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Counseling is key for students facing mental health problems.
For college students grappling with depression or anxiety, access to mental health counseling can mean the difference between failing and passing an exam — or between staying in school and dropping out.
When a recent audit found long waits at some UW System campuses for students who want counseling appointments, members of the board of regents responded with alarm. While students with the most urgent needs are prioritized at all schools, increased enrollment at some UW System campuses is making it difficult for counseling staff to keep up with overall demand. In fact, the number of staff has remained unchanged since 2002 across the system.
At one extreme is UW-Milwaukee, with just one counselor for every 4,289 students and where the wait for an appointment can be as long as four weeks during a semester’s busiest times. However, UW-Madison — the only system school meeting the minimum staffing ratio established by the International Association of Counseling Services Standards — has one counselor for every 1,492 students and is able to provide a quicker response.
UW-Madison operates a twenty-four-hour crisis phone line, and students with the most urgent needs receive appointments the same day, or the following morning if they call after hours. Other students typically see a counselor the day after they call, says Bob McGrath, a clinical psychologist and director of counseling and consultation services for University Health Services (UHS).
“Student issues can be very transitional,” McGrath says, explaining the need for prompt attention.
A spring 2007 survey by the American College Health Association found that more than 60 percent of college students reported feeling hopeless at times, 45 percent said they were depressed to the point of having trouble functioning, nearly 10 percent considered attempting suicide, and 1.6 percent had attempted suicide at least once during the past school year.
“A lot of mental illnesses emerge at this age,” says Sarah Van Orman, UHS director. “So this is the place to have the resources.”
An increased demand for the counseling services is expected as more veterans enroll in college, and because faculty, staff, and student awareness has grown following the tragedies at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech in which troubled students went on shooting sprees. But, Van Orman says, violence is not the typical response from students who are struggling with depression or anxiety. “The most common outcome,” she says, “is them dropping out of school or not doing well. If we know that we can get students in [for counseling] and get them into the right kinds of treatment, they’re going to do better, and they’re going to stay in school.”
McGrath notes that his office already has one of the mechanisms recommended by the UW System report: a process to track students who are identified as high-risk once they are referred to off-campus providers for continued care and treatment. “If there’s anyone that there’s a concern about,” he says, “we’re not just going to make a referral. We’re going to refer and follow up.”
McGrath and Van Orman say UW-Madison won’t seek to adopt some of the report’s other recommendations — including using more group therapy, setting a strict limit on the number of counseling sessions per student, and charging fees to help cover costs. The university’s counseling service offers a number of targeted support groups, but, in many cases, groups are not the right substitute for individual sessions, Van Orman says.
UW-Madison’s guidelines include a maximum of 10 sessions per student — a limit not strictly enforced for those who need more help — but the average number of sessions is 4.5. Last, charging any access fees for counseling services would “put a barrier up for students at a time when we don’t want to put barriers,” Van Orman says.
The $150 segregated fee that each UW-Madison student pays per semester helps to cover counseling, plus medical and prevention services. The fees total about half of the $2.4 million budget for salaries and benefits for counseling staff, with the rest coming from state tax dollars.
The start of the fall semester in September was “intense” as usual for UW-Madison’s counseling services, McGrath says, but he adds that the challenges of the work are outweighed by the rewards. “Now and then you get a letter from someone from five years ago that says, ‘You helped me make it through.’ ”
— Jenny Price ’96
For college students grappling with depression or anxiety, access to mental health counseling can mean the difference between failing and passing an exam — or between staying in school and dropping out.
When a recent audit found long waits at some UW System campuses for students who want counseling appointments, members of the board of regents responded with alarm. While students with the most urgent needs are prioritized at all schools, increased enrollment at some UW System campuses is making it difficult for counseling staff to keep up with overall demand. In fact, the number of staff has remained unchanged since 2002 across the system.
At one extreme is UW-Milwaukee, with just one counselor for every 4,289 students and where the wait for an appointment can be as long as four weeks during a semester’s busiest times. However, UW-Madison — the only system school meeting the minimum staffing ratio established by the International Association of Counseling Services Standards — has one counselor for every 1,492 students and is able to provide a quicker response.
UW-Madison operates a twenty-four-hour crisis phone line, and students with the most urgent needs receive appointments the same day, or the following morning if they call after hours. Other students typically see a counselor the day after they call, says Bob McGrath, a clinical psychologist and director of counseling and consultation services for University Health Services (UHS).
“Student issues can be very transitional,” McGrath says, explaining the need for prompt attention.
