Research News Roundup for March
With UW-Madison leadership, autonomous vehicles could bridge transportation gaps for people living in rural areas
UW–Madison engineers are leading a first-of-its-kind research center devoted to advancing autonomous vehicle (AV) availability in rural and tribal communities.
The Tribal and Rural Autonomous Vehicles for Equity, Liability and Safety (TRAVELS) Center at UW–Madison is supported by a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, with an additional $15 million available through matching funds and services from state entities, industry partners and participating universities.
“TRAVELS is the first national large-scale program focusing on rural and tribal autonomous passenger vehicles. It will help accelerate the deployment of state-of-the-art AV technologies in vast rural and tribal areas in the United States that have often lagged behind in access to these technologies,” says Xiaopeng “Shaw” Li, a UW-Madison professor of civil and environmental engineering who is heading the initiative. “It includes both fundamental research and real-world outreach and deployment. It will be a unique opportunity to utilize our cutting-edge research on real-world problems and see how university research can truly benefit communities in Wisconsin and across the nation.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was instrumental in advocating for the center. “I am thrilled that Wisconsin is at the center of autonomous vehicle innovation, helping make transportation more efficient, safer, and accessible for communities of all sizes,” said Senator Baldwin. “This program has the potential to help connect folks in rural and Native communities with better health care, good jobs, food, entertainment, and so much more – and I am proud to have done my part to make it a reality.”
Another successful field season for IceCube Upgrade at the South Pole
Since November of last year, a team of IceCube engineers and scientists have been hard at work during the second of three consecutive field seasons for the IceCube Upgrade. Over the course of the season, 37 team members, including 27 drill engineers and 10 installation and operations experts, were deployed to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole station, with a maximum of 30 people at any given time. The project is funded by NSF and international collaborators.
Each field season was more like a 10-week sprint, with a productive first field season last year setting up the project for success. The goal of the Upgrade is to drill seven holes next year and deploy seven more closely spaced and more densely instrumented strings of optical sensors in the central part of the array, which will improve IceCube’s sensitivity to low energies.
The majority of the team’s engineers come from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL), where drill and installation equipment has been fabricated and shipped to the South Pole. Additional drill engineers hail from Sweden, Taiwan, and Thailand. Installation experts came from Germany, Australia, the US, and Japan.
Graduate Students Build Professional Skills and Networks with CALL-ECL
Graduate students at UW–Madison’s School of Education are honing their skills and advancing their careers by collaborating with seasoned researchers on the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership Learning/Equity-Centered Leadership (CALL-ECL) project. This $10.1 million research project, funded by the Wallace Foundation in 2021 and housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), involves the study of a five-year initiative around eight school districts funded to develop principal pipelines that can support more equity-centered school leadership. The research study brings together multiple academic partners and encompasses five interconnected strands of study.
Learn more: https://www.wcer.wisc.edu/news/detail/graduate-students-build-professional-skills-and-networks-with-call-ecl
Assistant Professor Anyi Ma’s Research Featured in Harvard Business Review
In tough times, we often want to surround ourselves with the familiar—but that same impulse can sometimes extend negatively into the workplace, suggests new research by Anyi Ma featured in Harvard Business Review (HBR).
The study by Ma, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the Wisconsin School of Business, and her co-authors looked at the notion of personal control: how much sway we have (or think we have) over ourselves and outside events. For example, we may feel a reduced sense of personal control on an individual level if we’re worried about our child’s daycare or our daily commute, but we can also feel a loss of personal control over global issues occurring far from us, such as civil unrest or extreme weather. The study used data from employees in 60 countries collected in 11 other studies.
“Across these studies, we consistently found that when employees experience a lack of personal control, they are more likely to gravitate toward those who resemble them—whether in race, religion, socioeconomic class, or personality characteristics,” Ma states.
Donor Support Powers Experiential Learning Both Near and Far
Through WSB’s Marketing Leadership Institute, students were able to take advantage of two recent experiential learning opportunities: one close to home—and one more than 8,000 miles away. In November, a group of undergraduate and graduate students traveled to Chicago for a career trek that included stops at McDonald’s corporate headquarters and advertising firm DDB.
Then in January, a group of two dozen students traveled to Vietnam for a global immersion experience, which included in-depth interviews with consumer-insight professionals, visits with regional companies, and immersive cultural experiences.
In April, teams from some of the nation’s top undergraduate business schools will descend on Grainger Hall for the inaugural Wisconsin Invitational Consulting Case Competition. Over two days, students will put their consulting skills to the test, compete in front of a panel of judges, and contend for cash prizes. This first-ever event also features networking opportunities with top employers in the consulting industry, including Accenture and Deloitte.
Read more: https://business.wisc.edu/news/donor-support-powers-experiential-learning-both-near-and-far/