{"id":11902,"date":"2019-04-12T16:49:17","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T16:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/?p=11902"},"modified":"2019-04-12T16:49:17","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T16:49:17","slug":"research-at-uw-madison-changes-student-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/articles\/11902","title":{"rendered":"Research at UW\u2013Madison changes student lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

The National Science Foundation\u2019s ranking of UW\u2013Madison as 6th<\/sup>\u00a0in research expenditures in the FY 2017\u00a0Higher Education Research and Development Survey<\/a>, proves that UW\u2013Madison is a research powerhouse with more than $1.19 billion in annual research expenditures.<\/p>\n

But funding only tells part of the research success story. In fact, research at UW is changing student lives in profound, and sometimes even unexpected ways.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences student Kelton Halbert is pursuing a Ph.D. in high resolution weather prediction modeling and is working with Cooperative Institute for Satellite Meteorological Studies research Leigh Orf<\/a>. Photo courtesy of Kelton Halbert<\/p><\/div>\n

A passion for weather<\/h2>\n

Kelton Halbert has a stormy relationship with UW.<\/p>\n

He is pursuing a Ph.D. in high resolution weather prediction modeling. He\u2019s also a storm chaser hobbyist and his photo of more than a dozen twisters won a recent Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC<\/a>) photo contest.<\/p>\n

Halbert was an undergraduate studying meteorology at the University of Oklahoma when he was invited to present at a National Weather Association conference. Wayne Feltz, senior scientist and executive director of UW\u2013Madison\u2019s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS<\/a>) at SSEC, stopped Halbert at the conference to discuss graduate school plans. Two weeks later, Feltz invited Halbert to UW to give a talk on a piece of software that Halbert wrote called SHARPpy, a program that looks at severe weather forecasting and is a way of displaying information.<\/p>\n

\u201cUW\u2013Madison was not in my plans, but I fell in love with Madison during that visit and met Leigh Orf (associate scientist with CIMSS) who does severe thunderstorm and tornado research resolution modeling using super computers,\u201d Halbert recalls.\u00a0 \u201cToday, Leigh is my advisor and nobody is doing the research that Leigh is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using real-world observational data, Orf\u2019s research team studies weather conditions present at the time of large storms that spawn EF5 tornados.\u00a0Halbert grew up in Tennessee in a family that was interested in extreme weather and tornadoes. In fact, he chased his first storms with his mother. Most of his family, though, are musicians.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe joke is that I\u2019m the rebellious son who went on to a steady career path,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s my research at UW\u2013Madison that has put me solidly on that path.\u201d<\/p>\n

A love for medical research<\/h2>\n

Heidi Kletzien is a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Communication Sciences and Disorders. She heads to Harvard this fall to begin post-doc work. It\u2019s a bittersweet move for a woman, who unlike Halbert, always knew she would be a Badger.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Heidi Kletzien is headed to Harvard for post-doctoral work, after doing research at UW\u2013Madison. Photo courtesy of Heidi Kletzien<\/p><\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Kletzien, from Manitowoc, explains that her family members are all Badgers, starting with her great grandparents \u2013 Florence and Marty Below, who was an All American football player for the Badgers.<\/p>\n

For Kletzien, ice hockey is the sport of choice. She started playing when she was 5 and grew up going to every Badger game. As a UW freshman, she did just what she had dreamed of doing when she joined the Badger women\u2019s hockey team under Coach Mark Johnson.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be able to wear that jersey was really special,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m very competitive and I wanted to attend a university where I would get a top notch education but I also wanted to have an opportunity to win a national championship.\u201d<\/p>\n

She got that wish when the team won back-to-back NCAA Division 1 National Championships in 2006 and 2007.<\/p>\n

As an undergraduate, Kletzien balanced sports with courses in legal studies and political science. Then her academic focus took an unexpected turn her senior year.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Johnson always talked about how anatomy was one of his favorite courses on campus, so my senior year spring semester I decided to take anatomy,\u201d Kletzien recalls. \u201cI fell in love with the course, and at that point decided I needed to do something in medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

She called her parents two weeks before graduation and told them she was shifting her focus to medicine. She also discussed her new found interest with athletic team doctor Lee Kaplan (now at University of Miami), and soon started working in his lab studying osteoarthritis. In Kaplan\u2019s lab she discovered a love for research.<\/p>\n