A spring 2007 survey by the American College Health Association found that more than 60 percent of college students reported feeling hopeless at times, 45 percent said they were depressed to the point of having trouble functioning, nearly 10 percent considered attempting suicide, and 1.6 percent had attempted suicide at least once during the past school year.
“A lot of mental illnesses emerge at this age,” says Sarah Van Orman, UHS director. “So this is the place to have the resources.”
An increased demand for the counseling services is expected as more veterans enroll in college, and because faculty, staff, and student awareness has grown following the tragedies at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech in which troubled students went on shooting sprees. But, Van Orman says, violence is not the typical response from students who are struggling with depression or anxiety. “The most common outcome,” she says, “is them dropping out of school or not doing well. If we know that we can get students in [for counseling] and get them into the right kinds of treatment, they’re going to do better, and they’re going to stay in school.”
McGrath notes that his office already has one of the mechanisms recommended by the UW System report: a process to track students who are identified as high-risk once they are referred to off-campus providers for continued care and treatment. “If there’s anyone that there’s a concern about,” he says, “we’re not just going to make a referral. We’re going to refer and follow up.”
McGrath and Van Orman say UW-Madison won’t seek to adopt some of the report’s other recommendations — including using more group therapy, setting a strict limit on the number of counseling sessions per student, and charging fees to help cover costs. The university’s counseling service offers a number of targeted support groups, but, in many cases, groups are not the right substitute for individual sessions, Van Orman says.
UW-Madison’s guidelines include a maximum of 10 sessions per student — a limit not strictly enforced for those who need more help — but the average number of sessions is 4.5. Last, charging any access fees for counseling services would “put a barrier up for students at a time when we don’t want to put barriers,” Van Orman says.
The $150 segregated fee that each UW-Madison student pays per semester helps to cover counseling, plus medical and prevention services. The fees total about half of the $2.4 million budget for salaries and benefits for counseling staff, with the rest coming from state tax dollars.
The start of the fall semester in September was “intense” as usual for UW-Madison’s counseling services, McGrath says, but he adds that the challenges of the work are outweighed by the rewards. “Now and then you get a letter from someone from five years ago that says, ‘You helped me make it through.’ ”
— Jenny Price ’96
It Doesn’t Add Up
Extensive study busts stereotype that girls can’t do math.
We’ve all heard it, and many of us believe it: girls just aren’t as good at math as boys are. But is it true?
After sifting through mountains of data, a team of scientists says the answer is no. Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children, or students’ ability to solve complex math problems, they found that girls measured up to boys.
“There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance,” says Janet Hyde, a UW psychology professor who led the study. “Parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this.”
Although girls today take just as many advanced high school math courses as boys do, and women earn 48 percent of all mathematics bachelor’s degrees, the stereotype persists that girls struggle with math, says Hyde. Not only do many parents and teachers believe this, but scholars also use it to explain the dearth of female mathematicians, engineers, and physicists at the highest levels.
Cultural beliefs like this are “incredibly influential,” Hyde says, making it critical to question them, “because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can’t do math, that can have a big impact on your math self-concept.”
To carry out its query, the team acquired math scores from the annual state exams that are now mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act, along with detailed statistics on test takers, including gender, grade level, and ethnicity, from ten states. Using data from more than 7 million students, they then calculated the “effect size,” a statistic that reports the degree of difference between girls’ and boys’ average math scores in standardized units. The effect sizes they found were very close to zero, indicating that average scores of girls and boys were the same.
“Boys did a teeny bit better in some states, and girls did a teeny bit better in others,” says Hyde. “But when you average them all, you essentially get no difference.”
Some critics argue, however, that even when average performance is equal, gender discrepancies may still exist at the highest levels of mathematical ability. So the team searched for those, as well. They compared, for example, the variability in boys’ and girls’ math scores — the idea being thatif more boys fell into the top scoring percentiles than girls, the variance in their scores would be greater. The effort again uncovered little difference, as did a comparison of how well boys and girls did on questions requiring complex problem-solving.
Still, will all of this be enough to finally shift our country’s long-held attitudes about gender and math? Hyde can’t say, but she remains determined to do her part.
“Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change,” she says, ”but as a scientist, I have to challenge them with data.”
— Madeline Fisher PhD’98
We’ve all heard it, and many of us believe it: girls just aren’t as good at math as boys are. But is it true?
After sifting through mountains of data, a team of scientists says the answer is no. Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children, or students’ ability to solve complex math problems, they found that girls measured up to boys.
“There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance,” says Janet Hyde, a UW psychology professor who led the study. “Parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this.”
Although girls today take just as many advanced high school math courses as boys do, and women earn 48 percent of all mathematics bachelor’s degrees, the stereotype persists that girls struggle with math, says Hyde. Not only do many parents and teachers believe this, but scholars also use it to explain the dearth of female mathematicians, engineers, and physicists at the highest levels.
