They are the first longitudinal imaging studies to include autistic children with intellectual disability. “They’re a very, very impressive set of studies,” says Kevin Pelphrey, professor of neurology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who was not involved in the work. “I think they’re going to do a lot for the field.”
Nicole Thorne Jenkins, Dean, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia: Jenkins’ business career started early, as a bookkeeper for her parents Maryland waste removal business. “I was good at math but originally wanted to be an engineer,” the University of Iowa graduate recalls. Formerly a professor and vice dean of the Gatton College of Business at the University of Kentucky, she comes to the distinguished McIntire School, with its 700 undergraduate and 300 graduate students, having practical first-hand industry experience from working at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Dr. William A. Petri, Professor of medicine and vice chair for research of the Department of Medicine, University of Virginia: Virginia and other states are laying the groundwork for the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, understandably a topic of intense global interest. Petri has been in the midst of vaccine research at the UVA School of Medicine, where he studies immunology and molecular pathogenesis of infectious diseases.
University of Virginia professor Timothy Beatley lays out a case for building cities that are better hosts to birds and the broader natural world in “The Bird Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats.”
“People would ask us, ‘When should I come out to see peak gingko color?’ and we would say the 21st of October,” says David Carr, the director of the University of Virginia’s Blandy Experimental Farm, which is home to The Ginkgo Grove, an arboretum with over 300 ginkgo trees. Carr, who’s been at The Ginkgo Grove since 1997, says the trend toward warmer falls and later-in-the-season leaf color is a noticeable one. “Nowadays it seems to be closer to the end of October or the first week of November.”
While there are many ways to define empathy, it is often defined as the ability to understand another person's perspective or emotional experience and relate to it while staying in control of your own emotions, says Jessie Stern, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Virginia. "Empathy means I understand you are sad, and I feel a little bit sad myself. But I don't become so distressed that the situation becomes about me," she says.
“Even poor people tell jokes and have fun,” says John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. The invention of photography in the first half of the 19th century coincided, he notes, with a battle over slavery, the industrial revolution, the rise of the labor movement and post-Enlightenment scientific studies of race and poverty. “In all those cases, images were used to portray subjects as inferior,” he says. “And how African-American and Appalachian communities have been portrayed over time have a lot in common.”
The Washington region is seeing “an exponential increase” in new coronavirus cases, said John D. Voss, vice chairman for quality and safety at the University of Virginia Health System. He said the area has avoided caseload rates seen in other parts of the country, but battling the virus will depend on people’s behaviors through the Thanksgiving holiday.
“That poll’s results are striking: dealing with Covid is the only priority over which there is anything resembling a consensus,” Eric Leeper, economist and Paul Goodloe McIntire professor of economics at the University of Virginia, said via email.
Micah Schwartzman, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies the intersection of law and religion and has criticized the Kentucky ruling, said in an interview that the Supreme Court has now given a green light to more of these decisions – which in turn will make it harder for state and local governments to regulate efficiently. The New York ruling "is going to encourage a wave of litigation challenging state public health regulations and give a lot of energy to religious groups that think they're feeling constrained by local rules," he said.
Some doctors said that they were not convinced by the analysis that five days of isolation would prevent transmission from a majority of people. “There’s a sweet spot there, I would imagine, but I haven’t figured out where that is,” said Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care and infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia.
(By Dr. Michael Hanley, diagnostic radiologist at the UVA Cancer Center) Unfortunately, more than 70% of lung cancers are detected too late, when the chance for a cure is much lower. The goal of lung screening programs, like the one we offer at the University of Virginia Cancer Center, is to detect cancers early on, when there is a higher chance for a cure and for patients to return to their regular routines.
(By Natasha Heller, associate professor of religion) The changes in climate may have been caused by previous and current generations of adults, but it is the future generations that will have to deal with its worst effects. Today’s children will play a critical role in protecting the environment.
(Commentary co-written by Gerard Robinson, a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture) During the 2020 election, school choice finally received the national attention it deserves as one of the top civil rights issues of our times. To build on that momentum, advocates for the public funding of parents to choose a K-12 education for their children in public, private, or religious schools need to educate lawmakers and the public about the educational, social, cultural, and economic benefits of school choice.
A five-year, $500,000 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation is supporting the multi-pronged effort, called the Just Food for Charlottesville program, which includes increasing the number of students eating school meals, ensuring that their voices are heard when it comes to what is served and purchasing equipment for kitchens. Cultivate Charlottesville also will work with students to educate them about healthy options. UVA Health and Dorothy Batten are helping to fund the grant.
Lines were, once again, long at the final COVID-19 testing event in Charlottesville before the Thanksgiving holiday. Cars lined up for testing at Mount Zion First African Baptist Church for a testing event hosted by UVA Health.
(Commentary) I saw part of an interview a few weeks ago with Dr. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. His research suggests married couples have proven much more resilient in dealing with this virus – and all that comes with it – than their single peers.
In the University of Virginia’s Plant Ecology and Remote Sensing Lab, Elliott White Jr. deploys satellite imagery to compute ongoing losses of fragile coastal lands. From National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data, he calculated that coastal regions from Maine to Texas had experienced a net loss of 5,387 square miles of coastal and river swamps in a 20-year period from 1996 to 2016.
Researchers say they’ve found no evidence to support GOP grievances that the nation’s leading social media companies squelch conservative voices. “I know of no academic research that concludes there is a systemic bias – liberal or conservative – in either the content moderation policies or in the prioritization of content by algorithms by major social media platforms," said Steven Johnson, an information technology professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce.
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says that more Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or other nonbinary identities than ever before, but significant gaps remain in data collection and understanding of their well-being. That reality has significant implications for not only the current state of HIV care and services for LGBTQ people, but also the future evolution of those interventions. “We’re simply missing some of the data that would allow us to fully understand the well-being of sexual and gender diverse po...