As she prepares to step down as the University of Virginia’s faculty athletics representative, Curry School of Education professor Carolyn Callahan is being recognized alongside an outstanding UVA scholar-athlete by the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame.

Fourth-year student Micah Kiser, an All-Atlantic Coast Conference linebacker on the Cavalier football team, is a National Football Foundation National Scholar-Athlete and one of 13 finalists for the William V. Campbell Trophy, often called “the academic Heisman Trophy.” As a finalist, he receives an $18,000 post-graduate scholarship. The winner of the Campbell Trophy, to be announced Dec. 5, will receive an additional $7,000 in scholarship funds.

Kiser graduated in May with a degree in foreign affairs, and is playing this fall as a graduate student in the Curry School’s master’s program in higher education.

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As UVA’s faculty athletics representative, Callahan is recognized alongside Kiser as part of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame’s “Faculty Salutes” program. Additionally, each school with a Campbell Trophy finalist receives $5,000 to support its academic support services for student-athletes.

“Honoring the faculty athletics representatives from the schools with NFF National Scholar-Athletes sends a powerful message,” said Archie Manning, the foundation’s chair. “There is no group more committed to the well-being of our student-athletes, and the NFF National Scholar-Athlete success stories provide a natural vehicle for emphasizing the important contributions of the faculty athletics representatives in ensuring a strong connection between the academic and athletic experiences of our nation’s student-athletes.”

Callahan has announced her retirement as UVA’s faculty athletics representative after 20 years in that role. Carrie M. Heilman, an associate professor of marketing in the McIntire School of Commerce, will officially take over on Jan. 1.

UVA Doctor Elected President of the American Society of Nephrology  

The American Society of Nephrology has elected UVA’s Dr. Mark D. Okusa as its president for the coming year.

Okusa, John C. Buchanan Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the UVA School of Medicine and chief of nephrology at the UVA Medical Center, also directs UVA’s Center for Immunity, Inflammation, and Regenerative Medicine. Board-certified in internal medicine and nephrology, he has been in practice for more than 20 years, and has been voted as one of Castle Connolly’s Best Doctors in America each year since 2001.

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Okusa’s National Institutes of Health-funded research focuses on the role of inflammation and immune cells in initiating and maintaining acute kidney injury, and his findings in preclinical studies have served as a foundation for clinical trials for both acute kidney injury and progressive kidney disease. Okusa has served, and continues to serve, on national and international panels to help develop clinical practice guidelines and set the research agenda for acute kidney injury.

“I am honored and excited about being elected president of the American Society of Nephrology for this coming year and very grateful to the membership for giving me this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.  

School of Medicine Earns National Diversity Award for Sixth Straight Year

For the sixth consecutive year, the UVA School of Medicine has received a national award for its commitment to diversity and inclusion.

UVA is one of 24 U.S. health professions schools to receive the 2017 Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine, a national publication covering diversity in higher education.

“Our standards are high, and we look for institutions where diversity and inclusion are woven into the work being accomplished every day across their campus,” the publication said in announcing this year’s winners.

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UVA’s diversity efforts include:

• Summer Medical Leadership Program. This six-week summer academic enrichment program brings together 30 college undergraduates interested in medical careers who are from disadvantaged backgrounds and underrepresented groups in medicine. The main goal is to expose participants to the “real world of medicine” to prepare them not only for admission to medical school, but to assume future leadership positions in their chosen medical field.
• Partnerships with local schools. The School of Medicine hosts a Poster Symposium each year at Charlottesville High School to introduce high school students – and future health-care workers – to conducting medical research. As part of their projects, students visit the UVA Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and are mentored by UVA research scientists.
• Committee on Women. The committee promotes opportunities for mentoring and leadership for women throughout the School of Medicine, including an annual award honoring a faculty member for their leadership efforts.
• Latino Health Initiative. In partnership with groups across UVA and the Charlottesville area, initiative members work to improve health literacy, outcomes and access to care for local Latino residents. Ongoing projects include biweekly cardiovascular disease screening and education sessions, as well as training and empowerment for Latino community health workers.

“To receive this award six years in a row reflects the School of Medicine’s dedication and commitment to diversity and inclusion,” said Dr. David S. Wilkes, the school’s dean. “This is a great team effort. Our faculty, staff, and students consistently keep our core institutional values of respecting everyone at the forefront of what they do.”

Rita Dove, Two Alumni Among State Literary Award Winners

UVA was well-represented at the Library of Virginia’s 20th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards, handed out on Oct. 14.

Rita Dove received the Literary Award for Poetry for her book, “Collected Poems: 1974-2004,” which the judges described as “three decades of powerful lyric poetry from a virtuoso of the English language.”

A past Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at UVA, where she has taught since 1989. She served as U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-95) and Poet Laureate of Virginia (2004-06) and has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, a National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

“Collected Poems” was a 2016 National Book Awards finalist and a 2016 NAACP Image Award winner.  

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Among the other finalists for the poetry award was UVA English professor Lisa Russ Spaar, editor of “Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson.” 

Alumna Margot Lee Shetterly won the Literary Award for Nonfiction for her New York Times best-selling book, “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,” which “celebrates these unsung heroes and their experiences with issues of race, gender and scientific innovation,” according to the judges.

A 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grantee, Shetterly is the founder of the Human Computer Project, an endeavor that is recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s. A Hampton native, she knew many of the women behind the history in “Hidden Figures,” which was adapted into a Young Reader’s Edition, a picture book and an Oscar-nominated film.

The other finalists for the nonfiction prize included Annette Gordon-Reed and UVA history professor emeritus Peter S. Onuf for “’Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”

“Hidden Figures” also won the People’s Choice Award in the nonfiction category, chosen by readers in an online vote. 

Law School alumnus David Baldacci won the Library of Virginia’s Literary Lifetime Achievement Award.

He published his first novel, “Absolute Power,” in 1996; a feature film followed, with Clint Eastwood as its director and star. He has published 34 novels for adults; all have been national and international best sellers, and several have been adapted for film and television. His novels have been translated into more than 45 languages and sold in more than 80 countries; more than 110 million copies are in print worldwide. Baldacci has also published six novels for younger readers.

All of the winners received a monetary prize and an engraved crystal book.  

Virginia Commission for the Arts Also Honors Dove

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English and former U.S. Poet Laureate, has been named as one of 10 “Outstanding Artists” by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, as part of its “50 for 50 Arts Inspiration Award” program.

The honorees – 10 apiece from each of five categories – were selected from a pool of more than 350 nominees by a panel of former commissioners and arts leaders and confirmed by the full board of the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

The “50 for 50 Arts Inspiration Awards” are designed to recognize “programs, individuals and organizations critical to the arts in Virginia,” according to the announcement.

“We are indeed fortunate in Virginia to have an abundant and diverse roster of outstanding artists and organizations and their supporters spanning disciplines and decades,” the commission said in its announcement.

