Melissa Gismondi experienced a touchstone moment that confirmed for her the potential of the humanities to buttress the dynamics of liberal democracy. It happened in 2017 when she was at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, when the far-right protest against the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue occurred. Inside the classrooms were lectures and group discussions about the origins and purpose behind the mounting of Confederate statues. Despite taking place under a pervasive atmosphere of violence, the sessions powerfully connected past to present. “I don’t know if it’s too sappy to...
Michaela Barnett founded KnoxFill, a zero-waste way for Knoxville consumers concerned with sustainability to get the home cleaning and hygiene products they need. She is pursuing a Ph.D. from UVA’s Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, an interdisciplinary program between the schools of engineering and business. She’s examining the behavioral science of waste, examining how to keep things from entering the waste stream, how to reduce the amount of materials being mined for production and “how are we kind of opting out of this crazy consumption that’s really unsustainable for us and for the...
A doctor at UVA Health has been honored for his work to improve care for patients with mantle cell lymphoma. According to a release, the Lymphoma Research Foundation honored Dr. Michael E. Williams with the Mantle Cell Lymphoma Leadership Award.
Marlene Daut, a professor at the University of Virginia who describes herself as “a black woman of Haitian descent and a scholar of French colonialism”, denounced the French commemoration in the New York Times, calling Napoleon “France’s biggest tyrant, an icon of white supremacy ... an irredeemable racist, sexist and despot.” Defenders of Napoleon say he was a man of his time.
Redistricting helped U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist win his seat in 2016, but now the Republican-run Florida legislature will redraw the map. “It may be changed in such a way to make it less Democratic. I’d imagine redistricting factors in Crist’s decision to run for governor,” said Kyle Kondik, an election analyst at the University of Virginia.
UVA economist Leora Friedberg says people may have left for different sectors when restaurants shut down during the pandemic. “Restaurant work is hard work, and if there are better options out there, restaurants are going to have to make it better to work there, paying more, offering benefits, offering more reliable shifts,” Friedberg said.
Cale Jaffe, an environmental law professor at the University of Virginia, said discussions about repealing the Clean Economy Act are likely a dead end. The state’s electric utilities are preparing to meet its targets and likely don’t want to go back. “Given the significant infrastructure moves the utilities are already planning, I don’t think it’s realistic to look at repealing it, in any scenario,” said Jaffe, who was appointed by Northam to serve on the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission and has advised the campaign of state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.
“The political may be local and national, but it’s always personal,” said Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, who shared that she is the descendent of ancestors who were enslaved in the Charlottesville area. “My enslaved ancestors lived as chattel, three-fifths of a person under law, yet totally human. I am because they were. Some 400 years after they survived the wake of several oceans because they came from Madagascar, here I am teaching at Master Jefferson’s university,” Hawkins said.
Dr. Mami Taniuchi, a UVA infectious disease researcher, said that while the risk of breakthrough infections among vaccinated travelers is low, there is nevertheless an increased risk among unvaccinated workers who would not otherwise be coming together in such large numbers, or in such close quarters, to accommodate tourists. “The risks among vaccinated travelers are significantly reduced, but I worry about the risk of transmission among the people who are working around them,” Dr. Taniuchi said.
(Video transcript) Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton – co-founder and medical director, GoodStock Consulting LLC, and UVA associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine – joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down India’s COVID-19 case surge and what it means for the global economy.
Many people have picked up foraging as a hobby during the pandemic in an effort to get outside. The Blue Ridge Poison Center is warning people to be careful when picking and eating your own plants. In springtime, the Blue Ridge Poison Center at UVA Health sees a high number of poisoning cases due to consumption of foraged plants.
Over the past three days, reports of new Spectre-class attacks emerged that supposedly break all previous speculative execution patches and require performance-crippling mitigation techniques. There’s just one problem: Intel and the researchers fundamentally disagree as to whether a flaw exists at all. The research team from the University of Virginia has written a paper arguing that there are catastrophic flaws in the way AMD and Intel currently implement micro-op caches that allow them to leak data under certain circumstances.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill Wednesday aimed at holding universities in the commonwealth economically accountable for profiting off of slavery. The Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program requires Longwood University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia Military University, and the College of William & Mary — all institutions that benefitted from and exploited enslaved labor — to provide scholarships and economic development programs to descendants of enslaved people.
(Commentary) In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of UVA, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia – describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future. Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.
Demand for electricity is likely to balloon in Virginia over the next three decades as data centers flock to the state and electric vehicles increasingly replace traditional ones, a forecast from UVA’s Energy Transition Initiative released last week found.
Six independent research teams – including one from UVA – all came up with basically the same projection: Vaccines plus masking and physical distancing equal a much more manageable outbreak by summer.
(Commentary) “This is my ankle bracelet covered with SpongeBob stickers,” Christopher Ahn says as he lifts his foot onto the table to show an electronic monitoring device placed on him by U.S. marshals. How did Ahn wind up in this “situation”? The UVA Darden School of Business graduated is an unlikely person to be treated as a criminal by his own government.
(Video) John Lanier believes that we all have a part to play in the fight to stop climate change. Through his leadership of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, the two-time UVA alumnus continues the legacy of his grandfather, the late corporate environmental pioneer Ray C. Anderson. With a plan developed for the state of Georgia as the example, John makes a powerful case for a new and exciting method to fight climate change that incorporates not only solutions that reduce carbon emissions, but also those that address social issues such as unemployment and hunger on a local level.
UVA political science chair Jennifer Lawless said it “makes no sense” that Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are coming to Rhode Island on Wednesday on a visit centered around President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal.
After a dreary pandemic winter, more Virginians are venturing out in search of ramps – the leafy green allium that’s become a darling of the spring dining season. Sometimes, what they’re finding is poisoning them. Dr. Chris Holstege, medical director of the Blue Ridge Poison Center at UVA Health, said he and his colleagues have been alarmed by a sharp increase in Virginians consuming false hellebore, a highly toxic native species with leaves that – to the uninitiated – resemble the tops of wild leeks.