Cultural beliefs like this are “incredibly influential,” Hyde says, making it critical to question them, “because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can’t do math, that can have a big impact on your math self-concept.”
To carry out its query, the team acquired math scores from the annual state exams that are now mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act, along with detailed statistics on test takers, including gender, grade level, and ethnicity, from ten states. Using data from more than 7 million students, they then calculated the “effect size,” a statistic that reports the degree of difference between girls’ and boys’ average math scores in standardized units. The effect sizes they found were very close to zero, indicating that average scores of girls and boys were the same.
“Boys did a teeny bit better in some states, and girls did a teeny bit better in others,” says Hyde. “But when you average them all, you essentially get no difference.”
Some critics argue, however, that even when average performance is equal, gender discrepancies may still exist at the highest levels of mathematical ability. So the team searched for those, as well. They compared, for example, the variability in boys’ and girls’ math scores — the idea being thatif more boys fell into the top scoring percentiles than girls, the variance in their scores would be greater. The effort again uncovered little difference, as did a comparison of how well boys and girls did on questions requiring complex problem-solving.
Still, will all of this be enough to finally shift our country’s long-held attitudes about gender and math? Hyde can’t say, but she remains determined to do her part.
“Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change,” she says, ”but as a scientist, I have to challenge them with data.”
— Madeline Fisher PhD’98
A Degree of Success
Earning a college diploma pays off in the long run, but it seems degrees from some universities net more than others. PayScale Inc., an online provider of global compensation data, recently surveyed 1.2 million people who attended one of three hundred schools, hold bachelor’s degrees, and have a minimum of ten years of work experience. (The typical mid-career employee is defined as forty-two years old with fifteen and a half years of experience.) The survey excluded respondents with advanced degrees, including MBAs, MDs, and JDs.
UW-Madison graduates ranked fifth in the Big Ten for mid-career salaries. Here’s how they stacked up among some other peer institutions.
UW-Madison graduates ranked fifth in the Big Ten for mid-career salaries. Here’s how they stacked up among some other peer institutions.
- Dartmouth $134,000*
- UC Berkeley $112,000
- Illinois $ 96,100**
- Michigan $ 93,000
- Wisconsin $ 87,800
- Minnesota $ 84,200
- Ohio State $ 83,700***
Telling Tales
UW students introduce Wisconsin schoolchildren to African traditions.
During her childhood in Nigeria, Mobolaji Falomo x’10 didn’t spend family time in front of the television. At night, when the moon was out, her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered together to tell stories.
Now an aspiring pediatrician majoring in child development, Falomo is sharing that tradition through African Storytelling on Wheels, a UW-Madison program that sends students of African origin into elementary schools in eastern and northern Wisconsin. The effort brings African culture, music, and languages to classrooms, with help from a three-year grant from the 2008 Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment.
“How many of you like stories? What’s your favorite story?” Falomo asks fourth-graders in Arkdale, a rural community ninety miles north of Madison. She wears a vibrant orange long-sleeved tunic with a matching skirt and completes the traditional Nigerian outfit with a dark green head wrap.
The previous school Falomo visited with the program — located nearly five hours north of Madison — had just a handful of African-American students. “Those kids lit up,” she says. “They don’t see anybody that looks like them very often.”
Moji Olaniyan, a UW assistant dean who first shared tales from her native Nigeria with her daughter’s kindergarten class some years ago, launched African Storytelling on Wheels last spring. The program is operated out of the African Studies Program.
On this fall morning, Falomo teams up with Beatrice Okelo MAx’10, a native of Kenya who is seeking a degree in African languages, literature, and linguistics. The UW storytellers poll their young audience to find out how many students think Africa is a continent, and how many think it’s a country — and in one fifth-grade class, students were split evenly on the question.
The university student storytellers are from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, and Nigeria, or they were born to parents who came to the United States from those countries. The geography lesson inevitably sparks questions about their homelands, giving the storytellers a chance to break down generalizations and misconceptions some of the children have about Africa and its people. In the fifth-grade classroom, students ask if most people in Africa are sick, if Nigeria has ever been hit by a tornado, and if Africans go fishing.
“Kids are very inquisitive. What’s in their heads pops out,” Falomo says.
The students also wonder which languages the women speak. Okelo answers by connecting her culture to American culture, asking if the students have heard the phrase hakuna matata, made famous by a song in the Disney film The Lion King. As the children raise their hands, Okelo explains that “hakuna matata is Swahili,” one of four languages she speaks.