The winners will be officially recognized Jan. 31 at the commission’s 50th Anniversary Program for arts organizations across the state at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

UVA Nurse a Finalist for National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year

UVA palliative care nurse Jonathan Bartels was one of six finalists for the 2017 National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year Award, given by the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare in Boston. The award honors “outstanding health care professionals who display extraordinary devotion and compassion in caring for patients and families. The award recognizes those who make a profound difference through their unmatched dedication to compassionate, collaborative care.”

Bartels developed “The Pause,” which provides caregivers and family members with a moment for silent reflection after the death of a patient. In its profile of Bartels, the Schwartz Center described The Pause as “a means of transitioning and demarcating the brevity and importance of this moment. The Pause is a means of honoring a person’s last rite of passage and an opportunity for health care professionals to come together amidst suffering and loss.”

The profile continued, “As one colleague writes, ‘[Bartels] is a listener, inspirational leader of fierce compassion, and making an impact with one unique intervention among many, to ease suffering for families and health care providers.’”

Bartels talked about how he initiated The Pause in a first-person story for the Virginia Magazine. He was recognized as a finalist Nov. 16 at a ceremony in Boston.

Law Dean Wins Legal History Book Award for ‘Vagrant Nation’

School of Law Dean Risa Goluboff has won the American Society for Legal History’s John Phillip Reid Book Award for “Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.”

The award is the fourth major honor for the book, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press. The society considers both senior and mid-career scholars for the award.

“I am thrilled that my fellow legal historians find the book deserving of this honor,” Goluboff said.

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The book, her second, has also received this year’s Littleton-Griswold Prize, Lillian Smith Book Award and David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History.

“Vagrant Nation” explores how and why vagrancy laws that had been on the books for hundreds of years rapidly collapsed in the span of two decades.

Goluboff is an expert in constitutional law and legal history whose first book, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” won the 2010 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award and the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize.

National ‘100 Great Heart Programs’ List Features UVA

Becker’s Hospital Review has named the Heart and Vascular Center at UVA Medical Center to the national health care publication’s 2017 list of 100 hospitals and health systems with great heart programs.

“The hospitals named on this list are national leaders in cardiovascular health care,” according to Becker’s. “Many institutions pioneered groundbreaking procedures and remain on the forefront of heart care today. All have received recognition for delivering top-notch patient care.”

Becker’s highlighted the more than 300 heart transplants that have been performed at UVA, as well as UVA being ranked 50th nationally for cardiology and heart surgery in the most recent rankings from U.S. News & World Report.

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UVA Heart and Vascular Center leaders said the award highlights their efforts to provide high-quality, comprehensive heart care.

“We are excited to see our multidisciplinary team recognized for their collaborative efforts to provide the best care for patients throughout Virginia,” said Dr. Brian H. Annex, chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and medical director of the UVA Heart and Vascular Service Line.

“The award from Becker’s Hospital Review reflects our efforts to serve patients with a wide range of heart and vascular conditions,” added Dr. John Kern, chief of the Division of Cardiac Surgery and surgical director of the UVA Heart and Vascular Service Line.

UVA Health System Pharmacy Administrator Honored for Leadership, Service

The Virginia Society of Health-System Pharmacists has given Rafael Saenz, the UVA Health System’s pharmacy administrator, its R. David Anderson Distinguished Leadership Award.

Saenz was recognized in November both for his enhancements to pharmacy services at UVA and his service at both the state and national levels to enhance pharmacy services. 

Saenz’s efforts have included doubling the size of UVA’s retail pharmacy services, including the Charlottesville area’s only outpatient pharmacy that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; introducing specialty pharmacy services; and expanding UVA’s pharmacy residency programs.

Saenz has also been active with state and national pharmacy groups. He created the Virginia Society of Health-System Pharmacists’ Commonwealth Leadership Forum to bring together pharmacy directors from across Virginia to discuss common issues. He has also worked to create national consensus around a singular pharmacy technician training standard and participated on a national committee to rewrite technician training standards, while also representing hospital and health system pharmacies on the Virginia Board of Pharmacy.

To help expand the supply of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, Saenz chaired the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists’ Council on Education and Workforce Development. He also worked locally with Piedmont Virginia Community College to create accredited pharmacy technician training programs and with Virginia Commonwealth University to bring more pharmacists to Central Virginia.

Local Food Hub Honors Health System 

Local Food Hub has named the UVA Health System as a “Healthy Community Leader” at its annual Community Food Awards event, held Oct. 19.

The Healthy Community Leader award recognizes a community organization that demonstrates a commitment to partnering with Local Food Hub on increasing education about, and access to, local food.

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The Health System, including the UVA Medical Center, BeWell and Morrison Healthcare, piloted a workplace wellness program with Local Food Hub to increase access to fresh, healthy foods among Health System employees.  

“The Community Food Awards is a special opportunity to celebrate the farmers, businesses and nonprofit organizations that are helping to make healthy, local food available to all,” said Kristen Suokko, executive director of Local Food Hub. “We are honored to partner with these award winners.” 

Engineering Professor Earns Honorary Doctorate from University of Waterloo

Yacov Haimes, Lawrence R. Quarles Professor of Systems and Information Engineering and founding director of UVA’s Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems, on Oct. 21 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.

“He is globally renowned for his research in systems engineering, and leads the field in applying interdisciplinary, systems and multi-objective decision making perspectives to risk assessment,” the school said in announcing the award. “His techniques have helped address complex challenges in several domains, including water resource management and environmental engineering.”

The degree is the highest granted by the University of Waterloo.

Haimes earned a B.S. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written or co-written six books and 300 technical publications, more than 200 of which were published in archival-refereed journals. He has served as dissertation/thesis adviser to 39 Ph.D. students, 85 M.S. students and 132 B.S. students.

As part of his “Financial Management and Budgeting in Higher Education” course in the Curry School of Education last week, University of Virginia linebacker Micah Kiser presented an analysis paper in which he wrote about trends in revenues and expenditures within Power 5 conference universities.

“He just impressed me with his grasp of the subject matter,” said Justin Thompson, Curry’s associate dean for management and planning, “and his ability to present it with confidence, engage his classmates on their level and to respond to questions in a really thoughtful and well-informed way.”

Those same adjectives can be used to describe the grace in which Kiser accepted the Campbell Trophy during the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame’s annual dinner, held Tuesday in New York City. At the black-tie event, Kiser thanked his parents, professors, athletic administrators, academic advisers, teammates, coaches and a bevy of others.

Known as the “Academic Heisman,” the Campbell Trophy recognizes the best football scholar-athlete in the nation.

“I don’t think there’s any more deserving individual – a young person who better epitomizes what a scholar-athlete is,” UVA athletic director Craig Littlepage said. “There’s nobody more deserving than Micah Kiser.”

Kiser’s big night in the Big Apple drew praise from UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan as well.

Congratulations to an outstanding student and athlete! https://t.co/RjVcEEJFjo

— Teresa Sullivan (@terrysulli) December 6, 2017

Kiser, who is up for a long list of awards this winter, said the Campbell was the one he most wanted to win.

“On the field, off the field, in the community, in the classroom – it takes everything into consideration,” Kiser said Wednesday afternoon. “For me to be chosen to win this award – it means everything.”

