A young playwright is earning big recognition from the Kennedy Center. UVA fourth-year student Micah Watson is this year's winner of the Kennedy Center National Undergraduate Playwriting Award for her play, “Canaan.”
Gun safety has returned to the forefront of the national conversation following recent gun-related tragedies. In response to this, UVA’s Center for Politics hosted a panel Tuesday examining gun rights and responsibilities.
UVA introduced Tony Bennett as its basketball coach the week of the 2009 Final Four. But the journey that brought Bennett to Charlottesville began at least 17 years earlier with an obscure, fifth-round NFL draft choice by his beloved Green Bay Packers.
Tony Bennett has lifted the Cavaliers program to heights it hasn’t experienced in more than three decades. He’s also fallen victim to repeated March heartbreak. This year he has his best team ever, as well as the NCAA tournament’s No. 1 overall seed. Is the elusive breakthrough finally imminent?
Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at UVA, talks about times of xenophobic nationalism and strong poets who aren’t always read with such insight, as well as leveling powerful arguments about how verse frames identity, feeling, and nation.
The conclusion from a study in the journal "Addiction" looks at how states report overdose deaths and correct for underreporting. The study's author, Christopher Ruhm, a UVA public policy expert, estimated the actual death toll from opioids is 21 to 35 percent higher than the numbers coming from the Centers for Disease Control.
In preparation for its examination of race, National Geographic editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg tapped John Edwin Mason, a UVA professor specializing in the history of photography and the history of Africa, to dive into the magazine’s past. On Monday, she discussed his findings in an editor’s note. “What Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,” Goldberg wrote.
The magazine decided to take a tough look at its past coverage prior to the publication of its April issue, which is devoted to race. In an editorial titled "For decades our coverage was racist. To rise above our past we must acknowledge it," editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg writes that she enlisted the help of UVA professor John Edwin Mason to take a look at decades of National Geographic coverage.
Researchers from UVA and Fielding Graduate University found that while happiness and Facebook use increased together up to a certain point, the beneficial effect of social media use then waned. The researchers propose that that ability to interact with others on Facebook, instead of in more challenging face-to-face interactions, may help protect these individuals against mental health issues associated with ASD such as depression.
Lilia Abron graduated with a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Iowa – the first black woman in her field. On Monday, she told students at UVA’s Batten School that she knew as a young person she wanted to help people, but didn’t exactly know how – until she read Rachel Carson’s seminal book on the chemical industry and the environment.
UVA professors and students – teaming up with Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division engineers and scientists through the Naval Engineering Education Consortium – are developing a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of 3-D printing, and their teamwork is positively impacting Navy programs.
Jim Ryan will begin his tenure as UVA’s next president Aug. 1, moving his start date up by two months. On Monday, Ryan sent an email to UVA faculty and students that also discussed eventual departures of Pat Hogan, executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Tom Katsouleas, executive vice president and provost.
Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg asked John Edwin Mason, a UVA professor of African history and the history of photography, to dive into the magazine’s nearly 130-year archive and report back. What Mason found was a long tradition of racism in the magazine’s coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.
This makes four years in a row in which Virginia was either the best or second-best state for higher education. Schools in this state have a graduation rate of 71 percent, or second-highest in our study, and offer their students great long-term value.
“By applying this technology to different regions, we can ensure the efficacy of this tool in countless growing conditions for a myriad of plants,” said Xi Yang, a UVA assistant professor who designed this study’s SIF monitoring system.
For every 100 children born to parents living in the city six years ago, just 73 enrolled in first grade this school year, according to data compiled by UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where researcher Hamilton Lombard called the metric one of the best available indicators of a school district’s desirability.
Tasks often feel easier to perform as we gain experience with them, which can have unintended consequences when the task involves rating a series of items, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "We find that increased experience makes the evaluation process easier, which, in many instances, leads to an upward trend in judges' evaluations," says study author Kieran O'Connor of UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce.
This brings us to another area where U.S. systems are outranged: ground vehicles. Researchers at the University of Virginia successfully 3-D printed a drone body in one day. By snapping in place an electric motor, two batteries and an Android cell phone, they made a fully autonomous drone that could carry 1.5 pounds approximately 50 kilometers – six times the range of the U.S. Hellfire missile.
The University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Pennsylvania Law School round out the top five on our list, with a respective 56 percent and 52 percent of 2017 J.D.s heading to the biggest 100 law firms. (Both schools moved up three spots this year.)
(Commentary) UVA law professor Brandon L. Garrett has studied nearly all of the trial transcripts from wrongful convictions later exposed by DNA-based exonerations. "There is a national epidemic of overstated forensic testimony, with a steady stream of criminal convictions being overturned as the shoddiness of decades' worth of physical evidence comes to light," he wrote last year.