Students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia were part of a big conversation at the Rotunda on Monday. The woman who helped create the New York Times' 1619 Project spoke with UVA President Jim Ryan about it.
UVA alumna Dr. Vivian W. Pinn, founding director of the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health, has been awarded the 2020 Women’s Leadership Award by the Emily Couric Leadership Forum.
“Here we have two employees with parallel and roughly equal claims to personal dignity by their own understanding,” UVA law professor Douglas Laycock said. “The religious claim is protected by federal law; the trans claim is not, although it is probably protected by state law in nearly half the states. I have trouble seeing undue hardship in letting the religious employee use pronouns that conform to her own sense of reality.”
Research by UVA’s Amar Cheema and a colleague shows that giving people two savings accounts can lead to greater overall contributions, as they feel compelled to contribute to both accounts.
In our next installment of ‘Training Blocks’, we connected with University of Virginia head coach Todd Desorbo, who provided workouts from UVA’s training plan with star freshman Kate Douglass.
When UVA began alerting students to the threat of a new coronavirus, Soukarya Ghosh and James Yun started talking. Friends from high school in Northern Virginia now majoring in computer science, they thought they could help educate and inform the public.
(By Kate Still, neuroscience Ph.D. student) In the weeks leading up to my proposal defense, I suffered from anxiety because I feared that my committee would see the shortcomings that I perceived in myself. And when I didn’t pass, the failure confirmed my self-doubts. Eventually, as my loss of confidence became a bigger problem, I knew that I had to do something about it.
(Commentary co-written by Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, assistant professor of politics and global studies) One of the most enduring puzzles concerning India’s development is why the poor, who constitute a sizeable share of the electorate, continue to receive low-quality public services.
(Commentary by Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar, associate professor of economics at UVA) Whether you believe its proponents or its critics, Aadhaar may be one of the most transformative investments in state capacity ever made. A leading use case for Aadhaar has been to reduce leakage in India’s largest welfare program, the public distribution system.
(Commentary by Qian Cai, director of the UVA Weldon Cooper Center’s Demographics Research Group) Unfortunately, another new approach by the U.S. Census Bureau presents an even bigger concern. If implemented, this new approach will make the 2020 census the first census where the actual counts for counties, cities and towns will be distorted before they are released.
(Commentary by Bob Gibson, communications director and senior researcher at UVA’s Cooper Center for Public Service) Legislation to decriminalize marijuana possession and bills to make voting easier are rocketing toward Gov. Ralph Northam’s desk faster than their Democratic sponsors dreamed possible even last year, when Republicans still held two-seat majorities in both chambers and routinely gave such bills a swift and timely Richmond dispatch.
(Registration required) UVA management professor Emma Zhao’s research concludes that the co-chief executive structure is “probably not a good thing,” she says. With coauthor Lindred Greer at the University of Michigan, Zhao conducted studies of how groups negotiate and found that “when higher-power individuals work with other higher-power individuals, destructive power dynamics may emerge, which harm group performance.”
“I think they wanted to show that carrying weapons, whether it’s open or concealed, is a normal thing that millions of Americans do every day,” says Tom Ferguson, a UVA senior who came to Richmond in January to lobby on behalf of gun rights. “The right has understood that the battle of ideas is terribly important, because people want to feel that they are part of a crusade that is inspired by a philosophically sophisticated ... and morally significant agenda or purpose,” says Colin Bird, a UVA political philosopher.
University of Virginia constitutional and local government law expert Richard Schragger in January said the Norton militia resolution appeared to conflict with existing state law on militias.
Several high-profile examples of students who have succeeded in pulling off alternate dissertations. Amanda Visconti, who earned a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Maryland in 2015, created an interactive digital project that enables readers to annotate James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Visconti got a tenure-track gig as an assistant research professor at Purdue University. She eventually left that to become managing director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. A.D. Carson, who earned a Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication and information design at Cle...
“There’s a big appetite out there among the public for the horse race. It’s like sports,” said Kyle Kondik, the Washington-based communications director for UVA’s Center for Politics and managing editor of its nonpartisan newsletter, “Sabato’s Crystal Ball.” Campaigns conduct polling differently, Kondik said. “They use it as a tool to inform how to run a campaign,” he said.
Sanders’ prospects are still threatened by the possibility of a single candidate winning a large share of the black vote, according to analysts at UVA’s Center for Politics. But that threat has greatly diminished with Biden’s struggles. “For Sanders,” wrote the center’s Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Colman., “the more viable candidates remain, the better his position.”
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the Miller Center, and Saikrishna Prakash, law professor, were among three guest commentators taking stock of the evolution of the office itself, what the presidency has become and where it is headed.
Gov. Ralph Northam has announced the following appointments: Christopher Goyne of Charlottesville, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, to the Aerospace Advisory Council. Appointed to the Maternal Mortality Review Team: Donald J. Dudley of Charlottesville, director of the division of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and chairman of the Virginia Neonatal Perinatal Collaborative; and Elizabeth Newton of Charlottesville, registered dietitian nutritionist at UVA Health System.
Jonah Fogel, program manager for UVA’s Environmental Resilience Institute, has been following the changing policies around the solar industry in Virginia. The simultaneous push for renewable energy from companies like Facebook and Amazon — both of which have agreed to purchase energy from solar projects in Virginia — and the state have combined to create a rapidly expanding industry.