(Press release) Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, the 2020-21 chairman of the Devitt Award, the highest honor that is bestowed upon an Article III federal judge in the country, has announced today that Judge Julia Smith Gibbons of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is the 39th annual Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award recipient. Gibbons received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Vanderbilt University in 1972 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law.
The newly elected president of the International Council of Nurses has said she hopes to “increase the influence of nurses” across the world. Dr. Pamela Cipriano, who is from the U.S. and has served as vice president of the ICN since 2017, has become the 29th president of the global nursing organization. Dr Cipriano, who also serves as dean of the University of Virginia School of Nursing, replaces current ICN president Annette Kennedy, who is from Ireland.
Beyond the clamor, political scientist Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia, believes that one year before the midterm elections, this ballot will be a good test of the ability of Republican and Democratic forces to mobilize. Traditionally, he said, when a party takes control of the White House and Congress, it loses a feather in the midterm elections, and he wouldn’t be surprised if that happened in Virginia.
Lois Shepherd, Wallenborn Professor of Biomedical Ethics and co-director of the Studies in Reproductive Ethics and Justice at the Center for Health Humanities and Ethics of the University of Virginia, said that, for both ethical and legal reasons, medical information about specific employees should be kept confidential. “According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Americans with Disabilities Act ‘requires an employer to maintain the confidentiality of employee medical information, such as documentation or other confirmation of COVID-19 vaccination.’ While employers may ask em...
According to Dr. Meredith Clark, a UVA assistant professor of media studies, the concept of having “made it” is imperative to many Black people. These discussions about Black people becoming more upwardly mobile, she adds, have become more nuanced. “You’ve got a group of people who are left behind. But technology has flattened things so we have this conversation about how things are working out for those left behind at the same time as we’re having conversations about how it’s working out for people who were in the Black middle class,” Clark says.
The first American test tube baby was born here in Virginia 40 years ago, but the state is lagging when it comes to regulating fertility clinics. Naomi Cahn, who teaches family law at UVA, says would-be parents trust these places to protect their health and their future. Unfortunately, she says, some clinics have had catastrophic equipment failures where temperatures rose in freezers, and thousands of eggs or embryos were lost.
There may appear to be a spike in shootings on school campuses now because of the recent surge in gun violence nationally, Dewey Cornell, a UVA professor of education and a school threat assessment expert, said. Cornell used the analogy of a “flood” that covers every building in a town, pointing to the fact that murders rose by 30% in the U.S. in 2020, the highest increase since 1960. “The water is going to go everywhere in a flood zone,” Cornell said. “Every building, indiscriminately, but schools are somewhat protected.”
A local social media expert explains just how dangerous he thinks Facebook is. Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor of media studies, says the company disconnects people and undermines democracy. He wrote about this extensively in his book “Anti Social Media.” But now, he’s seeing his fears play out in real-time.
(Podcast) Facebook is hauled over the coals by Congress on a semi-regular basis, but this week has been especially damaging. Former employee Frances Haugen has blown the whistle on the company, leaking internal documents that reveal that it knew it was harming its users. Today on The Signal, what exactly has Facebook been keeping from the world? And what does the company have to say for itself? Featured: Siva Vaidyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
(Co-written by Kathryn Laughon, associate professor of nursing) We voted for Joe Biden with the expectation that the Biden administration would keep its promise to build a “fair and humane” immigration system, ending repressive immigration policies that keep children in cages, expel asylum applicants and restrict citizenship. … Instead, we woke up last week to see Border Patrol agents on horses chasing Black people with what looked like whips. We saw the Biden administration continuing anti-Black, anti-immigrant Trump administration policies. We saw them continuing to block asylum-seekers from...
Culpeper’s hospital just got a new and shorter name. Effective Oct. 1, the in-patient facility and ER on Sunset Lane will be known as UVA Culpeper Medical Center. UVA Haymarket and UVA Prince William, formerly part of Novant Health, have also been similarly renamed to align with UVA Health, its sole owner since July 1.
Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe made a stop in Charlottesville Wednesday to meet and talk with doctors about the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those doctors work at the University of Virginia, treating COVID-19 and pediatric patients. “It was eye-awakening in there to listen to these infectious doctors talk about how serious this is. That’s why from day one I’ve said everyone needs to be vaccinated,” McAuliffe said.
UVA Health is dedicating more than $30 million in fiscal year 2022 for increased compensation as a way to reward and retain staff. This will include market pay adjustments for a large portion of the organization’s workforce.
Low-cost antihypertensive drugs appeared associated with reductions in colorectal cancer-specific mortality among patients with stage I to stage III disease, according to results of a retrospective analysis published in Cancer Medicine. “Existing treatments for colorectal cancer cost upwards of several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but these agents have been shown to prolong survival only by three months to six months,” Rajesh Balkrishnan, a member of the cancer population health sciences program at University of Virginia Cancer Center, said. “Antihypertensive agents have been aro...
An international study has found that antibiotics alone cannot overcome the various factors that may cause stunted growth in children. According to a UVA release, researchers had hoped that some combination of antibiotics, vitamin B3 and a diarrhea treatment drug would lead to better growth for children in Tanzania. A double-blind study followed almost 1,200 children and found no benefit.
Previous research out of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University showed a representative’s law-passing skills have no significant impact on vote share in general elections, mostly because voters have no clue whether their representative is any good at passing laws or not.
A new study found more than half of Trump voters in 2020 supported red states seceding from blue states. This research comes out of the UVA Center for Politics. Larry Sabato and J. Miles Coleman of the Center for Politics say politics are now personal and impact life both in-person and online for many people, causing deep division.
(Commentary) Divorce usually isn’t a good idea, and that’s especially true of a nearly 250-year-old continental nation. The notion of a national breakup has long simmered as a fringe argument, but it is increasingly popular in certain precincts of the political right and has gained at least some traction with partisans of both sides. A recent survey by the UVA Center for Politics found that about 50% of Donald Trump voters and 40% of Joe Biden voters agreed to some extent with the proposition that the country should split up, with either red or blue states seceding.
That ubiquity has essentially turned WhatsApp into a public utility: It’s so crucial to global communications infrastructure that when it goes down, entire countries, segments of their economies, and even some basic daily governmental activities nearly grind to a halt. “It was basically like the entire internet was out. That was the perception” in Brazil, said David Nemer, a UVA media studies professor. A native Brazilian, Nemer has studied WhatsApp’s impact on the country.
Kim Forde-Mazrui, a professor at the UVA School of Law, said police held “a fairly privileged perspective” to think of a situation involving the repeated used of the n-word and monkey noises as “a sticks-and-stones matter. … The city and police department are being cowardly for not intervening and, if necessary, bringing charges so that a court can decide whether this is constitutionally protected,” Forde-Mazrui said.