Beaming With Pride
In one year, construction of the new Computer, Data & Information Sciences Building (CDIS) on University Avenue will be complete. The foundation of the 340,000-square-foot building—projected to open in Spring 2025—has been poured, and many of the massive, multi-ton steel beams and trusses that form the building’s skeleton are now in place.
The building’s design includes green roofs, a massive atrium, collaboration space, labs, skylights and a striking staircase. The facility will house multiple departments and centers, including Computer Sciences, Statistics and the Information School, as well as Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, the Center for High Throughput Computing, the Data Science Institute and the N+1 Institute.
“As much as computing and data are part of our everyday lives, we hope our new facility will become a part of the everyday life of all students,” said CDIS Founding Director Tom Erickson at a beam-signing ceremony for alumni, donors and students.
Go behind the scenes with the construction crew at go.wisc.edu/ls-cdisconstruction.
If we’re thinking about how we want to manage or protect groundwater resources in the future, we really need to be thinking about what’s happening on the land surface. And if you look at Wisconsin, greater than 90% of the land is, really, rural land.
Intragalactic Planetary
There’s an Earth-like planet circling around a star similar to our planet’s sun in the nearby constellation of Ursa Major. It was discovered by a team of researchers that includes incoming assistant professor of astronomy Melinda Soares-Furtado, a current NASA Hubble Fellow. The planet, called HD 63433 d, offers researchers the opportunity to study how planets evolve.
While the new planet has some similarities to an early Earth in terms of its atmospheric development, it’s dramatically different in other ways. Astronomers believe the planet is tidally locked, which means one side perpetually faces the star around which it rotates, while the other side remains in total darkness. Because it’s so close, scientists believe temperatures on the side of the planet that faces the star could reach as high as 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This is our solar backyard, and that’s kind of exciting,” Soares-Furtado says. “What sort of information can a star this close, with such a crowded system around it, give away? How will it help us as we move on to look for planets among the maybe 100 other, similar stars in this young group it’s part of?”
RISE Up
UW–Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin recently announced the debut of the Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative, an effort designed to address significant and complex problems facing our society. Over the next three to five years, UW–Madison plans to hire 120–150 new faculty members through the initiative, focusing those new professors on key issues such as artificial intelligence, environmental sustainability and fostering entrepreneurship.
“We’re going to look at the grand challenges facing our state and the world and grow the faculty in a targeted way that builds on our existing strengths, in places where, with strategy and investment, we can accelerate discovery and world-changing research and education, innovate for the public good … and be absolutely best in class,” Mnookin says.
257
The number of instruments that will be featured as part of the University of Wisconsin Marching Band’s annual Spring Concert performances on April 19 and 20.
