greased-pig chase turned the sawdust ring into pure chaos.

Spring Fever

Every year, as the lakes thaw and the Terrace chairs return, winter-weary students rush outside to welcome spring, just like generations of Badgers before them.

Beginning in the early 1900s, the UW hosted separate springtime celebrations for mothers and fathers, with Mothers’ Weekend evolving into a multiday showcase featuring tours, pageants, and athletic events. In 1934, the university combined that with the newer Dads’ Weekend into a single student-run Parents’ Weekend, drawing thousands of families for concerts, honors ceremonies, and a formal banquet at Memorial Union. Today, the tradition lives on in the form of fall’s Family Weekend.

Springtime revelry took many forms. Fasching parties, the German take on Mardi Gras, burst onto the UW scene in the 1950s in — where else? — Der Rathskeller. Polka bands and jazz trios filled the Memorial Union with music, and between free helpings of sauerkraut, wieners, and cheese, partygoers could try their hand at yodeling, pretzel-making, and beer-brewing workshops. In the first half of the 1900s, hundreds would flock to Bascom Hill for May Fete — a Victorian reinterpretation of older Celtic customs — to celebrate the season with singing, dancing, and winding brightly colored ribbons around a collection of tall maypoles.

Venetian Night offered a different kind of spectacle. Canoes and rafts packed with revelers pushed off onto Lake Mendota, drifting through floating lanterns and shimmering water displays before fireworks erupted overhead.

Ballroom Badgers

For much of the 20th century, formal dances were an important centerpiece of campus life. In fact, it wasn’t a social season at the UW without a dance or 10: Homecoming Ball, the Saint Pat’s dance (the grand finale of the engineers’ beard-growing contest), Senior Ball, International Club Ball, Panhellenic and Intra-Fraternity Balls, Pre-Medical School Ball, and a rotation of residence-hall dances. Summer Prom, held from the 1930s through the 1960s, drew students and alumni back to campus for a warm-weather weekend of dancing, live bands, and, depending on the weather, a memorable whiff of midsummer Lake Mendota algae blooms.

Some celebrations even had their own pre-event gatherings. The year’s Badger Beauties were crowned at a pre-prom ceremony, and the Scabbard and Blade Society hosted a Pre-Military Ball a week before the main event. The Military Ball itself was a full-dress formal complete with grand marches and uniformed ROTC pageantry.

The most dazzling of all, though, was the Junior Prom, the successor to several years of informal class parties held in Music Hall. On February 22, 1895, more than 250 couples arrived in carriages for the first of these dances. The newly built Red Gym armory was trimmed with the class colors of yellow and white. Tickets cost $2.50 per couple and included a late-night supper of chicken salad, ham sandwiches, coffee, olives, and almonds. The first UW prom queen, Bessie Bowman Harper x1896, later described the event as “just a simple affair, but a very impressive one.”

Over time, the prom evolved from waltzes and two-steps to tangos and foxtrots and moved to the marbled halls of the state capitol from 1916 to 1928, where dinner was served in the basement restaurant. After the Memorial Union opened, the prom returned to campus until its final run in 1958 — aside from a return to the capitol to celebrate the state’s 100th birthday in the 1948 Centennial Program, which featured music by Lawrence Welk’s orchestra and a late-night balloon drop. Formal dances live on today, evolving to reflect communities and cultures. The Wisconsin Black Student Union has been hosting its Ebony Ball since the 1980s. Last spring, as part of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Heritage Month, the Asian American Student Union put on its sixth annual APIDA Gala. That same month, the UW’s Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps held its own annual Spring Ball.

How Seniors Said Good-bye

For all the traditions that still mark graduation, many others have gone: class sing-alongs on Lincoln Terrace, outdoor “dance dramas” performed in the natural amphitheater behind Bascom Hill, women’s field days on the lower campus, and a senior gala held at Camp Randall.

One of the most striking customs was the Senior Swingout to honor graduating women. On Bascom Hill, younger students clad in white or pastel dresses formed a human archway, and the seniors — wearing traditional black caps and gowns — processed beneath while each class performed its own songs with the backing of the University Regimental Band. This chain was meant to symbolize unity across the classes, and the event became a poignant moment when seniors passed the torch.

Class Day Exercises brought the entire senior class together for a daylong program featuring farewell addresses, class histories and prophecies, and poems. The Senior Play was a popular element of Class Day, with seniors staging productions at the Orpheum Theater on State Street and at the elegant Fuller Opera House on the Capitol Square, which was razed in the 1950s.

From the late 1800s into the early 20th century, Class Day also included two beloved outdoor rites: the Ivy Oration and the Tombstone Ceremony. Inspired by traditions at several East Coast colleges, seniors would plant ivy on Bascom Hill while a designated class orator delivered a closing reflection. Then they’d cross what is now Observatory Drive toward the lake to lay small granite or marble markers, etched with the class year or a favorite phrase. Over the decades, these markers on Muir Knoll occasionally confused unsuspecting visitors. Some mistook them for a tiny hillside graveyard. (At one point, someone even added a stolen tombstone to the mix; mercifully, it was returned to the family.) Others were puzzled by inscriptions whose meanings have been lost to time: “In Memoriam, Senior Vacation, 1893.”

Both ceremonies faded out by the 1930s, but the broader tradition they belonged to — the senior class gift — persisted. Since the first class gift in 1868, which was a white marble marker of indeterminate nature near Observatory Drive, UW alumni have helped shape some of the university’s most cherished icons, from the Lakeshore Path and Picnic Point to the Carillon Tower and Memorial Union. The spirit of giving back and leaving something behind for the next generation may be the most lasting Badger tradition of all.

I’m occasionally guilty of this nostalgic attitude. After all, I’m probably the only person who misses Fat Sandwich, the short-lived and eccentric State Street eatery known for stuffing every imaginable condiment and deep-fried appetizer into sub rolls.

Unlike Fat Sandwich, several timeless State Street establishments survive. Staples range from State Street Brats and B-Side Records to the Chocolate Shoppe and Parthenon Gyros. Still, stability is not the reality of retail and real estate. And especially not in downtown Madison, where new batches of UW students repopulate the shopping and entertainment scene each fall.

Matt Tramel, the executive director of Madison’s Central Business Improvement District, reminds me: “The one way that State Street has never changed is that it constantly evolves.” State Street is alive and well, rebounding from COVID-19 pandemic lows. Nearly a quarter of the street’s storefronts saw closures in 2020 and 2021, with total visits dropping from 5 million in 2019 to 2 million in 2020. Now, there are only 10 vacancies among the 160 commercial spaces. And since 2023, State Street is averaging record levels of nearly 7 million annual visits.

On first impression, returning visitors may notice a different State Street — one with a few more high-rise apartments and even swanky Bus Rapid Transit stations, reflecting a growing city.

