While winning the presidency last year, Democrats faltered in the undercard, losing 13 House seats and both houses of the New Hampshire Legislature. That trend is likely to continue, said political scientist Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. “There’s almost no chance Democrats will make progress in controlling legislative chambers while a Democrat is in the White House,” Sabato told State Net Capitol Journal. “And even when a controversial unpopular president such as Trump gives an opening to Democrats as in 2020, Democrats can’t seem to capitalize on it.”
Saikrishna Prakash, a UVA law professor, said the position of the incumbent president will matter to the courts, but the legal questions at issue are significant and far from settled. “If the rationale for the privilege is candid advice giving, then it would be reasonable for the privilege to extend beyond a president’s term,” he wrote in a Washington Post column. “After all, Trump’s aides may not have supplied unfiltered advice if they knew that all their advice could be aired the week after Trump left office. President Biden faces the same issue with the counsel his aides now supply him.”
Of the long list of worries frontline health care workers face, Dr. Taison Bell at UVA Health says a potential stronger variant is at the top. Bell, a critical care provider at UVA, has an important message going into cooler months. “The thing about the coronavirus is that it keeps coming back,” he said. “But I fear coming into winter that our cases might go up like we’ve seen happening in eastern parts of Europe and we have to be prepared for the winter.”
(By Julie Cohen and Vivian Wong, associate professors in the School of Education and Human Development) At the University of Virginia, we have spent the last five years supplementing traditional methods for practice with a curriculum of digitally mediated simulations, administered online over Zoom. These simulations focus on a range of critical teaching scenarios – from providing students feedback during a discussion about a literary text to engaging a parent/guardian during a conference about a student.
The University of Virginia Nov. 4 announced that Madhur Behl was among 12 university science and engineering faculty to be honored with a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Five research projects have received pilot funding from the integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia, or iTHRIV. The National Institutes of Health-funded Clinical and Translational Research Award Hub awarded $200,000 to the multi-institutional research projects. There are teams of researchers, physicians, sustainability experts and software engineers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Virginia Tech, Inova Health System and Carilion Clinic getting funding.
(Press release) The American Cancer Society has approved funding for 82 research and training grants totaling $47.4 million. Recipients include UVA’s Kathleen J. Porter, who received a research scholar grant for “weSurvive: Improving Quality of Life and Health Behaviors of Rural Cancer Survivors.”
“The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being,” by Steven E Rhoads (Cambridge University Press). This is a 35th anniversary version of a classic. Rhoads, an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has built upon the best explanation I know of how orthodox economists think about choice, markets, externalities and other concepts. The new edition will be valuable to non-economists and economists alike: the former will learn how economists think; and the latter will learn some of the limits to how they think.
(Book review) It took historian Caroline E. Janney to bury the Appomattox legend in an avalanche of anecdotal and statistical evidence, and to remind us how Lee’s surrender became foundational to the destabilizing myth of the Lost Cause. Such are the notable achievements of her immensely readable and utterly convincing “Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox.” Ms. Janney, a professor of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, offers a fresh and disquieting version of Lee’s surrender, adroitly balancing official, political and military decisions with the ...
(By Anne Trumbore, executive director of digital and open enrollment at the Darden School of Business) The “Great Resignation” has left a lot of people with time on their hands. For many, this period is a time of reflection and a chance to pursue a new career. But how do you make the switch? And even if you plan to return to the same field, how do you show that you have kept current with the changes and trends that affected most industries during the pandemic?
Brian Nosek is into numbers. He’s also into breakfast. Nosek, a UVA psychologist, is a well-known champion of “open science,” a movement to make academic research and its findings accessible to everyone. For his latest data project, Nosek commissioned two research assistants: his daughters, 14-year-old Haven and 12-year-old Joni. “We love breakfast,” Nosek says. But how to decide where to dine?
Lisa Woolfork, a UVA associate professor of English who taught a course about “Game of Thrones,” credits the show’s success not only to high production values, but the “rich and evocative storytelling” of George R. R. Martin’s novels. “The capaciousness of Martin’s work allowed for multiple points of entry for an audience,” Woolfork says. “If you were interested in political intrigue and drama, then ‘Game of Thrones’ was appealing. If you were interested in swords and sorcery, then ‘Game of Thrones’ was appealing. It expanded beyond what anybody could call a ‘traditional’ fantasy audience beca...
Suspect in the death of Leesburg man was searching for someone else in the neighborhood, family says
Michael Fadely, 46, was killed in his home on Newton Place in the Barclay Woods neighborhood just before 4:30 a.m. Sunday, according to police. He was a systems engineering graduate at the University of Virginia and co-founded Strategic Technology Partners.
Growing up in a small town where STEM careers weren’t prevalent, Ashley Wilson’s early career goals were in education – she wanted to be an English teacher. Fast forward to Sept. 2021, when Wilson, a Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division systems engineer for the Battle Management System program, received the Women of Color magazine Technology Rising Star Award. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2014 with a degree in mechanical engineering, and later earned a master’s degree in systems engineering from Old Dominion University.
Dr. James Platts-Mills from the University of Virginia shared data from the 2017-2018 Global Pediatric Diarrhea Surveillance Network, which indicates that there were approximately 208,009 rotavirus diarrhea deaths among children under 5 years of age that year. Of these deaths, 71% took place in the African region.
Aynne Kokas, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and the author of the book "Hollywood Made in China," predicted that fewer Hollywood films would be approved for release in the future, and those that do will face stricter regulations.
(Commentary) Glenn Youngkin became governor-elect of Virginia defending parents against those who dismissed their concerns about curriculum and school culture as unserious and unworthy. That wasn’t just good politics; it demonstrates respect for our decentralized education system, which makes a virtue of local control. Having galvanized parental discontent with technocratic elites into a potent political force, Youngkin should now use his credibility with parents to promote a vision for Virginia schools that serves the interest of all the Commonwealth’s children. He could do this by calling up...
Sometimes a child is 11 when they get the first dose, but will be 12 by the time they need to get the second. So the question becomes which of the versions of the Pfizer vaccine should the child get. Getting one pediatric dose and one standard dose is recommended for that situation, according to Dr. Debbie-Ann Shirley, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with UVA Health. She says, unlike medications, vaccines are based on age rather than size and weight.
(Commentary) The legal issue is murkier than most media coverage recognizes. As University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash pointed out in Sunday’s Washington Post, the Supreme Court has recognized that former presidents can assert executive privilege regarding their papers. Some of the hubbub over these cases focuses myopically on the comparative virtue or venality of Trump versus Biden. But the real scoundrel in this episode is the Presidential Records Act, a law that entitles presidents and former presidents to blindfold the American people practically in perpetuity.
“It definitely seems like something changed in August,” said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, who pointed to Biden’s sharp drop in approval ratings after the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he called “a catalyst” for the changing political environment.