London Perrantes said being an NBA player first hit him when he stood on the court for the national anthem – looking across and seeing a slew of professional players who he recognized. The former UVA starting point guard had been undrafted, played in the NBA Summer League, waived by the San Antonio Spurs during training camp, and was a “Did Not Play” his first several times suiting up in Cleveland. But on Tuesday, Perrantes actually played in NBA game.
Calena Wagoner, a 2017 UVA graduate, has gotten into the rhythm of her job as a fifth-grade teacher at Lightfoot Elementary School and reports a smooth transition into her chosen profession.
An extraordinary crisis of conscience last year prompted two innocence claims filed Friday in the Virginia Court of Appeals for a Covington man convicted of bank robberies. The petitions for writs of actual innocence filed in the Virginia Court of Appeals by the Innocence Project at the UVA School of Law contend: "This case is straightforward. Mr. Bush was convicted and sentenced for robberies he did not commit.”
“We’ve seen a deepening decline in the death penalty since the year 2000, and some states fell faster than others,” said UVA law professor Brandon Garrett, who wrote “End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice.” He added that the declines are steepest in counties that had sentenced the most people to death.
Many classical musicians turn to climate science – and sometimes even climate data – as a direct inspiration for their work. Matthew Burtner, an Alaska-born composer who teaches music at UVA, presented at the American Geophysical Union, describing his music written about – and sometimes with – glaciers. Burtner is an “eco-acoustician,” meaning he brings both the sounds and the data signatures of the environment into his work.
Larry Sabato, a UVA politics professor, said Trump had also made progress on his agenda in ways that were less obvious. “Most people don’t follow federal rulemaking, but Trump and company are deconstructing the regulatory system in much of government, from the environment to the internet to the financial world.”
These are just a few examples of the many innovative ways that student affairs professionals around the country are applying behavioral science to college access, retention and completion efforts. Slowly but surely, student success experts and researchers are beginning to see these efforts pay off. For example, economists Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University and Sarah Turner from the University of Virginia and Stanford University are showing how behavioral science principles can improve student enrollment decisions.
“Republicans now have a struggle just to keep their majority” in the Virginia statehouse, said Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. “They’re going to have to focus whatever money they have on probably half of the 10 Democrats [in the U.S. Senate] who come from states that Trump carried. They can’t be lavishing $20 million on a long shot race in Virginia.”
(By Tim Cunningham, assistant professor of nursing) You’ve seen them, the iconic images of American soldiers dressed in fatigues and combat gear, cradling small, injured, sometimes bloodied children. Of firefighters heading toward danger to save lives. Of fishermen in modest sea vessels lifting exhausted, near-drowned refugees from the freezing Mediterranean. Compassion, all of it, on a grand and overwhelming scale.
The Children's Choir of Central Virginia performed a concert on Saturday to raise money for the UVA Children's Hospital.
More people are moving out of Virginia than in, reflecting changes in home prices, rates of retirement and federal spending since 2013. Virginia’s population isn’t declining — it’s just gaining more of its new residents from births rather than move-ins, according to 2016 data from the IRS compiled by UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
In the case of Bailey, the Lanahans were given a monetary settlement, which was substantially impacted, Fierberg said, by a Colorado law capping noneconomic damages. The Lanahans directed the entire settlement to the Gordie Foundation, which has now joined with the University of Virginia to create the Gordie Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. The Gordie Center aims to reduce hazardous drinking and hazing through education.
A new group on UVA’s Grounds called the MAN Club, or Men Advancing Nursing, is changing perceptions and helping to bridge the gender gap in the nursing profession with a unique fundraiser.
The income tax was modest initially, but World War I moved it to the center of federal financing as Congress reduced tariff rates and international trade declined. The income tax was expanded to the masses during World War II, and the government sold it, in part, by giving taxpayers a “very clear sense of what they were funding,” said UVA history professor Brian Balogh.
As part of its effort to recruit and retain competitive faculty, UVA has created a $75 million, multi-year plan to support about 70 endowed professorships.
UVA alum Chris Long, in his 10th season in the NFL, is currently a playmaker on the high-flying Philadelphia Eagles. But with a simple, empathetic gesture of putting his hand on the shoulder of teammate Malcolm Jenkins during the national anthem earlier this season, he took a step into a spotlight that he had always avoided.
Blockchain technology is a relatively new concept. Conceptualized in 2008 by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, the technology was implemented in early 2009 with the inaugural mining of the first 50 bitcoins. The concept itself is rather complex, but Robert Parham, a professor at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, summarizes cryptocurrency as an “immutable” form of currency that remembers each of its former transactions via the blockchain, which serves as a public ledger of sorts.
UVA historian Brian Balogh cohosts “Backstory,” the popular weekly history podcast. He agrees that the history profession is evolving to accommodate concerns about misinformation, though he also cautions that those who choose to sit out this battle are not somehow derelict of duty. “Not all of us are good at this kind of thing, just like not all of us are good at organizing archival collections, and not all of us are good at historiography,” he says. “Collectively, we need to try to distribute our strengths to ensure that we have all the bases covered.”
Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal legislation that keeps the internet equally accessible to all. A UVA law professor says the rollback of the rules, generally referred to as net neutrality, might have major impacts on the way people access the internet. Paul Mahoney said this means that ISPs could soon be able to force customers to pay extra to visit certain websites or access certain streaming services.
Four electric cars used by Danville under an energy project have now become a permanent part of the city’s fleet. Fermata Energy hopes to donate the four electric vehicles – 2015 or 2016 Nissan Leafs – and chargers to Danville as part of a requirement under a two-year research-and-development grant from the Virginia Tobacco Commission. Fermata, founded by UVA engineering professor David Slutzky, received a $2 million Tobacco Commission grant in May 2014 to operate within the tobacco region’s footprint.