With a $14.3 million gift, Jerry Frautschi will help build a world-class visitor and education center at an iconic UW–Madison landmark. Jeff Miller

The Lakeshore Nature Preserve has long held a special place in the hearts of Madison philanthropist Jerry Frautschi ’56 and his family. Now, with a $14.3 million gift, Frautschi will help build a world-class visitor and education center at this iconic UW–Madison landmark.

“My family has lived in Madison since the 1800s, and we feel a great sense of responsibility to give back to the city and community that we love,” Frautschi says. “I am pleased that I am able to carry on my family’s tradition of philanthropy and community service and that visitors will have a welcoming gathering place with improved access to the trails that line the lakeshore.”

The Lakeshore Nature Preserve Frautschi Center is planned for the area outside the stone wall at the Picnic Point entrance. This location does not disrupt habitat within the preserve and is designed to increase natural habitat and stormwater filtration.

“We are fortunate to have such beautiful natural spaces on campus for recreation, research, and education,” says UW–Madison chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin. “And we are exceptionally fortunate for Jerry and his family’s generosity and their commitment to creating this welcoming, accessible, and sustainable space for our students, employees, and visitors.”

The Frautschi family connection to the preserve began 36 years ago when Jerry and his brother, John, purchased what was known as Second Point along Lake Mendota’s shoreline. The property was in danger of being developed at the time, and the family was committed to preserving natural spaces. The brothers paid $1.5 million for the land and then gifted the property to their father for Christmas in 1988. The Frautschis renamed the land Frautschi Point and donated it to the University of Wisconsin.

Construction on the facility is slated to start in 2025, and the center is scheduled to open in 2026.

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

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

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

Warfarin Warrior

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

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

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

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

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

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

Computer Visionary

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

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

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

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

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

Grade-A Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailblazing Pharmacist

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

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

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

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

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

She Saved Trees before It Was Cool

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

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

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

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

Education Advocate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statement Piece

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

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

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

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

Cocktail Hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miguel’s Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT ONE: BACKSTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT TWO: GETTING INTO CHARACTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT THREE: SILVER LININGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camilla “Ylla” Koffler got animals ready for their close-ups.

Nowhere are the words shoot and capture more benevolently applied to animal life than in the work of photographer Camilla “Ylla” Koffler. During her short but prolific career, she celebrated her subjects as individuals with souls and personalities rather than portraying them as objects to be ogled like hunters’ trophies. Author Pryor Dodge ’71 offers the iconic photographer an equally flattering and well-deserved spotlight in Ylla: The Birth of Modern Animal Photography.

Ylla (EE-lah) was born in 1911 to Hungarian parents in Vienna. She began her artistic career studying sculpture, but an aptitude for photography and a penchant for rescuing stray animals led to her capturing their very best angles. At the outset of her career, she primarily photographed house pets or exotic species in zoos, eschewing the gender norms of the day by getting up close and personal with animals typically only approached by male zoo handlers. Her fearlessness eventually took her to Africa, where she discovered a passion for photographing animals in the wild.

Ylla’s appetite for adventure brought her to India in 1955. While riding in a speeding jeep to photograph a bullock cart race, she fell from the vehicle and died from her injuries.

“Ylla’s pictures brought animals into the living rooms of America and Europe in such a way that they conveyed a feeling of sharing in wonderful adventures,” Sports Illustrated nature columnist John O’Reilly wrote upon her death.

Her work also lives on in several books, including two children’s books that became instant classics: The Sleepy Little Lion by Margaret Wise Brown (of Goodnight Moon fame) and The Two Little Bears.

Dodge is also the author of The Bicycle, a history of bicycles and cyclists that features his own extensive collection of antique bikes and cycling memorabilia.

Attending a Shakespeare-recitation party in college got Ephraim more than she bard-gained for.

In literary analysis, a “green world” is a whimsical realm that provides respite from and resolution to characters’ real-world dilemmas. In Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare, Michelle Ephraim MA’93, PhD’98 reflects on how discovering the Bard gave her scattered life a new direction — and a green world of her very own.

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Ephraim was frequently subjected to her parents’ volatile emotions and overprotective tendencies. Eager to escape her oppressive upbringing, she pursued a degree in poetry and, eventually, a doctorate in literature. But grim reality haunted Ephraim: her boyfriend dumped her, and she struggled to keep up with her studies. Hope was nearly lost for our headstrong heroine until she stumbled upon a Shakespeare- recitation party and dedicated her career to studying his works.

Green World chronicles Ephraim’s journey to becoming a Shakespeare scholar, a winding path riddled with humor and heartbreak that rivals the best of the Bard’s stories. Ephraim even finds a kindred spirit in Jessica, the strong-willed Jewish daughter of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and she finally achieves the ever-elusive peace of a green world right here in Wisconsin.

