A group of 25 young leaders from Africa gathered at the University of Virginia’s Garrett Hall on Monday to kick off a six-week training program that aims to help them change the world for the better. The university is one of a handful of institutions hosting African nonprofit leaders, political advocates, journalists and government officials — mostly between the ages of 25 and 35 — for training in leadership, political action and civic engagement.
Twenty-five African fellows are in Charlottesville learning how to become the leaders of tomorrow. The fellows are emerging leaders participating in the second year of the Africa Initiative, a program created by President Barack Obama, aimed at helping a highly select group of African men and women gain a skill set necessary to return to their home countries and make a difference.
The University of Virginia has announced that David S. Wilkes will be the next dean of its School of Medicine. He will begin his duties on September 15.
In August this year as in last year, the third Congress of the Indonesian Diaspora will be held in Jakarta, summoning flocks of overseas Indonesians, or the Indonesian diaspora, to return to the country dear to their hearts. Numbering over 8 million people in over 90 different countries, the diaspora comprises Indonesian citizens, former Indonesian citizens and their descendants. Quantitative studies by David Leblang of the University of Virginia demonstrate that “dual-citizenship generates larger remittances at the macro and micro levels.” Countries that offer dual citizenship rec...
On this Father's Day, one Charlottesville writer is paying tribute to her dad and recalling their relationship in a heartfelt anthology. Jane Friedman is a lecturer in the University of Virginia's Department of Media Studies and a contributor to the book Every Father's Daughter. The book compiles the stories of 24 women offering glimpses into that special father-daughter relationship.
Sometime in the next few years, the small city of Manassas Park will become Virginia’s first locality where Hispanics outnumber non-Hispanic whites — or any other group, for that matter. We first noticed these numbers in a report by the Pew Research Center, which crunched some census projections and then reported that since 2000, there are 78 localities across the country that have flipped from having whites in the majority to whites in the minority. Pew’s report doesn’t say, so we called the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, which d...
W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has detailed in book and magazine form the positive impact of a good father and four ways today’s dads make valuable and distinctive contributions to their children’s lives.
Conservatives want to make it clear: They’re for the right of everyone to practice their religion, period. But they still want to be able to refuse to sell their products to gay couples or refuse to have same-sex marriages performed in their church. That’s our religious belief, they say, not intolerance. And it’s good politics. “The religious freedom message does blend into standard Republican attacks on the size of government,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia.
Boys outnumber girls three to one for the treatment of idiopathic short stature (ISS) with growth hormone,finds a new study of the four US pediatric growth-hormone registries. Asked to comment Dr. Alan Rogol, professor emeritus of pediatrics and pharmacology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, who has a special interest in growth and puberty, observed: "There is not an objective, scientific reason for this very real discrepancy between boys and girls. That's a fact. The rest is sociology.
(By Maurie McInnis, a professor of art history at the University of Virginia) In the dark of night, a white man entered the AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire. Nine people were killed. In the dark of night, a white man entered the AME church in Charleston and started a fire. The structure was completely consumed and the church destroyed. One is a headline from 2015, the other from 1822. The shooting this week has evoked horror and outrage across the nation; the event 200 years ago provoked only satisfaction among the city’s white inhabitants. Charleston, ...
(By Bob Gibson, executive director of U.Va.’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership) The Jeffersonian Dinner is making a comeback. That is good news for people who like food and conversation. It’s great for people who share passion for a cause and want to build connections. Reviving these dinners, for up to about 12 people at a time, is the gastronomic and philanthropic concoction of Jeffrey C. Walker, a leader in nonprofit giving and one of the newest appointees to the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors.
A dorm opening at the University of Virginia this fall will be named for Isabella and William Gibbons, a former slave couple who lived at the university in the 19th century. While other colleges are refusing to rename buildings named after white supremacists, UVA is actively working to address the university's role in slavery and oppression.
The future has arrived. We already have 3-D bioprinters that can print tissue. Now the goal is to someday print organs. “There’s a real problem with an organ shortage for patients who need transplants,” says Shayn Peirce-Cottler, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. The school just acquired two state-of-the-art, high-end, three dimensional bioprinters.
Researchers have found two drugs that saved the lives of mice infected with the deadly Ebola virus, and you may have them in your medicine cabinet already. A team from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the University of Virginia and Horizon Discovery Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., decided to take a different approach. Instead of creating a new drug from scratch, they set out to determine whether an existing drug could be deployed to fight Ebola.
In a 200-page open letter to the globe, Pope Francis is calling for a cultural revolution of change. In his recently-released encyclical on climate change, the Pope denounced the current state of the Earth and said it's all a result of human selfishness. "Unbridled consumer capitalism," said Willis Jenkins, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.
Tuition assistance provides many benefits for employees, and 54 percent of employers offer these programs for undergraduate study, according to a report from the Society for Human Resource Management, often setting aside a maximum amount that students can use at a range of local institutions. "We're talking about monopolistic deals that limit student choice and that, in many cases, don't actually deliver on the promise of a free or subsidized education," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.
The recent blockbuster film “Interstellar” is credited with providing a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole to popular audiences. Yet, for scientists like American astrophysicist John F. Hawley, there are light-years between black holes as they are thought to exist in actual spacetime and as they appear on screen. A professor at University of Virginia (which has had astronomy as an area of specialization since its founding in 1819), Hawley in 2013 won the Shaw Prize for Astronomy, one of the most prestigious honors in the field.
In the mid-1990s the Cuban government began to allow private citizens to operate family-run restaurants and rent rooms out of their homes. With the substantial increase in tourism seen over the past six months, it seems that everyone is renovating their homes to offer rooms for rent. Even more exciting is the explosion in both the number and quality of paladares, or privately owned restaurants. But this lack of availability and predictability doesn't work so well for the paladares, who have innovative menus and an upscale foreign clientele to satisfy. According to Gerry Yemen and Gregory B...
Organ donation saves millions of people each year, but the fact is that there aren’t enough organs to go around. Now, scientists, engineers and students at the University of Virginia have begun using a machine that could someday make replacement parts for humans.
The University of Virginia has taken another step in its quest to raise awareness of what enslaved people contributed to UVA during its early years. At a special ceremony, the school named a new dormitory for Isabella and William Gibbons, a married couple who lived and worked on campus before the Civil War.