But the essence of the street, as that vibrant crossroad between the city and the campus, remains awfully familiar. So join us on an eight-block journey as we revisit old haunts and discover new favorites.

Town and Gown

The campus end of State Street technically starts on the 800 and 700 blocks, stretching across Library Mall and the University Club, Memorial Library, Wisconsin Historical Society, and University Book Store. With Bascom Hall towering behind your shoulders, State Street presents a straight path to the Wisconsin State Capitol, with bustling storefronts perfectly framing the view. Welcome to the ultimate intersection of town and gown.

Most students think of the corner of State and Lake as the true beginning of a State Street trip, the ever-reliable Walgreens — and before it, the beloved Rennebohm Drug Store — marking the spot. This 600 block is State Street’s most-striking blend of old and new, mom-and-pops next to national chains. The sliver storefront of City Bar, the underground cocktail lounge serving speakeasy vibes since 1998, now stands next to a Target. The small-scale version of the big-box department store opened in 2021, offering students a sorely needed walkable option for fresh groceries as well as consumer products.

Across from Target’s red, modern façade sits the classic Bavarian exterior and biergarten of State Street Brats, largely untouched by time since it opened in 1953 (under the name Shorty and Lammy’s Brathaus). Just as it did then, the bar serves its signature red brat, named for the coloring of its split smoked beef and pork recipe. I’d never been the biggest fan of bratwursts, but after ordering the red brat for the first time, I’m a convert. The recipe delivers a flavor-filled bite. Not bad for a $7 meal in 2026.

Longtime neighbors on this block include clothing store Urban Outfitters, popular lunchtime eatery Mediterranean Cafe (friendly competitor Sunroom Cafe closed in 2020), and hippie paradise Sunshine Daydream. Sadly, no longer to be found is Paul’s Book Store, which closed the (used) book on its legendary seven-decade run at 670 State in 2025.

The new tenant, the edgy Raygun design and apparel store, brings a bit of the same spunky spirit with much less of the musty smell. Other newer storefronts include the adorable Mochi Asian gift shop, which stocks brightly colored plush toys as far as the eye can see, and The Guild, a video gaming lounge where you can play on PC stations and the newest consoles with food and drinks brought right to you.

The Late-Night Block

It’s not hard to tell that the 500 block of State Street caters to UW students and their evolving tastes. A popular stop on the Frances Street corner is Colectivo, a Milwaukee-based coffee shop chain. It has glass windows and doors for exterior walls, so you can always see swarms of students socializing in the modern industrial interior. For the fast-casual crowd, just steps from each other are Raising Cane’s chicken, Mooyah burgers, Potbelly sandwiches, Jimmy John’s subs, Qdoba burritos, and Taco Bell munchies. You can bet this is a busy block on late nights.

Interspersed with these national brands are uniquely Madison mainstays.

B-Side Records, with remarkable resilience in the music streaming era and a stroke of luck with the vinyl revival, continues to sling albums old and new on State. The shop moved from the 400 to the 500 block in 2022, its loyal customers helping to relocate some 5,000 vinyl records and CDs from the original 1982 location. B-Side’s long rectangular layout makes it feel like you’re browsing the world’s coolest (and best-organized) garage sale. My personal standard for a record store is whether its collection includes Pat Benatar. Sure enough, I found her 1980 Crimes of Passion with the sticker price of $28.99, nestled alongside a whole lot of Beatles and David Bowie.

Early settlers to the 500 block’s late-night scene include Mondays Bar — which has been offering generous pours, year-round holiday lighting, and free popcorn since the ’70s — and the Stop & Shop convenience store, which has dutifully held down the Gilman Street corner since the ’60s.

Several since-closed establishments also had long runs on this block, including Gino’s pizza, The (Discount) Den, Cellar Subs, the Afghan restaurant Kabul, the Turkish restaurant Hüsnü’s, and The Pipefitter head shop.

New to the block, but not to Badgers’ hearts, is the Red Shed. The illustrious dive bar relocated from Frances Street in 2024, hauling its red-and-white striped covered wagon to the front window of 508 State. Cheap Long Island iced teas — served since 1969 — are here to stay.

State Street’s Sweet Tooth

State Street’s 400 block is a sight for sore eyes and a sweet tooth, thanks to the Chocolate Shoppe on the Gilman Street corner. This ice cream operation has been in high demand ever since it opened on State Street in 1964, expanding to several Madison locations and shipping products to sellers across the country.

Chocolate Shoppe produces more than 100 flavors, all in the super-premium category for the ice cream’s dense richness and high butterfat content. Its branded labeling makes no bones about the dietary tradeoffs: “You want nutrition, eat carrots.” To my taste (and with due acknowledgment of Babcock Dairy), the award-winning and slyly named This $&@! Just Got Serious flavor is among the most satisfying scoops around.

And if ice cream doesn’t satisfy your sweet tooth, there’s always Insomnia Cookies next door. Bookending the 400 block is “Madison’s happiest corner,” as self-described by the Badger Liquor Shop that’s occupied the Gorham Street intersection since the 1930s. Even if you’re not a drinker, the store’s iconic neon sign — animating liquid drops from a bottle — still gives you something to smile about.

Happy memories also permeate the block. Bygone favorites range from Gargano’s Pizzeria and Ella’s Deli (now home to Hawk’s Bar & Grill) to the Sacred Feather hat store and Tropic Jewel (which sold its last beads in October). The Tellus Mater kitchenware shop closed in 2019 after nearly six decades on State, but you can still spot its fading name on the storefront now occupied by the Mimosa spiritual gift shop, which replaced cutlery and bakeware with crystals and incense.

New to 419 State Street, where Yellow Jersey bike shop once enjoyed a long ride, is the eatery Izakaya Kuroyama. This fast favorite serves authentic Japanese street food with cozy, traditional ambiance. I can’t think of a better way to relive the college years than to stop in for some ramen — with, of course, an ice cream chaser.

A Melting Pot

Among the many pleasures of a stroll down State Street is the diversity of people and places: a remarkable melting pot of cultures and cuisines.

