L&S News  Author: L&S News

The UniverCity Alliance brings together students, faculty and research centers from across the UW-Madison campus and connects them to the places where people live. The goal of the project is to provide resources to communities to help develop the best solutions for urban growth and development issues.

UW-Madison’s University Opera is on a roll. Both shows from last year, Transformations and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, have won awards in the National Opera Association’s (NOA) Opera Production Competition for 2015-2016.

It is the second year in a row that UW-Madison has garnered an award from NOA, and the first time that each production was separately recognized. University Opera produces only two operas each year.

Before becoming a hospitalist and medical instructor at Duke University, Dr. Suchita Shah Sata was an honors student at UW-Madison, where a number of art history courses helped make her a better doctor today.

She says, "I even teach my medical students to approach a sick patient like a Seurat painting: You have to get really focused on the small dots of color (lab values, vital signs, heart sounds, family history, etc.), but then you have to step back and see the whole picture in order to accurately diagnose and treat the patient."

Read more about her experience in her own words.

Irene B. Katele died peacefully of metastatic ovarian cancer at her home on Dec. 20, 2016, surrounded in love by her family and friends.

Irene was in the compassionate care of Agrace home hospice for six weeks. She had been diagnosed with stage IIIc ovarian cancer in October 2008. Irene was 58 years old.

Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of Political Science Scott Straus was appointed a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Barack Obama.

Mark Seidenberg, a veteran cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes a strong case for how brain science can help the teaching profession in his book, Language at the Speed of Sight.

In June 2015, Nancy Nicholas and the late Albert “Ab” Nicholas made one of the largest donations in UW–Madison’s history: a $50 million matching gift to inspire alumni and friends to join them in supporting UW students.

Now the match has been completed, resulting in a total of $100 million in new gifts, including the match from the Nicholases. These gifts will be invested in the UW Foundation’s endowment, and will generate about $4.5 million in annual scholarships.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Odyssey Project has received a $100,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to help expand Odyssey Junior, an innovative program creating a pipeline to college for economically disadvantaged children through a humanities-based course of self-discovery and expression.

The Odyssey Project has a 14-year track record of empowering adults near the poverty level to overcome adversity and achieve their dreams through higher education. It offers a two-semester humanities course that lets students rediscover the joy of learning while earning six credits from UW-Madison.

Each year, 21 students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison participate in a unique capstone project: writing, designing, publishing and circulating an award-winning publication, Curb Magazine.

In September, as Curb staff members debated the philosophy behind this year’s issue, they finally came to a last-minute consensus: at a time of such division, why not talk about love?