Meet UW–Madison’s Nobel Prize winners

Francis Halzen started with an idea so out there that it's hard to believe it could ever be real. He wanted to bury a giant telescope deep into the South Pole's ice to search for elusive particles from the cosmos.

But his vision didn't just become a reality. It won the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics.

Halzen earned the world's most prestigious award for his contributions to the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and the discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Tracking these particles has shed unprecedented light into the workings of black holes, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena.

"It is difficult to imagine that we could have pulled this off anywhere but at UW-Madison with its unique research infrastructure," says Halzen, the first sole awardee in the physics category since 1992, and the first active member of the UW faculty to win a Nobel Prize since 1975. "The success of this project involved some luck, and I was fortunate to be at UW, where unconventional ideas can thrive and where I had the support of a remarkable community."

Halzen joins the distinguished ranks of 22 scholars with UW-Madison ties who have won a Nobel Prize, including alumni, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members (past or present at the time of the award). This number places the UW in elite company - by most counts, among the top 20 universities in the country.

Prior to Halzen, the latest Nobel laureate with a connection to UW-Madison was Claudia Goldin, a former economics faculty member who earned recognition in 2023 for revealing differences in labor market outcomes for women. Goldin served as a professor in UW's Department of Economics in the early 1970s. She went on to become the third woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and the first ever sole awardee in the category.

As the UW-Madison community celebrates these recent achievements, let's look back at other Nobel-winning Badgers who - sometimes in dramatic fashion - made life-changing breakthroughs for the benefit of us all.

Howard Temin: A Heretic Turned Hero

Howard Temin had a hunch. It would lead the UW-Madison virologist to a Nobel Prize in 1975 and later contribute to the discovery of HIV. But first, it earned him the scorn of the scientific community.

Prior to 1970, the field of molecular biology operated on the central dogma that genetic information in cells is transferred in one direction - from DNA to RNA - to produce proteins. Never the other way. But closely studying the anomalies of a cancer-causing virus in chickens, Temin theorized in 1964 that some viruses - later classified as retroviruses - could reverse this process to spread.

For six years, this stance caused him ridicule. A former Cal Tech colleague gave a professional talk on these viruses without citing any of Temin's seminal contributions. When pressed by the audience why not, the researcher responded: "I've given Temin's work the amount of attention it deserves."

Intellectually fearless, Temin never wavered. "All of these doubts were based not on experimentation or alternative hypotheses, but merely arguing from the central dogma that viruses don't behave that way," he later told the UW Oral History Project.

Then in 1970, Temin discovered the enzyme - reverse transcriptase - that does, in fact, allow genetic information to flow backward. When he went home that evening, his excitement was so palpable that his wife, renowned UW medical geneticist Rayla Greenberg Temin (MS'58, PhD'63), knew instantly that he had proven his hunch right.

Practically overnight, he reflected, "I went from being a rebel to establishment."

Temin's discovery revolutionized molecular biology, opening doors to new areas of cancer research, drug development and gene therapy applications. It also provided the roadmap for researchers to identify HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS, early in the epidemic and to eventually develop effective antiretroviral treatments. Temin played an active part in research and public policy efforts related to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early '90s.

When he accepted his Nobel Prize, he proved again that he was not afraid to speak his mind. Toasting a banquet audience filled with cigarette smokers (including the king of Sweden), Temin expressed "outrage" that, while his fellow researchers were tackling cancer in the lab, so little was being done to address a leading and preventable cause of it.

"And then I sat down," Temin recalled, "and everyone in the audience, including the royalty, put out their cigarettes." (In a cruel twist of fate, Temin died from a nonsmoking form of lung cancer in 1994 at age 59.)

Temin joined the UW's McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in 1960 after finishing graduate school and a postdoc fellowship. He claimed that the center had reached out to "practically every young virologist, as many as 40 or 50, and none would come," since, nationally, viruses were not viewed as a particularly important aspect of cancer research. We now know that viruses cause up to 20 percent of all cases.

When Temin arrived in Madison, he found his first lab to be unsuitably located in a dark basement surrounded by steam pipes and next to an open sump pit. From that inauspicious start, he went on to become a giant in his field and stayed at UW-Madison throughout his career. Upon being named a Nobel laureate, he thanked the university "for having provided … an environment in which unorthodox ideas could be considered and established."

Har Gobind Khorana: Cracking the Genetic Code

Har Gobind Khorana grew up in poverty in the small village of Raipur, India. His family home was partly a courtyard, shared with cows and horses. There was no schoolhouse, so the future Nobel laureate learned to read under a tree from his father. When Khorana, at age 6, owned his first pencil, it was a life event.

"Although poor, my father was dedicated to educating his children, and we were practically the only literate family in the village inhabited by about 100 people," Khorana wrote in an autobiographical entry for the Nobel Prize.

Eventually, Khorana attained formal education in India, proving himself a genius. In 1960, he came to the UW to be a professor of biochemistry and codirect the Institute for Enzyme Research. Here, he and his colleagues discovered how genes direct the production of proteins - groundbreaking work that cracked the genetic code and resulted in a 1968 Nobel Prize.

