Before Bjorn Borgen (BSME ’62) built a multibillion-dollar investment firm, before he settled out west in the Rocky Mountains, before he even set foot on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, he was a teenager working…
Badger Engineers are cleared for takeoff. The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents voted to approve the creation of a new aerospace engineering major within the UW-Madison College of Engineering on Feb. 5, 2026….
When So Yeon Kim tells people that she has worked on designing materials for both solid-state batteries and next-generation nuclear reactors, they are often surprised, assuming that these energy systems are very different. “But from…
While fantasies of mechanical maids aren’t yet reality, autonomous aides are emerging in a few areas of the modern world. Highlight reels from the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, held in August 2025 in Beijing,…
The cells in our bodies move in groups during biological processes such as wound healing and tissue development—but because of resistance, or viscosity, those cells can’t just neatly glide past each other. Or can they?…
In their senior years, University of Wisconsin-Madison mechanical engineers apply four (or more) years’ worth of skills to a real design project. Historically, the ideas and support for those projects—designing a tool or devising a…
Concentrating solar power plants use a large array of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays and capture their heat, which boils water for steam turbines to produce electricity. The technology and systems in these massive…
The magnetic soft robots in Yunus Alapan’s lab on the third floor of the Mechanical Engineering Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus don’t look like complex miniature droids or anything you’d find in a…
There’s a booming industry demand for microchips, which are used in virtually all electronic devices today. But meeting that demand is challenging for chipmakers, because current mechatronic systems have reached the limit for how fast…
Sleep was on Nicolas Greaves and his groupmates’ to-do list. But, with motors to test, force calculations to crunch, prototype components to 3D print and more, the tasks kept stacking up. In the end, Greaves…
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is leading a major multi-institution project to develop and test a critical fusion technology—research that will directly benefit commercial fusion power plant developers. A $19 million Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE)…