Falomo tells the story of a male tortoise that eats food meant for his wife, prepared by a doctor to help the female tortoise become pregnant. Falomo asks the fourth-graders about their favorite foods to engage them in the story. In this version, the turtle takes a trip from Madison to Texas to deliver lasagna, eats the lasagna on the way back home, and becomes pregnant instead of his wife. She then adds a song, playing a tall African drum and singing in Yoruba, and teaches the class a refrain to sing along with her.
The stories always have a moral, with the end result showing the danger of behaviors such as ingratitude or treating others poorly. But the children don’t always catch on right away — as shown when Okelo tells the story of a hyena that falls in a pit and acts less than thankful for the help he gets from a cow. “I learned if I was a cow, I’d never trust a hyena,” says one fifth-grade boy after hearing the tale.
Sometimes, the storytellers use questions to guide children toward the story’s ultimate lesson, as when Okelo asks, “What would you do if someone helped you out of a pit?” The class responds correctly, “Say ‘Thank you!’ ”
At the end of each presentation, the storytellers pass handmade African instruments around the room for students to shake, pound, and bang.
During a break in the teacher’s lounge, as the storytellers wash down a snack of brownies and Rice Krispie bars with small cartons of milk, a third-grader peeks in and says, “You rock!”
— Jenny Price ’96
During her childhood in Nigeria, Mobolaji Falomo x’10 didn’t spend family time in front of the television. At night, when the moon was out, her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered together to tell stories.
Now an aspiring pediatrician majoring in child development, Falomo is sharing that tradition through African Storytelling on Wheels, a UW-Madison program that sends students of African origin into elementary schools in eastern and northern Wisconsin. The effort brings African culture, music, and languages to classrooms, with help from a three-year grant from the 2008 Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment.
“How many of you like stories? What’s your favorite story?” Falomo asks fourth-graders in Arkdale, a rural community ninety miles north of Madison. She wears a vibrant orange long-sleeved tunic with a matching skirt and completes the traditional Nigerian outfit with a dark green head wrap.
The previous school Falomo visited with the program — located nearly five hours north of Madison — had just a handful of African-American students. “Those kids lit up,” she says. “They don’t see anybody that looks like them very often.”
Moji Olaniyan, a UW assistant dean who first shared tales from her native Nigeria with her daughter’s kindergarten class some years ago, launched African Storytelling on Wheels last spring. The program is operated out of the African Studies Program.
On this fall morning, Falomo teams up with Beatrice Okelo MAx’10, a native of Kenya who is seeking a degree in African languages, literature, and linguistics. The UW storytellers poll their young audience to find out how many students think Africa is a continent, and how many think it’s a country — and in one fifth-grade class, students were split evenly on the question.
The university student storytellers are from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, and Nigeria, or they were born to parents who came to the United States from those countries. The geography lesson inevitably sparks questions about their homelands, giving the storytellers a chance to break down generalizations and misconceptions some of the children have about Africa and its people. In the fifth-grade classroom, students ask if most people in Africa are sick, if Nigeria has ever been hit by a tornado, and if Africans go fishing.
“Kids are very inquisitive. What’s in their heads pops out,” Falomo says.
The students also wonder which languages the women speak. Okelo answers by connecting her culture to American culture, asking if the students have heard the phrase hakuna matata, made famous by a song in the Disney film The Lion King. As the children raise their hands, Okelo explains that “hakuna matata is Swahili,” one of four languages she speaks.
Falomo tells the story of a male tortoise that eats food meant for his wife, prepared by a doctor to help the female tortoise become pregnant. Falomo asks the fourth-graders about their favorite foods to engage them in the story. In this version, the turtle takes a trip from Madison to Texas to deliver lasagna, eats the lasagna on the way back home, and becomes pregnant instead of his wife. She then adds a song, playing a tall African drum and singing in Yoruba, and teaches the class a refrain to sing along with her.
The stories always have a moral, with the end result showing the danger of behaviors such as ingratitude or treating others poorly. But the children don’t always catch on right away — as shown when Okelo tells the story of a hyena that falls in a pit and acts less than thankful for the help he gets from a cow. “I learned if I was a cow, I’d never trust a hyena,” says one fifth-grade boy after hearing the tale.
Sometimes, the storytellers use questions to guide children toward the story’s ultimate lesson, as when Okelo asks, “What would you do if someone helped you out of a pit?” The class responds correctly, “Say ‘Thank you!’ ”
At the end of each presentation, the storytellers pass handmade African instruments around the room for students to shake, pound, and bang.
During a break in the teacher’s lounge, as the storytellers wash down a snack of brownies and Rice Krispie bars with small cartons of milk, a third-grader peeks in and says, “You rock!”
