RIVER FALLS – Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers visited University of Wisconsin-River Falls Thursday, Sept. 25, as part of his 2025 tour of all 13 Universities of Wisconsin campuses. Evers made stops …
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RIVER FALLS – Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers visited University of Wisconsin-River Falls Thursday, Sept. 25, as part of his 2025 tour of all 13 Universities of Wisconsin campuses. Evers made stops in two general chemistry lab classes and the Neuroscience Research Lab and asked students about their majors, career goals and why they chose UWRF.
“It was really interesting and valuable to me because I had a chance to talk to a bunch of students and hear directly from them why they want to go to school here, whether it’s the size of the campus, the good interactions with faculty, you name it,” Evers said. “It was fun hearing directly from them.”
One of those students was Sophia Stelmach, a first-year pre-vet major originally from Elk River, Minn.
“I told him that I chose UWRF because I’m really passionate about getting into pre-vet studies. I’ve always wanted to be a veterinarian,” Stelmach said. “It has a beautiful campus and an amazing pre-vet program. It has an almost 100% placement after graduation, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to go to this school.’ I love my professors. I love my classes.”
In the Neuroscience Research Lab, Alexa Olstad, a sophomore psychology and neuroscience double major from Lindstrom, Minn., and Rachel Wyant, a junior neuroscience major from Bristol, explained research they are working on, studying how adolescent nicotine use leads to addiction and physically changes the brain. Olstad and Wyant demonstrated a new microscope system that can reconstruct and display neurons in three dimensions, allowing them to measure changes to neuron structure in mice.
“The cool thing about this technology is that before we had this software system, we’d only get 2D images,” Olstad said, showing how she could rotate a 3D view on a monitor. “Now that we have this, you can zoom in and out. When we’re calculating the length of the dendrite, it’s more accurate.”
Olstad and Wyant shared that in November, they and eight other UWRF students will travel to the Society for Neuroscience Conference in San Diego, Calif. to present their research.
The classes Evers visited in Centennial Science Hall will have a new home spring semester, as UWRF prepares to open the new Science and Technology Innovation Center (SciTech) in January.
Submitted by UW-River Falls