Kiser, who has helped lead the Cavaliers to their first bowl game since 2011 – they will face the U.S. Naval Academy in the Military Bowl on Dec. 28 in Annapolis, Maryland – was selected from a field that included 181 semifinalists and 13 finalists.

In the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August, it was Kiser who organized the now-iconic photo of the football team, arms locked, standing at the Rotunda – a potent symbol of the team’s unity in the wake of the white supremacist violence.

“Micah Kiser is an amazing young man,” head football coach Bronco Mendenhall said. “For him to win the ‘Academic Heisman’ is a powerful tribute to not only him, but his parents [and] also the University of Virginia. It’s the perfect award for excellence in leadership for not only a young man, but an institution.”

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On the field, Kiser is leading the Atlantic Coast Conference in tackles for the third straight season. In the classroom, the Baltimore native – who is pursuing a master’s degree in higher education – has a 4.0 grade-point average.

Kiser, who earned his undergraduate degree in foreign affairs in May, is the second UVA player to win the Campbell Trophy, joining linebacker Thomas Burns, a nuclear engineering major who won the award in 1993.

For winning the Campbell, Kiser earned a $25,000 post-graduate scholarship.

Kiser recently had hand surgery, but said he expects to be recovered in time for the bowl game.

He said he plans on pursuing an NFL career, then hopes to follow in Littlepage’s footsteps and one day become an athletic director.

Coming out of high school, Kiser had scholarship offers from Stanford, Wake Forest, Oklahoma, Florida and others.

“UVA was a 40-year decision for me,” Kiser said. “I knew how a degree from UVA would carry weight everywhere – all around the world. It’s been a great five years, which is really going to set me up well for the future.”

The University of Virginia Board of Visitors on Friday approved a 2.5 percent increase in tuition for most undergraduate Virginians entering in fall 2018, and a 3.5 percent increase for most entering out-of-state students.

The tuition structure for the 2018-19 academic year includes a 2.5 percent increase for all returning in-state students across schools (amounting to between $308 and $436, depending on the school) and a 3.5 percent increase for all returning out-of-state students across all schools ($1,530 to $1,712, depending on the school).

It will be the third consecutive year that increases have been held at or below the rate of inflation for most in-state students.

“The University of Virginia is committed to offering an excellent education at an affordable price,” Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Pat Hogan said. “We welcome talented students with no consideration of their ability to pay, limit their exposure to loan-based debt and assist middle- and low-income Virginia families by setting tuition rates that protect UVA’s status as one of America’s best values in higher education.”

Some 70 percent of UVA’s undergraduate students are enrolled in either the College of Arts & Sciences or the Curry School of Education. For those in-state, first-year students, the 2.5 percent increase sets tuition for 2018-19 at $13,682, or $334 more than what current first-year students are paying. Tuition for out-of-state students entering the College or Curry will increase by $1,530, to $44,724.

For entering students in schools other than the College or Curry, the tuition structure adjusts tuition in varying amounts – a reflection of the differing instructional and programmatic needs in individual schools. That blend of rates among schools and among classes supports the University’s key priorities: a commitment to maintain affordability for Virginians, but also a recognition that significant investments are necessary to ensure the quality of the educational experience overall and to address strategies and specific needs at the school level.

Overall, the weighted average tuition increase for all in-state UVA students is 3.3 percent, and the weighted average for non-Virginians is 3.9 percent.

The University continues its commitment to meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need of all undergraduate students, and offers admission to students with no consideration of their family financial situation. UVA also caps loans for low-income Virginians at a maximum of $1,000 per year, with a maximum of $4,500 per year for all other Virginia students with demonstrated financial need.

Last December, the Board of Visitors also approved the establishment of the Bicentennial Scholars Fund, a permanent endowment that could reach a value of $300 million through philanthropic support and disbursements from the UVA Strategic Investment Fund. Earnings from the Bicentennial Scholars Fund will provide need- and merit-based scholarships for undergraduate students, while relieving pressure on long-term tuition increases by funding need-based aid from this fund instead of from tuition revenue.

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In January, the board authorized the Cornerstone Grant program, which provides University-funded grants to qualifying, full-time undergraduate Virginia students from middle-income families earning less than $125,000.

Such efforts have bolstered UVA’s educational value, and its ability to attract and retain increasing numbers of underrepresented students and expand the breadth and depth of its cultural and socioeconomic diversity.

For example, institutional data for 2017 indicate that since 2012:

• First-year minority student enrollment has increased by 38 percent;
• African-American enrollment of first-year students has increased by 41.5 percent;
• UVA received applications from 2,271 African-American students in 2017, an increase of 600 versus 2012;
• First-generation student enrollment is up by 42 percent; and
• Enrollment of students with Pell Grant eligibility has increased by an estimated 34.3 percent.

The Board of Visitors this year moved up the review and approval process for tuition and fees, which previously had occurred after the new year. University officials said the earlier decision allows UVA to develop and share financial-aid packages with students and their families sooner, providing prospective students better information on which to make college decisions and giving returning students more time to plan for the next academic year.

The 2018-19 tuition plan supports the University’s ongoing efforts to recruit and retain faculty and staff; addresses needs including information technology resources and physical security; and accounts for ongoing uncertainties regarding state support.

The plan is built with the assumption that state revenue will be consistent with the current year’s level. Significant changes in that support could result in UVA administrators requesting the board to consider an adjusted rate.

The tuition plan also includes a $110 increase in the mandatory comprehensive fee for all regular-session students. Of the increase, $5 will be directed to meet planned University compensation increases for employees and operational needs in University Transit, Newcomb Hall and Student Health & Wellness, while $4 will provide increased arts offerings for students across Grounds. The remaining $101 will address increases in student health volume in the areas of general medicine, counseling and psychological services, and accessibility needs across Grounds.

In the 1980s, Sharon Bragg made good money as a hairdresser in Charlottesville. She had a natural talent for the job and a thriving clientele.

Fast-forward to this December, and Bragg is earning her second advanced degree from the University of Virginia’s School of Nursing.

Bragg is one of 518 students who are earning degrees this month. These mid-year diplomas are going to students who are either finishing their coursework early or, like Bragg, perhaps took an extra semester to complete a final project.

Bragg’s journey to UVA started when she realized she’d hit a wall in the beauty business. She was ready for a new challenge. Her roommate was working for the local rescue squad and convinced Bragg to volunteer with the unit.

It was a fateful decision. Bragg realized she liked caring for people and set out to begin a second career as a nurse in the UVA Health System. She’s been at it for the last 26 years, both in the hospital and in the classroom.

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In December of 2012, Bragg earned her master’s degree in nursing. She returned to the classroom in 2014 to begin her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, all while working as the full-time assistant nurse manager in the Health System’s medical intensive care unit. She wrapped up her degree requirements this month.

Catherine Vermillion’s road to UVA began at Virginia Tech, where she earned her undergraduate degree in human development in 2016. A desire to teach drew her interest to UVA’s Curry School of Education. She enrolled in August of 2016 and accelerated her studies so she could earn her master’s degree in teaching this month.