— Jenny Price ’96
Manly Display
Study investigates the development of secondary sex characteristics.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even moose among the trees do it: they all develop flashy secon-dary sex characteristics that make males visibly different from females. The question of how males and females of the same species can end up looking so different — whether due to beards, antlers, or outlandish plumage — has long perplexed evolutionary scientists. But a study by UW researchers may have discovered the biological mechanism behind the process, as well as how that mechanism evolved.
In the August issue of Cell, genetics professor Sean Carroll and post-doctoral fellow Thomas Williams published the results of a study of fruit flies that examined how males develop dark-colored abdomens while females do not. That abdominal coloration is considered a secondary sex characteristic — that is, a developmental difference between males and females that has no direct connection to reproduction. Secondary sex characteristics present a problem because males and females have nearly identical genetic material and yet show such distinction, called dimorphism.
“Specifically,” says Williams, “we wanted to find out how genetic expression can be limited to one sex and not the other.”
What Carroll and Williams found was that dimorphism, at least among the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, is linked to a pair of genes called bab-1 and bab-2 — short for bric-a-brac, due to the way that it governs the flies’ physiological decoration. Those genes produce a protein that appears to control the development of abdomen color, as well as other male-female differences within the flies.
The flies, they found, are all born with the genes that would give them colored abdomens, as well as genes that would repress that coloration. But males produce a protein that represses the repression mechanism.
“In evolutionary biology, you deal with a lot of double negatives,” says Carroll. He notes that such complications arise out of the way that genes tend to stack characteristics, adding to and modifying a species’ inheritance of genetic code. “That’s pretty common in genetics — it’s much easier to modify something that’s already there than to add a new characteristic,” he says.
Carroll’s lab studied the protein in several different fruit fly species and concluded that it was active in the development of secondary sex characteristics in all of them. From this, they generalize that a similar process takes place in other species, leading to the development of the differences between bucks and does, cocks and hens, and men and women.
“This seems to have a deep influence in evolution,” Carroll says. “It shows us a little about how genetics often adds bells and whistles to a species.”
— John Allen
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even moose among the trees do it: they all develop flashy secon-dary sex characteristics that make males visibly different from females. The question of how males and females of the same species can end up looking so different — whether due to beards, antlers, or outlandish plumage — has long perplexed evolutionary scientists. But a study by UW researchers may have discovered the biological mechanism behind the process, as well as how that mechanism evolved.
In the August issue of Cell, genetics professor Sean Carroll and post-doctoral fellow Thomas Williams published the results of a study of fruit flies that examined how males develop dark-colored abdomens while females do not. That abdominal coloration is considered a secondary sex characteristic — that is, a developmental difference between males and females that has no direct connection to reproduction. Secondary sex characteristics present a problem because males and females have nearly identical genetic material and yet show such distinction, called dimorphism.
“Specifically,” says Williams, “we wanted to find out how genetic expression can be limited to one sex and not the other.”
What Carroll and Williams found was that dimorphism, at least among the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, is linked to a pair of genes called bab-1 and bab-2 — short for bric-a-brac, due to the way that it governs the flies’ physiological decoration. Those genes produce a protein that appears to control the development of abdomen color, as well as other male-female differences within the flies.
The flies, they found, are all born with the genes that would give them colored abdomens, as well as genes that would repress that coloration. But males produce a protein that represses the repression mechanism.
“In evolutionary biology, you deal with a lot of double negatives,” says Carroll. He notes that such complications arise out of the way that genes tend to stack characteristics, adding to and modifying a species’ inheritance of genetic code. “That’s pretty common in genetics — it’s much easier to modify something that’s already there than to add a new characteristic,” he says.
Carroll’s lab studied the protein in several different fruit fly species and concluded that it was active in the development of secondary sex characteristics in all of them. From this, they generalize that a similar process takes place in other species, leading to the development of the differences between bucks and does, cocks and hens, and men and women.
“This seems to have a deep influence in evolution,” Carroll says. “It shows us a little about how genetics often adds bells and whistles to a species.”
— John Allen
Going Green(house)
With its northern climate, Wisconsin is known for hot summers and cold, snowy winters, which support a wide variety of vegetation — just not necessarily when UW classes are in session. But biology and horticulture students can get a good long look at all sorts of plants, thanks to the collections at the university’s Botany Greenhouse.
Located at 430 Lincoln Drive, the greenhouse contains more than a thousand species of plants in eight thousand square feet of space divided into eight rooms. Overseen for the last quarter century by Mohammad Mehdi Fayyaz MS’73, PhD’77, the structure provides a tropical oasis, irrespective of the weather outside.