Forty years ago, Krishna Pradhan MA’74, PhD’82 opened Himal Chuli on the 300 block with his wife, Bishnu, so they could share their native Nepali food with the Madison community. Himal Chuli was reportedly the first Nepali restaurant in the United States when it opened in 1986. When it closed earlier this year, it wasn’t even the only one on State Street. Indeed, the whole span of State reflects something of a United Nations, with grocery markets and restaurants featuring authentic fare from China, Taiwan, Japan, India, Laos, Thailand, South Korea, Mexico, and the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Next to Himal Chuli’s old storefront is the Greek temple façade of Parthenon, a cherished greasy spoon for gyro lovers. Stepping inside the temple, you can see — and smell — cone-shaped slabs of gyro meat spinning on large skewers alongside vertical rotisserie grills. Sliced, served on a grilled pita, and topped with tomatoes, onions, and homemade tzatziki sauce, this little piece of Greece has sustained generations of lamb-eating Badgers since 1972. (And always order the side of fries.) Other familiar faces on this block include Ragstock, the vintage clothing store and source of student Halloween costumes since 1981; The Soap Opera, which has sold natural bath products inside its pastel-colored walls since 1972; the clothing boutique Jazzman (1980); Mackesey’s Irish Pub (1983); and Triangle Market (1935).

Unfortunately, you can no longer order a morning bun from the Ovens of Brittany, bring a date to Tutto Pasta, or try on stylish ’fits at Sassafras and Karen & Co. But there are new memories to be made among the trendier storefronts on this block, including the Tap Tap arcade bar, Little Sweet bubble tea café, and Madison Modern Market gift shop.

The Arts District

There is no Madison view quite as memorable as the Orpheum Theater’s 55-foot-tall sign and marquee lighting up State Street with the capitol building in the background. It’s a gateway of sorts to State Street’s arts district.

The 200 block of State is home to the Orpheum, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), and Comedy on State. This year, within a one-block radius, you can experience Broadway’s Hamilton and The Great Gatsby and catch stand-up acts by John Mulaney and Adam Conover. The Orpheum opened its doors as a movie palace in 1927. The Overture Center and MMoCA complex, spanning the entire south block, was designed by renowned architect César Pelli and completed in 2006. State-of-the-art performance halls and galleries fill out the nearly 400,000 square feet. (Some may remember the former occupants of this lot, including Yost’s department store and the Radical Rye sandwich shop.) Nearly as iconic as the Orpheum’s sign is MMoCA’s corner façade, with glass panels that rise three stories high and reveal a glorious glass staircase inside.

A Quick Bite

We’ve made it to the 100 block of State Street, where dozens of vendors and thousands of visitors overflow from the Saturday morning farmers’ market on the Capitol Square. But there’s no need to wait for the weekend to enjoy a quick bite to eat.

The closest storefront to the capitol is Teddywedgers, which opened in 1984. This carryout pasty shop was purchased in 2014 by siblings Anthony Rineer and Karima Berkani ’05, who grew up eating the meat pies as their mother played violin at the Overture Center. They’ve painstakingly preserved founder Miles Allen’s original recipe and no-frills service. For the longest time, I assumed this modest corner spot was a convenience store. Imagine my surprise when I finally stopped in for this story and was treated to the most satisfying $6 meal in the modern economy. Ready to serve in seconds on a chilly morning, the round, hearty pasty — the traditional version served with ground steak, potatoes, and onions — warmed and filled me up. And trust me: you only need the “half.” Across the street is Ian’s Pizza, which has been serving pies by the massive slice since its original store opened on Frances Street in 2001. While past generations of UW students still salivate over the rectangular pan-style slices of Rocky Rococo (also a staple on State for a time), today’s Badgers go wild for Ian’s best-selling mac and cheese pizza and other imaginative offerings. In 2011, the restaurant gained national attention for its part in Madison’s Act 10 protests, feeding protesters as many as 1,000 pizzas per day and receiving donation orders from all over the world.

Hemp retailers have flourished almost everywhere since a 2018 bill federally legalized the distribution of certain THC products. On the 100 block of State Street, you’ll find Pinebox cannabis dispensary and The High Crowd Cafe, which, yes, serves THC-infused lattes and teas.

You can still get traditional lattes and teas across the street at Michaelangelo’s Coffee House, a fixture since the ’90s. UW alumni can see themselves reflected in the display windows of Vintage on State, which opened last year and almost exclusively stocks old-fashioned Badger gear. Time for another ’90s Starter jacket! For dancing enthusiasts and aspiring DJs, the three-story Cielo nightclub is another new addition to the block.

And at the end of this journey, there’s one more familiar sight: a construction crane. The five-story Wisconsin History Center will open in 2027 on the corner of State and N. Caroll, showcasing the Wisconsin Historical Society’s vast collections for an estimated 200,000 visitors per year.

After that will come a reimagined pedestrian plaza at the top of State Street. The City of Madison unveiled design proposals last summer, including a concept that draws inspiration from Library Mall down by the UW.

And that, in short, is State Street: always changing, but forever connecting the campus and city.

What are your favorite State Street memories? Email onwisconsin@uwalumni.com, or write to 1848 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 53726.

Preston Schmitt ’14 is a senior staff writer for On Wisconsin.

Published in the Spring 2026 issue.

Therefore, we do not envy those in Stockholm, Sweden, who must isolate all the variables and single out particular scientists for every Nobel Prize.

Twenty-one scholars with UW–Madison ties have won a Nobel, including alumni and faculty members (past or present at the time of the award). This number places the UW in elite company — by most counts, among the top 20 universities in the country.

And still, it doesn’t seem enough for all the Nobel-worthy work that takes place on this campus.

Some observers were stunned when UW biologist James Thomson, who first derived human embryonic stem cells in the lab, was not among the stem cell scientists who shared in the 2012 Nobel Prize. That same year, the “God particle” Higgs boson was discovered with critical contributions from UW physicists Sau Lan Wu and Wesley Smith and computer scientist Miron Livny. But the following year, the Nobel Prize went to a pair of international researchers who had first theorized about Higgs’s existence. So it goes.

The last Nobel Prize winner with a UW–Madison connection was Claudia Goldin, a former economics faculty member who earned recognition in 2023 for demonstrating differences in labor market outcomes for women. Who will be next? We can’t say for sure, but sources tell us that several UW researchers remain in serious consideration for the world’s most prestigious award.

With federal research funding at risk here and elsewhere, it’s time to celebrate the Nobel-winning Badgers who — sometimes in dramatic fashion — made life-changing breakthroughs for the benefit of us all.

A Heretic Turned Hero

Howard Temin had a hunch. It would lead the UW–Madison virologist to a Nobel Prize in 1975 and later contribute to the discovery of HIV. But first, it earned him the scorn of the scientific community.

Prior to 1970, the field of molecular biology operated on the central dogma that genetic information in cells is transferred in one direction — from DNA to RNA — to produce proteins. Never the other way. But closely studying the anomalies of a cancer-causing virus in chickens, Temin theorized in 1964 that some viruses — later classified as retroviruses — could reverse this process to spread.

For six years, this stance caused him ridicule. A former Cal Tech colleague gave a professional talk on these viruses without citing any of Temin’s seminal contributions. When pressed by the audience why not, the researcher responded: “I’ve given Temin’s work the amount of attention it deserves.” Intellectually fearless, Temin never wavered. “All of these doubts were based not on experimentation or alternative hypotheses, but merely arguing from the central dogma that viruses don’t behave that way,” he later told the UW Oral History Project.

