After spending 26 years at McKinsey & Co., Scott C. Beardsley did on unusual career pivot. He became dean of a business school. Not any school, mind you, but UVA’s Darden School of Business.
Carla Williams has moved on from player to assistant coach to deputy athletics director. On Monday, she took over as UVA’s athletics director – the only African-American female to lead a Power Five school. The roots of her leadership come from her playing days at Georgia.
A UVA graduate student will have a chance to win $1 million. Hannibal Brooks will play on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” on Monday.
The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to determine if the legal rights of married same-sex couples can be balanced with the constitutional protections of freedom of religion and speech guaranteed to people of faith who cannot accept same-sex “marriage” on moral and religious grounds. Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor who studies religious liberty cases, said that if the high court wants to issue a narrow ruling, it could decide the case on the basis of free exercise of religion rather than free speech, and to confine that to weddings.
Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of UVA’s Center for Politics, is dubious that a Republican will lose this district. “We rate this special election as ‘likely Republican.’ This is a district the party should be able to hold, but I’m very curious about the margin and whether the Democrats can really compete,” Kondik said.
Geoffrey Skelley, with UVA’s Center for Politics, said he disagrees with the committee’s reasoning for holding a convention instead of a primary. At the end of the day, he said, voter turnout and participation are higher with a primary.
While black voters are the core of the Democratic base, Alabama’s voting-age population is about 27 percent black and 69 percent white, according to 2014 Census data. “If black voters make up about 25 percent of the electorate and [Democrat Doug] Jones wins at least 90 percent of them, that would mean that Jones would probably have to win at least one-third of the white vote to have a chance of winning,” wrote Geoffrey Skelley, an analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics, in an analysis of the Alabama race.
This is a moment that has arrived on so many college campuses already. There is Georgetown University, which has worked to confront its ties to slavery. And the University of Virginia, where officials are planning a memorial to commemorate the contributions of enslaved people who helped build the school.
The awards keeping coming for UVA senior linebacker Micah Kiser. On Sunday night, Kiser won the 2017 Dudley Award, which is awarded to the state of Virginia’s top college player.
A team of UVA computer scientists trained AI image-recognition software to tie certain scenes to gender. It went through billions of images in two collections, one from Facebook and the other from Microsoft. The trained AI decided that shopping and washing are things women do, while linking coaching and shooting to men – because the images the AI analyzed were already marinated in human biases.
So when Daniel T. Willingham, a UVA professor of psychology and the author of “Raising Kids Who Read,” told me that parents don’t need to worry about teaching young kids the mechanics of reading – and in fact, he warns against doing so – I felt free. Parents, it turns out, are pretty crummy reading instructors.
There are already some publicly available reasons to worry about Trump’s health: Besides being the oldest president ever elected, he’s overweight, appears to subsist on a junk-food-heavy diet, and avoids exercise. “Grover Cleveland hid his surgery for jaw cancer, going so far as to have the operation done on a boat in New York Harbor,” said Nicole Hemmer, a UVA media history professor. “And of course the public was not informed of the full extent of Woodrow Wilson's debilitating stroke in 1919.”
With Christmas season coming up, a nationwide program is giving parents a way to put old crayons to use – by recycling them. It's called the Crayon Initiative. Crayons are collected, melted down, and turned into new crayons for the UVA Medical Center.
Another HEPC project entitled “Txt 4 Success” offers college counseling via text message to more than 11,000 students. A UVA report on this initiative indicates students who opt-in to receive texts are more likely to attempt and complete a higher number of college courses than students who do not receive text messages. Students who receive texts are also more likely to persist throughout their first year of college.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a UVA professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, explored the scientific legitimacy behind these beliefs. His book “Return to Life” features compilations of stories of children who reported memories from a history they weren’t alive for.
(Co-written by UVA alumna Chris Mai) A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that states nationwide face rising prison health care costs, exacerbated by their aging prison populations. The share of people ages 55 and older increased in 44 states between fiscal years 2010 and 2015, and this age group now accounts for more than 10 percent of the prison population in 25 states. These aging people in prison experience higher rates of serious and chronic disease than do their younger counterparts and consume more health care.
Levels of development figure prominently in how countries prioritize human rights, said Brantly Womack, a UVA expert on Chinese politics. Although China is the world’s second-largest economy, living standards remain low for the majority and millions remain mired in poverty. Along with many developing nations, China puts heavy stress on the unfairness of global inequality and the right of the majority to sustain and improve itself materially, Womack said.
The company is built around Lacritin, a protein that company co-founder and UVA researcher Gordon Laurie discovered in 2001. He found the protein lacking in patients with dry eye, so he isolated the active ingredient into an eye drop medication called Lacripep. The company spun out of UVA in 2013.
Comedian Ralphie May died from hypertensive cardiovascular disease, Clark County Coroner’s office confirmed. Dr. Brandy Patterson, a UVA assistant professor of cardiology, did not treat May, but she does have many other patients, including young adults, with high blood pressure and heart disease. Here’s what she wants everyone to know about these conditions.
UVA announced its inaugural baseball Hall of Fame Class on Thursday, and will induct 15 former players into the first class. The list includes four current MLB players, three of which are former All-Stars, as well as a host of others.