Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) is an interdisciplinary public research institute on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus in Madison, Wisconsin. It is in the Discovery Building, which also houses the Morgridge Institute for Research and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s Town Center, with which WID partners to run outreach programs and public events.
WID opened in 2010 with five research themes, which have grown as collaborations crossed disciplines and new teams formed.
The institute is led by Jo Handelsman, who was appointed in February 2017 after serving in the Obama administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
WID’s faculty have dual appointments at the institute and in campus departments, working in areas such as data science and visualization, tissue engineering and nanomedicine, omics, health, agriculture, and complex systems.
WID aims to solve big problems by bringing together a broad community, encouraging interdisciplinary thinking, and promoting the Wisconsin Idea.
Discovery Hubs at WID act as campus-wide integrators. They help generate new ideas and start collaborative projects, and they provide services to other researchers by applying specialized tools to problems beyond WID’s own programs. The three hubs are the Data Science Hub, the Multi-Omics Hub, and the Illuminating Discovery Hub.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:03 (CET).