Tuesday saw a pair of Power 5 conferences postpone their fall football seasons. The Big Ten and Pac-12 announced the cancellation of fall football games, while the ACC, Big 12 and SEC remain committed to pressing forward with a potential fall season. That means powerhouse programs such as Michigan, Ohio State and USC won’t play football games this fall. Virginia, however, continues to prepare for the season despite constant uncertainty.
Over the summer, the UVA football team met virtually in Zoom meetings. It was in those virtual sessions where players shared about their experiences with social injustice and a new group was just starting to form. GroundsKeepers is a powerful name with an even stronger purpose. “It's our Grounds and they want it to be an amazing place and it already is, but there’s things that we can improve,” UVA head football coach Bronco Mendenhall said.
“It’s one of these very simple setups, and it already is rich enough to show this effect.” University of Virginia theoretical physicist Marija Vucelja tells Science News. The experiment also suggests that the effect might show up in materials other than water and glass beads. Vucelja says, “I would imagine that this effect appears quite generically in nature elsewhere, just we haven’t paid attention to it.”
Biden's choice of Harris will shore up support among key voting blocs that are critical to ensuring a victory in the fall, political scientists and campaign strategists said. UVA political scientist Larry Sabato said the selection shows Biden has “accepted the fact he’s the front-runner” for the general election, and “when you’re the front-runner, you do not make a risky decision.”
Three pediatric cardiologists, including Dr. Peter Dean at UVA Children’s, are offering some advice on when it may be safe for kids to return to playing sports after recovering from COVID-19.
For decades, conventional wisdom claimed that the brain was disconnected from the immune system, but recent research has shown that this is not the case. Microglia are at the center of this debate, but it’s not easy to study them — until recently, lab equipment struggled to distinguish between brain microglia and other types of immune cells. Now, Samantha Batista from University of Virginia used an elegant approach to study these microglia.
“My understanding is that West has already missed enough deadlines that he has no path to 270 electoral votes,” Kyle Kondik from UVA’s Center for Politics said Tuesday. “And even in places where he has submitted signatures, there are questions about the validity of those signatures.”
In early June, the commonwealth launched an adult COVID-19 serology study in partnership with the University of Virginia, Inova Health System, Virginia Commonwealth University, Sentara Healthcare and Carilion Clinic. To date, that project has enrolled 4,652 adults (93%) of the 5,000 participant goal and is ongoing.
Wednesday, community members gathered to reflect, mourn and heal. “We’re reclaiming this space because this once was adjacent to Vinegar Hill,” Zyahna Bryant, UVA student and activist, said. “Vinegar Hill was demolished and Black people and indigenous people have a history of being removed and being violently abused in many different ways by this city, so by taking this space today we’re not only reclaiming the narrative of Aug. 12, we’re reclaiming the narrative of our city.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, UVA’s Darden School of Business was among the first institutions to get out ahead of the calamity. Darden Dean Scott Beardsley was the first B-school dean to recognize that the pandemic and the recession it would cause would open the doors to a flood of new MBA candidates, some newly unemployed, others who saw their opportunities for advance scuttled by the downturn and the health crisis.
Kamala Harris made history as the first woman of color to be nominated as vice president on the ticket for a major party in United States history. Experts at Sabato's Crystal Ball at UVA’s Center for Politics said it did not come as a surprise.
It’s a day they’ll never forget. Pastors, rabbi, clergy and people of all faith backgrounds linked in arms to join the counter-protest against the Unite the Right rally on Au. 12th, 2017. Wednesday night, on the third anniversary of the rally, the University of Virginia hosted a panel of religious racial justice activists to reflect on the experience, and what inspired them to counter-protest.
In an oral history released after his death, the former national security adviser revealed a few key moments in which his ideas failed in the war against Saddam Hussein. The newly released oral history was conducted for UVA’s Miller Center as part of its series of interviews with key figures documenting nearly every presidency of recent times.
“Praying With Our Feet: Religious Activists Remember the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville,” featured a panel of clergy who worked to combat the white supremacist views espoused at the 2017 rally. Moderated by Jalane Schmidt, a UVA associate professor of religious studies, the panelists spoke candidly about their experiences and how the rally challenged and strengthened their belief.
The designers of the new memorial, which can’t be missed and is already attracting a steady stream of visitors, say they wanted to fulfill the need for a memorial that made an invisible, often whitewashed history visible. They also wanted something open-ended, subject to interpretation, a place of happy accidents. They succeeded. Here is a space you might sit in for a long time, and wonder: How did we get here? And where are we going?
As lockdown orders took hold across the nation, Lalin Anik, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, set out to learn more about the effect of quarantine on FOMO. What she found in her research, which she hopes to publish this winter, is that FOMO, like many things in 2020, hasn’t gone away. It’s just moved online.
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.