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After graduation, the Alexandria native is returning to her roots, where she will begin teaching kindergarten at her hometown’s Lyles-Crouch Elementary School in January. “I’m excited to work in a public school. I think diversity is important,” she said.

She will also make the adjustment to being called “Ms. Vermillion.” “It was weird at first and made me feel old,” she said.

UVA does not hold formal graduation ceremonies for December graduates, but they are invited back to participate in Finals Weekend, which takes place May 18-20 this year.

Vermillion and Bragg both said they will return in May to formally collect their diplomas. Bragg, who will gladly tell you that she is 56, said nothing can keep her from walking the Lawn.

“I think there are very few times as an adult that you get to have ceremonies and pomp and circumstance,” she said. “So, I’m just excited at the possibility. It’s just a beautiful ceremony. I don’t want to miss out on that.”

Here are six more facts about UVA’s 518 December graduates.

• All 11 of UVA’s schools and the Data Science Institute awarded degrees this month.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, UVA’s largest school, awarded the most degrees: 253.
• UVA awarded 25 different types of degrees this December. The Bachelor of Arts degree was the most awarded, with 177 recipients. The Bachelor of Science degree came in second, with 30 degrees distributed.
• Vermillion was one of 45 people to earn a Master of Teaching degree in December.
• Bragg was one of only two people to earn a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree.
• Seventeen people were awarded a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies degree from UVA’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Chester R. Titus, 96, died in Charlottesville on Dec. 17. A longtime administrator at the University of Virginia, he served as housing director, associate dean of student affairs and associate professor of education.

Over his nearly 30 years on Grounds, from 1958 to 1987, Titus developed the Residence Life program in the Dean of Students Office and overhauled the process that made the Lawn rooms the prestigious and desirable address for fourth-year students that they are today.

Patricia M. Lampkin, vice president and chief student affairs officer since 2002, met Titus when she joined UVA’s Dean of Students Office in 1979 and said he was an early mentor.

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“Chester raised me,” she said. “He and a strong group of colleagues taught me about the culture of the University and this place.” She learned from him when to offer guidance, when to be quiet or when to assert oneself, she said.

After one year off to finish his doctorate, Titus returned to the Grounds to make something more of the residential experience for students. Basically, there were just dormitory counselors, and Titus developed the Residence Life program to help students transition to college life.

“He was a strong supporter of student self-governance and had patience for student learning, even through trial and error,” Lampkin said.

Titus’ work set the stage for the transformation of the Lawn rooms into residences to which students would aspire. After he oversaw the renovation of the rooms, and they started to become more popular, he realized a more thorough process was needed. He created application and selection committees whose criteria included contributions to University life. The majority of committee members are students.

Titus himself enjoyed the Lawn as a member and eventually executive director of the Colonnade Club. Originally a faculty group that stewarded Pavilion VII, the club has fostered social, cultural and intellectual exchange among the faculty and University community since 1907.

Before he retired in 1987, Titus received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, which is presented at Valedictory Exercises to two graduating students and a member of the University community. The awards honor those who give “generous and unselfish service to others.” 

“He treated everyone with equal respect,” Lampkin said. “He was clearly an inspiration.”

Predeceased by his wife, who died a year ago, Titus is survived by his four sons, John B. Titus (Beth), Thomas S. Titus, Peter G. Titus (Therese) and Gerard A. Titus (Kim), plus eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held Friday at 10 a.m. at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, with a reception immediately following at the Colonnade Club in Pavilion VII on the Lawn.

Groundbreaking discoveries. A new president. Celebrities in the classroom. A party two centuries in the making.

Yes, there was a lot going on at the University of Virginia in 2017.

Here is a look at some of UVA Today’s most popular stories of the year, as measured by story views and social media engagement, presented in no particular order:

BOV Selects James E. Ryan as UVA’s Next President

In September, the Board of Visitors unanimously voted to name Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James E. Ryan as its next president. Ryan, who will succeed Teresa A. Sullivan, earned his law degree from UVA and previously served on the School of Law faculty. Ryan is set to begin his term on Oct. 1, 2018.

‘Two Blind Brothers’ Get Big Surprise From Ellen

In January, UVA alumni Bradford and Bryan Manning – whose clothing company, Two Blind Brothers, raises money for blindness research – received a $30,000 check while on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Since then, the brothers have raised more than $60,000 and quit their day jobs in order to devote more time to the cause.

UVA Sets – and Breaks – Record for Early-Action Applicants

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The number of early-action applicants for the Class of 2021 rose by 24 percent compared with the previous year, with 20,446 students applying for the non-binding early action program out of more than 36,700 total applications. That number rose again this fall, by an additional 5 percent, for a record 21,400 early-action applicantsfor the Class of 2022.

Taking Back the Lawn and ‘Concert for Charlottesville’ at Scott Stadium

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Soon after white supremacists led violent demonstrations at UVA on Aug. 11 and in Charlottesville the next day, the University community came together on the Lawn to reclaim the space and send a message of solidarity.

The next month, tens of thousands packed Scott Stadium on Sept. 24 for a blockbuster unity concert that featured a host of big-name artists, including the Dave Matthews Band, Ariana Grande, Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, Chris Martin and surprise guest Stevie Wonder.

Study Finds Key to Preventing Disruptive Behavior in Preschool Classrooms

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A team of researchers at UVA’s Curry School of Education found that children who formed positive relationships with their preschool teachers tended to show better social-emotional and behavioral skills over time.

UVA Reverses Depression Symptoms in Mice

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In a study, School of Medicine researchers reversed depression symptoms in mice by feeding them lactobacillus, a probiotic bacteria found in live-cultures yogurt. They plan to confirm their findings in humans.

Alums Katie Couric and Tina Fey Go Back to Class

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Students in a media studies course, “Women and Television,” had a chance to talk with Couric and Fey via video chat. They asked Couric about difficult stories she’s covered during her journalism career, such as reporting from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and interviews with victims of the 1999 Columbine shooting. Fey discussed everything from her writing for shows like “Saturday Night Live” to the female television stars who inspire her.

UVA in Numbers

This video exploring the University by the numbers was among the most-viewed web stories generated this year.

A Life of Lessons

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Alumnus Ben Williams went to 12 schools and spent seven years in foster care while caring for his troubled younger brother. Now he is principal of a new high school for young men, some whose lives mirror his own. Read his amazing story.

Enslaved Laborers Memorial Making Headway

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In June, the Board of Visitors approved the design for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, which commemorates the contributions of slaves who worked to build and sustain the University in its early years. In October, the location (east of Brooks Hall, across from the Corner) and size of the memorial was staked out and design plans were displayed.

Celebrating the Bicentennial

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Commemorating the 1817 ceremony in which U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe observed the laying of the cornerstone at the University’s first building, October’s Bicentennial Launch Celebration featured performances by more than 800 UVA students and faculty alongside special guest stars like Leslie Odom Jr., the Tony Award-winning actor and singer who played Aaron Burr in the Broadway megahit “Hamilton”; Grammy Award-nominated R&B singer Andra Day; and rock band the Goo Goo Dolls.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in 68 children have some form of autism – a rate that has increased by more than 120 percent since 2002, when the rate was one in 150 children.

