Jingle and sleigh bells may be ringing later on this holiday week, but COVID-19 alarm bells sounded Friday with the latest report from the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute.  
Aaron Jay Ledesma knew that [UVA alumnus] Timothy-Keith Schau Earley would one day be his husband on their fourth date.  
(Audio and transcript) A Q&A with UVA Law alumnus Ryan Melogy, founder and chief legal officer of Maritime Legal Aid and advocacy.  
Leonard Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron: Leonard Schleifer grew up in Queens, New York, and had a passion for science and entrepreneurship from an early age that was inspired by his parents and a devoted high school math teacher. He graduated from Cornell University and earned an MD/PhD from the University of Virginia, specializing in neurology. Soon thereafter, Schleifer became frustrated with a lack of treatment options for patients with disorders of the nervous system. He began wondering if biotechnology could make a difference for these patients.  
Dawn Staley’s South Carolina women are 12-0, ranked No. 1 in the country, sights set on another national title. She’s coming off a gold medal summer at the Tokyo Summer Olympics, where she guided the Team USA women to the top step. It was Staley’s first Olympic gold as a coach—and her fourth overall, to go with the three she won as a player. At 51, the Philadelphia native’s resume is an avalanche of accomplishment, from her time at the University of Virginia (national player of the year twice) and the WNBA (six time all-star) to her current role as a leader of women and that shiny national cha...
After completing his sophomore year at University of Virginia last spring, Michael Biggiani, was given an opportunity that was life-changing. The 2019 Oyster Bay High School graduate, was chosen for a virtual internship with the Africa Disability Alliance, which is in Pretoria, South Africa. A nonprofit, it’s run by people with a disability. Biggiani’s work centered how COVID-19 affected students from the University of Malawi, especially those with disabilities.  
Imagine a crypto trader who does hundreds or thousands of transactions a day. What if he was legally required to collect personal data about every single person he does business with? Think of how burdensome that would be. Or rather: Think of how burdensome that will be. Under a provision slipped into the new infrastructure bill, that’s the law. Section 6050I is a “long-forgotten statute” within the tax code, says Abe Sutherland, an adjunct at the University of Virginia School of Law and a fellow at the Coin Center. It requires people who transact large amounts of cash—above $10,000—to file re...
It is understandable the state wanted to do such a campaign this year in the wake of the largest absentee turnout in recent memory, according to J. Miles Coleman with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “I would emphasize this is one of the products of our federal system — every state handles voting differently,” he said.  
Democratic incumbents are playing defense in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire. Their best chances for flipping seats in the Senate are in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina, said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.  
(Video) Ever since Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) condemned Donald Trump at the close of the former president’s impeachment trial, the relationship between the two has been strained, to put it mildly. But, on Wednesday, the former president took his criticism of the Kentucky senator to a whole new level. Resident scholar at the University of Virginia Center for Politics Tara Setmayer joins the show to discuss.  
A stalled legislative push, including on voting rights and Democrats’ social welfare and climate agenda, has occupied the White House’s efforts. And Democrats have predicted a bloodbath in the midterm elections, limiting their prospects for further action in Congress post-2022. “It’s not politically smart to engage on reelection yet,” said David Ramadan, an adjunct professor at the Schar School at George Mason University and resident scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “If Democrats lose the House in 2022, then Biden is a de facto lame duck.”  
Experts are divided on exactly what the current impasse means for the remainder of the 117th Congress. Some, like Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, say they expect little legislative activity to take place. Sabato said he expects Democrats to focus on tasks like filling vacant seats on federal courts, which they can do with a simple majority. “Judicial appointments are the one area where they really have been successful,” Sabato said. “They’ll fill every possible judgeship, as long as they maintain the 50-50 Senate. As long as they can do that, they’ll get something done tha...
Nearly every course on entrepreneurship follows the same basic framework. To start a business, you come up with (or get assigned) an idea, do some market research, pencil-whip a few financial projections, identify a team, explore financing options -- in short, take an idea and create a business plan to execute that idea. As University of Virginia associate professor Saras Sarasvathy writes, that’s an example of causal reasoning. “Causal rationality begins with a pre-determined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal -- fastest, cheapest, most efficient, etc. -- alterna...
(Audio) The annual rate of inflation is the highest its been in the United States since June 1982, according to U.S. Labor Department data published Dec. 10. What factors contribute to increasing prices for goods and services, and how can they be reined in? Guests include Eric Leeper, Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor in Economics and director of the Virginia Center for Economic Policy at UVA.  
The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge story that has shown the demand for local news, but also has exposed the diminished resources of the journalists tasked with covering it. “If there was ever a time that local news was important, it was during the pandemic, and it was during that time that also became particularly difficult to stay afloat, if you were a local newspaper,” said Jennifer Lawless, a University of Virginia professor and co-author with Danny Hayes of the new book “News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement.”  
Dr. Cameron Webb, of the White House COVID-19 response team, said the purpose of the meeting was to provide useful data in “very real-time” about the most contagious variant yet. Webb said omicron has an abnormal number of mutations. While omicron has over 50 mutations, including more than 30 on the spike protein alone, the delta has about 10 mutations. “I think since we first heard about it on Thanksgiving we have been telling folks this is a variant of concern, that is not a designation we use lightly,” said Webb, a physician and lawyer who teaches at the University of Virginia.  
(Transcript) The conversation includes Dr. Peter Jackson, a UVA infectious diseases researcher.  
“From the signals that we’ve seen so far in the U.K. and South Africa, we can expect to see more breakthrough infections with omicron, and there’s a good chance that it is probably going to become the dominant strain, at least for now, and overtake delta,” Dr. Taison Bell, assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of infectious diseases and international health and pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Virginia, told TODAY.  
(Commentary by Rabih Alameddine. Kapnick Writer in Residence) I dislike book lists and I used to think that I hate end-of-year lists most of all, but not anymore. Thanks to The New York Times’ latest list, I can now say that I loathe lists of all-time best quite a bit more than end-of-year ones. I’ve been teaching at the University of Virginia this last year. Instead of my providing a list this year, I thought I’d let my students do it for me. I might be new to academia, but I did read the memo about getting the credit while having graduate students do all the work.  
A new class of faster, more powerful semiconductors for enhanced wireless communication and digital imaging is on the drawing board, thanks to research led by a UMass Lowell scientist. Joining Podolskiy on the team are researchers from Purdue University, the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Virginia. “If we are going to sustain innovation in communications and information processing, we must better understand and learn how to control both electronic and optical properties of these new semiconductor materials,” said team member Avik Ghosh, University of Virginia professor of ele...