Impact

Founded at UW–Madison in 2017, PANTHER brings together more than 30 investigators from academia, industry, and government to understand traumatic brain injury at the cellular level, the scale where injury actually happens and where no emergency-room scanner can see. With millions of dollars in support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the team studies how brains are hurt by impacts, blasts, and ballistic threats, and how to stop it.

The science is already becoming products. A helmet manufacturer has built a more protective liner system as a direct outcome of PANTHER research, and new bicycle and work helmets informed by the program are in development. Roughly two million Americans suffer traumatic brain injuries each year. Research built to protect Marines is on its way to protecting all of them.

The bioeffects work pays off beyond any one incident: rigorous exposure science protects service members, informs safety standards, and gives medicine the foundation to diagnose what it once could not even measure. It is protective research in the most literal sense, defense of the human brain itself.

Protecting against invisible harm

The program’s protective mission extends to invisible threats as well. When American personnel overseas began reporting unexplained neurological symptoms, PANTHER researchers took up a question science had barely studied: can pulsed microwave energy injure the brain, and how? They are leading the search for answers, building the experimental science of electromagnetic bioeffects from the cell up.

The most-used isotope in nuclear medicine, the one behind roughly 85 percent of diagnostic scans for cancer and heart disease, was long made abroad in aging reactors using weapons-grade uranium. Fusion technology born in UW–Madison’s nuclear engineering program offered a better way, and the National Nuclear Security Administration has backed the resulting company, SHINE Technologies, with cooperative agreements since 2010, precisely because its process needs no weapons-usable material.

About 56,000 American patients rely on these scans every day. SHINE’s fusion-driven production, now expanding through a $263 million Department of Energy financing commitment, is building a reliable American supply, plus one of North America’s largest facilities for a targeted cancer therapy isotope, with capacity for 100,000 doses a year.

Security policy and cancer care, advancing together.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis progressively scars the lungs, and medicine still doesn’t know why, or how to stop it. Median life expectancy after diagnosis is three to five years, and it is a leading reason for lung transplantation. With nearly $11 million from the Department of Defense, an interdisciplinary UW–Madison team spanning the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the School of Medicine and Public Health, the College of Engineering, and the School of Pharmacy is investigating the biology of lung scarring while building new imaging techniques and drug delivery systems, aided by artificial intelligence and advanced 3D modeling.

For patients who struggle to breathe and to keep their independence, the goal is what medicine has never had against this disease: ways to see it, slow it, and stop it. Cell biologists, engineers, lung doctors, and medicinal chemists working as one team, the whole research university mobilized against a single intractable disease, and a template for how defense-funded health research improves lives far beyond the force.

The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies trains the Army’s 38G environment and natural resources specialists: officers who manage water, land, and environmental crises in the world’s most fragile places, where a failed harvest or a poisoned well can undo everything a mission builds. The program revives a campus tradition dating to World War II, when UW–Madison hosted an Army Civil Affairs Training School.

Environmental competence in uniform means disasters better managed, resources protected, and communities stabilized. American soldiers trained, at Wisconsin, to leave places better than they found them.

UW–Madison holds the National Security Agency’s Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research designation and is a founding member of U.S. Cyber Command’s Academic Engagement Network. In the Cyber Badger exercise series, developed and executed with CISA, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the Wisconsin National Guard’s 176th Cyber Protection Team, students and professionals defend simulated networks against realistic attacks.

The defenders trained here go on to protect the systems civilian life depends on: the hospital’s patient records, the utility’s control room, the school district’s network, the county’s election infrastructure. Scholarship programs like the DoD Cyber Service Academy carry Wisconsin students directly into that service. Cyber defense is neighborhood defense.