Bronco Mendenhall says three decades as a football coach is enough for now. He’s ready to try something new. Saying he wants “to become a better version of himself,” Mendenhall surprised his team and Virginia fans by announcing he will step down as the Cavaliers’ head football coach at the end of this season.
Bronco Mendenhall is stepping down from his position as head coach of the Virginia Cavaliers football program following the team’s bowl game at the end of the season, the team announced on Thursday. “This week, there was a sense of clarity that I needed to step back from college football,” Mendenhall said in a press conference on Thursday evening.
(Commentary) This is how Bronco Mendenhall’s tenure at Virginia was destined to end. He was never going to coach college football into his dotage and was never going to betray his team with energy he deemed less than full throttle. So while the precise timing of Thursday’s resignation was somewhat surprising, the abruptness of Mendenhall’s decision, the unyielding principles and abiding faith that informed his thinking, and the incurable transparency of his explanation were Bronco Mendenhall to the core.
The distinction of becoming the first woman engineer at NASA belongs to Kitty O’Brien Joyner, who began her career with the NACA in 1939. Her path to a successful career began after being inspired by her father, an engineer by trade who encouraged Joyner to pursue her passion. Joyner was also the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia’s engineering school.
Dewey Cornell, a UVA professor of education and the country’s leading advocate for school-based threat assessments, has published an array of studies. His data suggests schools that used threat assessment were less likely to use other exclusionary school discipline practices and that racial disparities among those who are suspended or expelled were also reduced.
Sequencing itself can be as fast as a 24- to 48-hour turnaround. It’s the logistics of moving samples around that’s the real bottleneck. “It’s really just stupid stuff,” said Amy Mathers, associate director of clinical microbiology at UVA Health, whose lab team sequences positive coronavirus samples for the state of Virginia.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have re-signed infielder/outfielder [and UVA alumnus] Chris Taylor, perhaps the most difficult to replace of the Dodgers’ 12 free agents. The 31-year-old Taylor drew interest from multiple teams following his first All-Star season but chose to return to the franchise where his career blossomed. The deal is expected to be for at least four years and $60 million, with a club option for a fifth year.
Edward Finley, finance professor at University of Virginia and a regular correspondent, wrote to point out that how value stocks respond to changes in rates depends on how stocks in general respond to rates, a relationship that has changed a lot over time. Before the 1990s, stocks and bonds were positively correlated (so when stocks rose, bond yields went down). He explains: “Until the ‘90s, investors had little confidence in the Fed’s ability to control inflation. As a result, inflation expectations drove all asset prices, leading to a positive correlation between stock and bond returns. Once...
“Be cautious, he has no record,” warns Larry Sabato, the founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “He displayed a talent in the campaign for giving all the right signals to the right groups without committing to very much. He’ll be doing a tap dance, depending on the issue. It’s clever, but you don’t have to admire it or think it’s courageous. It worked politically.”
Giving What We Can and the wider effective altruism movement are not without their critics. These say that such charitable donations should never be seen as a substitute to a decent level of taxation and state social services. Jennifer Rubenstein, assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, and author of Between Samaritans and States, adds that effective altruism “does not empower poor people as political actors or entities.”
(Audio) We often hear from Washington that the United States is locked in another great powers conflict with China. But is the “great powers” Cold War era analogy the right one for modern China? Among the guests is Melvyn Leffler, professor of history emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of several books on the Cold War.
Pathologists believe it is likely a matter of time before the omicron variant of the coronavirus appears in the D.C. region, but labs across Virginia are scanning millions of previous positive tests for it. It all depends on the new variant’s transmissibility, Dr. Amy Mathers with the UVA Health Lab told WTOP. “We don’t know if omicron is going to take off like delta did. If it does, and takes over in different areas and turns out to be much more transmissible, we will then see it in a matter of probably weeks,” Mathers said.
We spoke with Dr. Taison Bell, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia who specializes in infectious diseases, to learn about Omicron compared to previous COVID-19 variants. … Dr. William Petri, another infectious disease expert at UVA Health, highlighted how quickly the Omicron variant appeared to become dominant in South Africa, the first country to identify the mutation.
The University of Virginia Procurement Department is getting ready to host a couple of online workshops. According to a release, these free workshops are targeted toward small, woman-owned and minority-owned businesses.
Tiger Fuel has made a $20,000 donation to JackFest. The money will help with an expansion project at the Ronald McDonald House in Charlottesville and UVA Children’s.
UVA Health is searching for the omicron variant through a method called sequencing. Researchers use computer coding to study positive COVID samples across the state to detect the new strain. UVA Health associate professor of medicine and pathology Dr. Amy Mathers says there’s good news so far. “We’ve sequenced about 5,000 SARS-CoV-2 locally and on behalf of the state and did not find a single omicron,” she said.
UVA Health is among the few medical labs sequencing COVID-19 samples to look for the omicron variant right now. It studies COVID-19 positive samples from across the commonwealth looking for variants.
One approach is to create a vaccine that targets a feature that most coronaviruses (or at least SARS-CoV-2 variants) have in common. “If you want to make a universal vaccine, what you’d want to do is try to make a vaccine that targets something that the virus can’t apparently change,” Steven Zeichner, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at the University of Virginia, said. Zeichner’s lab is also currently working on a universal COVID vaccine that targets a piece of the spike protein called the fusion peptide—that piece is relatively unchanged across coronaviruses.
Birdwood typifies the multi-purpose direction that future golf developments would be wise to study. Located about 10 minutes from downtown Charlottesville, it’s a convenient, upscale public course that serves as an amenity to an adjacent resort, with a walkable routing across interesting and varied land. It’s also the home course for the University of Virginia golf teams boasting state-of-the-art practice facilities, including a new par-3 course called “The Nest.” Originally opened in 1984, Davis Love III, along with brother Mark and lead designer Scot Sherman, re-routed and re-engineered the ...
The very first words of the First Amendment are a warning against government establishment of religion. That is why the state of Utah’s welfare-provision system being intertwined with the LDS Church is “troubling,” said Douglas Laycock, a UVA law professor and a leading expert on the separation of church and state. “I can’t think of anything at all analogous,” he said.