Then in 1970, Temin discovered the enzyme — reverse transcriptase — that does, in fact, allow genetic information to flow backward. When he went home that evening, his excitement was so palpable that his wife, renowned UW medical geneticist Rayla Greenberg Temin MS’58, PhD’63, knew instantly that he had proven his hunch right.

Practically overnight, he reflected, “I went from being a rebel to establishment.”

Temin’s discovery revolutionized molecular biology, opening doors to new areas of cancer research, drug development, and gene therapy applications. It also provided the roadmap for researchers to identify HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS, early in the epidemic and to eventually develop effective antiretroviral treatments. Temin played an active part in research and public policy efforts related to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early ’90s.

When he accepted his Nobel Prize, he proved again that he was not afraid to speak his mind. Toasting a banquet audience filled with cigarette smokers (including the king of Sweden), Temin expressed “outrage” that, while his fellow researchers were tackling cancer in the lab, so little was being done to address a leading and preventable cause of it.

“And then I sat down,” Temin recalled, “and everyone in the audience, including the royalty, put out their cigarettes.” (In a cruel twist of fate, Temin died from a nonsmoking form of lung cancer in 1994 at age 59.)

Temin joined the UW’s McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in 1960 after finishing graduate school and a postdoc fellowship. He claimed that the center had reached out to “practically every young virologist, as many as 40 or 50, and none would come,” since, nationally, viruses were not viewed as a particularly important aspect of cancer research. We now know that viruses cause up to 20 percent of all cases.

When Temin arrived in Madison, he found his first lab to be unsuitably located in a dark basement surrounded by steam pipes and next to an open sump pit. From that inauspicious start, he went on to become a giant in his field and the UW’s only individual Nobel Prize winner to finish out his career at the institution. Upon being named a Nobel laureate, he thanked the university “for having provided … an environment in which unorthodox ideas could be considered and established.”

Cracking the Genetic Code

Har Gobind Khorana grew up in poverty in the small village of Raipur, India. His family home was partly a courtyard, shared with cows and horses. There was no schoolhouse, so the future Nobel laureate learned to read under a tree from his father. When Khorana, at age six, owned his first pencil, it was a life event.

“Although poor, my father was dedicated to educating his children, and we were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people,” Khorana wrote in an autobiographical entry for the Nobel Prize.

Eventually, Khorana attained formal education in India, proving himself a genius. In 1960, he came to the UW to be a professor of biochemistry and codirect the Institute for Enzyme Research. Here, he and his colleagues discovered how genes direct the production of proteins — groundbreaking work that cracked the genetic code and resulted in a 1968 Nobel Prize.

Khorana was the last of his family, including his kids, to learn of the award. Harking back his humble childhood, he often retreated to the Wisconsin countryside to collect his thoughts. Khorana was watching the sun rise when his wife, having failed to reach him several times by phone, drove over to relay the news. In 1970, Khorana created the world’s first synthetic gene, demonstrating that the basic unit of heredity can be constructed with organic chemicals in a lab. His discoveries helped clear the way for modern gene therapy and genome editing, which have resulted in revolutionary treatments for those with severe genetic diseases.

Apparently, Khorana’s understated personality made him easy to miss in the public eye. In 1969, just a year after he had earned the Nobel Prize, Wisconsin state senator Ernest Keppler ’49, LLB’50 took to the chamber floor to lament that some public employees were making a higher salary than the governor. Referencing a list of names, he sneered: “How about Har Gobind Khorana? Any of you know him?”

MIT leadership certainly did, hiring Khorana away from Madison after a decade of work that changed the scientific world forever.

An Electronic Miracle

A quartet of UW alumni have earned Nobel Prizes for their work in supercharging the digital revolution and the many electronic devices in your home, at work, in your hand, and on your wrist.

John Van Vleck 1920, the “father of modern magnetism,” laid the foundation with his novel theories on the magnetic properties of solid-state materials. Alan MacDiarmid MS’52, PhD’53 discovered polymers (think plastics) that conduct electricity, with applications that now span from rechargeable batteries to electronic sensors to LED displays. Before creating the handheld calculator, Jack St. Clair Kilby MS’50 helped invent the integrated circuit, or microchip, an essential component of modern computers and the key to our miniaturized devices.

But only one Badger brainiac has won a pair of Nobel Prizes: John Bardeen ’28, MS’29.

Bardeen was born and raised in Madison, where his father served as the UW’s first medical school dean. He lived at home while studying electrical engineering at the university and enrolled in one of the first quantum theory courses in the country with Professor Van Vleck. He continued his graduate work at Princeton under Eugene Wigner, a theoretical physicist who would later work at the UW and earn a Nobel Prize himself. Being surrounded by such brilliance paid off. After serving in World War II, Bardeen landed at Bell Labs and coinvented a semiconductor device called the transistor. Hailed as an electronic miracle, it replaced the much larger and less efficient vacuum tube that amplified early radios, televisions, and computers. (Today, an iPhone 15 Pro has some 19 billion transistors in its main processor alone.)

When Bardeen came back from the lab after his breakthrough on the transistor, he told his wife in his typically understated way: “I think we discovered something today.” The invention earned Bardeen and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

At the Nobel Prize ceremony, the king of Sweden teased Bardeen for only bringing one of his three children. The scientist responded, presumably in jest, that he would bring all of them the next time he won a Nobel Prize.

Remarkably, 16 years later, that’s exactly what he did. He won his second prize for the fundamental theory of superconductivity (when electrical resistance vanishes below a certain temperature) — knowledge that is now applied in technologies such as the MRI scanner.

Bardeen is one of four laureates who have earned more than one Nobel Prize, and the only to double dip in the physics category.

Mr. and Mrs. Lederberg

It started as a picture-perfect story. The Wisconsin State Journal called the UW geneticists “one of the top husband-wife science teams in the nation” who “spend many more hours together in the laboratory than in their home.” And together they earned the 1956 Pasteur Award for their joint contributions to microbiology.

But in 1958, Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize, while Esther Zimmer Lederberg PhD’50 was barely a footnote. In a famous picture of the couple from the ceremony, an expressionless Esther stares blankly ahead at the camera. Fittingly, she’s now the face of the Matilda Effect — a term coined by historian Margaret Rossiter MS’67 to describe the historical bias against recognizing the contributions of female scientists and instead attributing their findings to male colleagues.

Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize at the young age of 33 for his field-altering discoveries around bacterial reproduction, producing an understanding of how traits like antibiotic resistance can spread. He was the UW’s first active faculty member to earn a Nobel Prize, sharing the honor with his mentor Edward Tatum MS’32, PhD’34.