“The greenhouse’s chief purpose is as an instructional tool,” Fayyaz says. “We get botany and biology students who are studying morphology and physiology of various plants. But we also get art students who are looking for a tranquil space to draw.”
The greenhouse is open to the public weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The UW also has other greenhouse, the D.C. Smith Greenhouse on the west side of campus, which offers a conservatory and reflecting pond, and is open to the public during regular university building hours.
— J. A.
Located at 430 Lincoln Drive, the greenhouse contains more than a thousand species of plants in eight thousand square feet of space divided into eight rooms. Overseen for the last quarter century by Mohammad Mehdi Fayyaz MS’73, PhD’77, the structure provides a tropical oasis, irrespective of the weather outside.
“The greenhouse’s chief purpose is as an instructional tool,” Fayyaz says. “We get botany and biology students who are studying morphology and physiology of various plants. But we also get art students who are looking for a tranquil space to draw.”
The greenhouse is open to the public weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The UW also has other greenhouse, the D.C. Smith Greenhouse on the west side of campus, which offers a conservatory and reflecting pond, and is open to the public during regular university building hours.
— J. A.
New Home for WSUM
When the student radio station WSUM moves into a brand new studio this winter, there are some things its staff won’t miss about their old digs on State Street — beginning with the poor acoustics in the converted office space where the station has been since 1996.
WSUM’s new home is part of the UW’s 250,000-square-foot wing of the new University Square complex, located at Lake Street and University Avenue, which includes University Health Services, a student activity center, and offices for the registrar and financial services. The development also includes a food court, retail space, and apartments.
The radio station’s new space — paid for mostly with student fees — is on the project’s fourth floor and offers DJs and hosts a north-to-south view of the new East Campus Mall. Last May, then-Chancellor John D. Wiley MS’65, PhD’68 designated $400,000 in unrestricted donor funds for state-of-the-art digital equipment. WSUM, which transmits at 91.7 FM in Madison, also has a new live recording studio that David Black ’93, the station’s manager, says will allow the station to bring in more bands for performances and recording, “instead of cramming them into a closet.”
— Jenny Price ’96
WSUM’s new home is part of the UW’s 250,000-square-foot wing of the new University Square complex, located at Lake Street and University Avenue, which includes University Health Services, a student activity center, and offices for the registrar and financial services. The development also includes a food court, retail space, and apartments.
The radio station’s new space — paid for mostly with student fees — is on the project’s fourth floor and offers DJs and hosts a north-to-south view of the new East Campus Mall. Last May, then-Chancellor John D. Wiley MS’65, PhD’68 designated $400,000 in unrestricted donor funds for state-of-the-art digital equipment. WSUM, which transmits at 91.7 FM in Madison, also has a new live recording studio that David Black ’93, the station’s manager, says will allow the station to bring in more bands for performances and recording, “instead of cramming them into a closet.”
— Jenny Price ’96
Double Trouble
A determined physician fights a battle against lung cancer and its stigma.
Tracey Weigel spends days from sunrise to sunset attacking tumors brought on by lung cancer, trying her best to be a “numerator doctor.”
A thoracic surgical oncologist with the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, Weigel cannot bring herself to focus on the denominator of a disease that kills 160,000 Americans each year.
“I think there’s a lot of nihilism about lung cancer,” she says. “You have to focus on being that one person in ten.”
Pessimism about this most fatal of all cancers has statistical grounding. Almost 85 percent of patients diagnosed with lung cancer die within five years. It kills more women than breast, ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancers combined. Yet its research funding pales in comparison. It received less than 5 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s $4.8 billion budget in 2007. Weigel is quick to point to a reason for the disparity: the stigma from the connection between smoking and lung cancer, she says, contributes to poor research, late testing, and — eventually — death.
“It’s treated like a ‘dirty disease,’ like you did it to yourself,” Weigel says. “The thought never crossed my brain that someone ... deserved to get lung cancer.”
About half the people who face lung cancer have stopped smoking by the time of their diagnosis, and 15 percent have never smoked. The biggest risk smokers face is cardiovascular disease, but Weigel does not see the same shame among those patients — or the same fatalism among their providers.
Just as Weigel fights tumors, she battles the pessimism about lung cancer. Her weapons of choice are better screening, improved cancer staging, and a multidisciplinary approach.
Survival rates improve dramatically if the cancer is caught early, yet only 16 percent of cases are diagnosed before the disease spreads from the lungs. Weigel sees this as sufficient cause to advocate for research into the efficacy of CT screening for lung cancer in high-risk patients.
