Overall Rating Silver
Overall Score 59.88
Liaison Alex Frank
Submission Date April 14, 2022

STARS v2.2

University of Wisconsin-Madison
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 9.70 / 12.00 Alex Frank
Sustainability Analyst
Office of Sustainability
"---" indicates that no data was submitted for this field

Part 1. Sustainability research

Total number of employees that conduct research:
2,356

Number of employees engaged in sustainability research:
336

Percentage of employees that conduct research that are engaged in sustainability research:
14.26

Part 2. Sustainability research by department

Total number of academic departments that include at least one employee who conducts research:
152

Number of academic departments that include at least one employee who conducts sustainability research:
76

Percentage of departments that conduct research that are engaged in sustainability research:
50

Research Inventory 

A copy of the inventory of the institution’s sustainability research (upload):
Inventory of the institution’s sustainability research:
See attached.

A brief description of the methodology the institution followed to complete the research inventory:
UW-Madison worked with Academic Analytics (https://academicanalytics.com/) to generate a report on all research works from UW-Madison faculty and principal investigators from 2017 to 2021. The research works were matched against the STARS provided keywords that were grouped by similar topic. Higher scores represented higher matches between the research work and the term group keywords. We used three steps to find the researchers and research works that best fit within sustainability research.

First, all research works that scored 0.1 or higher were analyzed for the best example for each individual researcher. When determining which research work was the best fit, we considered the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Three Pillars of Sustainability. If a research work had more than one author and both were in the inventory, we found a next best alternative title whenever possible. We recorded the certainty that each title was a good example of sustainability research and reviewed the list with another student intern.

Second, we analyzed a list of researchers that attended an on-campus sustainability workshop, indicating they have expressed an interest in sustainability. Some of these researchers were not captured in the first round of analysis, but had a good example of sustainability research. We added those researchers and their best examples to the inventory.

Third, we analyzed the research works added in the second step and determined the majority of the works fell under term group 9 ("species," "biodiversity," etc.), term group 10 ("renewable energy," "footprint," etc.) and term group 11 ("ethical," "responsibility," etc.). To ensure that we did not miss research works that were a good fit but had a score below 0.1, we analyzed all research works from these three term groups. For researchers that had not yet been added to the inventory, we determined their best work from these term groups.

The final list of sustainability researchers was limited to only account for those active during academic year 2020-2021. The total number of employees that conduct research includes all faculty and any academic staff who can be a official principle investigators.

Optional Fields 

Website URL where information about the institution’s sustainability research is available:
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Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.