Esther Lederberg met Joshua while she was finishing up her master’s degree at Stanford, and they both moved to Madison when he accepted a professorship at the UW in 1947. After earning her doctorate, she became a research associate in her husband’s lab. In a 1998 interview with the UW Oral History Project, Joshua called Esther a “superb” and “very meticulous experimentalist” who organized and executed many of the lab’s studies. During this time, Esther discovered the lambda phage, a stealthy bacterial virus that could stay dormant in an infected host until suddenly striking. It’s become a go-to model organism in the study of other viruses and in the work of genetic engineering. She also helped to develop a modern research technique called replica plating — using velvet cloth to efficiently transfer colonies of bacteria from one dish to another. Until recent years, the scientific community had primarily attributed replica plating to Joshua.

During his Nobel Prize lecture, Joshua noted that his research “enjoyed the companionship of many colleagues, above all my wife.” But the award marked the start of their divergent careers. When Joshua was offered a position to lead the genetics department at Stanford in 1959, Esther had to settle for an untenured research faculty position there — and then fight to stay employed at all after the couple split in 1966.

“Esther, in her life, had to face a number of hurdles that had been placed in her way by the times,” her former colleague Stanley Falkow said at her memorial service in 2006. “She did so with extraordinary grace, gentleness, and with a respect and love for science that is important to remember and emulate, especially in a time when the pursuit of basic knowledge is becoming so very difficult.”

A Wonder Drug

Last January, the World Health Organization announced that Niger was the first African country to eliminate the transmission of river blindness. Before the 1980s, the disease — caused by a parasitic worm and spread from blackflies — became a public health crisis in developing nations and caused blindness in hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Now the disease is on a steep decline, thanks to the mass distribution of an antiparasitic medication called ivermectin — the wonder drug first discovered by UW alumnus William Campbell MS’54, PhD’57. Campbell was a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-1970s when he found that an active substance in a new species of soil bacteria was extraordinarily effective in killing roundworms in mice and other parasites in farm and domestic animals. A more potent derivative called ivermectin was released as an animal health product in 1981 and is a commonly used drug for heartworm prevention for dogs and cats today.

Not yet satisfied, Campbell advocated for potential human applications and identified river blindness as a promising target. Ivermectin was approved for human use in 1987, and since then Merck has donated some five billion doses to combat river blindness. The drug has also been used to treat scabies, head lice, and other tropical diseases such as elephantiasis — benefiting hundreds of millions of people, many in the poorest parts of the world. In 2015, Campbell shared a Nobel Prize for his heroic contributions.

Campbell grew up in Ireland and sailed to the U.S. for graduate work in veterinary science and zoology at the UW. He was hooked on parasites all the way back in high school, when an outing to an agricultural show introduced him to a common liver parasite in sheep and cattle. He was fascinated that a drug could so easily treat it.

His adviser at the UW, veterinary science professor Arlie Todd, encouraged Campbell to apply to Merck after earning his doctorate. At first, Campbell had “considerable misgiving” about starting off in the pharmaceutical industry.

“I only wanted to work on science for the sake of science and not for utility,” he said after earning a 2023 UW Distinguished Alumni Award, “but I discovered the tremendous joy and excitement of doing something that might actually be useful.”

UW Nobel Winners

How many Nobel Prizes can UW–Madison claim? It depends on how you’d like to count them.

Twenty-one UW faculty and alumni have won a Nobel. Because John Bardeen won twice, the university can claim 22 Nobel Prizes. But a pedant could point out that Edward Tatum and Joshua Lederberg shared in the same Nobel Prize in 1958, and the same for Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser in 1944, bringing the UW’s number of distinct awards down to 20.

The UW has nearly added other future Nobel winners to its faculty. Milton Friedman, who helped establish the Chicago school of economics and won a 1976 Nobel Prize, briefly taught at the UW as a visiting scholar in the early 1940s. He withdrew his name for consideration as a tenured professor and left the economics department amid internal disputes. Richard Feynman was set to join the physics department in 1942, but the university discreetly granted him leave so that he could work on the government’s Manhattan Project. He won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.

The following list includes only UW faculty and alumni who were individually named for the prize. Lynn Price ’80, MS’82 and professors Jonathan Patz and John Magnuson served as lead authors for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.
—P. S.

In 1996, the UW Law Library had just opened its gleaming glass reading room overlooking Bascom Hill. The hill was the heart of my tour that crisp fall day. At the bottom, my guides gestured toward College Library, noting that it had been named one of the country’s best places to find a date. At the top, I learned about “traying,” the tradition of sledding down campus slopes on fiberglass cafeteria trays.

My group wanted to know how much hill climbing was expected of first-year students. A few years later, when I led tours for UW–Madison’s Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration (SOAR), this was still a hot topic. I fielded questions while scaling the mountain backward in my favorite Chuck Taylors and a Bucky-printed bucket hat. Campus tours have changed a lot in 20-plus years, with new facilities to explore, fresh facts to share, and increased accessibility for guests with disabilities. There’s even a Zoom session where six campus tour guides share their experiences and answer questions about life on campus. For in-person tours, two guides from UW Campus and Visitor Relations lead each group of 15 to 20 guests, covering a third of the campus on foot in 75 minutes. They take turns presenting, then get new partners for the next tour. This makes each tour unique, keeps the guides on their toes, and energizes the tour group.

Though backward-walking guides and the Bascom Hill endurance test are long gone, campus tours are more memorable than ever. I don’t recall much about the students in charge of my inaugural UW tour, but today’s tour-goers get to know their guides almost as well as the campus. The guides’ personal experiences — and personalities — can be a real factor for visitors when choosing a college.

Reading Your Guests

Abby Medhin x’26 wouldn’t be a Badger if not for her tour of UW–Madison. The Milwaukee native was set on attending an out-of-state college but agreed to a tour when her dad urged her to check out the campus.

“The two guys who led it were so enthusiastic about UW–Madison and did a great job explaining student life. I started picturing myself here, which I hadn’t done before,” she says. The experience inspired Medhin to become a campus tour guide last January. So did her goal of getting comfortable talking to acquaintances. As a future nurse, Medhin knows the value of building rapport with patients, but sometimes anxiety derails her efforts to connect. “Social anxiety has been a factor in my life for a long time. Being a tour guide gives me lots of practice talking to new people, which really helps,” she says.

The experience also helps Medhin navigate the performance anxiety that used to make public speaking unbearable. Rehearsing her tour script has an advantageous side effect: she feels more at ease giving class presentations.

“My friends tell me I’m good at it now, which I can hardly believe,” she says.

