Stoking UWM’s Student Entrepreneurial Fire
When Jesse Depinto’s full-time job was suddenly downsized, he began to dream of starting a business of his own. Depinto, a 23-year-old engineering undergraduate who already co-owns a small company, is now pursuing another thanks to UWM’s Student Startup Challenge (SSC). The SSC is energizing the campus entrepreneurial culture, giving students with sustainable product ideas [...]
Unique Johnson Controls Lab Speeds Discovery
When Johnson Controls built a state-of-the-art dry lab to enable groundbreaking discoveries in the area of energy-storage devices and batteries, it decided to put the facility where UWM students and faculty could readily contribute – right in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS). The Energy Advancement Center, which opened in fall 2012, is [...]
Are Online Clinics the Future of Medicine?
What if you could go to the doctor’s office, get a diagnosis, and be treated, all without leaving your house? Through a process developed at UWM and the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), avatars of real patients and doctors (aided by the patients’ medical records) meet at a virtual clinic. F. Mariam Zahedi, professor of [...]
Revealing the Healing Power of Light
Scientists have known for years that certain kinds of light in certain doses can heal wounds, but they don’t understand exactly how it works. UWM scientist Chukuka S. Enwemeka is on the forefront of revealing the cellular mechanisms of phototherapy.
Art, Science, Dance Merge in Milwaukee
Milwaukee: a world-class destination for dance performance, dance education, dance therapy and dance research. That is the vision that inspires the Harmony Initiative, a unique partnership among UWM’s Peck School of the Arts, the Milwaukee Ballet and the Medical College of Wisconsin. The initiative addresses today’s arts funding challenges with a comprehensive business model that [...]
Cracking the Ice Code
What happened the last time the Earth’s climate shifted from “icehouse” to “hothouse”? And what does it tell us about climate change today? John Isbell is on a quest to coax that information from the last time it happened on a vegetated Earth. The only problem is, that was between 290 and 335 million years [...]
A Sleep Pod to Keep Babies Safe
Jennifer Doering’s interest in safe sleeping for infants grew out of her studies of postpartum depression and parental sleep deprivation in impoverished areas of Milwaukee. In her visits to homes, she found cultural preferences and simple exhaustion often led to co-sleeping. “People were asking for ways to make sleeping safer even if they chose to [...]
Teen Brains on Pot
Calm teenagers can reason almost as well as adults. But introduce a negative emotion, like stress, into their decision-making process and it’s a whole other story. Regular pot use before age 16 has been shown to disrupt development of parts of the brain involved in the ability to make rational decisions, persist over time and [...]
‘Bolsa Familia’ Boosts Families in Brazil
Can Brazil’s local governments run a federal income-supplement program without political interference? Yes, they can, says Natasha Borges Sugiyama, a UWM assistant professor of political science who has been studying the political impact of Brazil’s “Bolsa Família” (Family Grant), a program designed to alleviate poverty and develop human potential. The program gives stipends to mothers [...]
Reading Spanish, Mastering English
Can studying Spanish help Latino students learn English and other subjects better? Javier Tapia, associate professor of education at UWM, is working with St. Anthony’s, a choice school, to test that idea. Currently, all instruction in the K-8 grades is in English, even though the majority of students come from Spanish-speaking homes. St. Anthony’s, with [...]