School of Human Ecology

Charles Raison is one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s best and brightest. Officially, he holds the position of Mary Sue and Mike Shannon Chair for Healthy Minds, Children & Families. In practice, he is a master of connecting ideas, research, and practice, leading the way in novel treatments for treating mental conditions. More simply put,… Read more »

School of Human Ecology professor Christine Whelan, who has taught on everything from gender and marriage to social change, has turned her sights to the pursuit of happiness. What she’s uncovered has become the basis for one of the most talked-about classes on campus, Consuming Happiness. “Spending money to maximize happiness is the basis for… Read more »

Creative thinking. Responsible leadership. Being a global citizen. These are qualities we put into practice every day. Undergraduate students in Design Studies, Retailing, and Consumer Science are thinking outside the textbooks to tackle societal issues on an international level by helping artisans in developing nations build better careers and foster strong communities. As part of… Read more »

A human ecology perspective can shape the world. When Elizabeth Doyle ’15 was an undergraduate in UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE), she studied community and nonprofit leadership. She showed such a passion for organizing people to improve housing, transportation, and education that she earned a Truman Scholarship — one of the nation’s most prestigious… Read more »

Many of Helen Louise Allen’s students have a picture in their minds of their teacher sitting at a loom, her skilled hands creating — seemingly out of nothing — extraordinary textiles. But there was a side of the delightfully eccentric woman that few of her students ever saw: the hunter. Allen traveled the earth, scouring… Read more »

Badgers are known for their desire to do good: they join the Peace Corps in record numbers, they sign up for Teach For America, and they spend their academic breaks doing service projects. Badgers have good hearts, but do they have good heads — at least when it comes to giving? Thanks to the Philanthropy Lab,… Read more »

Early is the answer. If the question is how to solve Wisconsin’s achievement gap — the difference in poverty rates between its black and white citizens — then the answer is to act early. Wisconsin ranks 49th in the nation in the severity of its achievement gap, and the UW’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE) understands that… Read more »

Like a lot of graduate students in the School of Human Ecology’s (SoHE) human development and family studies program, Dave Smallen PhDx’18 wants to find a deeper understanding of how human minds and emotions work. Unlike a lot of grad students, however, he almost didn’t finish his undergraduate studies because in 2006, when he was… Read more »

UW–Madison students do great things, even when the cards are stack against them. Pablo Montes, a first-generation, working-class student, was dependent on aid when he transferred to UW–Madison. Once here, he was blindsided by the university’s steeper cost of living. Montes became homeless, couch-surfing among friends and unable even to get help from Wisconsin’s FoodShare… Read more »

Word of SoHE’s Financial Life Skills (FLS) program has spread across campus, pushing enrollment from 100 students in its first year to 400 students, plus a wait list for year three. What’s driving the surge? In large part it’s the practical instruction in money management that one student described as “valuable information I’ll use the… Read more »

Knowing the past is part of any good education, but great education explores the past, illuminates the present, and anticipates tomorrow. By combining all three elements, SoHE prepares graduates for career success in retail, fashion, textiles, and consumer behavior, which means a deep dive into China. As China becomes an increasingly important market for American-made… Read more »

Nancy Wong, professor of consumer science in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology, designed an energy-tracking app to make reducing day-to-day energy usage more accessible. Drawing on parallels between food consumption and energy use, Wong’s team designed “My Earth – Track Your Carbon Savings” with approaches used in food-tracking apps that help users catalog their… Read more »