“In a culture where artificial intelligence is ever-encroaching, Green World reaffirms our love of reading, enforcing how vastly literature can transform us,” writes author Jennifer Gilmore. “It changed Michelle Ephraim, and the joy and urgency of that discovery, shown through her own life, is breathtaking.”

Green World received the 2023 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Massachusetts. Ephraim is a professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

Damadian is shown here with an MRI machine. Getty Images/Neville Elder

No scalpels required. Thanks to Raymond Damadian ’56’s remarkable invention, it’s no longer necessary to open up the human body to detect cancer or pinpoint an injury.

Damadian built the world’s first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and performed the first full-body scan in 1977, after he discovered that tumors and normal tissue emit response signals that differ in wavelength.

“I thought if we could do on a human what we just did in that test tube, maybe we could build a scanner that would go over the body to hunt down cancer. It was kind of preposterous,” Damadian admitted, “but I had hope.”

That initial scan of a colleague’s thorax took nearly five hours to complete in Damadian’s machine, which he dubbed Indomitable in a nod to achieving what many thought couldn’t be done. Indomitable now resides at the Smithsonian Institution.

Damadian took a unique path to making his contribution to the medical field. As a boy, he attended public school but studied violin at the Juilliard School on weekends. When he was 15, the Ford Foundation gave him a full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, and he left Juilliard behind. “It was okay,” he said. “I was no Itzhak Perlman.”

But later in life, controversy swirled around him. Damadian wasn’t selected to win a 2003 Nobel Prize when two fellow scientists received recognition for their role in MRI development — and he didn’t take the snub lightly. In keeping with what has been called his “exuberant” personality, Damadian took out full-page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers with the headline, “The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted.” The scientific community was abuzz about this unprecedented step, taking sides about whether he deserved a Nobel.

“If I had not been born, would MRI have existed? I don’t think so,” he said.

His supporters believe that he was passed over for the prize in part because of his belief in creationism. A full explanation may come to light when the Nobel’s archives from 2003 are opened in 2053, though Damadian will never see it. He died in 2022. But the debate doesn’t matter to those experiencing pain or facing the possibility of cancer. Some 60 million MRI scans are performed each year, and patients are simply grateful for the machine that provides the answers.

Willson-Broyles excels at finding the balance between humor and tragedy. Brianna Royle Kopka/B2 Photography

When Rachel Willson-Broyles MA’07, PhD’13 was growing up outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, she fell under the spell of the Swedish band Ace of Base and decided “to learn about Sweden, because that’s where they were from.”

Some 15 years ago, as she was working toward her PhD in Scandinavian studies at UW–Madison, she took a seminar in translation in the Department of Comparative Literature. Scandinavian studies professor Susan Brantly suggested she translate a page or two of the 2006 novel Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger by a distinguished Swedish author, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who was going to be visiting the UW–Madison campus.

“I’d already starting translating stuff by myself,” Willson-Broyles says, “articles and things. I really just loved the Swedish language.”

She took Brantly up on the offer, and when Khemiri arrived in Madison, the professor suggested she give the author her translated pages.

“I felt a little silly doing it,” Willson-Broyles says. “My student project.”

But two months later, Khemiri contacted her. He’d sent the pages to Knopf, the publisher with the English rights to the novel. An editor wanted to know if Willson-Broyles was a translator.

She replied, “I’d like to be a translator.”

Montecore was published in English, with Willson-Broyles as translator, in 2011.

That year, Khemiri told the New York Times, “Rachel excels at finding the balance between humor and tragedy, which I sometimes struggle with.” In the years since, Willson-Broyles, who lives in Saint Paul, has translated some 40 books from Swedish to English.

Among the most recent are two novels by the acclaimed crime author Christoffer Carlsson: Blaze Me a Sun — “the first great crime novel of 2023,” according to the New York Times — and 2024’s Under the Storm, which the Times reviewer described as “once more wonderfully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles.”

As a full-time translator, Willson-Broyles says she can finish a book in about three months. The level of involvement with the writer varies. “Most authors are delighted to answer questions,” she says.

Willson-Broyles’s wish list includes seeing translators get more cover bylines and more consistent royalties — “not only for my career,” she says, “but for everyone who works in literary translation.”

Most nights find Wright, an associate clinical professor at UW Law School, working on his second thriller, a follow-up to his smash debut, The Coyotes of Carthage, a screwball dive into the bleak world of dark-money politics. No less an authority than bestselling legal-thriller writer John Grisham calls Wright “a major new voice.”

