“What’s crazy is, we’re three months in, and we’re still not able to calibrate our risk management. It’s a mess,” Brian Nosek, who runs the Center for Open Science at the University of Virginia, told columnist Joel Achenbach.
New research from the UVA School of Medicine is shedding light on the biological architecture that lets us hear – and on a genetic disorder that causes both deafness and blindness. Sihan Li, a graduate student in the lab of Jung-Bum Shin, of UVA’s Department of Neuroscience, has made a surprising discovery about how the hearing organ in mammals achieves its extraordinary sensitivity.
According to researchers, the findings of this study show that primary aldosteronism is much more common than previously recognized. To reach this conclusion, researchers from four academic medical centers (including Brigham and Women’s Hospital, University of Alabama, University of Virginia, and the University of Utah) studied patients with normotension (blood pressure that is within the normal range), stage 1 hypertension, stage 2 hypertension and resistant hypertension to determine the prevalence of excess aldosterone production and primary aldosteronism.
A team of researchers led by UVA chemistry professor W. Dean Harman has developed a new method for manufacturing pharmaceuticals that could reduce dosage amounts and side effects, leading to dramatic improvements in the safety and efficacy of new drugs.
UVA’s new Student Health and Wellness Center reflects a similar emphasis on preventative and wellness care, including a teaching kitchen to provide students firsthand experience with making healthy meals.
Patrick Jackson, a UVA assistant professor with the Thaler Center, which studies infectious disease, said he and his colleagues have been researching the coronavirus and treatments. “The science about masking suggests that there is a benefit to that and probably more a benefit to the people around you than there is to you directly from wearing a mask,” he said.
Some students at the UVA School of Law raised more than $20,000 for charity, despite this year’s major fundraiser being canceled. The 37th Annual North Grounds Softball League Invitational was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
(Commentary by Grace Elizabeth Hale, professor of history and American studies) William “Roddie” Bryan’s video of Gregory and Travis McMichael shooting Ahmaud Arbery is not the first image Americans have seen of whites killing African Americans.
While keeping social connections alive through Zoom happy hours and Skype birthday parties can help, they can’t fully substitute for the comfort we take in the physical presence of others, UVA psychology professor James Coan said.
“I think football will start in the fall," Virginia head coach Bronco Mendenhall said. "It’s too soon to tell whether it will start on time, and what it will look like.”
The UVA athletics department will host “Wahoowa Saturday” on May 30. The digital event will feature virtual tailgates, highlights, and trivia. Cavalier fans are also encouraged to reenact and submit their favorite moments in UVA history, and the best examples will be shared during the event.
Justin McCoy, son of Greg and Diane McCoy of New Paris, has been named to the University of Virginia spring semester dean’s list with a 4.0 grade-point average. McCoy, a kinesiology major, has been accepted in the Curry School of Education and Human Development and is a member of the university’s wrestling team.
Beaches tend to evoke more reaction and anger than parks and other public spaces. It’s in large part, experts say, because the U.S. shoreline is increasingly private, and controlled by fewer, and richer, people. “We went from a time, prior to WWII, where much of American shorelines were treated as public land, to a frenzy of privatization where the shoreline was gobbled up,” said Andrew Kahrl, a professor at the University of Virginia who wrote “The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.”
“This isn’t the first time there’s been a tango or a contretemps between IGs and the president,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a University of Virginia constitutional scholar. He noted that IGs are somewhat “anomalous” and have been described as “moles for Congress” because of their unique obligations to sit within the Executive Branch but report their findings to lawmakers.
For Jarrett Zigon, a professor of anthropology and chair in biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, the result follows a well-established correlation. “It’s not surprising at all. Basically, any place that I’ve ever seen data for, where there’s an increase in naloxone access and the distribution of it, the data show a strong correlation to the lowering of overdoses. The surprising thing is that people do not accept this,” Zigon said.
Benjamin Spencer is a nationally renowned civil procedure and federal courts expert and a current professor of law at the University of Virginia. However, on July 1, he will make history and become the first African American to be the dean of any school at The College of William & Mary, the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the country, after Harvard University. He will lead their law school.
“Family structure is about as important as family income in predicting who graduates from college today,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. “In the absence of SAT scores, which can pinpoint kids from difficult family backgrounds with great academic potential, family stability is likely to loom even larger in determining who makes it past the college finish line in California.”
In this pandemic, we’re swimming in statistics, trends, models, projections, infection rates, death tolls. UVA professor Brian Nosek has professional expertise in interpreting data, but even he is struggling to make sense of the numbers.
All women should have access to the at-home test that can provide early detection of cervical cancer
(Commentary by Emma Mitchell, assistant professor of nursing) I’m a public health nurse who has spent a career studying ways to better test women for the human papillomavirus, the main cause of cervical cancer, so they can get early and lifesaving treatment. In rural, resource-limited areas – in the U.S. as well as abroad – I’ve seen how this disease claims lives and fractures families. When a mother dies early, stable homes vanish, children are orphaned, and girls’ sexual and reproductive health, often already at significant risk, are placed in even greater jeopardy.
(Commentary co-written by Gaurav Chiplunkar, assistant professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business) The impact of the coronavirus disease and the associated lockdown in India on firms, workers and employment has been devastating in many ways. From migrants desperately trying to get back home to small businesses and their workers struggling to keep afloat, the true economic effects of the pandemic are only starting to materialize. As policymakers weigh their options on reviving the economy after the lockdown, they face crucial questions on how to stimulate employment and encourage new business...