The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web

The Dalai Lama's unique, decades-long relationship with fellow Buddhists and UW researchers in Madison

Madison Magazine Cover Story May 2013

Excerpt from original source:

On an otherwise nondescript day in 1992, UW neuroscience professor Richard Davidson sat in a small waiting room outside the personal residence-in-exile of Tenzin Gyatso—better known as the fourteenth Dalai Lama—in Dharamsala, India. He’d been summoned by a faxed letter with a seemingly simple premise: His Holiness was tired of scientific researchers putting all the focus on negative emotions such as anxiety and depression. He wanted Davidson and his colleagues to study kindness and compassion using the tools of modern neuroscience.

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World Peace

World Peace

Donna Hicks has found that the simple concept of honoring human dignity has the power to achieve reconciliation when nothing else can.

On Wisconsin Magazine, Spring 2013 Cover Story

Excerpt from original source:

On a steamy tropical morning in a Latin American country in 2003, Donna Hicks PhD’91 entered a room packed with government and military leaders in crisis. She was there to lead the participants, entrenched in intractable conflict, in a communications workshop. The president of the country hadn’t planned to stay until Hicks, acting on instinct, suddenly asked his permission to shift the focus to another topic altogether, one she’d been theorizing about for years: dignity. The president canceled his meetings and pulled up a chair.

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Leading Lady

Leading Lady

From civil rights-era Mississippi to modern-day Milwaukee, Thelma Sias has taken a deep interest in her community, supporting local causes while making a national splash. Not to mention rubbing elbows with everyone from the Obamas to Oprah.

Milwaukee Magazine, March 2013

Excerpt from original source:

There’s a subtle shimmer hovering over the hot pavement on North 17th Street as I pull up to Thelma Sias’ Lindsay Heights home. It’s caramel with cream trim, a new construction, subtle but relatively massive at just more than 3,500 square feet. It would fit perfectly in any upscale suburb, but its owners are deeply committed to their Johnsons Park community, and so it stands, proudly, here. Sias, 58 years old, greets me at the front door in a dress suit and heels, a short shock of salt-and-pepper hair worn natural, her carved chin held high, her long purple nails deftly gripping the door frame. She’s striking. I instinctively straighten my spine.

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Person of the Year: The Dairy Farmer

Person of the Year: The Dairy Farmer

The worst drought in decades brings Dane County’s rich and varied agricultural community into sharp focus. Dairy farmers in particular have been hit hard, but surviving—even thriving—in hard times is all in a day’s work.

Madison Magazine, October 2012 Cover Story

Excerpt from original source:

Jeff Endres snaps his flip phone shut and climbs out of his pickup, offering his hand in polite greeting. There’s an earnest crease on his brow tucked just beneath a red ball cap, his white T-shirt already work-stained by late morning. He’s so soft-spoken you have to lean in to hear him against the constant thrum of the dairy farm that beats like an enormous heart, a living, breathing thing. A calico kitten shoots out of the calf barn and fiercely weaves itself around his dusty brown boots. I nod toward the lush-looking crops across the road and tell him how healthy everything looks to me, how vibrant and alive, when just a month ago all the world seemed scorched, choked spikes of browns and yellows.

“Yeah, it’s kind of misleading,” Endres says, thoughtfully. “The damage has been done in a lot of it.”

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Bringing sexy back

Bringing sexy back

A vibrator developed in Madison restores pleasure for women following cancer and menopause

Isthmus Cover Story, August 24, 2012

Excerpt from original source:

It's the kind of thing nobody talks about, the sort of life-altering, debilitating problem you don't know anything about until you're forced to know: the incredible pain and sexual dysfunction in women brought on by cancer treatment and, in many cases, menopause. The side effects of treatment, as well as lack of estrogen, can have a devastating impact on women, and in many ways the health care system is ill equipped to address sexual health in women unrelated to reproduction.

"I think one of the unfortunate things is our society, for very long, has not been open to talk about sex at all," says Margaret Straub, a physician assistant in the UW Radiation Oncology clinic. "This is just another example where it's shied away from, even within the medical community."

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