The University of Virginia’s spring break ended Monday. While thousands of students participated in UVA’s service-oriented Alternative Spring Break, hit the beaches or visited with family, a clutch of crooners headed to China for a whirlwind singing tour capped by a performance at the Great Wall, the world’s largest military structure.
more >The University of Virginia leapt into the No. 2 spot in Wednesday’s Peace Corps ranking of volunteer-producing large universities and colleges in 2018.
With 74 alumni currently serving worldwide, the University ranks just below No. 1 University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has 75 volunteers. Since the Peace Corps’ founding in 1961, around 1,220 UVA alumni have served as volunteers.
more >Using a powerful radio astronomy observatory in Chile, an international team of astronomers have observed the formation and entwined motions of a massive binary star system, providing new understanding of how this common type of star comes together.
more >From social media to social justice, environmental awareness to historic figures, University of Virginia faculty, staff and alumni will share their scholarship and creativity at this week’s Virginia Festival of the Book.
The festival, which runs from Wednesday through Sunday, is co-sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Book and produced by Virginia Humanities, which is affiliated with UVA.
more >University of Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett has built his program atop what he refers to as the “five pillars”: humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness.
The pillars seem to be holding up pretty well. Bennett’s squad earned a No. 1 seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament, and both current and former players have earned accolades not just for their play, but for their commitment to academics and community service.
more >Scrubbing into surgery and watching her father’s orthopedics team make an incision into a patient’s hip didn’t make an 11-year-old Rachel Politi squeamish.
Politi was mesmerized by the methodical atmosphere of the operating room, where everyone played their role in an effort to help the patient.
“It was almost like a symphony,” Politi recalled.
Even so, Politi wasn’t 100 percent sure she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her father (an orthopedic surgeon) or her mother (a pediatrician).
more >Two current University of Virginia graduate students and two alumni are serving as Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellows at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, D.C.
No other university is as well-represented this year in the prestigious 12-week fellowship program, which exposes early-career individuals to policy issues involving science and technology, and provides a greater understanding of the role that scientists and engineers play in advising the nation.
This year’s annual Virginia Festival of the Book will celebrate 25 years when it draws authors and book lovers to Charlottesville, starting Wednesday and continuing through Sunday. One of its signature events will feature three festival favorites – Lee Smith, Adriana Trigiani and Douglas Brinkley – who’ll share some advice and fond memories of past visits, plus new books.
more >In the early 1980s, ESPN – then just a few years old – was looking for some leverage over big networks like ABC, CBS and NBC, and college basketball caught its corporate eye.
CBS owned the rights to the Final Four – as it does today – but Roger Werner, an alumnus of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and his fellow ESPN executives realized that few were paying attention to the earlier rounds of the NCAA Tournament, the conference championships or important regular season games.
Enter ESPN.
more >The University of Virginia is launching the state’s first regional community survey panel, called BeHeardCVA, through the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. The panel is designed to be a trusted vehicle for communicating the voices of residents in the Charlottesville area and Central Virginia.
more >University of Virginia alumnus Derek Mitchell has focused his career on the emergence of – and threats to – democracy in Asia. Now, he is at the helm of an institution charged with promoting and safeguarding democracies around the world.
more >The University of Virginia men’s basketball team learned Sunday night that its outstanding season earned a top seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The Cavaliers are a No. 1 seed in the South Region and will face No. 16 Gardner-Webb University on Friday at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, South Carolina.
more >Adial Pharmaceuticals CEO William Stilley recalled his tenure at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business as a time of intense instruction in a number of disciplines, helping him develop the confidence that he could capably lead in a variety of fields.
The one area he scratched off his list of potential careers: life sciences. Too technical, too complex, he thought.
more >Heart failure – a condition in which the heart muscle can no longer pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs, and distinct from a heart attack – is the most common reason Americans age 65 and older are hospitalized. And while we spend nearly $31 billion annually dealing with it, more distressing are its symptoms: breathlessness, fatigue, an inability to lie down flat, and an uncomfortable swelling of the midsection and extremities.
Without treatment, half all heart failure patients will die within five years of diagnosis.
more >The University of Virginia’s Dual Career Program has launched a new community resource aimed at connecting talented job candidates with local employers, in collaboration with the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, UVA Licensing and Ventures Group and the UVA Research Park.
The online initiative, called Embark, offers an innovative solution to support the region’s collective talent recruitment and retention efforts.
more >We know University of Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett will have his team ready to play Thursday, but what are you – as a fan – doing to prepare?
more >After more than 1,300 combat hours in the Middle East and three years of working at the Pentagon, University of Virginia alumna Caroline Darney faced the biggest decision of her life.
Should she continue in the military or go civilian?
Darney, whose father had been an Air Force pilot, loved everything about her time as a naval flight officer and foreign defense liaison.
more >Last time we spoke with University of Virginia alumnus John Dickerson, he had just assumed the anchor chair on CBS News’ “CBS This Morning.”
One year in, Dickerson, who previously hosted the CBS Sunday public affairs program “Face the Nation” and has found success as an anchor, journalist and White House correspondent, is still enjoying the role and the “never a dull moment” atmosphere that comes with it.
more >You might say San Diego native Annika Meurer’s criteria for choosing a college was a tad unusual.
Meurer wanted to go to a school outside of California that had strong academics. But one of the main things she was looking for was a college with Division I football and basketball programs.
It wasn’t that Meurer was planning on playing either sport. Rather, she had been a huge sports fan since she was little, and didn’t want to lose touch with that aspect of her life.
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