What do you remember about finding your own creative spark? Tina Fey: A story that comes to mind is that, when I was in college, I studied drama at the University of Virginia and, like everybody, I mostly wanted to be an actor. But then, the first time I took a playwriting class and I wrote a one-act play, and I was not in the play, I sat back and watched other people get laughs and stuff from something that I wrote, and it was such a unique thrill that something opened in my brain and I went, “Oh, I think this is it for me.”
Ray Szwabowski of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Public Defender Office announced Friday that he will seek the Democratic nomination for Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney. According to a news release from his campaign, after graduating from UVA with a degree in Spanish and foreign affairs, Szwabowski stayed in Charlottesville to work as a Spanish-speaking sales representative and then returned to UVA to earn his law degree in 2015.
UVA alumnus Dr. Krishna Udayakumar is playing a leading role in the global effort to rid the world of COVID-19. Udayakumar, 42, is the founding director of Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center, which tracks worldwide production and distribution of COVID vaccines.
Tom Bannard knows what it’s like to recover from alcohol and drug problems on a college or university campus that offers more temptation than support. Five years after becoming coordinator of Rams in Recovery, Bannard has built the collegiate recovery program at Virginia Commonwealth University into a model and a mentor for other Virginia colleges and universities. “We are kind of a flagship,” said Bannard, 36, who relied on a similar program, Hoos in Recovery, when he returned to UVA in 2008 after undergoing rehab for substance use disorder.
Zena Howard stands firmly at the top of the Triangle’s Black architecture community. The late Phil Freelon recruited her to join his Durham-based firm in 2003. He was committed to making good design accessible to everyone. “I thought it was a great firm doing the type of work I like to do,” said Howard, a 1988 graduate of UVA’s School of Architecture. “I thought by joining them, I could take it even further and contribute and grow what they’d started and take it to another level.”
Daniel Mendelsohn’s intellectual journey – from classics professor to Holocaust chronicler to “editor-at-large” at the New York Review of Books – took him back in 2019 to his alma mater, the University of Virginia, where he delivered the lectures that comprise this slim volume.
Actress and singer-songwriter Jen Lilley, a UVA graduate known for her work in “The Artist” and other films, has penned some pandemic-year lyrics for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and recorded a duet with singer Bryan Lanning. Proceeds will help purchase holiday gifts for homeless children in Roanoke.
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine is a New Hampshire native and a dual citizen of the United States and Uganda. But he can easily make you believe he’s from either Chicago (“The Chi”) or Uganda (“Queen of Katwe”). Because he can play a refugee from the Angolan civil war in writer-director Ekwa Msangi’s “Farewell Amor,” you’d think the transformation from the son of academics and the grandson of an archbishop might be easy for him. While the onscreen results are effortless, they weren’t achieved easily. For one thing, Angolans and Ugandans have little in common, culturally or even linguistically.
Colin Hunter is the co-founder and head of strategy and growth at BetterWorld. From his early career at Bain and Company, Colin brings with him a vast background in strategy consulting. Recognizing that a large portion of donations made to charitable causes do not make it to the end cause, he used his expertise in scaling and growing brands to found BetterWorld. He has a deep-rooted commitment to nonprofit work, having served in every role of the nonprofit ecosystem, from board member to advisor, consultant, event host and donor. Colin received a B.A. from UVA and also studied at Oxford.
Two UVA Darden School of Business alums have temporarily shifted their apparel company’s production from stylish activewear to face masks, in efforts to ebb the transmission of COVID-19.
(Video) Frontline workers at UVA Health began receiving vaccinations for COVID-19 on Dec. 15, according to the school. This footage, released Dec. 17, shows Frankie Allen, a patient care technician and nursing student, receive the first dose of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
A UVA student is raising money for the Make a Wish foundation by running 48 miles in 48 hours Jan. 8 through 10. “I was reading David Goggins’ biography where he talked about his 4x4/48 challenge, which is essentially run four miles every four hours for 48 hours and I thought that would be a perfect fit to raise money and test myself physically and mentally,” Connor Burns said.
They did it for Helen. They wanted to make a difference. Now a determined group of 2020 Colonial Forge High School graduates – including five current University of Virginia students – who lost their friend in a car accident have been recognized with a National Purpose Award for their work to improve Stafford’s rural roads.
(Commentary by Hannah Adams, dual degree master’s candidate in public policy and public health, and Katie Platz, Ph.D. nursing student) Ten months ago, many people might not have known what telehealth was, let alone visited with their health care provider through their phone or computer screen. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Virginians have now seen their doctor online. It is now hard to imagine health care in Virginia without this technology.
The UN advisory group includes Sophia Kianni, 18, an Iranian-American student at the University of Virginia who founded and directs Climate Cardinals, a youth association that translates documents in numerous languages to make climate information more accessible to non-English speakers. “There really is a discrepancy in the amount of information available,” she said, “which is a shame because the top 10 countries worst affected by climate change – none of them are majority English-speaking.”
Canajoharie High School graduate and Eagle Scout Jacob St. Martin, currently an undergraduate student studying Mechanical Engineering and Global Sustainability at the University of Virginia, will present the results of a nearly year-long study to NASA officials this Wednesday. Mounted as part of NASA’s Big Idea Challenge, St. Martin’s team developed a system for delivering energy to equipment in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon.
Jim Kavanaugh, 95, died on Wednesday, December 31, 2020, at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate, medical student, and resident before joining the University’s faculty as a child psychiatrist in the School of Medicine.
Architect Jaquelin “Jaque” Taylor Robertson, the Driehaus Prize winner who cofounded the New York firm Cooper Robertson in 1988, was an urbanist at his core. The former dean of the UVA School of Architecture, where he founded a certificate program in American Urbanism, he also served as the first director of the Mayor’s Office for Midtown Planning and Development in New York. Although he received acclaim for residences like the serene Rose House in East Hampton, he is synonymous with Celebration, Florida, the idyllic master-planned community developed by the Walt Disney Company that he designe...
Virginia Coal and Energy Commission: Cale Jaffe of Charlottesville, UVA associate professor of law and director, Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic.
Virginia Interagency Coordinating Council: Kristen Heinan of Charlottesville, assistant professor of pediatric neurology, University of Virginia.