Meet UW-Madison Innovators
Reid Alisch
“What you eat, your life experiences, how much you exercise, all of these things can modify your DNA methylation levels. DNA methylation doesn’t change your DNA, but the presence or absence of DNA methylation can change the way your DNA is used and whether or how much genes are expressed.”
Joseph Andrews
“We’re printing devices and electronics that have been previously investigated, but now we can print them in ways you can’t achieve with conventional techniques. We know how these sensors will work and operate, but through printing them, or using other flexible electronics fabrication techniques, we can apply these sensors to new fields.”
Mike Arnold
“Carbon promises to transform what computers and communications devices like cell phones can accomplish for people, by enabling faster, more energy efficient electronics and also new forms of electronics that are flexible, stretchable or transparent."
Mei Baker
“Solving immediate problems is in my blood, and I’m interested in translational research that has a clinical impact. When I have a problem in front of me, I’ll find a solution. I love it. I feel very lucky to be in a position to solve problems.”
Emily Bick
"I’m hoping to be able to provide a cost-effective, skilled labor-free experience for farmers, so they can put out sensors, in complement to scouting fields, and get better pest information, which leads to data-driven pest responses."
Helen Blackwell
“I would love our findings to contribute to the understanding of how bacteria interact in their myriad natural environments and how we can harness these interactions to treat infectious disease. I hope to continue to work with students here at UW to discover chemical approaches to decipher these bacterial interactions.”
Mahua Dey
"What’s currently most exciting is a personalized, gene-modified tumor vaccine we developed from patient tumor cells that can super charge an aging immune system to better attack cancer cells. We’re really excited about moving it into the clinical realm in an early phase clinical trial to offer hope to brain cancer patients."
Joao Dorea
“By developing technology for the agriculture sector, I’m excited about the opportunity to translate and use technologies and AI to help farmers improve their decision-making and optimize animal monitoring, health and welfare. It’s very cool to apply the technology we see in hospitals and grocery stores to agriculture and see it working there.”
Jeff Endelman
“We want to create potato varieties that have a transformative impact on agriculture, and there’s a lot of software and technology development to help us realize that goal–that’s the interplay between the two parts of the research. The applied science drives the basic science–we want to be more effective at delivering genetic solutions to farmers.”
Dawei Feng
“From a company perspective, we envision becoming a major player in the market of green energy storage and evolving into a research institute to address critical problems. We hope we can be an example of combining fundamental knowledge with practical applications. From a research perspective, I hope we will continue to do innovative research.”
Jacques Galipeau
"We’re working with a new class of technologies, living therapeutics, with use cases in cancer therapeutics and autoimmune diseases, which is very exciting. We’ve shown that we can take an idea from the whiteboard to getting a federal license to initiate the first human clinical trials to de-risk these platforms and impact human outcomes.”
David Gamm
“I want to understand how retinas are made and why different diseases cause them to fail and degenerate. Ultimately, our aim is to apply that knowledge to manufacture more authentic human retinal cell types and tissues that can be used to advance therapies for people at every stage of disease."
Amanda Gevens
"As the University of Wisconsin Extension Potato and Vegetable Pathologist, my program supports vegetable growers by providing research-based recommendations for controlling diseases during production and in storage. My research program directly feeds into my extension work.”
Shaoqin “Sarah” Gong
"By designing and synthesizing innovative drug/gene delivery systems and tissue engineering scaffolds, our research has the potential to create new gene/genome editing therapies that can cure the root causes of genetic diseases or new cell therapies that can fight against blindness.”
Padma Gopalan
“Many of the materials we have developed are already being used in the semiconductor industry to enable the fabrication of small features. The application profile of the aligned carbon nanotubes on a silicon wafer is also far-reaching, with potential impacts in next-generation logic chips, radio frequency amplifiers and beyond.”
Jenny Gumperz
"Our work relates to using immune cells to fight cancer. We are developing a very different approach to do this–it involves activating the T lymphocytes of cancer patients in a very specific way to fight cancer."
