The UVA women’s swimming and diving team reaffirmed its national championship front-runner status on Wednesday, kicking off the ACC Championship meet with the new fastest-ever time in the women’s 200 medley relay. The group of Caroline Gmelich, Alexis Wenger, Alexa Cuomo, and Kate Douglass combined for a 1:32.93 in the relay. That breaks the old NCAA, American and U.S. Open records of 1:33.11 that was set in 2018 by Stanford.
An ambitious pilot aimed at improving virtual learning last summer has earned high marks from participants, according to a new report from UVA’s School of Education and Human Development. The program, which has since been reconstituted as an ongoing nonprofit enterprise, was rated in surveys as both engaging to students and beneficial in improving teacher performance.
UVA Health nurse Theresa Lovdal says the hospital has around 55 staff employees in its COVID ICU. She says they’ve taken care of up to 100 COVID patients at a time during the peak of the pandemic. “Honestly, it’s been the hardest year in many of our lives, in health care in general. Not just nurses and not just in the ICU, but it’s just been an incredible challenge,” said Lovdal.
The Dodgers have traded right-hander Josh Sborz to the Texas Rangers for a minor-league pitcher. Sborz, 27, was the Dodgers’ second-round draft pick out of the University of Virginia in 2015. He made the majors briefly in each of the past two seasons, going 0-1 with a 6.08 ERA in 11 relief appearances.
The deaths of George Floyd and so many more Black individuals, along with COVID-19, have highlighted the structural racism that has long galvanized advocates for prison abolition like architect Deanna Van Buren, who has been working on alternatives for nearly a decade.
Marjan Naderi, DC’s youth poet laureate in 2020, had long worried that poetry was dying. After years of expressing herself through poems, winning slam poetry contests, and even publishing her own book, Naderi wondered whether her craft was worth the effort anymore. “We spent the past four years seeing our speech as something disposable, when it’s anything but that,” Naderi said in an interview with The DC Line. “Is this nation even ready for poems? Especially the last few years, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” And then she listened as Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Presi...
Sitting with the hard stuff is part of Paul Dafydd Jones’ definition of what it means to be patient. Jones, a UVA associate professor of religious studies, explores the concept of patience in his forthcoming book, “Patience: A Theological Exploration. Part 1: From Creation to Christ.” "Patience with respect to the pandemic is obviously a good thing. We need to wait it out. We need to be diligent. We need to persist with mask-wearing, physical distancing, all that stuff," Dafydd Jones said. "But patience vis-à-vis the crisis of global heating? Patience vis-à-vis right wing extremism? That would...
Robert D. Blackwill, a Council on Foreign Relations Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy, and Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia White Burkett Miller professor of history, argue the U.S. must change and clarify its strategy to prevent war in the region. “The U.S. strategic objective regarding Taiwan should be to preserve its political and economic autonomy, its dynamism as a free society, and U.S.-allied deterrence – without triggering a Chinese attack on Taiwan,” their report states.
(Podcast) Nathan Moore is the general manager at WTJU and the staff advisor of WXTJ at the University of Virginia. He is also the current president of the board of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. We invited Moore to ask about running community and college radio stations at the start of the second year of the pandemic. We talk about remote live broadcasting, training and recruiting new volunteers, and strengthening the mission of community and student media and the arts.
(Commentary by Steven M. Gillon, a senior faculty fellow at UVA’s Miller Center) The outcome of Saturday’s impeachment vote was never in question because Republicans could not convict Trump without indicting their entire party. The events on Jan. 6 – and indeed Trumpism itself – represent the culmination of a half-century of Republican strategy to mobilize and empower both white-nationalist sentiment and reactionary Christian fundamentalism.
(Commentary co-written by Daphna Bassok, associate professor of education and public policy, and Laura Bellows, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Human Development) For many child-care providers, COVID-19 has led to large enrollment drops, heightened costs, and staffing challenges. For some, it has meant closure. Emergency stabilization funds to mitigate the pandemic’s immediate damage are an important first step. But returning to a pre-coronavirus baseline would not be enough to create a stable child-care sector that adequately supports kids and families.
(Commentary co-written by Rachel Harmon, professor and director of the Center for Criminal Justice at UVA’s School of Law) One of the big campaign promises Joe Biden made last summer as Americans took to the streets to demand racial justice was policing reform. He had to walk a careful line between activists who wanted to defund the police and many others who wanted to make more modest adjustments to police policies. Now, caught in the middle, the risk is the new administration might end up accomplishing far less than it should.
"Now [that] we understand more what can induce HSV to come out of hiding and reactivate, we can start to understand how this works at the level of the infected nerve cell," said researcher Anna Cliffe, a UVA assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology.
Index providers, such as S&P Global, MSCI, FTSE Russell and Bloomberg, calculate widely used benchmarks for stocks, bonds and other securities, but these companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. investment industry’s main watchdog. “Certain index providers are presently acting as unregulated investment advisers. The SEC’s failure to recognize this reflects an inadequate and antiquated view of the index fund market,” said Adriana Robertson, a professor at the University of Toronto, who co-authored the paper with UVA law professor Paul Mahoney.
The National Science Foundation has awarded grants to nine universities, including UVA, to fund 11 research projects under the Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, which was launched in partnership with Amazon to help ensure AI systems are accountable, beneficial to all, fair, inclusive and transparent.
Because men drive more miles and engage in riskier driving – speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, driving drunk – more men than women die in car crashes overall. But when you compare similar car accidents with belted occupants of about the same age, height, BMI and vehicle year, women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in frontal car accidents, according to a 2019 study from UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics.
“If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information. And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights,” says co-author Zachary Irving, a UVA assistant professor of philosophy who explored the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of mind-wandering as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley.
An innovative warning system developed by two UVA researchers has become a critical factor in helping to keep students on campus. The system, developed by environmental engineer Lisa Colosi-Peterson and molecular epidemiologist Amy Mathers, uses wastewater testing from the university’s residence halls to detect COVID-19 infections before students even report symptoms.
Researchers who tested nearly 4,700 Virginians from June to mid-August for traces of a prior coronavirus infection found that only about 2.4% had previously been sick. But two out of three of those who had contracted the virus didn’t have any symptoms. And when adjusted for population, the numbers were nearly three times higher than summer reports of positive tests on the Virginia Department of Health website. This indicates that the number of COVID-19 cases, as expected, is likely much higher, said Dr. Eric Houpt, an infectious diseases expert at UVA Health who was a co-author of the report.&...
UVA will expand its graduate school catalog to include Africana and Caribbean studies, the school’s news outlet, UVAToday, reported on Monday. The two new programs will focus on culture, heritage, and history through an interdisciplinary lens, involving multiple school departments including the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. The Caribbean serves as a knowledge gold mine for finding solutions for today’s societal and environmental challenges, according to UVA professors.