Gayle Zinda, a patient and lung cancer survivor, credits Weigel for opening her mind to CT screening despite doubt among other doctors. “I’m so grateful that she was not afraid to be human and still be a great doctor,” Zinda says.
Weigel also uses technology to gather critical information about the spread of cancer within and beyond the lungs. Then she works with a team: a thoracic surgeon, a medical oncologist, and a radiation oncologist review all patients coming to UW Hospital and Clinics with a suspicion or diagnosis of advanced lung cancer, then decide the best combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
The approach, says UW oncologist Minesh Mehta, transforms the outlook for patients who may feel as though their lives are collapsing. “They hear a totally different message — ‘There’s a whole team working on me. They’re going to work hard. It’s not like my world is caving in on me,’ ” he says.
Lung cancer, admittedly, is personal for Weigel. Her mother, who faced the disease in 1990, was not referred to an oncologist upon diagnosis and died seven months later following a course of chemotherapy. It may well be, Weigel now says, that her mother’s primary care doctor was right to doubt that treatment would extend her life. But, she adds, without a team to consider every angle of a case, a patient — and a family — will never really know.
Weigel remembers that her mother, a smoker who had long since quit, awoke at 2 a.m. just before her death, looked at Weigel’s father, and said, “Bob, I killed myself.”
Weigel’s most important numerator simultaneously lost the battle against lung cancer and its stigma. In fighting both tumors and shame, her daughter seeks to win the war.
— Kathleen Bartzen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99
Tracey Weigel spends days from sunrise to sunset attacking tumors brought on by lung cancer, trying her best to be a “numerator doctor.”
A thoracic surgical oncologist with the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, Weigel cannot bring herself to focus on the denominator of a disease that kills 160,000 Americans each year.
“I think there’s a lot of nihilism about lung cancer,” she says. “You have to focus on being that one person in ten.”
Pessimism about this most fatal of all cancers has statistical grounding. Almost 85 percent of patients diagnosed with lung cancer die within five years. It kills more women than breast, ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancers combined. Yet its research funding pales in comparison. It received less than 5 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s $4.8 billion budget in 2007. Weigel is quick to point to a reason for the disparity: the stigma from the connection between smoking and lung cancer, she says, contributes to poor research, late testing, and — eventually — death.
“It’s treated like a ‘dirty disease,’ like you did it to yourself,” Weigel says. “The thought never crossed my brain that someone ... deserved to get lung cancer.”
About half the people who face lung cancer have stopped smoking by the time of their diagnosis, and 15 percent have never smoked. The biggest risk smokers face is cardiovascular disease, but Weigel does not see the same shame among those patients — or the same fatalism among their providers.
Just as Weigel fights tumors, she battles the pessimism about lung cancer. Her weapons of choice are better screening, improved cancer staging, and a multidisciplinary approach.
Survival rates improve dramatically if the cancer is caught early, yet only 16 percent of cases are diagnosed before the disease spreads from the lungs. Weigel sees this as sufficient cause to advocate for research into the efficacy of CT screening for lung cancer in high-risk patients.
Gayle Zinda, a patient and lung cancer survivor, credits Weigel for opening her mind to CT screening despite doubt among other doctors. “I’m so grateful that she was not afraid to be human and still be a great doctor,” Zinda says.
Weigel also uses technology to gather critical information about the spread of cancer within and beyond the lungs. Then she works with a team: a thoracic surgeon, a medical oncologist, and a radiation oncologist review all patients coming to UW Hospital and Clinics with a suspicion or diagnosis of advanced lung cancer, then decide the best combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
The approach, says UW oncologist Minesh Mehta, transforms the outlook for patients who may feel as though their lives are collapsing. “They hear a totally different message — ‘There’s a whole team working on me. They’re going to work hard. It’s not like my world is caving in on me,’ ” he says.
Lung cancer, admittedly, is personal for Weigel. Her mother, who faced the disease in 1990, was not referred to an oncologist upon diagnosis and died seven months later following a course of chemotherapy. It may well be, Weigel now says, that her mother’s primary care doctor was right to doubt that treatment would extend her life. But, she adds, without a team to consider every angle of a case, a patient — and a family — will never really know.
Weigel remembers that her mother, a smoker who had long since quit, awoke at 2 a.m. just before her death, looked at Weigel’s father, and said, “Bob, I killed myself.”
Weigel’s most important numerator simultaneously lost the battle against lung cancer and its stigma. In fighting both tumors and shame, her daughter seeks to win the war.
— Kathleen Bartzen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99
Nervous Once, Nervous Forever?
A study suggests that children may not outgrow shyness or anxiety.
