The phenomenology research program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison began in the mid-1960’s as a collaboration of theoretical and experimental faculty. The Institute was created by the University in 1984 with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, with Vernon Barger and Francis Halzen as directors. The group’s mission is to promote research at the interface of theory and experiment in particle physics, with an emphasis on the interpretation of experimental data, the design of new experiments, and the construction and testing of theoretical models.