Down in his basement, sitting at a wood desk strewn with papers and empty bottles of unsweetened tea, Wright faces the wall with two screens in front of him (one for research, one for writing). Music pounds. Sam Cooke, Aretha, Master KG, Outkast, the Chicks. More often than not, the same song roars over and over and over and over again.

“For me, writing is a loud experience,” says Wright, who also lectures in the UW Program in Creative Writing, where he earned his MFA. “Part of the way I know I’m doing okay is that you sort of zoom out on the music. You’re not really listening to the lyrics. You lose track of time. You’re mesmerized with whatever’s on the screen.”

Author Lorrie Moore, Wright’s former UW writing instructor, is a bit in awe of him. “He works hard and stays up late,” she says. “He laughs and makes you laugh. He is blessed/cursed with a quick, high-energy brain.”

Wright is a towering presence, both intellectually and physically, thanks to his six-foot-two height. Besides his UW degree, he has a bachelor’s in economics and history and a master’s in environmental economics from Duke as well as a law degree from Washington University. He even found time to get a master’s from Johns Hopkins’s writing program while doing a five-year stint as a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. When Wright applied to the UW’s program, he wrote, “I have the perfect job. For someone, but not me.”

His sly wit snakes through every page of The Coyotes of Carthage. When asked to describe himself, he conjures up a cinematic vision, pointing out his freckles, hair that’s a little wild, and his “exceptionally big head,” which requires him to wear “special big-headed glasses.”

Besides teaching in two programs, Wright is the former codirector of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted people. Thanks in part to his efforts, four men were freed.

Wright continues to meet clients in Wisconsin’s maximum-security prisons with law students in his clinic. “I sometimes describe it as being like Scooby-Doo,” he says. “A bunch of students and I get in a van, and we go and try to solve murders around the state.”

Experiences like these inform Wright’s fiction. His Department of Justice work, for example, had him trekking to rural areas to try voting rights cases. While passing time in places like Bolivar County, Mississippi, he befriended local politicians — “masters of their communities,” as he calls them. And the down-and-dirty secrets he learned about small-town elections reveal themselves throughout The Coyotes of Carthage.

Swamp Creature

The novel tells the tale of Dre Ross, a sleazy, 30-something, African American political consultant in Washington, DC. A former small-time drug dealer raised by a bipolar schizophrenic mother, he slept in alleys and did hard time in juvenile prison for a savage assault he didn’t commit.

This down-and-out swamp creature has been given his last chance: Go to backwater Carthage, South Carolina. Dupe its flag-waving voters into approving a ballot initiative that will sell public land to a mining company. Never mind that its toxic runoff will kill tourism, poison the water supply, and basically destroy the place. The dirty trickster whips up websites for phony front groups such as the Council of Christian Commerce and the Society for American Freedom. He runs dishonest ads and polls. He launches nasty online attacks.

Dre, writes Wright, “wonders at what point he lost control.” Whether he means of the campaign, his sanity, his decency, or all three goes unsaid. Lest a reader think Dre only has it in for white people, he is an equal-opportunity abuser who “admits that for his people he might have done more harm than good.”

Sour wisdom from the dark-money world — and Wright’s rural journeys — peppers Dre’s thoughts. “Elections are about getting voters to hate others.” “God bless social media. Good for pictures; terrible for truth.”

“Steve has a real heart to his work,” says novelist Judith Claire Mitchell, who formerly taught in the UW creative writing program. “There’s an emotional openness that balances the cynicism. His main character in Coyotes is very openly wounded. His heart is broken, and that’s not hidden.”

Critics loved the book for the way it combines the alienation of Catch-22’s Joseph Heller with Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo ethos and the wacky imagery of a Coen brothers movie. “Riveting,” with a “tick-tock pace and knockout prose,” cheered the Washington Post. “Darkly funny and bleakly honest,” gushed Salon. “Crackerjack debut,” raved USA Today, which put Wright on its list of “100 Black Novelists You Should Read.”

“Writing,” says Wright, “is the art of keeping people paying attention.”

Like most first-time novelists, he took a long time to finish The Coyotes of Carthage — four and a half years. He came home from work and would “eat something, walk the dogs, and write — and that was my life.” When he gave the supposedly final manuscript to friends to read, they hated it. Too intellectual, too grim, they said.

During those years Wright had started visiting prisons. “The darkness of that world — the horrific crimes, the awfulness of the wrong person going to jail, and the possibility that the real person who did it was out there and causing more harm — entered the novel, and it became very different from what I wanted it to be,” he says. “I don’t know if I was using it as therapy.”

When told he should cut it from 140,000 to 70,000 words, Wright says, “I was pretty sad, but you stand up. You brush yourself off, and then you go at it, and in the end, I’m still quite proud of it. But it’s obviously a very different book than I thought I had finished four years ago.”

