For Chris Farley it was “mission” accomplished yet again. For the 22nd straight year, the 1998 UVA graduate ran a 26-mile marathon in fewer than 3 hours. Farley’s most recent achievement came Nov. 15 at the Upstate Classic Marathon in Guilderland, N.Y., near Albany, finishing the race in 2:55.19.
Jonathan Gordon sometimes wishes his college buddies would talk about more serious topics. The group of four men, who all met on their freshman floor at the University of Virginia and are now in their 30s, have all been groomsmen in each other’s weddings. They have gone on international trips together. They all consider the other men in the group their closest friends. So why don’t they ever actually talk about their feelings?
Due to a series of mini-strokes starting in 2012, Harrison Ruffin Tyler lives almost without time. It would be quite a change for anyone, but it’s particularly so for someone like him, who grew up steeped in family history. Harrison was raised in his grandfather’s hunting lodge; his grandfather — John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States — was born in 1790.
A University of Virginia graduate has turned a lifelong hobby into a business - one that connects co-workers at a time when many are only linked remotely. Collin Waldoch grew up an avid fan of 'Jeopardy!', often keeping score when watching the show with family and friends. Over the years, he was part of high school quiz bowl, and started up pub trivia teams while attending UVA. In 2017, Waldoch first launched Water Cooler Trivia as a side project. By the time the pandemic hit, he had drawn the interest of enough companies – more than 1,000 – to do it full time.
There was a time in Denver Riggleman's life when he sat on the banks of a creek that reeked of dead fish and peered through night-vision goggles into the thick of the Olympic National Forest. He was looking for Bigfoot. Or at least, others in his group were. Riggleman, a nonbeliever who was then a National Security Agency defense contractor, had come along for the ride, paying thousands of dollars in 2004 to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?
Margaret Thornton, who taught English in Charlottesville City Schools prior to becoming a PhD student in educational leadership at the University of Virginia, said teacher shortages limit schools’ capacity to improve and can exacerbate inequality. Thornton’s graduate work is focused on the concept of school detracking. The idea is that tracking students into either advanced or grade-level classes perpetuates inequity because students of color, immigrants and poor students are much less likely to be selected for more rigorous tracks.
Students at the University of Virginia are moving out of the Charlottesville area, and it will be months before they move back. Grounds will be quiet until February.
University of Virginia infectious disease expert Dr. William Petri says rapid tests aren't the end-all be-all. "I think any test is not going to be 100 percent, and the antigen detection tests are less sensitive than the reverse transcriptase PCR tests that we started out, with in general," Petri said. "The antigen tests have to detect the amount of virus that is transmissible to other people. So they're not, they're not detecting the very, very lowest levels of infection, but they are detecting the level that is most associated with being transmissible."
Reggie Leonard, 35, associate director for career connections and community engagement at University of Virginia, remembers the moment he got bitten by the wine bug. “The thing that made it all click was when I watched Action Bronson tasting natural wines in France on YouTube,” Leonard said. “I had never seen wines with those colors, and had no idea there could be so much variety and so much fun with wine. I loved how much Action and the fellas were in the streets of Paris, drinking something traditionally relegated to white linen-lined tables on a sidewalk, in shorts and a T-shirt.”
The report quotes William Anthllis, director and CEO ofg UVA’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, and Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics.
Kyle Kondik, the author of a political history titled "The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President," is skeptical about Ohio being either a predictor or even a swing state that Democrats that stand a chance of winning back in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump won Ohio each time by a margin of around 8 percentage points. "It's definitely moving off of the really competitive presidential playing field," said Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, who had said even before this election that Ohio's demographics were going to make it redder.
The Sexual Assault Resource Agency will host a Giving Tuesday auction this week. Charlottesville-area businesses are offering a host of activities you can bid on, including a run with UVA President Jim Ryan.
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.