I see a little of my 20-year-old self in Medhin, remembering how I used the tours to work on my own stage fright. Her warmth and excitement shine through when she divulges her favorite study spots and the best movies she’s seen at Union South’s Marquee Cinema. Campus and Visitor Relations employs 75 tour guides each semester, and they memorize a 10-page script outline filled with facts about university history, academics, and resources. They don’t recite it verbatim, however. They enhance it with personal experiences from the classroom and beyond. Guides often share what they’ve learned by studying abroad or participating in student organizations. Many discuss acclimating to campus or working with academic advisers. The challenge is choosing the right stories for your audience.

When representatives from a Thai university joined one of Medhin’s tours, for example, she asked them about the ways their institution resembled and differed from the UW. Then she used this information to customize their experience. Medhin highlighted organizations that might help Thai students feel at home and spent extra time explaining things that might be unfamiliar, including the way classes are structured and the role of academic advising.

“Reading your guests — learning who they are and what they need — is a huge part of the job,” she explains.

Fascinating Factoids

Sometimes an energy boost is what’s needed most. I took a morning tour last spring to learn about the latest approach to showcasing campus (see sidebar), and a few people in the group yawned as they introduced themselves. The leaders — seasoned guide Emily Mihalovich x’26 and knowledgeable newcomer Lucas Liske x’27 — noticed this and took action. Soon their witty quips and fascinating factoids had us laughing and asking questions.

Mihalovich, a finance and accounting major from the Phoenix area, used colorful descriptions to entertain and educate. While discussing housing and safety, she called the residence halls on the west side of campus “the cheapest lakeshore property you’ll ever have.” Ears perked up when Liske, a communications and psychology major from Medford, Wisconsin, mentioned that he plays sax in the UW Marching Band. Soon he was tackling their questions about Badger football games. My group passed by a Chemistry Building classroom, strolled up North Charter Street, and walked through Grainger Hall. A dozen other groups followed the same route at the same time, but we didn’t crash into each other. Every group got its own spot at each destination. It was a complicated dance, but the guides choreographed it perfectly.

“It can be tricky to find places to stand so guests can see everything, especially in the summer, when we have more tours going at once,” Medhin says. “You have to imagine things from their perspective and remember that they may not have seen the campus before.” Knowing shady spots to rest and where to hang out during thunderstorms is also essential, since most of the tour is outdoors. Plus, it’s wise to check in with the group in case someone needs a breather or a bathroom break. Liske made sure everybody was comfortable as we approached Library Mall.

Sometimes a more complicated challenge arises. According to Macy Olson x’26, who supervises fellow student guides, training is a valuable tool for navigating these situations.

“If a guest asks about something not so positive — maybe college tuition getting more expensive — it’s important for guides to give honest answers,” she says, adding that a little diplomacy can go a long way. This echoes the advice Zola Dincin Schneider ’46 shares in the popular Campus Visits and College Interviews: A Complete Guide for College-Bound Students and Their Families, which insists that the best type of campus tour guide “speaks from the heart, is candid, and answers questions without hiding the true facts.”

Unlike my UW campus tour in 1996, this one didn’t mention Library Mall’s history of student demonstrations. Though I missed that discussion, I appreciated the new ways the guides addressed student engagement, weaving it into descriptions of campus organizations and volunteer opportunities.

During their training, the guides give mock tours peppered with various disruptions, from loud noises to strangers trying to join the group.

“We learn to be very aware of our surroundings and adapt quickly,” Medhin says. “We want everyone on the tour to be safe, comfortable, and focused on what the campus has to offer.”

“Loved the Tour So Much”

Leading tours is a chance to turn visitors’ vague ideas about the UW into vivid impressions. Sometimes a tour helps them embrace a possibility they hadn’t considered, as in Medhin’s case. Other times, it provides a sense of belonging that they haven’t found elsewhere. Olson witnessed this phenomenon while leading a tour for a middle-school group.

“One of the students asked me about LGBTQ resources,” she recalls. “After I shared what he needed, he said, ‘This is so helpful and makes me feel better about going here.’ That made me feel really good, and I’m so glad he felt comfortable asking me for this information.” Olson, a social work and legal studies major from Freeport, Illinois, is considering careers in advocacy, counseling, and human services. Creating an atmosphere where people can explore difficult questions is key in all these fields, and supervising other guides has helped her hone the skill.

“Being a new guide can be intimidating, so we try to help everyone feel truly welcome and make them want to come to work each day,” she says. “We’ve also built a strong feedback culture, one where it’s normal to ask questions and where we’re constantly thinking about how to improve.” Like Medhin, many students apply to be guides because they want to strengthen a skill set or rise to a challenge.

Liske hopes to become a more polished presenter. The tour-guide experience is quite different from his previous job at a small-town cheese-packaging factory.

“I spent last summer moving 40-pound blocks of cheese, so I decided to spend this summer talking with people,” he says.

Meanwhile, Medhin is realizing just how impactful she can be. She recalls a woman sprinting toward her during a recent tour stop — a mom from a tour she’d given the previous winter.

“She told me her son loved the tour so much that he couldn’t talk about any other university afterward. It turned out that he was attending SOAR that day,” Medhin recalls. “I felt so proud that I was part of the reason he chose UW–Madison.”

Today, most of the horses that do work are the equine equivalent of professional athletes: racing and showing. But a select few pursue more modest careers in public service.

Two of those horses are Rettke and Vetter. They and the human officers who ride them, Jolene Eck and Ryan Conybear, make up the UW Police Department’s Mounted Unit.

You’ve probably seen them standing guard at Badger football games or keeping the peace on busy weekend nights downtown. But the Mounted Unit plays another, less visible role on the UW force — one that cars would be hard-pressed to replace.

“It’s a way for us to make a connection with our students and our community,” Conybear says.

Champing at the Bit

Before cars, police horses were the fastest way for officers to get around. A 1929 Milwaukee newspaper boasted that the city would purchase four horses from the U.S. Army for the city’s police force. But in the 1940s, the Milwaukee police motorized, and the horses were phased out.

By the fourth quarter of the 20th century, interest in mounted police rebounded, as departments recognized the animals’ prowess in public relations. The City of Madison’s Mounted Patrol Unit got its start in 1986, and the UW Police Department (UWPD) Mounted Unit began in 1989.

Early on, as with many latter-day mounted patrols, the UW’s officers rode their personal horses, so the unit’s size (and existence) fluctuated. In 2015, the unit’s last horse, Vegas, was diagnosed with an incurable muscle disease. In 2017, Vegas was put down after serving 12 years with his owner, Assistant Chief Kari Sasso.

The unit was essentially dormant until 2020, when UWPD leadership made a push to revive it. A call went out to the officers to gauge interest in mounting up. Eck and Conybear were the first to put their names in for the job. Rettke and Vetter were purchased by the university and officially joined the force in 2022. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the horses were named after two legendary UW female athletes: Jessie Vetter ’09 (hockey) and Dana Rettke ’21 (volleyball).