Such a sharp rise might lead to assumptions that the process of diagnosing autism is a relatively easy one with few obstacles. That is not the case; many children and families wait months or years before receiving a diagnosis. Because early intervention is key to success for children with autism, delays can have long-term consequences for children, families and communities.

In a demonstration of the University of Virginia’s dedication to sustained work on autism, the Board of Visitors recently approved $6.2 million over three years to support transformative autism research.

In the Curry School of Education, Micah Mazurek, an associate professor and clinical psychologist with expertise in autism, is currently working on a project that uses technology to teach and train community-based primary care providers – rapidly improving early access to high-quality care for autism.

She recently fielded a few questions about her research, which began in 2015, and the results to date.

Q. Why is diagnosing autism a critical and sometimes frustrating process?

A. For children with autism, early intervention is critically important. The earlier we can begin working with a child with autism, the better the outcome. Beginning intervention as early as possible capitalizes on important developmental windows and maximizes children’s learning potential.

These interventions help children with autism learn the skills they need to communicate, interact with others and manage their behavior. Unfortunately, many children are not able to access these interventions as early as possible because of diagnostic delays.

In many cases, parents are already noticing signs of autism by age 1 and we can make a verifiable diagnosis by the age of 2. Yet the average age of diagnosis is between 4 and 6. This means that we are missing the most important window for intervention.

One of the challenges we are facing is that there are very few health care professionals with training in autism. Autism is a complex disorder and requires specialized training for both diagnosis and treatment. There are large areas of the country, especially rural areas, that do not have access to autism specialists. The growing level of demand, coupled with limited capacity, has resulted in long waitlists at autism centers. Families living in rural areas face even greater barriers and are required to travel long distances to receive autism services. These barriers also mean that many children with autism are not receiving comprehensive health care in their own communities. 

My colleague, Dr. Kristin Sohl [of the University of Missouri’s Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders], and I wanted to find a way to address these barriers so that children with autism and their families would have access to high-quality and comprehensive care as early as possible, no matter where they live. 

Q. Can you tell us about the idea you had to help reduce the backlog?

A. We were inspired by the work of a physician at the University of New Mexico, Dr. Sanjeev Arora, who designed and developed an innovative virtual training model called “Project ECHO” to train community-based physicians and nurses across the state in effective treatments for hepatitis C. The model dramatically increased access to specialty care in underserved regions.

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Our question was, why couldn’t we use the same sort of model to improve access to care for autism? Together with colleagues at the University of Missouri, we developed and tested a new “ECHO Autism” program to train community-based doctors and nurses in best-practice care for autism.  

ECHO Autism connects local primary care providers to an interdisciplinary team of autism experts, using videoconferencing technology. In developing the model, we wanted to ensure that the expert “hub” team was composed of members with essential types of expertise in autism. We ultimately included a pediatrician specializing in autism, a clinical psychologist, a parent of a child with autism, a social worker, a dietitian and a child/adolescent psychiatrist.

Q. Why did you need all of those perspectives?

A. Each team member brought unique and essential sets of expertise to the table. Because we wanted to train primary care providers in both identification and medical management of autism symptoms, we needed expertise in diagnosis, assessment, medical treatment and care coordination. Best-practice care for children with autism also requires full partnership with families and incorporation of their perspectives, strengths and values. By including a parent expert on our hub team, we were able to incorporate the lived experience of having a child with autism. This enabled us to teach and model family-centered care and to emphasize the value of family voices and expertise. 

Q. Once each of those roles were filed, how did you leverage their expertise?

A. During the initial six-month pilot, our expert hub at the University of Missouri connected virtually for two hours every other week with primary care physicians and nurse practitioners located in rural areas using high-quality, multi-point videoconferencing technology. Each session included a brief lecture and two case presentations, during which primary care providers presented, discussed and received recommendations on their own cases. Through collaborative learning and guided practice, participants learned new skills and began to implement best-practice techniques in their own practices.  

Q. Were the results of the six-month pilot promising?

A. The results of the pilot study were especially positive. We saw that providers gained confidence in their ability to effectively screen and identify symptoms of autism and to effectively manage common medical and behavioral challenges. We also saw improvements in their use of recommended autism screening tools and resources. These preliminary results suggest that we were successful in building local primary care expertise in autism and indicate that this model may be helpful for reducing barriers to care for children and families.

Q. What comes next?

A. Our research team has now received funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration through the Autism Intervention Research Network on Physical Health to test the effectiveness of the ECHO Autism model in a large sample, using a more rigorous research design.

In this replication study, we have trained 10 additional expert hub teams in academic medical centers across North America. Each ECHO Autism team will train at least 15 primary care providers.

The reach of this project is especially exciting. In equipping 10 new teams of autism specialists to serve as hubs, we can make an exponential impact in underserved areas by training more than 150 primary care physicians caring for underserved families. The scale of the project also allows us to use a more rigorous research design, including cluster randomization and direct measurement of practice change through chart reviews. This will help us learn whether the model is effective in improving actual care of children with autism.

Q. What constitutes an underserved family?

A. In our project, underserved families are those who are living in federally designated “Health Professional Shortage Areas,” or families who face economic, cultural or linguistic barriers to accessing health care (such as low income, homelessness, etc.). 

Q. How do you envision the future of this project and what is next for you?

A. We are already testing new ways of extending the scope and reach of our initial project. For example, we are currently evaluating a more extensive ECHO Autism training model that includes hands-on training and verification of diagnosis for toddlers at high risk for autism.

We also are actively exploring new applications of this model for training others in evidence-based care for autism, including teachers, mental health professionals and other types of health care professionals. By leveraging technology, we are not limited by geographic barriers. This allows us to close the gap between research and real-world practice by spreading knowledge and increasing local capacity for high-quality care in underserved communities.

We all know it’s hard to focus when you’re hungry. Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education are working across several fields to figure out why that is, how much it matters in the classroom and what we can do to make sure all children are well-fed and ready to learn.

“There is pretty solid evidence that children who are hungry are not able to focus, so they have a low attention span, behavioral issues, discipline issues in the school,” said Sibylle Kranz, an associate professor of kinesiology and a registered dietitian nutritionist in the Curry School. “Having children who are well-fed and not hungry makes a difference in their individual performance, and also how much they are contributing to or disrupting the classroom situation.”

However, finding the most efficient and effective ways to help get children the nutrients they need involves parsing through complex and interconnected issues like poverty, accessibility and nutrition. Ongoing projects across several fields within the Curry School – including developmental psychology, policy and health and wellness – are exploring the many pathways between food and learning outcomes in school-age children.

Here are three ways researchers are diving in.

Developmental Psychology: Food Insecurity and Kindergarten Readiness

One recent study shows that food security – having reliable access to a sufficient amount of food – could affect learning as early as kindergarten. Published in the journal Child Development in March, the study found children who experience food insecurity in early childhood are more likely to start kindergarten less ready than children from homes that are food-secure.

