History of Research at the UW-Madison

Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a long and celebrated history. Although research on campus preceded the creation of the Graduate School by a few years, the story of the Graduate School and the story of research at UW are interwoven.

The Research Committee was created in 1917 to provide research resources for the faculty. Initially with state funds, but by 1925 with funds from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the Committee disbursed funds through an annual competition that continues to the present. Today the Graduate School oversees more than a billion dollars in extramural funding for the campus.

Research firsts, new approaches to old problems, broadreaching technical and organizational research innovations are commonplace at the University of Wisconsin. Even those that could be attested to be of historical importance would be too numerous to list here. Therefore, the list below is a select few milestones reflecting the past 100 plus years of research at UW-Madison.

1876. Edward Birge, biologist, and Chancey Juday, starting in 1900, establish the field of limnology (lake studies) in North America.

1890. Stephen Babcock, and agricultural chemist, develops the Babcock butterfat test for assessing the quality of milk.

1924. Harry Steenbock develops a process for enriching food with vitamin D. He and colleagues establish the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to use income from their patents and investments to fund university research.

1933. Karl Paul Link, biochemist, synthesizes blood-thinner dicumarol. A variant is used in the rat-killing compound Warfarin.

1934. The Arboretum is dedicated to conserve and reclaim the natural ecology of Wisconsin's woods and prairies. It becomes a center of the Graduate School in 1990.

1936. University of Wisconsin Press is founded.

1941. Harold Rusch, oncologist, is the first to show which wavelength of ultraviolet light produces skin cancer. Later in the 1960's Derek Cripps, professor of Medicine lays the foundation for Sun Protection Factor (SPF) ratings.

1957. Robert Parent, engineer, and V.E. Suomi, meteorologist, lead a team of researchers in using remote sensing by satellite to measure heat budget of Earth. Subsequently, the Space Science and Engineering Center is organized within Graduate School.

1957. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) begins collecting data from a random sampling of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. This long-term study provides an opportunity to study the life course, intergenerational transfers and relationships, family functioning, physical and mental health and well-being, and morbidity and mortality from late adolescence through middle age.

1966. The Institute for Research on Poverty is established to inquire into the origins and remedies of poverty and to share knowledge among researchers and policy analysts.

1969. William Sewell, sociologist, and colleagues unveil the Wisconsin Model of Socioeconomic Attainment. It includes for the first time social psychological causes of attainment such as status aspiration.

1984. University Research Park founded to encourage technology transfer and create endowment for research programs.

1985. The Dictionary of American Regional English, Vol. 1, is published. This unique reference tool documents the many differences that characterize the various dialect regions of the United States.

1998. James Thompson, professor of anatomy, successfully derives human embryonic stem cells, capable of unlimited undifferentiated proliferation, in the laboratory.

2002. Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute established to serve as catalyst for the advancement of women in science and engineering.

2004. Construction begins on the IceCube Neutrino Detector, 5000 sensors buried in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, designed to search for high energy neutrinos from cosmic sources.

2007. In fall 2007, the proposal (1.5 Mb PDF) for the public Wisconsin Institute for Discovery was approved by the University Academic Planning Council, establishing the institute as a center within the Graduate School.