In The News

New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials. A team of researchers from Purdue University – that also includes Baoxing Xu, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia – worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. 

Playwright Henrik Ibsen coined the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The University of Virginia, one of New America’s recent Public Interest Technology University Networks grantees, is a living example of this. Barbara Brown Wilson, associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the UVA School of Architecture and co-founder and faculty director at the UVA Democracy Initiative Center for the Redress of Inequity through Community-Engaged Scholarship – more commonly known as the UVA Equity Center – and Michele Claiborne, the center’s director of equitable analytics, along...

In partnership with the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, our team is designing a bespoke education module on Leading for Racial Equity. The course will provide our Young Global Leaders with the knowledge and tools to drive meaningful change within their organizations, with the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of employees and accelerate greater inclusion across sectors. 

An anonymous gift is going to create new opportunities for Piedmont Virginia Community College students who want to transfer to the University of Virginia.

University of Virginia students living in Lawn residences next year may still post profane four-letter oaths on their dorm room doors, but the size of the print will be a lot smaller.

UVA football players are refusing to sit back and watch history unfold. They want to be a part of the discourse to help change the narrative. “Changing one person’s life is changing their world,” Terrell Jana said. He and teammate Nick Grant have been vital to the formation of The Groundskeepers, a group created in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor in the summer of 2020.

About halfway through the second meeting of Read What You Sow, a book club founded by New York Liberty forward [and UVA alumna] Jocelyn Willoughby, a member clicks to raise her hand and participate in the virtual discussion. For an hour the topics are manifold, loosely guided by Willoughby’s own questions. One in particular rouses a response.

“All else being equal, when we’re alone, our brain is a little more vigilant for any signs of danger. Also, our brain perceives demands from the world as more demanding than they would be if we had someone with us,” UVA psychology professor James Coan said. “And there’s a really simple reason for it: It’s that the world is more demanding when we’re alone, because anything that the world demands of us when we’re alone, we have to do by ourselves.”

Kitty Joyner was not only the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia’s engineering program, but she also went on to become the NACA’s first woman engineer, getting her first job with the agency in 1939. She worked first for the NACA and then for NASA until her retirement in 1971, making significant contributions to research on aeronautics, supersonic flight, and airfoil designs. 

(Commentary) Originalist legal scholars such as UVA Law professor Larry Solum have delved deeply into analytic philosophy of language to articulate how their efforts to find the original meaning of constitutional language relate to social and historical facts that bear on that interpretive enterprise. In no sense is this a kind of “literalism.” 

The brisk fundraising since the violent protest indicates that most Republican voters are “comfortable” with the party that has been remade in Trump’s mold, says J. Miles Coleman, a nonpartisan analyst at the UVA Center for Politics. “The Republican Party — it’s not going to go back to the party it was before Trump,” he said.

With Virginia limiting its governors to a single term, Ralph Northam can’t run for re-election this year. It’s still startling that he’ll manage to finish out this term. Back in 2019, Northam was embroiled in scandal. A photo on his medical school yearbook page showed a man in blackface. At first, the Democrat said he was in the photo, then he denied it. “Everybody in the Democratic Party that mattered demanded Northam’s resignation, not just in Virginia but nationally,” recalls Larry Sabato, who directs UVA’s Center for Politics.

After living in Virginia for most of the life, Larry Sabato has now been remembering the segregated racially schools and their systematic efforts in stopping the Black people voting. Now he, at 68, has observed that the state has diversified enough and now has embraced the liberal values. It has shifted from the symbol of this old South to the symbol of the quite new.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a newsletter produced by UVA’s Center for Politics, downgraded the Missouri Senate race from “safe Republican” to “likely Republican,” still favoring the eventual GOP candidate. “We’ll see if Democrats can get a good recruit here,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of the newsletter.

Historically, this level of involvement among young American voters has been scarce, if not nonexistent. In recent history, the U.S. has had one of the lowest youth voter turnouts of anywhere in the world. “In U.S. presidential elections, about 70% of voters 60 and up have turned out — which is nearly three times the rate of Americans between 18 and 29,” UVA public policy professor John Holbein wrote recently in the Conversation.

Companies contribute to these funds on behalf of workers through payments negotiated with unions, but they are less heavily regulated than single-employer plans, in part because they were presumed to be safer. For a number of reasons, that has turned out not to be the case. “This is not a new problem...,” said James Naughton, a former actuary and an associate professor at UVA’s Darden School of Business. “This is a problem that’s been around for at least 15 years.”

(Podcast) Throughout his presidential campaign, Joe Biden called for national reforms to police practices and civil rights. What specific policies might the Biden Administration and Congress pursue in the months and years ahead? To discuss these issues, on Feb. 25, the Gray Center hosted the fourth event in its webinar series, “The Administrative State in Transition.” The panel discussion included Rachel Harmon of the UVA School of Law.

“Watching the storming of the Capitol on January the 6th ... definitely brought back memories of the scene in Charlottesville during the summer of hate,” says Claudrena Harold, chair of history at the University of Virginia and co-editor of “Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.” 

In honor of International Women’s Day March 8, Becker’s Hospital Review asked women in the health care industry to share their insights on leadership. … Dr. Tracey Hoke, Chief of Quality and Performance Improvement for UVA Health: “When I was a little girl, my mom used to tell me that I could accomplish anything that I set my mind to. Now that I serve on a nearly all-female hospital leadership team, it is clear to me that other moms must have been deliberately building strength, confidence and resilience in their girls as well. This generation of women in leadership has extended the success of...

Researchers think manageable stress increases alertness and performance. “When we experience stress, we have an increase in arousal, which signals to us that something important is happening,” explains Bethany Teachman, a UVA professor of psychology. “If we appraise the situation as challenging but manageable, then the arousal helps us focus and direct effort toward addressing the challenge. Think about how difficult it is to give a good presentation or performance if you feel no arousal at all.”