How do you know when a monkey is nervous? It sounds like the lead-in to a joke, but worried monkeys are giving scientists some important clues about the brains of shy and anxious children and whether they’ll be anxious or depressed as they grow up.
Ned Kalin, chair of the UW’s Department of Psychiatry and co-director of the Health-Emotions Research Institute, this summer published findings of a study that found that adolescent monkeys that were more anxious than their peers tested that way again later in life.
Young rhesus monkeys have long been used as models for anxious behavior in children. And psychiatrists know that anxious temperament in children predicts a higher risk of developing into depression, anxiety, and substance abuse problems over time.
“The important point is that we need to identify people early in life who are at risk for [these problems],” Kalin says. “This work points to ideas about how early interventions might make a long-term difference for children at risk.”
The study also showed that the brains of anxious rhesus monkeys were different from those of their calmer peers; in situations both stressful and serene, their brains showed a stronger stress response. In other words, their brains hit the panic button even when things were calm.
“The brain machinery underlying the stress response seems to be always on in these individuals,’’ Kalin says, “even in situations that others perceive as safe and secure.”
And when things are truly scary, the part of their brains that triggers the “flight or fight response” gets very active.
So how do you study worry and anxiety in a monkey? The researchers exposed both calm and worried monkeys to a variety of situations. One test took place in the cozy confines of their home, where they were housed with familiar cage-mates. The second test occurred when they were separated from a partner while in an unfamiliar cage. And the most uncertain and potentially worrying situation was when the young monkey was confronted by an unfamiliar person who wouldn’t make eye contact. When that happened, the most nervous monkeys froze and even stopped vocalizing — a response very similar to that of shy children in the presence of a stranger. Also, these anxious monkeys had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol compared to the calmer animals, and their brain scans showed more activity in the area of the brain that responds to stress.
The monkeys were tested as adolescents and again, about a year and a half later, as they became adults. The monkeys who were nervous as youngsters were still more stressed out as adults, indicating that anxious temperament is a lifelong trait.
Kalin has a deep interest in how the brain influences mood, reactions to stress, and physical health, and is an advocate for screening children for mental health issues. This latest research suggests that extremely shy or anxious children aren’t likely to grow out of their problems. So the anxious monkeys might be telling us that, from a medical perspective, we should be worried about anxious children — and make sure they get the help they need.
— Susan Lampert Smith ’82
How do you know when a monkey is nervous? It sounds like the lead-in to a joke, but worried monkeys are giving scientists some important clues about the brains of shy and anxious children and whether they’ll be anxious or depressed as they grow up.
Ned Kalin, chair of the UW’s Department of Psychiatry and co-director of the Health-Emotions Research Institute, this summer published findings of a study that found that adolescent monkeys that were more anxious than their peers tested that way again later in life.
Young rhesus monkeys have long been used as models for anxious behavior in children. And psychiatrists know that anxious temperament in children predicts a higher risk of developing into depression, anxiety, and substance abuse problems over time.
“The important point is that we need to identify people early in life who are at risk for [these problems],” Kalin says. “This work points to ideas about how early interventions might make a long-term difference for children at risk.”
The study also showed that the brains of anxious rhesus monkeys were different from those of their calmer peers; in situations both stressful and serene, their brains showed a stronger stress response. In other words, their brains hit the panic button even when things were calm.
“The brain machinery underlying the stress response seems to be always on in these individuals,’’ Kalin says, “even in situations that others perceive as safe and secure.”
And when things are truly scary, the part of their brains that triggers the “flight or fight response” gets very active.
So how do you study worry and anxiety in a monkey? The researchers exposed both calm and worried monkeys to a variety of situations. One test took place in the cozy confines of their home, where they were housed with familiar cage-mates. The second test occurred when they were separated from a partner while in an unfamiliar cage. And the most uncertain and potentially worrying situation was when the young monkey was confronted by an unfamiliar person who wouldn’t make eye contact. When that happened, the most nervous monkeys froze and even stopped vocalizing — a response very similar to that of shy children in the presence of a stranger. Also, these anxious monkeys had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol compared to the calmer animals, and their brain scans showed more activity in the area of the brain that responds to stress.
The monkeys were tested as adolescents and again, about a year and a half later, as they became adults. The monkeys who were nervous as youngsters were still more stressed out as adults, indicating that anxious temperament is a lifelong trait.
Kalin has a deep interest in how the brain influences mood, reactions to stress, and physical health, and is an advocate for screening children for mental health issues. This latest research suggests that extremely shy or anxious children aren’t likely to grow out of their problems. So the anxious monkeys might be telling us that, from a medical perspective, we should be worried about anxious children — and make sure they get the help they need.
— Susan Lampert Smith ’82
