In The News

In Virginia, state law prohibits public employees from striking, but frustration among teachers is growing. School employees “see the buildings that are literally crumbling around them,” says Livingston. “They see the lack of resources.” The resulting problems are defying textbook solutions. “Our teachers are browbeat,” says Robert C. Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.  The Curry School is working with the state Department of Education to “heat-map” teacher shortages across the state, using data to refine possible solutions for various regions or even ...

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the new book, "Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy," dismissed the significance of the stock plunge. "Mark Zuckerberg isn't panicking," he said. "The Facebook board isn't panicking. Most of its large institutional investors aren't panicking. They know they're in it for the long game." 

Organizers with Charlottesville Community Health Fair are urging people to register for screenings and physicals ahead of an event planned for Saturday. “I hope people will leave with a renewed enthusiasm to take care of themselves as best they can,” says Dr. Marcus Martin, the vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity and professor of emergency medicine at the University of Virginia. “If there is a need for behavioral change related to what they eat, how much they eat, exercising, that will be very important.” 

Many high-paying law firms recruit recent J.D. grads from top-ranked law schools. In U.S. News' 2019 Best Law Schools ranking, law school degree grads from the class of 2016 who completed their degree at an institution ranked among the top 15 earned $180,000 on average in the private sector, according to data submitted to U.S. News by 179 ranked law schools in an annual survey. The top-15 list includes four public law schools: University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Texas-Austin, University of Virginia and University of California-Berkeley. 

UVA’s program, funded primarily by alumni donations, has run for nearly two decades. Law graduates who take public-service jobs – as public defenders, prosecutors, government attorneys or at legal aid offices or other nonprofits – that pay less than $75,000 per year are eligible for loan assistance.  

(Commentary by Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies) Imagine running a business that generated $13.2 billion in revenue in one quarter – a 42 percent increase over the same quarter a year before. And imagine that it reported a 31 percent jump in profits over the same quarter last year. Now watch as many allegedly smart people dump your stock because they think the future of your company looks bleak. 
 

It remains conventional wisdom in many parts of the education world that private schools do a better job of educating students. It is one of the claims that some supporters of school choice make in arguing that the public should pay for private school education. The only problem? It isn’t true, a new UVA study confirms.  

Utah author James McLaughlin’s new, critically acclaimed debut novel almost never got published. McLaughlin, a Virginia native and UVA alumnus who lives in Utah full time, spent 20 years crafting his book, "Bearskin," which tells the story of a man named Rice living on a nature reserve in Virginia's backwoods. There he tries to protect the area from bear poachers — especially a group of locals who want nothing more than to hunt bears on the reserve. Rice's desire to catch the poachers becomes an obsessive passion, one that forces him to confront his dark past dealing with a Mexican drug cartel...

As he discusses experiences in his life that contributed to his success as a legal scholar and dean of the George Washington University Law School, UVA alumnus Blake D. Morant doesn’t mention receiving awards and degrees, or even being appointed to two distinguished deanships. Instead, he immediately recalls his years as an Eagle Scout and his upbringing by a mother who encouraged him to develop all of his talents to take advantage of opportunities for advancement. 

An independent political analyst has shifted Ohio’s first congressional district from “leans Republican” to “toss up” after U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Cincinnati, was outraised last quarter by Democrat Aftab Pureval. “Pureval raised more than double what Chabot raised last quarter and is approaching the long-time incumbent’s cash-on-hand total,” the analysis said. Sabato’s Crystal Ball is a service of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. 

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, said Balderson has led every poll that he has seen by 5 to 10 percentage points. But he said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision to place a $238,000 ad buy last week — a particularly dicey one for Trump — is telling, given the party has dozens of other districts across the country that are potentially a better investment. 

Larry Sabato, a UVA expert who analyzes federal races, described O’Rourke as alone among Democratic candidates in "somewhat-to-very competitive Senate races" to call for impeachment. "However," Sabato wrote, "we do not keep up with uncompetitive Senate states. Sometimes long-shot candidates will take positions that more cautious nominees who have a real chance to win will avoid." 

While survival rates among patients with ovarian cancer have increased in recent years thanks to newer and more personalized treatment approaches, one major question still remains: How can the disease be detected in its earlier stages? “This has been the ‘Holy Grail’ of ovarian cancer for as long as I’ve been alive,” Dr. Susan C. Modesitt, director of the Gynecologic Oncology Division and the High-Risk Breast/Ovarian Cancer Clinic at the University of Virginia, said during an Ask the Experts session at the OCRFA Ovarian Cancer National Conference. “If we found everyone in stage 1, then we woul...

The University of Virginia will close the core of Grounds the weekend of Aug. 11 and 12 amid fears that white supremacists and counter-protesters may clash. 

The language and claims at the hearing stunned legal scholars and activists. “It’s just breathtaking in its cruelty,” UVA law professor Anne Coughlin said. “It feels like a juvenile, adolescent joke that utterly denies the extent of the injury that was proved at the trial. It’s just awful.” 

Kathryn Hunter-Williams is directing Heritage Theatre Festival’s new production of “The Mountaintop,” which opens Thursday in UVA’s Ruth Caplin Theatre. She said Katori Hall’s layered drama can offer audiences timely glimpses of the humanity behind the hero. 

Harry Harding, a veteran China expert at the University of Virginia, said many U.S. observers were disappointed and frustrated by the countries’ growing differences on a range of topics, despite more than three decades of “comprehensive engagement” by Washington and Beijing to manage or resolve the issues. “What I call a political Minsky moment is when significant numbers of analysts and citizens believe that a policy has failed. Their attitude can be described as ‘enough is enough’, or ‘time for a change’,” Harding said. 

The Internet of Things, the interconnection of billions of objects and devices that will be communicating with each other, has been the topic of many futurists’ projections. However, getting the engineering sorted out with the aim of fully realizing the myriad visions for IoT is another story. One key issue to address: How do you get the electronics onto these devices efficiently and economically? A team of researchers from Purdue University and the University of Virginia has developed a new manufacturing process that could make equipping a device with all the sensors and other electronics tha...

Research by scientists at the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech suggests that boosting the flow of fluid and macromolecules through a series of recently discovered lymphatic channels in the brain may offer a promising approach to prevent or at least hold back cognitive decline associated with aging or dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.  

University of Virginia researchers have made a discovery that could lead to the prevention of Alzheimer's disease and aging-related memory loss.