Staff

Learning Support Services (LSS) staff member Dennis Rinzel passed away on September 8, 2017.

A new UW2020 initiative will centralize the databases of the university’s five natural history museums, which have separated over the decades to specialize and accommodate growing collections. The 1.3-million-specimen Wisconsin State Herbarium will coordinate with the zoology, geology, entomology and anthropology museums to merge records in a way that allows researchers to study the full scope of natural artifacts in one central location.

Wisconsin Sea Grant is launching a new project to cut erosion and protect Lake Michigan shoreline homes, beaches and harbors.The effort is funded through an award from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Resilience Grants Program and builds on prior Sea Grant work in Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties.

The “Wisconsin Idea,” often described as the most succinct explanation for the university’s role in the state of Wisconsin, will be dissected on campus during 15 lectures this fall in Sociology 496: “FORWARD? The Wisconsin Idea, Past and Present.”

When the Iranian government offered Mo Fayyaz a full scholarship to study horticulture abroad, a simple oversight meant the University of Wisconsin–Madison was not his top choice. “I didn’t even know there was a state called Wisconsin,” laughs Fayyaz, who is retiring in August after 33 years as the distinguished director of the botany department greenhouse and botanical gardens.

The Wisconsin State Herbarium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has discovered a collection of more than 2,000 mosses from the turn of the 20th century, lost to time in a cabinet inside Birge Hall, where the herbarium is housed.

The UW–Madison Memorial Carillon concerts will resume at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 28, with Sunday afternoon concerts on the second and fourth Sundays of the month at least through August.

Eight members (two from L&S) of the University of Wisconsin–Madison community have been selected by the University Staff Awards Selection Committee to receive the 2017 University Staff Recognition Award.

Eight members of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s academic staff — including Mo Fayyaz in the Department of Botany — have been selected as recipients of the 2017 Academic Staff Excellence Awards.