The study looked at a nationally representative data set that measured how often children from low-income households experienced episodes of food insecurity over several years of early childhood. The researchers then compared children’s kindergarten readiness – measured through a mix of math and reading tests and teachers’ reports of children’s skills in areas that lead to classroom success, like curiosity and self-control – for children who were and were not food insecure. It showed that food insecurity in infancy and toddlerhood predicted lower cognitive and social-emotional skills in kindergarten.

Anna Markowitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Curry School’s EdPolicyWorks research center and a coauthor of the study, said it’s important to distinguish food insecurity – which is feeling unsure about whether you will have enough to eat – from hunger. While they often go together, hunger is a physical experience, while food insecurity is psychological.

Markowitz also emphasized that the results are non-causal – that is, it’s impossible to know whether or not food insecurity directly causes decreased kindergarten readiness. Particularly for young children, whose well-being is dependent on their parents, tackling food insecurity means diving into parents’ well-being and therefore a web of poverty-related factors, including maternal health and mental health, families’ general economic security, parenting practices and more.

However, nutrition may also be a significant pathway through which food insecurity can potentially affect children. “If you’re a parent who’s worried about the quantity of food, unhealthy calories are very cheap and healthy calories are not cheap,” Markowitz said. “So that nutrition pathway could certainly be real.”

What’s clear, Markowitz said, is that a strong link exists between how secure a child’s family feels about their ability to provide enough food and how prepared that child is when they enter kindergarten – and that helping young children learn is incredibly important to a host of long-term effects.

“There’s a lot of social science research showing the long-term effects of those early skills,” Markowitz said. “Children’s early skills predict not just labor market attachment and wages, but also whether or not you’re likely to be incarcerated, your marriage, your physical and mental health.”

While the problem is complex, the possibility for impactful work in this area is immense. “There is good evidence that kids are more malleable when they’re younger, so those early years of life are really important when thinking about interventions,” Markowitz said. “There are programs that we know work, and many more opportunities to improve children’s lives at home, which is really exciting. If you can start kids off in a good place, you can make a big difference.”

Education Policy: ‘Nudging’ Schools to Adopt Flexible Breakfast Programs

In other cases, resources are already available, but may not be reaching all the children who need them. Researchers from the Curry School and UVA’s Department of Economics have partnered with Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, a child nutrition advocacy group, and Ideas42, a behavioral design firm, on a study encouraging school districts in six states to adopt flexible breakfast programs that have been shown to feed more children.

Called “Breakfast After the Bell,” the flexible breakfast program was developed the United States Department of Agriculture to address the large percentage of eligible students across the country who don’t eat the free or reduced-price breakfast that their school provides. Breakfast programs are typically underutilized compared to lunch programs, possibly because they require students to arrive at school early, or because of social stigma.

“Breakfast After the Bell” has been shown to increase the percentage of students taking advantage of school breakfast by delivering the food directly to classrooms on a mobile cart, instead of serving it in the cafeteria.

“In the long term, schools that adopt Breakfast After the Bell and allow kids to take meals to, or eat in, the classroom will see improved behavior, focus and performance from their students, due to kids’ better nutrition that results from greater participation in breakfast,” said Wendy Bolger, director of program innovation strategy at No Kid Hungry. “Students who can start the day on task because they are not distracted by an empty stomach are more ready to learn.”

However, only a small percentage of schools have adopted these programs. “These programs are really effective at increasing the number of students who eat breakfast, but they’re only in 20 percent of schools,” said Zach Sullivan, a doctoral candidate with the Curry School’s Nudge4 lab.

Sullivan said while the programs are inexpensive overall, they still involve some start-up costs, like purchasing a cart or extra trashcans for classrooms. Another hurdle can be developing buy-in from teachers and cafeteria workers, who may need to adjust schedules and routines to accommodate the program.

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That’s where the work with UVA, No Kid Hungry and Ideas42 comes in. In a large-scale study involving 2,500 elementary schools, researchers are using the theory of behavioral “nudging” – using simple, low-cost tactics to “nudge” someone toward a certain behavior – to encourage schools to switch to a flexible breakfast program.

“The main research question was: Can we use low-cost, scalable outreach to increase the number of schools who are adopting these flexible breakfast strategies?” Sullivan asked.

Researchers sent low-cost mailers to school district decision-makers explaining the benefits of Breakfast After the Bell, varying the messaging to test different persuasive tactics. They also sent follow-up emails and offered grants to cover start-up costs.

“By making salient the low-cost, easy-to-implement effective strategies schools can use to deliver breakfast, and by nudging school leaders with social comparisons of similar schools that have achieved higher participation rates, we hope to meaningfully improve both school nutrition and academic performance,” said Ben Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy and director of the Nudge4 Solutions Lab.

The breakfast project has been in progress for more than a year, with results expected in 2018. If researchers find the mailers had a positive effect on the number of students eating breakfast, Sullivan said the team plans to compare the results with publicly available student outcome data, like attendance and test scores. Ultimately, they hope to study whether the increased breakfast improves school performance.

“We were so pleased to work with the team at UVA because of their track record and commitment to simple, scalable solutions in education policy,” said Bolger, of No Kid Hungry. “Also, we needed a team that would take risks with us and be innovative and flexible – we had other partners drop out because they felt the challenges we were tackling were too hard. The UVA team held on to the vision of improving the lives of at-risk students and were motivated by their desire to apply past successes with social norms messaging to persuade this new audience of school stakeholders to adopt Breakfast After the Bell.”

Health and Wellness: Making School Snacks More Nutritious and Filling

In the Curry School’s kinesiology program, associate professor Sibylle Kranz is studying school nutrition from a different angle. Instead of looking at whether or how much children are eating in school, she’s interested in what they’re eating – and whether it’s nutritious enough.

“There’s a pretty large proportion of kids who just don’t have any access to food at home,” said Kranz, who is also a certified child nutrition epidemiologist. Not being able to “just whip out something to eat in the middle of their lessons as needed” means children require “nutrient-dense meals and snacks,” she said.

Much of Kranz’s research has focused on improving the quality of the food that children receive in school by making small changes or substitutions that increase the amount of dietary fiber, with whole grains, fruits, vegetables or protein in school breakfasts and snacks.

So far, the results have been positive. In a study published in The Journal of Nutrition in March, Kranz and her colleagues found that serving high-protein and high-dietary fiber breakfasts improved the quality of preschoolers’ diets. Kranz said even if children are resistant to new foods at first, they quickly adapt – and significant gains in health measures, such as fiber intake, can be observed even among children who only changed their diets minimally.

“The main premise is that it is possible for us to make small changes to what’s served,” she said. “Because it’s in a child care setting, children are very likely to accept it.”

The next step, she said, is studying the link between a better diet and learning outcomes. “Part of what I’m working on now is trying to figure out if kids who feel full longer learn better,” she said. “There’s a lot of literature on the importance of breakfast, but it’s mostly looking at having breakfast versus not having breakfast, but not the level and time to metabolize the glucose in the bloodstream, or the type of breakfast.”

