Grad Spotlight: Princess Merenini

Princess Merenini, a first-year graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, was one of the 2019 Pei Wang Fellowship award recipients. The Pei Wang Fellowship honors the late Pei Wang (Ph.D. 1952, chemistry) by gifting this award to honorable graduate students at UW–Madison. Merenini is an international student from Nigeria. She moved to the United States in 2016 to pursue her undergraduate education at Savannah State University (SSU). Growing up in Nigeria, Merenini was taught that there were only four “prestigious” career paths: medicine, law, engineering and pharmacy.

UW–Madison establishes free, campus-wide COVID-19 testing to support campus reopening

In the early days of the pandemic, when labs across the country were struggling to meet the demand for testing supplies and materials, the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory immediately took action. The state’s leading animal health lab provided COVID-19 test kits, scarce materials, equipment and training to the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, which performs COVID-19 testing for high-priority patients statewide.