As the CEO of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Iverson is the head of a nonprofit that brings cutting-edge discoveries to the market.

For someone with no formal science or medical training, Erik Iverson talks with the excitement and intelligence of someone who has both, especially when speaking about world-changing innovations that have come out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison over 100 years.

He explains how biochemist Harry Steenbock invented the process of enriching food with Vitamin D via irradiation in the early 1920s, and how the drug Warfarin — discovered after chemist Karl Paul Link studied a mysterious cow-killing clover that led to an invention first licensed as a rat poison — became the most prescribed blood thinner in history for treating blood clots and deep-vein thrombosis. When Iverson mentions present-day innovations, he talks fervently about radiopharmaceuticals, explaining that these drugs, which help doctors diagnose and treat diseases, have radioisotopic payloads that can attach to the protein in cancer cells and kill them, or target them so a surgeon can go in and take them out. He notes that Madison could become the epicenter of new research on radiopharmaceuticals because of UW–Madison’s second-to-none medical physics program.

Read more at channel3000.com/madison-magazine.