In future research, Kranz plans to examine how nutritionally rich foods high in fiber and protein affect learning outcomes in children. She believes when it comes to improving student learning, it’s about quality, not quantity. A more filling breakfast could make a big difference.

At a time when the U.S. struggles to address a growing trend of childhood obesity, improving the nutritional benefits of the food children eat at school has the potential for a range of other health benefits. “It’s improving diet quality and thereby improving both learning outcomes and health,” Kranz said.

In all of these areas, researchers say they still have much to learn about how nutrition affects learning – and what teachers, parents, administrators and policymakers can do to help. But each new study that sheds light on this complex issue brings us one step closer to ensuring all children have the nutritious food they need to reach their full potential in the classroom.

Teen drama is all-consuming; jealousy and conflicts with friends can make adolescents feel the whole world is against them.

Now, new research from the University of Virginia has found ramifications from these conflicts may have long-term links to premature aging in adulthood.

The clue to this new discovery was found in the bloodstream, in the form of something called interleukin-6, a protein that’s been associated with the development of cancerous tumors, arthritis, osteoporosis and a number of other problems associated with aging.

That substance was found at high levels in the bloodstreams of 28-year-olds who experienced chronic social conflict beginning at the early age of 13.

Joseph Allen, UVA’s Hugh Kelly Professor of Psychology, led the study, titled “The Body Remembers” and published in the journal Development and Psychopathology.

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Allen and his team began following 127 Charlottesville middle schoolers in 1998. They asked the students how well they managed conflict and then posed the same question to their peers. They then observed the students interacting with their close friends.

The researchers touched base with the students several more times over the years. At the age of 28, blood was drawn from all of the study participants; those who had chronic difficulty managing conflict beginning at 13 had higher levels of interleukin-6 in their bloodstreams.

Why is this happening?

“What we think is that the stress-response system that all humans have is particularly open to influence in adolescence,” Allen said. “There is a lot changing in the brain. There is a lot changing in terms of hormone development. We think the system is particularly primed in adolescence to be affected by peer relationships.”

While it is well-known that increased stress levels in adulthood can lead to health problems, the idea that stress in adolescence can have lasting effects is counterintuitive.

“We don’t think of that typically with adolescence because adolescents are so healthy,” Allen said.

The researchers, who were largely UVA undergraduate and graduate students, would pose vignettes to the research subjects, starting at age 13. One took place on a basketball court, where the student is pushed and called a wimp. “What would you do?” asked the researchers.

Pushing back would be a demonstration of poor conflict management. Continuing to play and ignoring the shoving is the healthier response.

At 21, researchers observed the subjects with their romantic partners. “We bring them into our offices and we interview them separately and we ask them to identify topics about which they disagree,” Allen explained. The pair then comes together and discusses one of those topics. “The 21-year-old who came in and their partner was really rude and hostile and aggressive to them, those were the kids who were at risk.”

The conflict could be over anything, from jealousy to the amount of time people spent together and how they deal with each other’s friends.

Allen said neither gender nor socioeconomic status appeared to affect interleukin-6 levels. Neither did personality traits like extroversion or introversion. “What that really says is that people with all different personalities can learn to handle conflict well or can struggle with handling it badly, and it’s not just simply some trait that people have inherited that’s not likely to be able to be changed.”

Allen said the results are alarming. “It’s frightening because with many things in life, we get second chances. We can fix things,” he said. “The possibility, and at this point, it’s just a possibility, that our struggles at 13 could stick with us, even if we later learn to overcome them, is what is really concerning.”

Allen said the results are important because adults tend to trivialize adolescents’ social experiences as something over-dramatic.

“This says that when the adolescents are so upset about their relationship problems, they are actually onto something. That these relationship problems are potentially far more significant than we realized,” he said.

As children become adolescents, it can be challenging for parents to realize their kids are struggling because the teens are trying to handle things on their own. “They can be going through terrible social stress or terrible bullying or terrible conflict and they might tell their friends, but they won’t necessarily tell their parents,” Allen said.

That is why Allen says it is important that parents model good conflict resolution with one another and their children, because they are always watching.

EDITORS NOTE: The full study can be read online, free of change, until January 31.

AffordableCollegesOnline.org, which provides resources and rankings for online education programs, lists the University of Virginia as the “Best Online College in Virginia” and the No. 13 online college nationally.

UVA also ranks No. 2 nationally in the “Most Affordable Online Colleges” category and No. 29 in the “Best Education and Online Teaching Degree” category.

AffordableCollegesOnline.org ranks only public, not-for-profit institutions that offer online education programs – even if they are primarily residential institutions, like UVA – according to a news release. Its “primary data points” included regional accreditation, in-state tuition and fees, percent of full-time undergraduate students earning institutional financial aid, number of online programs offered and student-to-teacher ratio, according to the release.

The website also includes a “Peer-Based Value” metric, which “compares the cost of a program to the cost of other programs with the same (or similar) qualitative score.”

Inaugural Richard Guy Wilson Prize Goes to English Ph.D. Alumna

Claire Eager, who earned a Ph.D. in English from UVA in 2017, is the first recipient of the Richard Guy Wilson Prize for Excellence in the Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places.

The $5,000 annual prize – named in honor of Wilson, Commonwealth Professor in Architectural History at UVA’s School of Architecture – provides students, both undergraduate and graduate, with an opportunity to examine and reflect upon the value of place and the diverse ways through which we all contribute to the shaping of the built and natural environment.

“It is an honor to receive the first Richard Guy Wilson Prize.”

- Claire Eager

The prize encourages students from any discipline at UVA to participate; submissions include, but are not limited to, writing, design, poetry, painting, legal/business briefs, scholarly research and essays, film, and photography.

One of Wilson’s former students, Mallory Walker, an alumnus of the College of Arts & Sciences, endowed the prize in Wilson’s honor with a $100,000 gift.

A panel of faculty judges awarded Eager the inaugural honor for “Complicit Paradise: Invasive Species and Collaborative Design in Donne and Bedford’s Twick(e)n(h)am,” a chapter from her dissertation.

“It is an honor to receive the first Richard Guy Wilson Prize,” Eager said. “It will allow me to continue my ongoing field research investigating how the sensory effects of paradisal settings in texts accord with the physical experiences of extant and restored period gardens in the U.K. and elsewhere.”

Eager, now an assistant professor on the general faculty in UVA’s Department of English, received the award in December at a dinner hosted by Dean of the Library John Unsworth and his wife, Maggie, in Pavilion II on the Lawn.

Matthew Scarnaty, who received master’s degrees in architecture and landscape architecture in 2017, was awarded an honorable mention for his submission, a cultural landscape analysis of the history of local food production in downtown Charlottesville, incorporating diverse sources – oral history, cartographic interpretation and contemporary diagrams – to reveal unexpected insights into Charlottesville’s socio-ecological history.

Submissions for the annual prize are reviewed by a rotating panel of UVA faculty members from various disciplines. Last year’s reviewers included faculty from creative writing, American studies, landscape architecture and architectural history.

Entries for the 2018 Richard Guy Wilson Prize are due in May.

