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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”