Wisconsin Engineer Magazine
Madison’s unique introductory course: How it came to be, how it will change In a world of evolving technology and shifting priorities, engineers must be adaptable. However, the same should also apply to engineering education. While UW-Madison teaches its students to adjust and overcome the challenges they face, the curriculum itself is similarly changing. The […]
Over 80 years after Italian immigrant Enrico Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, international nuclear engineering students face significant limitations with job options in the United States. Hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, sophomore Gerson Esquivel is an undergraduate international student in UW-Madison’s nuclear engineering program. Like many international students, he overcame the challenge of living in […]
Apple’s bid to bring spatial computing into everyone’s daily life may be out of step with today’s technology. February 2024 marked the release of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s push for virtual reality to be a part of everyone’s daily life. However, professionals remain skeptical that this will be the product to crack the mainstream. […]
Written by Mike A. Shapiro Our magazine’s first woman editor was also one of the first women to graduate UW–Madison with an engineering degree. When June Hartnell began editing Wisconsin Engineer in August 1944, she had a co-editor, a boyfriend with a red and white single-seat airplane, and the top GPA in the electrical engineering […]
Niche and confined to technical discourse, Linux and open-source technologies shoulder the responsibility of maintaining life in the modern digital age. On a global scale, from governments to multinational corporations, world leaders invest in the immense power of one technology. This exceedingly powerful tool is known as open-source. Open-source computing makes Linux, an operating system […]
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 […]
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 […]