Sundaram Gunasekaran
"Research is pursuing answers to unanswered questions and pushing at the edge of science. The process of discovering the scientific underpinnings of what we are studying and developing tools and technologies to support that pursuit is very satisfying.”
Susan Hagness
"It’s exciting to work on cross-disciplinary problems that are interesting and challenging from an academic perspective and fundamentally important from a societal perspective—and to do so within a collaborative campus environment that provides a huge breadth of expertise."
Jesse Hampton
“I’d like to explore several new areas: One is the application of data science and remote sensing in geological engineering and infrastructure problems. We’ve gotten really good at being able to collect data over the past few decades, but we haven’t been able to fully harness all of the information yet.”
Jiamian Hu
"I create new computer models to design materials and devices. When we design devices, we consider the influence of materials microstructures, making device modeling more accurate and discovering new functionality through the creation and control of interfaces between monolithic materials components."
Quanyin Hu
“We want to develop a basic drug delivery system with enhanced efficacy and minimal toxicity. When we design our projects, we always think about the patient first and designing delivery system that can have real impacts on patients.”
George Huber
“We hope to design new technologies that will allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, recycle more plastics and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”
Shawn Kaeppler
“Broadly, our society and our planet face challenges like climate change, needing to feed people, human health and protecting our environment with clean water and healthy soils. Within that context, my vision is to continue to find ways to apply our research and discover new things and try to translate them into systems.”
Bhuvana Krishnaswamy
"To learn more about areas that aren’t densely populated, like oceans and deserts, we can study them through deploying sensors or new monitoring equipment. In remote locations, deploying battery-powered devices that can last for months is a challenging problem. Much of our research focuses on low power wireless communications.”
Dan Ludois
“I’m trying to identify gaps in electromagnetism I can fill with unique electrostatic and capacitative technology. The first part of my career was motors and generators; the next stage of it is going to be wireless power transfer aspects and eventually aerial platforms.”
David Lynn
“One of the areas we’re particularly excited about now is the design of ‘slippery’ liquid-infused materials that offer new ways to prevent fouling by bacteria or other organisms and substances. The work we’re doing now is aimed at developing processes for the fabrication of slippery coatings that are scalable and more compatible with various types of manufacturing processes.”
Hiroshi Maeda
"Our society faces climate issues, food security, energy challenges and extreme weather. Plants can do remarkable work, sucking up CO2 and producing a variety of chemicals, simply using sunlight energy. By understanding how plants do this and utilizing this power, I’m optimistic we can address the pressing issues we’re facing today.”
Megan McClean
"Our work on fungal dispersion has the potential to contribute to therapeutics for diseases that are growing in prevalence and severity, particularly fungal diseases. Better control of cells also has implications for biotechnology. I think biomanufacturing has the potential to lessen our reliance on fossil fuels and allow implementation of greener production methods.”
Denise Ney
"The success with GMP-rich foods for PKU patients made a difference for people living with that disease, which is so rewarding. It’s so affirming that all that effort came to fruition, and when I think of my career, it’s such a happy feeling–I did that. I trained three Ph.D. students on that project, and now they’re leaders in the field, so I feel like my legacy helped the PKU community and goes on.”
Mike Petersen
“I’d love to create some actual hemp plants that could subsequently go to market with some enhanced trait, like disease resistance, a trait that makes it more medically valuable, or anything that would make it stand out from a normal hemp plant in nature right now. Growing hemp on millions of acres would give farmers another choice of what to grow and more money in their pockets.”
Brian Pfleger
“My group is trying to understand what prevents the field of biomanufacturing from having a larger market share and how to build the things we can demonstrate in the lab at scales that make sense. I spent time on my sabbatical at the University of Stuttgart in Germany learning about barriers and identifying cool experiments and hypotheses about what we can study. In the near future, I hope we can develop technologies that bring things in our field to market.”
David Plante
“The broader goal of my research is to identify causes of unexplained hypersomnolence and novel ways to treat these problems. I ultimately aim to improve the sleep health and quality of life for persons with sleep disorders.”
