Accomplished Editor-Writer-Researcher Joins WCER’s Grant-Editing Team as Skilled Senior Editor Retires
July 5, 2022 | By Karen Rivedal, WCER Communications
Christine Wenc and Kurt Brown, WCER grant editors present and past, plus Lead Editor Molly Wesling, not pictured.
WCER is welcoming a new grant editor even as it bids farewell to another with deep appreciation for his 11 stellar years of reviewing and improving grant proposals.
Christine Wenc, an accomplished writer, editor, and researcher with roots in Madison and Boston, joined WCER on June 1.
She was hired to work with Senior Editor Molly Wesling, who replaces Kurt Brown as lead editor. Brown’s last working day was June 17; he is retiring after 27 years at UW–Madison. Also a playwright and author, he will spend part of his retirement finishing a memoir.
Brown came to WCER as senior grant editor in 2011, after previous campus jobs including communications director for the Land Tenure Center, a unit started in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences that researched land and poverty issues in developing countries. At WCER, besides editing grant applications to federal and private agencies for SoE faculty and academic staff, he gave many talks to graduate students about strategies for winning grants, and he helped initiate Teacher Speakout! , which brought rural K–12 teachers to campus to discuss the realities of Wisconsin classrooms with education researchers.
Brown was recognized for his university service in 2021 with the Ann Wallace Academic Staff Distinguished Achievement Award.
Wenc has more than 10 years of high-level experience in developmental and structural editing for proposals, reports, books, and articles in the social sciences, humanities, public health, law, and medicine. She also has been a successful grant writer and administrator, and an independent researcher and writer in the history of science, medicine, and technology.
At UW-Madison, she is working half-time as a grant editor for WCER and also holds a 10% appointment as a communications specialist at the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. She earned her bachelor’s degree at UW–Madison in English in 1991, and she volunteers as a grant writer/adviser for the Arts + Literature Laboratory, a Madison contemporary arts nonprofit that recently won its first National Endowment for the Arts grant with Wenc’s help. She also has two master’s degrees, in English and creative writing from Hollins College, and in history of science from Harvard University.
From 2014 to 2017, Wenc was a grant writer/administrator for the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, and before that managed a three-year book project at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was a writer/editor for the hospital from 2008 to 2012, and she worked as a collection development specialist for Harvard University Libraries from 2005 to 2008, in addition to working as a fact checker/copy editor since 2003.
Wenc also worked independently as a developmental and structural editor for clients in history and social sciences from 2014 to present, and she has edited reports, papers, and publications in international public health and medicine since 2013.