Khorana was the last of his family, including his kids, to learn of the award. Harking back his humble childhood, he often retreated to the Wisconsin countryside to collect his thoughts. Khorana was watching the sun rise when his wife, having failed to reach him several times by phone, drove over to relay the news.

In 1970, Khorana created the world's first synthetic gene, demonstrating that the basic unit of heredity can be constructed with organic chemicals in a lab. His discoveries helped clear the way for modern gene therapy and genome editing, which have resulted in revolutionary treatments for those with severe genetic diseases.

Apparently, Khorana's understated personality made him easy to miss in the public eye. In 1969, just a year after he had earned the Nobel Prize, Wisconsin state senator Ernest Keppler ('49, LLB'50) took to the chamber floor to lament that some public employees were making a higher salary than the governor. Referencing a list of names, he sneered: "How about Har Gobind Khorana? Any of you know him?"

MIT leadership certainly did, hiring Khorana away from Madison after a decade of work that changed the scientific world forever.

John Bardeen: An Electronic Miracle

A quartet of UW alumni have earned Nobel Prizes for their work in supercharging the digital revolution and the many electronic devices in your home, at work, in your hand and on your wrist.

John Van Vleck (1920), the "father of modern magnetism," laid the foundation with his novel theories on the magnetic properties of solid-state materials. Alan MacDiarmid (MS'52, PhD'53) discovered polymers (think plastics) that conduct electricity, with applications that now span from rechargeable batteries to electronic sensors to LED displays. Before creating the handheld calculator, Jack St. Clair Kilby (MS'50) helped invent the integrated circuit, or microchip, an essential component of modern computers and the key to our miniaturized devices.

But only one Badger brainiac has won a pair of Nobel Prizes: John Bardeen ('28, MS'29).

Bardeen was born and raised in Madison, where his father served as the UW's first medical school dean. He lived at home while studying electrical engineering at the university and enrolled in one of the first quantum theory courses in the country with Professor Van Vleck. He continued his graduate work at Princeton under Eugene Wigner, a theoretical physicist who would later work at the UW and earn a Nobel Prize himself.

Being surrounded by such brilliance paid off. After serving in World War II, Bardeen landed at Bell Labs and coinvented a semiconductor device called the transistor. Hailed as an electronic miracle, it replaced the much larger and less efficient vacuum tube that amplified early radios, televisions and computers. (Today, an iPhone has more than 20 billion transistors in its main processor alone.)

When Bardeen came back from the lab after his breakthrough on the transistor, he told his wife in his typically understated way: "I think we discovered something today." The invention earned Bardeen and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956.

At the Nobel Prize ceremony, the king of Sweden teased Bardeen for only bringing one of his three children. The scientist responded, presumably in jest, that he would bring all of them the next time he won a Nobel Prize.

Remarkably, 16 years later, that's exactly what he did. He won his second prize for the fundamental theory of superconductivity (when electrical resistance vanishes below a certain temperature) - knowledge that is now applied in technologies such as the MRI scanner.

Bardeen is one of five laureates who have earned more than one Nobel Prize, and the only to double dip in the physics category.

William Campbell: A Wonder Drug

In 2025, the World Health Organization announced that Niger was the first African country to eliminate the transmission of river blindness. Before the 1980s, the disease - caused by a parasitic worm and spread from blackflies - became a public health crisis in developing nations and caused blindness in hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Now the disease is on a steep decline, thanks to the mass distribution of an antiparasitic medication called ivermectin - the wonder drug first discovered by UW alumnus William Campbell (MS'54, PhD'57).

Campbell was a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-1970s when he found that an active substance in a new species of soil bacteria was extraordinarily effective in killing roundworms in mice and other parasites in farm and domestic animals. A more potent derivative called ivermectin was released as an animal health product in 1981 and is a commonly used drug for heartworm prevention for dogs and cats today.

Not yet satisfied, Campbell advocated for potential human applications and identified river blindness as a promising target. Ivermectin was approved for human use in 1987, and since then Merck has donated some five billion doses to combat river blindness. The drug has also been used to treat scabies, head lice and other tropical diseases such as elephantiasis - benefiting hundreds of millions of people, many in the poorest parts of the world. In 2015, Campbell shared a Nobel Prize for his heroic contributions.

Campbell grew up in Ireland and sailed to the U.S. for graduate work in veterinary science and zoology at the UW. He was hooked on parasites all the way back in high school, when an outing to an agricultural show introduced him to a common liver parasite in sheep and cattle. He was fascinated that a drug could so easily treat it.

His adviser at the UW, veterinary science professor Arlie Todd, encouraged Campbell to apply to Merck after earning his doctorate. At first, Campbell had "considerable misgiving" about starting off in the pharmaceutical industry.

"I only wanted to work on science for the sake of science and not for utility," he said after earning a 2023 UW Distinguished Alumni Award, "but I discovered the tremendous joy and excitement of doing something that might actually be useful."

An earlier version of this story appeared in the Winter 2025 edition of On Wisconsin magazine.