Natural & Physical Sciences

The Enid H. Anderson Professor of English and Steenbock Professor of Physical Sciences in the Department of Chemistry are honored for their contributions to research, teaching and service.

Eight L&S faculty members have been chosen to receive this year’s Distinguished Teaching Awards, an honor given out since 1953 to recognize some of the university’s finest educators.

Thomas Givnish and his team of researchers reconstructed the rise, spread and species diversification of Calochortus, a large group of flowering plants in the lily family.

This year’s spring commencement speaker at UW–Madison, Meghan Duggan, a Department of Integrative Biology alumna, Badger sports legend and trailblazing leader who scaled the heights of her sport, winning Olympic gold in women’s hockey as captain of Team USA in 2018.

Botanist and professor Simon Gilroy and Haddie McLean, manager of The Wonders of Physics, have received this year’s Bassam Z. Shakhashiri Public Science Engagement Awards. The awards recognize one UW faculty member and one academic staff member for their work engaging the public in science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

24 exceptional L&S graduate students have been selected as recipients of the 2023-24 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards, recognizing their strengths and commitment surrounding the craft of teaching.

Assistant Professor of Physics Ke Fang and Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences Xiangyao Yu will each receive $75,000 to support their research.

Simon Gilroy and his lab are no strangers to sending plants into space. And, at the end of January, the botany professor and his team will be doing it again for their sixth experiment with NASA on the International Space Station, this time with tomatoes.

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the University of Wisconsin–Madison will establish a new hub called the Wisconsin Sloan Center for Systemic Change, or WiSC², to transform graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).