A University of Virginia vice provost for academic affairs has been selected as the next executive vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of Texas System. According to a release, Chancellor James Milliken announced on Tuesday that Archie L. Holmes, PhD, will be heading back to his home state.
UVA political science chair Jennifer Lawless said it would be “tough to find someone stronger than U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris” on the campaign trail, after Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden announced Harris as his pick for running mate on Tuesday. Lawless appeared on GoLocal LIVE an hour after Biden’s decision was announced.
Charles Nuttycombe, director of CNalysis, an election forecasting firm, assessed the likely outcomes of state legislative races in “The State of the States: The Legislatures,” an essay published at Crystal Ball, the political website run by Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. Nuttycombe’s conclusion is best summarized in the sub-headline: “Don’t expect much overall change even as many chambers are competitive.”
A task force at the University of Virginia has released a report recommending several ways to improve racial equity. The Racial Equity Task Force’s report, called Audacious Future: Commitment Required, outlines 12 initiatives.
University of Virginia officials have elaborated on plans for the fall semester which will begin as we inch closer to Labor Day. President Jim Ryan and the top brass at UVA held a virtual town hall Monday afternoon. The format included Ryan reading questions about COVID-19 that have been submitted.
After administrators at the University of Virginia noticed an uptick in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks both locally and nationally, they began to look at the plans they’d made for in-person reopening of classes this fall. UVA quickly made the difficult decision to delay in-person classes for two weeks, and move to an online format for at least two weeks while they monitor conditions.
The University of Virginia’s Racial Equity Task Force is recommending a sweeping set of changes at the school, including removing Confederate and racist symbols, funding scholarships and endowments for minority students and faculty and rooting out procedures and policies perpetuating prejudice.
People with weakened immune systems are at higher risk of getting severely sick from COVID-19 and may be sick for a longer period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some schools are being proactive about accommodating their immunocompromised students. The University of Virginia is offering some in-person instruction, but is making all courses available online, for example.
When classes resume at the University of Kentucky next week, the world will look very different for the university’s undergraduates. Some of them will be studying at home, virtually. Those who’ve chosen to live on campus will take a mix of in-person, hybrid and online courses, the former in physically distanced classrooms wearing masks under the shadow of COVID-19. The University of Virginia is taking a similar approach.
In May, the nonprofit Northwest Evaluation Association and collaborators at Brown University and the University of Virginia projected that students would return to school this fall having made only two-thirds of their typical school-year gains in reading and less than half of their typical school-year gains in math.
UVA coach Bronco Mendenhall may not be in a hurry this month, but there’s plenty of work to be done at UVA before a potential season is played, work being done amidst the swirling uncertainty around the season.
Two UVA students are launching a podcast Wednesday about the Unite the Right events from 2017 and how they affected Charlottesville’s immigrant community. Mehdy Elouassi and Abdullah Paracha say they created the podcast as a student project through the Religion, Race and Democracy Lab at UVA.
Another round of positive-free COVID-19 testing has Virginia football coach Bronco Mendenhall feeling good about the safety procedures his team and the UVA athletic department are using, even while his overall outlook for fall sports remains grim.
The University of Virginia released their fourth update on COVID-19 student-athlete testing on Monday. There were no new positive tests since the last update issued on July 31. There have been no positive test results since the report issued on July 24.
Dr. Peter Dean, a pediatric cardiologist at the University of Virginia who treats the college’s athletes along with MacKnight, was co-author of an analysis published last month by the American College of Cardiology about returning to play after a coronavirus infection. Although he hasn’t diagnosed myocarditis in any UVA athletes who have had COVID-19 so far, he said he’s had athletes in the past with myocarditis caused by other factors.
Anne Verbiscer, research professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, explains how and why the Perseids come to produce such a stellar performance around this time each year. “This meteor shower is special/unique because it has consistently put on a nice ‘show’ each August when the Earth sweeps through the debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. Swift-Tuttle is on an elliptical 133-year orbit, so it’s made many trips into the inner solar system, leaving behind a trail of dust particles in its path. Earth smashes into that trail every mid-August.”
Our Verify researchers spoke with two constitutional law experts, Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University and Sai Prakash, professor of law at the University of Virginia. “He can summon them back into session by citing this constitutional authority," Prakash said. "Now whether individual members of Congress comply or not is another question, but that’s never to my knowledge been tested. I don’t think the president’s ever tried to forcibly round up members of Congress.”
A study has found that a gene involved in diabetes, lipid metabolism and coronary artery disease may play a role in the increased risk of stroke among people of African descent. “Given the undue burden that people of African ancestry endure from stroke and other cerebrovascular disease, the lack of investigation of risk factors in this group has been a substantial gap,” says Dr. Bradford B. Worrall, a neurologist at the University of Virginia and co-author of the study.
(Commentary by Ashley Deeks, law professor) “The growth of machine learning tools in military operations raises new questions about where the most critical decision points are located. Are the most important political, operational, and legal decisions made out in the field, where the tools are used, or in headquarters, at the time the tools are developed? This post argues that – perhaps ironically – the growing use of autonomy may end up centralizing key military and legal decisions.”
The University of Virginia held a virtual town hall over Zoom on Friday morning to address the current plan to return to Grounds in the fall and answer questions from students, faculty and staff.