First novels are notoriously autobiographical, but Wright’s upbringing bears no resemblance to Dre’s. When asked what traits he has in common with his ruthless, haunted antihero, Wright jokes, “I think in the book I describe him as exceptionally good-looking.” He quickly confesses that he shares Dre’s “cynicism and acerbic responses. I can be a bit of a smart aleck.”

A Family of Eccentrics

The son of a computer scientist mother and a father who was an army doctor, Wright grew up obsessed with storytelling. He loved the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which allowed preteen readers to control plots by deciding which way stories would turn.

He wrote his own Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and fan fiction and remains an avid devotee of Star Trek and Star Wars. His dog, Ahsoka, a black Lab/Great Pyrenees mix, is named after a Star Wars character mentored by the virtuous young Anakin Skywalker (before he became Darth Vader).

“He tries to show her all the ways in the world to be good, with the irony being he ends up the worst person in the world,” Wright says, adding, “Now that’s not at all my relationship with my dog.”

His two sisters and parents were also Trekkies. “I’ll be honest,” he says, “I come from a family of eccentrics.”

He had a globetrotting childhood, growing up in Nashville, Spokane, Oakland, and on military bases in West Germany and Alaska. “There’s nothing like being an American overseas, especially during the Cold War, to make you love and admire your country.”

Having been in spit-polish schools on military bases, Wright got the shock of his young life in Augusta, Georgia, where he endured his junior and senior high school years. With uncharacteristic understatement, he says, “That experience was formative.” Westside High School introduced him to a community where education was inseparable from race, Christianity, and traditional notions of patriotism.

Once, when he stayed silent for a football game prayer and merely bowed his head, teammates razzed him. A teacher yelled at a student for failing to show respect for the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance. Students isolated themselves by race at lunch, and admission to Advanced Placement classes seemed to Wright to have a cap on Black students.

“Race is one of those things we continue to try to figure out,” he says. “Obviously, over the arc of our country, we’ve made tremendous progress, but especially as a Black civil rights lawyer who represents Black men in the criminal justice system, [I see] we clearly have a long way to go.

“A lot of the conversations we have about even discussing race in our schools deal with people’s discomfort with having conversations about our past and how that implicates our present. My hope is that we can get better at having those conversations. Hopefully, that will lead to better policy in health care, criminal justice, poverty — things I’ve dedicated my life to dealing with.”

Part of the key to Wright’s success is his easygoing nature, which allows him to feel at home in varied settings.

“He has no problem being plunked down in a room with conservatives or liberals, or with people who aren’t interested in politics or who are very interested in politics,” says his former Department of Justice colleague Robert Popper, who is now senior counsel at the right-leaning group Judicial Watch. “He likes to laugh with and, frankly, at them all.”

Back in his days as a rural trial lawyer, Wright became friends with a lot of politicians he would not necessarily vote for. “But I thought they were very good people, and it wasn’t the end of the world,” he says.

This ability to see all sides of people and situations clearly has benefits for Wright’s work as both a novelist and a law school professor.

No Easy Answers

Wright takes his law students behind bars in the Wisconsin towns of Waupun, Stanley, and Green Bay.

He struggles to describe the smell of a maximum-security prison. A “giant antiseptic bleach” scent provides the top note. Underneath lurk odors of men who haven’t showered because of guard shortages. “I think it’s the smell of misery,” Wright says.

Before the students go in, he gives them a talking to.

“This is something you’re going to remember the rest of your life,” he tells them, keeping tabs on their moods. “I’m always mindful of their energy and the tone, because there’s just objectively sadness in a prison, and for some students, it’s scary.

“Prisons are by design intimidating. You walk through one hall. A door closes behind you, the barred door opens in front of you, and you walk down another hall. Just the sound of it. The clicking of bars behind you and the clicking of doors ahead of you. The whole aesthetic. You’re occasionally given a tour, and we’ve been to solitary wings. There are guys in there just screaming for their lives.”

Nevertheless, Wright encourages his students to retain a sense of humor.

“You can still have moments of levity and moments of laughter,” he says. “I want them to learn, but I want them to have fun. I don’t see how you can have fun without laughing every once in a while.”

Most of his students have very strong feelings about the criminal justice system. Some hate police and believe no one should go to jail. Some think police can do no wrong, and there are no innocent people in jail. “They tend to be a little simplistic at both extremes,” says Wright.

“Part of what I hope to do is to create some complexity, to explain to students that oftentimes there aren’t a lot of easy answers, that there are different stakeholders, and that all people — including the police, suspects, and victims — are not all just one thing.”

Spoken like a true novelist. •