(Commentary by Steven M. Gillon, a senior faculty fellow at UVA’s Miller Center) The outcome of Saturday’s impeachment vote was never in question because Republicans could not convict Trump without indicting their entire party. The events on Jan. 6 – and indeed Trumpism itself – represent the culmination of a half-century of Republican strategy to mobilize and empower both white-nationalist sentiment and reactionary Christian fundamentalism.
(Commentary co-written by Daphna Bassok, associate professor of education and public policy, and Laura Bellows, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Human Development) For many child-care providers, COVID-19 has led to large enrollment drops, heightened costs, and staffing challenges. For some, it has meant closure. Emergency stabilization funds to mitigate the pandemic’s immediate damage are an important first step. But returning to a pre-coronavirus baseline would not be enough to create a stable child-care sector that adequately supports kids and families.
(Commentary co-written by Rachel Harmon, professor and director of the Center for Criminal Justice at UVA’s School of Law) One of the big campaign promises Joe Biden made last summer as Americans took to the streets to demand racial justice was policing reform. He had to walk a careful line between activists who wanted to defund the police and many others who wanted to make more modest adjustments to police policies. Now, caught in the middle, the risk is the new administration might end up accomplishing far less than it should.
"Now [that] we understand more what can induce HSV to come out of hiding and reactivate, we can start to understand how this works at the level of the infected nerve cell," said researcher Anna Cliffe, a UVA assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology.
Index providers, such as S&P Global, MSCI, FTSE Russell and Bloomberg, calculate widely used benchmarks for stocks, bonds and other securities, but these companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. investment industry’s main watchdog. “Certain index providers are presently acting as unregulated investment advisers. The SEC’s failure to recognize this reflects an inadequate and antiquated view of the index fund market,” said Adriana Robertson, a professor at the University of Toronto, who co-authored the paper with UVA law professor Paul Mahoney.
The National Science Foundation has awarded grants to nine universities, including UVA, to fund 11 research projects under the Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, which was launched in partnership with Amazon to help ensure AI systems are accountable, beneficial to all, fair, inclusive and transparent.
Because men drive more miles and engage in riskier driving – speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, driving drunk – more men than women die in car crashes overall. But when you compare similar car accidents with belted occupants of about the same age, height, BMI and vehicle year, women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in frontal car accidents, according to a 2019 study from UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics.
“If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information. And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights,” says co-author Zachary Irving, a UVA assistant professor of philosophy who explored the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of mind-wandering as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley.
An innovative warning system developed by two UVA researchers has become a critical factor in helping to keep students on campus. The system, developed by environmental engineer Lisa Colosi-Peterson and molecular epidemiologist Amy Mathers, uses wastewater testing from the university’s residence halls to detect COVID-19 infections before students even report symptoms.
Researchers who tested nearly 4,700 Virginians from June to mid-August for traces of a prior coronavirus infection found that only about 2.4% had previously been sick. But two out of three of those who had contracted the virus didn’t have any symptoms. And when adjusted for population, the numbers were nearly three times higher than summer reports of positive tests on the Virginia Department of Health website. This indicates that the number of COVID-19 cases, as expected, is likely much higher, said Dr. Eric Houpt, an infectious diseases expert at UVA Health who was a co-author of the report.&...
UVA will expand its graduate school catalog to include Africana and Caribbean studies, the school’s news outlet, UVAToday, reported on Monday. The two new programs will focus on culture, heritage, and history through an interdisciplinary lens, involving multiple school departments including the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. The Caribbean serves as a knowledge gold mine for finding solutions for today’s societal and environmental challenges, according to UVA professors.
For nearly a year, Isabella Gibbons has peered over Charlottesville. Inscribed into the rough-hewn granite of UVA’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, her eyes not only draw attention to the cruel realities of slavery – but ask what we are going to do to rectify them. As UVA continues to atone for its racist history, a form of reparation may finally be on the way for the living descendants of enslaved laborers like Gibbons, who helped build and maintain the University for decades.
UVA officials on Tuesday banned all in-person events and gatherings on and off Grounds and shuttered recreational centers, citing a sudden surge in student COVID-19 cases related to failure to follow health guidelines.
UVA announced on Tuesday night a litany of health and safety restrictions after reporting its highest single-day spike of new cases of COVID-19. The measures went into effect at 7 p.m. Tuesday and will remain in place until Feb. 26, at which point University leaders will assess lifting them.
UVA implemented new restrictions after a “troubling rise” in coronavirus cases, including the arrival of a more contagious variant, officials said Tuesday night.
UVA student Spencer Buddington was home on winter break in Abingdon when he and his friends intervened to give CPR to a man who had a heart attack inside Abingdon General Store.
(Commentary by Rita Felski, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English) What exactly would be lost if we lost the humanities? Perhaps this question can serve as a thought experiment for clarifying why the humanities matter. It puts things in a fresh perspective by inviting us to imagine an experience of loss and to anticipate the reactions triggered by this loss.
One of the first things that UVA Health did when the pandemic began this year was get tablets out to nursing homes, according to David Cattell-Gordon, director of its nationally recognized telemedicine program. “When there were outbreaks of COVID, we were able to see patients quickly using a peripheral device where you can hear chest sounds, and a pulmonologist could make a quick determination that that patient needed to come in and be tested or stay at home and be monitored.”
(Transcript) At UVA, a new memorial to the thousands of enslaved people who helped build the school and then worked there – craftsmen, construction workers, cooks, domestic servants. Some of their names are known. Most, more than 3,000, remain anonymous, honored by so-called memory marks in the stone.
A Lebanon County native is on the move again after being traded for the second time in his Major League Baseball career. Cedar Crest High School andf UVA graduate Derek Fisher, 27, has been traded from the Toronto Blue Jays to the Milwaukee Brewers the teams announced.