Wisconsin Engineer Magazine

143 years after being built, the Washburn observatory continues to offer a view of the cosmos to the public. See how dedicated engineering and innovative techniques contributed to the extraordinary lifetime of this UW-Madison icon. Outlasting its namesake, former governor C. C. Washburn, by over half a century and remaining scientifically relevant for decades after […]

QTE is an identity-based student organization that provides a sense of community for LGBTQIA+ students enrolled in the College of Engineering. All UW-Madison students deserve to feel a place of belonging. Four identity-based engineering student organizations on the UW-Madison campus aim to make this a reality. This includes the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), […]

First included in running shoes in 2017, carbon-fiber plates greatly increase running efficiency. Most professional runners now use this technology because of the advantage it provides. Alex Marrione, a long-distance runner for the Wisconsin Track Club, purchased a new pair of Nike running shoes for training during his senior year of high school. These shoes, […]

The curse of the Engineering Centers Building strikes again! After two fires and two floods over the lifetime of the building, how will the community of the College of Engineering recover from yet another disaster? History repeats itself. That’s the saying. While usually applied to large-scale societal events – war, epidemics, famine, natural disasters – […]

Electric motors have relied on the same fundamental technology for nearly two centuries until two UW-Madison Electrical Engineering graduate students returned to one of Benjamin Franklin’s early designs. In 2009, Dan Ludois was a UW-Madison Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate student. In the laboratory of Giri Venkataramanan, he spent his Friday afternoons attending seminars held […]

Machines or Mercurial Philosophers: Why Students Choose to Study the Former College enrollment trends ebb and flow with various societal, economic, and cultural changes. Within the landscape of higher education, two distinct areas often experience significant fluctuations in enrollment: humanities and engineering. While humanities programs explore the breadth of human expression and thought, engineering and […]

Live in Madison, work in Chicago, and get dinner in Minneapolis – the possibilities of high-speed rail in the Midwest are endless.  As winter break approaches, the stress of finals might finally dissipate for UW-Madison students. But as thousands of students plan to travel home for the holidays, the burdens of the semester are replaced […]

With the pop culture outbreak this summer surrounding Oppenheimer, more attention has been brought to research in nuclear engineering, specifically in UW-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. The release of Oppenheimer this past summer drove a pop culture frenzy. But more importantly, it increased conversations about nuclear engineering in the daily lives of […]

After facing the cancellation of their first competition, Badger Solar Racing, an engineering student organization, recently competed for the first time, now excited to compete in many more. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the lifestyle of all college students, canceling, postponing, and restructuring events and activities critical to the college experience. Many events never returned in […]