Back in the Saddle

When they started with the Mounted Unit, Eck and Conybear worked four to five regular patrols per week, responding to calls for service as any other officers would. Except instead of showing up in a squad car, they showed up on horseback.

“We found some limitations,” says Eck. “There are certain calls for service that we can’t necessarily get to as fast as you could in a vehicle — off-campus buildings or the far west side.”

In those days, the unit even performed routine traffic stops. The horses wore a breast collar fitted with lights, and the officers had lights on their vests and saddlebags that could flash red and blue like the lights on a police car. In lieu of sirens, the officers used whistles to get drivers to pull over.

“Not every time we attempted a stop did a car stop,” Eck admits.

The mounted officers typically develop very close bonds with their equine partners.

Today, most of the Mounted Unit’s duties involve interacting with the community. In large crowds, like those on game days or late nights on State Street, the horses’ height gives the officers extra visibility. And the animals can move through congested areas more nimbly than a car.

Then there’s the intimidation element. Rettke stands five feet eleven inches at the shoulder and weighs almost 2,000 pounds; Vetter, the runt, is 5 feet seven inches and 1,750 pounds. In many cases, Eck says, the sheer size of the animals can deter would-be troublemakers.

“If people on State Street or Library Mall get into a fight, just bringing the horses to that area can make them want to leave,” Eck says.

But the primary effect of the horses’ presence is positive. When they’re not doing crowd control, they’re usually out on “community rides” — easy-going patrols through neighborhoods or visits to specific spots on campus. People are encouraged to pet the horses and get to know the officers.

“A lot of smiles and excitement” are typical reactions, Eck says. The community rides take the unit through neighborhoods such as Eagle Heights and to stops like the dean of students’ office. The officers make a special point to visit residence halls, Eck says, “so that when the students see us, they’re not like, ‘Oh my goodness, police are here.’ ”

Even in more chaotic environments, such as a Friday night on State Street, the horses can completely change the energy. Conybear remembers something an apprehensive stranger said to him on one such night: “ ‘I don’t really like police, but can I ask you a question about your horse?’ That’s the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind,” he says.

Horse Sense

What makes a good police horse?

The Mounted Unit doesn’t know much about Vetter’s and Rettke’s lives before they joined the force. They’re originally from Canada but came to the UWPD through Mounted Patrol International, a Texas-based mounted police training and consulting company.

There’s no statutory retirement age for police horses — the animals typically live for 25 to 30 years. The City of Madison’s Mounted Patrol Unit has a 23-year-old police horse, Bubba, who, according to Conybear, shows no signs of slowing down. Vetter is 13 and Rettke is eight.

Both are draft horses, bred for agricultural work. Rettke is a Percheron, with a dark brown coat and a mane and tail to match. Vetter is a Clydesdale-Percheron cross with a dappled coat and flaxen mane that’s neatly braided during hot summer months. The horses were selected for their strength, size, and temperament — calm, cool, and collected. But what really sets them apart is their training.

The Mounted Unit’s work requires a level of social awareness that both horses and humans have honed over the last three years. To strengthen the bond between horse and rider, the officers were partnered with specific horses: Eck, a more experienced equestrian, with the younger Rettke; Conybear with the more mature Vetter. In addition to learning standard care and riding techniques, the officers had to train the horses to be comfortable around crowds and loud noises — and, most importantly, to be comfortable around them.

“We have a pretty close relationship,” Conybear says of Vetter. “She’s a very opinionated lady. She’ll tell me when something bugs her, whether it’s how she tips her ears or her breath work and things like that.”

Eck says working with Rettke has taught her as much about herself as it has about horses. “We can’t both be energetic and fast-paced,” Eck says. “She’s taught me that sometimes I have to just keep calm throughout my whole body, because she can sense that when I’m riding.” Eck says both horses are “definitely food motivated.” During our interview, when the officers weren’t paying close attention, Rettke and Vetter availed themselves of the freshly cut grass across from the UW police station on Monroe Street.

The two-horse team may take a little more upkeep than a 400-horsepower squad car. The Mounted Unit spends eight hours a week training at Dawson Pointe Stables in Oregon. Add to that the time it takes to get the horses ready for work — brushing them, cleaning them, loading them into the trailer, and driving them to wherever the day’s event is, all of which the officers do themselves. And, of course, there’s the poop. (The officers always pick up after their partners.)

But at the end of the day, the advantage is clear. No one wants to pet a police car.

Video by Jason Weiss

That precious bit of movie history is safeguarded by UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Koepp x’85 entrusted it to the center along with many of his other early drafts and final scripts, including Mission: Impossible (1996) and War of the Worlds (2005), which he cowrote with Steven Spielberg.

One of the top archives of its kind in the world, WCFTR has for 66 years been preserving — and sharing — resources from the film, theater, and broadcasting industries. Although it’s located on the UW–Madison campus, some 2,000 miles from Hollywood, the center’s rich collection draws scholars, researchers, and movie buffs from around the globe.

And a rapidly growing digital presence means that many of the jewels in this fascinating collection can be accessed from anywhere, for free, 24/7. Through the center’s Media History Digital Library, online visitors can view millions of pages of historical books and magazines focused on film, broadcasting, and recorded sound, gaining insight into American culture.

“We are doing more than ever before to bring our collections to the world,” says director Eric Hoyt, the Kahl Family Professor of Communication Arts.

Among the center’s treasures are the original Jurassic Park screenplay, the pilot script for Bewitched, and a casting call for what would become the American TV hit The Office, which includes a description of the character Michael Scott (Steve Carell): “a train wreck of bad leadership characteristics.” Althea Dotzour

The center “is a treasure trove of insight, images, and ideas about film and theater,” says the filmmaker and film scholar Karen Pearlman, who came from Australia to tap the archival riches for her book about the 20th-century American dancer and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Pearlman and Richard James Allen, who together direct the Physical TV Company, went on to donate their papers and films to WCFTR as well.

How did a heartland university become a premier destination for entertainment history? Top-notch faculty helps. And, crucially, UW–Madison saw the value of preserving film materials long before other major institutions.

“New Ways for Understanding Ourselves”

The collection was made possible in 1960 by a collaboration between UW–Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1969, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research acquired the hugely significant United Artists collection, containing nearly five decades of records from the film production and distribution company founded by movie legends Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith.

Today, the center is part of UW–Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. It contains an astonishingly wide range of holdings, including the collections of Broadway greats such as Hal Holbrook, Moss Hart, and George S. Kaufman; plus film and television collections from pioneering late-night TV host Faye Emerson, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, MGM studio head Dore Schary, and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. “It houses one of the best and most useful collections of material for film studies anywhere in the nation,” says Thomas Doherty, a film scholar and professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. Doherty turned to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research as he did research on blacklisted screenwriters in the 1940s for his book Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist.

