Congratulations to Professor Silvia Cavagnero, who has been named a WARF Named Professor for 2026–27 — one of UW–Madison’s highest research honors. Established through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the WARF Named Professorship is awarded to a select group of faculty across the university each year in recognition of outstanding scholarly achievement and national or international leadership in their field. The honor comes with a named title and funding that supports the recipient’s ongoing research program.
Cavagnero’s lab studies one of biology’s most fundamental puzzles: how proteins fold into their functional three-dimensional shapes inside living cells. Her group focuses in particular on the earliest, most vulnerable moments of a protein’s life — as it emerges from the ribosome — examining how proteins avoid misfolding and aggregation with the help of molecular chaperones like Hsp70. Using tools spanning multidimensional NMR spectroscopy, time-resolved fluorescence, and mass spectrometry, her work has helped illuminate not just how healthy proteins fold correctly, but how folding can go wrong — insight with implications for diseases linked to protein misfolding and aggregation, including prion disorders.
The Department of Chemistry congratulates Professor Cavagnero on this well-deserved recognition of her research and her contributions to the field.