Autumn in Madison is well upon us — midterms are past, finals are ahead, the leaves are falling, and the weather ranges from almost balmy to snow flurries. Joshua and I have already begun cooking for a big family gathering this year at Olin House. (It includes our signature pumpkin chiffon pie, which has been a must-eat Thanksgiving treat for my family since my childhood!)
This stretch of time between Thanksgiving and the December holidays can fly by in a rush. If you find yourself wanting to savor a bit more of fall, I recommend this stunning multimedia story about autumn on campus, a good reminder to pause and appreciate the “beauty [of] the in-between.”
Between Past and Future
For the past decade, UW–Madison has celebrated Native November — honoring the First Nations of Wisconsin and reflecting on the history beneath our feet. Our beautiful Seed by Seed banners hang on Bascom Hall, and we have speakers, meals, music, and Cultural Landscape Tours that invite us to stand between past and future.
I was honored to attend a screening premiere last week of the UW–Madison-affiliated documentary Sacred Wisdom, Sacred Earth, where I learned about the Seventh-Generation Principle that many Indigenous communities live by — a call to consider not only the next generation, but seven generations to come when making important decisions. It’s a lesson worth noting in a place dedicated to shaping lives and futures.
RISE-ing to the Moment
Our campus has been amazingly good at building a culture of collaboration, but we haven’t always been as good at building the infrastructure to make that collaboration seamless. That’s a central goal of RISE, the initiative we launched 21 months ago to hire new faculty into wildly important areas and forge new pathways for collaboration across disciplines.
I saw some fascinating early results at last week’s campuswide RISE Summit, which brought together more than 200 faculty and researchers across our three RISE focus areas, AI, EARTH, and THRIVE. Here’s a quick look at a few things happening:
Faculty leaders at our new Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center have built what they call an “eharmony for researchers,” to bring together more than 40 experts in medicine, chemistry, and computational biology to map how aging cells change over time, with the ultimate goal of preventing a host of aging-related diseases.
Our new RISE-AI Collaboration HQ, led by Kyle Cranmer MA’02, PhD’05, is picking up speed. And the Center for Humanistic Inquiry into AI and Uncertainty is gathering scholars from history, media, philosophy, English, ethics, library science, and computing to ask smart questions about how to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence and harness its extraordinary potential.
RISE is also about creating new opportunities for our students. It’s inspiring some incredibly exciting team-taught courses that stretch across disciplines, and we recently announced an inaugural round of RISE research fellowships.
A Note to Our Badger Nursing Family
One terribly sad update: Our Badger nursing community, and so many of us across our campus and beyond, are mourning the sudden loss of Dean Emerit Linda Scott, who passed away last week after a brief illness. Dean Scott was a transformative leader who cared deeply about advancing excellence in nursing and reducing health disparities. She was a national leader in the nursing profession and an effective and passionate dean, as well as a dear friend to so many of us. I will miss her insights, passion, and wonderfully dry sense of humor. If you’d like to share a memory or contribute to the scholarship fund honoring her legacy, you can do that here.
To all of our treasured alumni: I am so grateful for all of you. I hope the week ahead offers an opportunity to pause between what is finished and what comes next, and to savor the beauty of this season.
Thank you for being part of our incredible Badger community — past, present, and future.
Happy Thanksgiving, and on, Wisconsin!
Jennifer L. Mnookin
Chancellor
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Chancellor’s Choice
If you’ve visited Madison recently, you might have encountered a wild turkey or three strutting across campus. Twenty years ago, turkeys crossing University Avenue would have been an incredibly rare sight. But today, they have dedicated social media fan pages, and their numbers and behaviors have spurred campus safety guidelines on confrontational big birds!
Some alumni might remember two Bucky Badger clocks on the bank at University and Park, keeping watch as they hurried to class. The bank is gone, but one of the clocks has recently been restored so Bucky can once again let students know how late they are.
And speaking of our iconic mascot, don’t miss the December 2 premiere of the PBS documentary Bucky! Narrated by comedian Charlie Berens ’09, the film traces Bucky’s evolution from his humble papier-mâché origins to mascot superstardom.