In 2009 she met Nadine Connor, associate vice chancellor for research policy and compliance in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, and a\u00a0professor in the College of Letters & Science\u2019s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the School of Medicine and Public Health\u2019s Department of Surgery.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time I met Nadine, I wasn\u2019t quite sure what a swallowing disorder was, but I thought, that if they were looking at muscles in the head and neck, as an athlete, muscles were something I understood.\u201d Kletzien went on to become Connor\u2019s lab manager.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mentors \u2013 Nadine along with Michelle Ciucci (associate professor in the\u00a0Division of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery)<\/em>, and Timothy McCulloch (chair of the Division of Otolaryngology at the School of Medicine and Public Health) \u00ad\u2013 changed my life. If I had not found them, I would not be doing what I am doing today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Kletzien\u2019s research interest is in the underlying cellular mechanisms contributing to swallowing and voice disorders that occur with age and disease.<\/p>\n

And just as her mentors helped her, she gives back to the community. She\u2019s a volunteer hockey coach and was president of two student organizations \u2013 Optical Society of America and Society for Photonics and Instrumentation Engineering. She serves on the student advisory council for the national Dysphagia Research Society.<\/p>\n

Two former athletes are among the undergraduates she has mentored. They are former Badger hockey player and med student at Penn State, Brittany Ammerman, and biomedical engineering student and former UW football player Patrick Kasl. Her goal is to help them find their research passion just as she found hers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to forever give back to what was given to me at UW\u2013Madison,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Making life better overseas<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Students of Gregg Mitman, interim director of the\u00a0Center for the Humanities\u00a0<\/a>and professor of history, medical history and environmental studies, also are giving back by making life better for their home countries in Africa.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Emmanuel Urey, shown with his family, created two documentaries on Liberia while a graduate student at UW. Photo courtesy of Emmanuel Urey<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Emmanuel Urey came to UW\u2013Madison from Liberia in 2011 and graduated last May with a Ph.D. focus in the environment and resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy passion drove me to come to UW\u2013Madison and the\u00a0Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies<\/a>, which houses a land tenure institution that is known around the world,\u201d Urey recalls.<\/p>\n

While at UW, Urey and Mitman collaborated on two documentaries about Liberia,\u00a0In the Shadow of Ebola<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Land Beneath Our Feet<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>After graduation, he has maintained strong ties to UW and serves as a project assistant for a website that he developed with Mitman,\u00a0Liberianhistory.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At home, Urey is raising money to build a school and working for Landesa to implement the new\u00a0Land Rights Act<\/a>. He says his graduate experience at UW was geared toward informing that law, which protects land rights for more than 3 million indigenous Liberians.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing to UW\u2013Madison boosted my commitment to making the law possible,\u201d he says. \u201cI discovered people who are committed to the environment and who have a deep passion about the work they do in terms of reducing inequality in the world. They have been very encouraging and a motivating factor in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also volunteers as the president of a newly accredited college, The Salvation Army Polytechnic in Liberia. Education with Integrity is the school\u2019s motto and a widely held belief he says he also found at UW.<\/p>\n

Focus on global health history<\/h2>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>

Ayodeji Adegbite<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ayodeji Adegbit<\/a>e came to UW\u2013Madison from Nigeria to pursue a Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine and technology. His research focuses on global health history, with a particular interest in Africa. He became interested in infectious disease research while serving in Nigeria\u2019s National Youth Service Corps. While in the corps, he was stationed in an area that experienced an Ebola outbreak.<\/p>\n

\u201cI came to my research with a lot of questions, but not a lot of direction,\u201d Adegbite recalls. \u201cThen I stumbled onto UW\u2013Madison and found Gregg Mitman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since coming to UW in August 2018, he has conducted a literature review on global health that has provided him with a broad knowledge of the history of health crisis in Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be able to make an impact in Nigeria,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I know that with my research at UW I will be able to find my way to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The National Science Foundation ranks UW\u2013Madison as 6th\u00a0in research expenditures in the FY 2017\u00a0Higher Education Research and Development Survey. But funding only tells part of the research success story. In fact, research at UW is changing student lives in profound, and sometimes even unexpected ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":11904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-11902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories","tag-cimss"],"acf":{"include_for_media_link":"no","guest_author":[{"first_name":"Natasha","last_name":"Kassulke","link":"mailto:natasha.kassulke@wisc.edu"}],"sub_title":"","ssec_home_page_carousel_image":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2019\/04\/Kelton_Halbert_web_banner.jpg","short_title":"Research at UW\u2013Madison changes student lives"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11902"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11911,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11902\/revisions\/11911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}