“Wisconsin was one of the first universities to realize that the records of the studios and filmmakers were worthy of preservation and cataloging, at a time when snooty universities turned up their noses at collections from Hollywood,” he says.

WCFTR’s archives are rivaled only by those at the University of California–Los Angeles, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Library of Congress. Working hands-on with the actual artifacts can be a thrill, says Mary Huelsbeck, the center’s assistant director. “I love any chance I get to work with our movie posters,” she says. “I’m amazed not only at the artwork but all the movies I’ve never heard of.”

Film archivist Amanda Smith says that one of her favorite corners of the center’s collection is “our growing number of press junket interviews.”

“We have one collection from news broadcaster John Stofflet ’83 during his time as an entertainment reporter in Seattle and another from Milwaukee-based entertainment reporter Gino Salomone. The footage consists of three- to five-minute interviews with basically every celebrity who was producing work from 1990 to today.” Particularly fun, Smith notes, are the few seconds before and after the official interview, when reporter and star are just casually chatting.

The center’s materials are often used in the classroom. UW–Madison communication arts professor Jeff Smith MA’89, PhD’95, for example, borrows a 16mm print of the nearly forgotten Warner Bros. movie Nora Prentiss for his film noir class. For his course American Film Industry in the Era of the Studio System, Hoyt has students select and analyze a paper artifact — newspapers, scripts, memos — from U.S. cinema history prior to 1940.

“Research in the humanities is vitally important,” says Hoyt. “This work confirms what we think of as our history, and sometimes it challenges it. It cares for a shared past and gives us new ways for understanding ourselves.”

“Our Shared Knowledge of America and the World”

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research has been one of the most successful humanities units on campus in terms of receiving federal grants. From 2023 to 2025, it won three separate grants totaling $550,000.

One of the center’s largest efforts has been Project Ballyhoo, a five-year initiative to digitize and share motion picture pressbooks, which contained promotional materials. The open-access database allows users to view the material and to see how these early marketing tools made their way into newspapers and trade magazines.

Historic Hollywood pressbooks are being digitized as part of the WCFTR’s Project Ballyhoo, recently described by the National Endowment for the Humanities as “among our nation’s most significant humanities projects.” WCFTR

The innovative technologies and data analytics methods created by the WCFTR team for Project Ballyhoo are also designed to serve as a model for future researchers. To speed up its work, the center has leveraged the high-level computing power of the Center for High Throughput Computing, UW–Madison’s core research computing center.

In January 2025, Project Ballyhoo was awarded a prestigious, roughly $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). However, less than three months later, the government terminated that federal grant, plus an even larger one to digitize the work of video artist Wendy Clarke. The American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association responded with a lawsuit asking that the NEH funding be restored.

Last July, a federal judge issued a preliminary ruling that was supportive of many of the plaintiffs’ claims. Project Ballyhoo was one of the NEH awardees referenced in the decision as “among our nation’s most significant humanities projects” that holds the potential to contribute something great to “our shared knowledge of America and the world.” Nevertheless, the ruling did not order the NEH to immediately restore the grants.

Due to the loss of federal funds, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is putting a greater emphasis on growing its base of donor support.

“The funding landscape will change,” says Hoyt. “Our commitment to access, preservation, and history never will.”

Below are just a few of the love stories you shared. WAA will post a new batch of stories in 2026. To submit your own story of how you met, go to uwalumni.com/news/badger-sweetheart-submission. Kelly Widule ’14 and Matt Widule ’15 met at an ugly-sweater party and reunited through a Facebook shout-out when Matt wrote, “You were the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.” David Bryant ’02 and Jennifer Rens ’02 met in Witte in 1998 when she walked into his room and introduced herself. It all started our freshman year when we were both in the same Chemistry 103 class. You could say Rachel and I had chemistry. Our first date was going to see Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and we still love that series today. We had the best times with band, and almost all our best friendships to this day were made in the band. So the obvious choice was to propose to Rachel in the biggest way possible, during the Fifth Quarter of our final home game in 2015 against Northwestern. I had let band director Mike Leckrone know my plan and had him make sure to play “Hey! Baby” as the first song of the Fifth Quarter. As soon as the song started, I grabbed Rachel by the hand and sprinted out to the center of the W at midfield and started singing “Hey! Baby” to her while a good portion of the band surrounded us to sing and play along. After the first chorus was finished, I popped the question in front of 80,000-plus Badger fans, band members, and our family and friends in the stands.

— Karl Schmirler ’16 and Rachel Schmirler ’16

I was a nursing student, and Paul was in landscape architecture. We were introduced by mutual friends on a blind date. From then onward, we dated exclusively, enjoying every UW event and the beautiful campus and falling in love. We were married in 1975 and will celebrate 50 years by taking an alumni trip in November. Two of our three children graduated from UW–Madison, and the grandchildren want to be Badgers as well.

—Barbara Bergum ’73 and Paul Bergum ’73 Joaquin and I met through PEOPLE [the Precollege Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence] when we were in high school, but we began a relationship our freshman year at UW–Madison. We would spend a lot of time walking down the Lakeshore Path to Picnic Point and looking at the koi fish at Allen Centennial Garden until we both graduated in 2019. We are now coming up on our 10-year anniversary. We are also engaged and planning to marry at Allen Centennial Garden next year.

— Alma Sida Ontiveros ’19, JD’21 and Joaquin Lara ’19

We met in Introduction to Occupational Therapy, though neither of us became OTs. We were instructed to introduce each other to the class on the first day and discovered we had many similarities. We hung out occasionally the rest of the semester. We started dating about a year and a half later after prompting from mutual friends and have been together ever since. We have lots of great Madison memories from the library to the Library [bar] to football games, including a Rose Bowl. We still make the trip back to Camp Randall a few times a year.

— Jordan Seitz ’13 and Nathan Seitz ’13, DPT’16 I met Alex during my sophomore year and his junior year. We were both enrolled in a modern literature class in the Mosse Humanities Building. We sat near each other every Tuesday and Thursday and had minimal conversation. One day, the professor offered an extra-credit movie, and I asked him to watch it with me. Our first date after the movie was late-night ice-skating at the Shell. After dating for six years, we got married in May 2025. Since graduating, we have bought Badger season football tickets and love going back to cheer on our team in the place we fell in love.

— Sophie Sjo ’21 and Alex Pillard ’20 To view all the responses, visit uwalumni.com/news/badger-love-stories.

Thanks to Andrea Stegman of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association for collecting these stories.

Published in the Winter 2025 issue.