By Rachel Robey
Filled with light and flexible lab spaces, Morgridge Hall is a “fresh start” that lets researchers “chase their dreams.”
Faculty, staff and students from departments across the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) are together under one roof for the first time since the school’s founding in 2019. In Morgridge Hall — UW–Madison’s $267M research and education facility that opened in late August — researchers are finding that the modern, light-filled space is already leading to novel collaborations.
Designed for research and collaboration
Open concept in its design, Morgridge Hall features a central staircase circling “The Heart,” a seven-story atrium illuminated by a geometric skylight on the building’s seventh floor. This “grand staircase” — so-called by CDIS Director Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau — connects researchers spanning computer science, statistics, data science, library and information science, and biostatistics and medical informatics, mostly organized by research area rather than by department. Since breaking ground in 2023, one of Morgridge Hall’s fundamental goals has been to enable cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Moreover, the building is “designed to make you excited about coming to work,” said Assistant Professor Mike Hagenow. The glass panels surrounding his robotics lab make his work partially visible to the public. “It makes for transparent science,” he continued. “Students and researchers can also walk by and see what’s going on and sometimes even make research connections that they might not have found otherwise.”
Since an estimated 500 guests (including Governor Tony Evers and principal donors John and Tashia Morgridge) attended the official ribbon-cutting ceremony in September, it’s become apparent that you don’t have to actually work in Morgridge Hall to be excited about coming here: “We’re having good success getting people [from other departments] to come here, give talks, and just hang out in this space because it’s so pleasant,” said Assistant Professor Charles Yuan. A quantum computing researcher, Yuan also noted that being located next-door to the Physics Department is convenient for regular collaboration.
Of course, this is also by design. Morgridge Hall is situated in UW–Madison’s “tech corridor” alongside frequent collaborators in Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Discovery Building. Nearby, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation supports translational research and commercialization efforts, making innovation the inevitable outcome.
Already Morgridge Hall’s design is “paying dividends,” said Hagenow: “People in Wisconsin are very open to collaboration. It’s a great place for novel research.”
For grad students, it’s a “fresh start”
Among graduate students, Morgridge Hall has reinvigorated academic curiosity and department spirit. Students in Professor Patrick McDaniel’s research group describe the new setup — which collocates them among a diverse range of computer science researchers — as a “fresh start” and a strong catalyst for the cross-pollination of ideas.
“We’ll become more well-rounded because we can see what other groups are working on,” said Kyle Domico, a third-year PhD student. “Beyond being system security researchers, we’ll know what people in programming languages and machine learning are doing, too.”
And, they’ve been pleased to find, this enthusiasm has permeated to researchers throughout the building: “The Madison Security and Privacy Seminar Group started as a way to gather interested researchers to discuss emerging trends, but historically it’s been a small group of Computer Sciences graduate students, plus a few regulars from Electrical and Computer Engineering,” said Blaine Hoak, a sixth-year PhD student who’s been running the group for over a year. “At our first meeting in Morgridge Hall, we had undergraduates, master’s students, PhD students, faculty, and — for the very first time — new people from the iSchool and ECE.”
The benefits extend beyond research, too. Assistant Professor Akarsh Prabhakara was thrilled to find his students “incredibly happy” in the new space, despite leaving familiar labs in the old building behind. For students, the advantages of the new space are seemingly boundless: labs flooded with sunlight, readily available huddle rooms (“perfect for impromptu meetings,” said Hoak), and the much-loved espresso machines (a gift from donors, currently on temporary hiatus). All contribute to a more vibrant and social research environment.
“One of the biggest problems that grad students face is that [being in] academia can be a really isolating process,” said Hoak. In just a few short months, Morgridge Hall has already done much to alleviate a common experience: “Being able to see and meet other graduate students naturally — without having to cold email — has been really awesome,” said Yohan Beugin, a fifth-year PhD student. “I’ve already met a bunch of new people that I didn’t know before we moved in.”
Flexible labs let researchers “chase their dreams”
On floors three through seven, Morgridge Hall has a fleet of ultramodern labs dedicated to the rigorous research our university is known for conducting. In addition to the ample sunlight, generous size, and open spaces that inspire collaboration, the labs are also designed to adapt to the needs of different researchers — and research areas.
“I’m an engineer at heart,” said Professor Prabhakara, who got his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. “To sustain end-to-end hardware and software research, there’s really no other way to do it than set up dedicated lab spaces and let faculty chase their dreams.” His own lab, where he researches wireless systems and cyber-physical systems, is split into numerous areas: the imaging sector, the communication sector, and the prototyping sector.
Hagenow, a robotics researcher who studies teaching and teaming, also appreciates the flexibility of the new space. “The new labs can be designed for the computational and industrial needs of the modern age,” he said. “I do a lot of prototyping and fabrication, so including some of those capabilities as part of the lab setup was useful.” Hagenow works in a lab suite alongside other robotics researchers, which is beneficial to him and his students, he says. In addition to finding opportunities for collaboration, it strengthens camaraderie.
Professor Yuan appreciates that Morgridge Hall is a departure from the maze-like academic buildings he’s encountered on other campuses, where he found himself memorizing the quickest route to his office “encountering as few people as possible and trying not to get lost.” These old design principles left researchers siloed and remote from one another. “That’s just not the case here,” Yuan continued. “You just walk through the floors and you see what everybody is doing.”