Aurelie Rakotondrafara
“Recent studies suggest that plants respond to stress, like environmental conditions or pathogen attacks, by switching to non-canonical mechanisms to express their defense genes in a similar fashion as some viruses do. Thus, plant viruses can be great models to increase our basic understanding of the diversity of translation and cellular processes.”
Vatsan Raman
“This is an exciting time to be in biotechnology with such explosive growth. Biotechnology is changing the world at an astounding pace. Looking ahead, I aim to pursue research that not only advances scientific knowledge but also translates into real-world applications that benefit society.”
Bulent Sarlioglu
“We are in exciting times, where there are great opportunities for research to advance many emerging technologies, like electric vehicles and airplanes. Power electronics and electric machines are key enabling technologies with tremendous research opportunities in academia and industry.”
Eric Shusta
"The newest set of brain targeting molecules we found through immunization and screening of lamprey antigen receptors (VLRs) target brain tissue that is exposed to the bloodstream during various neurological diseases. Targeting molecules like this don’t ferry cargo into the brain under normal conditions, but anywhere there’s a blood-brain barrier disruption, they can deliver drugs directly to the site of pathology.”
Melissa Skala
“My goal is to unravel the complexities of how the body works, and it’s a difficult problem because there are tons of tiny little pieces orchestrating this response. As an imaging person, I’m focused on unraveling those complexities in the most intact representative systems possible. Cells are amazing little machines, and it’s exciting to see what they do.”
Igor Slukvin
“I envision that my research will be eventually translated into the clinic. I hope that we can initiate clinical trials with the stem cell-based immunotherapy technologies recently developed in my lab.”
Michael Sussman
"In animals, almost every receptor is incredibly important. In plants, the large family of receptors and their hormones play critical roles in many aspects of plant metabolism, growth and development, although cell expansion is one of the more obvious. Plant cells are long, and they have to regulate their expansion very carefully.”
Aussie Suzuki
“Now that I’ve developed new technology that makes invisible structures visible, I want to use them to address biological questions in cell division, HIV-1 and EBV research. I also would like to continue to develop novel imaging technologies for future patents.”
Weiping Tang
“Some of our work will lead to new tools for other researchers to use, and some of our work may eventually lead to new therapeutics. I hope to contribute to the development of new drug discovery methods that can accelerate the drug development process and make it more efficient. This could include the development of new strategies, platforms and modalities.”
Ramathasan Thevamaran
"These discoveries enable us to innovate new material systems to tackle some of the most challenging problems we face; for example, preventing traumatic brain injury from collisions and creating strong and tough lightweight composites for the next generation of aerospace applications.”
Dan Thoma
"Most engineers get into the field to make an impact on society, and I’ve always been involved in energy applications—higher operating temperatures for higher efficiencies, or new materials and the next generation of fusion reactors for sustainable energy. These have big impacts.”
Andreas Velten
"I always like figuring out how things work and using my knowledge to build something functional that can do things people couldn’t do before. That’s also where images are really powerful. The most exciting data, once you make an image or video out of it, is much easier to understand and clicks with people much better."
Ophelia Venturelli
"We aim to identify control knobs for precisely steering microbiomes to desired states and develop the capabilities to build microbiomes from the bottom up with desired functions. We aim to apply these frameworks for precision and personalized medicine by targeting the microbiome, produce valuable industrial compounds from waste streams and renewable resources and promote sustainable agriculture to meet the needs of our growing population and changing climate.”
Bu Wang
"Our goal is to produce low-cost, carbon-negative cementitious materials that can be readily used by current concrete construction practices. This will provide dual benefits of removing carbon dioxide from the air and reducing the usage of cement, a carbon-intensive material."
Xiangyao Yu
“I work on databases—storing, managing and getting insights from data. Data is becoming a foundation of our society—the advancement of computer sciences is increasing driven by the expanding volume of data. This makes it an exciting time to work on database optimizations in various aspects.”