History Chair Awarded Prestigious Mathematics Award

The American Mathematical Society has awarded its 2018 Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize to Karen Hunger Parshall for her groundbreaking work in the history of mathematics. Established in 1998, the honor recognizes notable exposition and exceptional scholarship in the history of mathematics.

Parshall, chair of the Corcoran Department of History and Commonwealth Professor of History and Mathematics, was recognized for her work on the evolution of mathematics in the United States and on the history of algebra, as well as for her contribution to the international life of her discipline through her teaching, editorial work and conference presentations. She received the prize Jan. 11 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.

“I have continually benefited from my daily bouncing back and forth between conversations with colleagues in both of my departments.”

- Karen Hunger Parshall

Parshall said she was honored and humbled. “Since 1988, when its then-dean of the faculty, the physicist Hugh Kelly, made possible a completely unheard of 50-50 joint appointment for me in history and mathematics, the University of Virginia has provided a challenging but supportive environment,” Parshall said. “I have pursued my research, trained graduate students in the history of mathematics, and introduced undergraduates to the amazingly rich histories of science and mathematics. 

“I have continually benefited from my daily bouncing back and forth between conversations with colleagues in both of my departments.”

DesignIntelligence Names UVA’s Robin Dripps as ‘Most Admired Educator’

DesignIntelligence has named Robin Dripps, T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture, one of its 25 Most Admired Educators for 2017-18.

Dripps teaches within the School of Architecture’s studio design sequence, lectures on architectural theory and directs a seminar on the relationship between design intent and detail manifestation. She has taught at the school since 1970.

Each year, DesignIntelligence, a company that supports architecture, engineering, construction and design businesses and institutions, names 25 exemplary professionals in education and education administration. DesignIntelligence staff selected the 2017-18 class of education role models with extensive input from design professionals, academic department heads and students. Educators and administrators from the disciplines of architecture, industrial design, interior design and landscape architecture are considered for inclusion.

Dripps was recognized for “outstanding contribution to the education and development of future practitioners, and for furthering the professions of architecture, engineering, construction and design,” DesignIntelligence noted.

Architecture Dean Ila Berman added, “Always operating at the cutting edge of the discipline, Robin is not only highly creative and rigorous, but also fearless in her approach to architectural education. She is truly a prized design faculty member at the School of Architecture who has taught and inspired generations of UVA alumni.”

Dripps said, “This is a very special recognition, especially happening in the latter part of my teaching career. It does seem to validate my constant desire to remain curious about how things work.”

Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design Named ‘Top 10’

The American Society of Landscape Architects’ online blog, The Dirt, recently listed its picks for 2017’s best books on the environment, cities and landscape, including School of Architecture professor Tim Beatley’s “Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design” as one of the top 10.

In the book, Beatley, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, presents strategies that both boost biodiversity and foster deeper human connections with nature in cities. He highlights examples like the Mappiness Project in the United Kingdom, Singapore’s sky bridges and San Francisco’s Please Touch community garden.

The Dirt’s Top 10 Books for 2017 also includes “Be Seated” by Laurie Olin, recipient of the 2013 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture; and “The New Landscape Declaration: A Call to Action for the Twenty-First Century,” which features contributions by UVA landscape architecture faculty members Julie Bargmann, Brad Cantrell and Beth Meyer.

CASE District III Honors UVA Engagement Programs

The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education’s annual District III awards competition will recognize two UVA engagement efforts at the district’s meeting in February.

University Advancement earned a grand award for its #GivingToHoosDay campaign, a fundraising appeal tied to “Giving Tuesday,” held in April.

Virginia Nursing Legacy, a biannual alumni magazine produced at the School of Nursing, earned a special merit award.

Three Law Alumni to Be Honored for Public Service

The School of Law will honor three alumni for their public service work during a Feb. 3 ceremony in Caplin Pavilion, as part of the second annual “Shaping Justice” conference.

1987 graduate Jeffrey Kerr, general counsel of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation in Norfolk, will receive the Shaping Justice Award for Extraordinary Achievement.

Kim Rolla and Jeree Thomas, alumnae from 2013 and 2011, respectively, will receive Shaping Justice Rising Star Awards. Rolla is an attorney with the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center’s Civil Rights and Racial Justice Program. Thomas is policy director at Campaign for Youth Justice in Richmond.

This year’s conference, titled “Shaping Justice in an Age of Uncertainty,” will feature keynote speaker Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The conference is sponsored by the Law School, the Program in Law and Public Service, the Mortimer Caplin Public Service Center, the student-run Public Interest Law Association and numerous other student organizations.

Kerr’s team at PETA was named Corporate Counsel magazine’s 2017 Best Legal Department, and was involved in high-profile lawsuits such as a 13th Amendment case against SeaWorld, the first two successful constitutional challenges to “ag-gag” laws, and the “monkey selfie” copyright case.

Rolla joined the Legal Aid Justice Center as a Lewis F. Powell Fellow in 2013. At UVA Law, she was a member of Virginia Law Review and received the Herbert Kramer/Herbert Bangel Community Service Award.

Before joining the Campaign for Youth Justice, Thomas served as a Skadden Fellow with the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center. At UVA Law, she was one of five second-year law students selected for the first class of the school’s Program in Law and Public Service. She was also the recipient of the James Slaughter Award and inducted into UVA’s Raven Society.

A committee comprising public service faculty, administrators and student leaders selected the awardees.

UVA Honored on National ‘100 Great Orthopedics Programs’ List

Becker’s Hospital Review has selected the UVA Health System for its list of 100 hospitals and health systems with great orthopedics programs. 

“The hospitals included on this list are national leaders in orthopedic care,” the national health care publication wrote in its introduction to the list. “Many are high-volume joint replacement centers and have earned recognition for knee and hip replacements as well as spinal procedures. These hospitals and health systems also engage in research and clinical trials to further advance the field of orthopedics.”

“This is an outstanding honor for our faculty, our health care team members and our partners from across the UVA Medical Center and UVA Health System who work diligently each and every day to provide the highest-quality care and service to patients throughout Virginia and beyond.”

- Dr. A. Bobby Chhabra

In selecting UVA Orthopedics to this year’s list, Becker’s highlighted its top 50 ranking by U.S. News and World Report for orthopedics care as well as low infection rates for patients receiving total joint replacements.

“UVA Orthopedics is humbled to be recognized again by Becker’s Hospital Review for our exceptional, comprehensive patient care and outcomes in all orthopedic specialties, particularly hip and knee joint replacement,” Dr. A. Bobby Chhabra, chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery, said. “This is an outstanding honor for our faculty, our health care team members and our partners from across the UVA Medical Center and UVA Health System who work diligently each and every day to provide the highest-quality care and service to patients throughout Virginia and beyond.”

Hospitals named to the list by Becker’s Hospital Review are not ranked and are presented in alphabetical order.

UVA Recognized for Care of Patients With Blood Vessel Tumors

The UVA Health System has been honored as one of 12 Comprehensive Clinical Care Centers in the U.S. for von Hippel-Lindau disease, which causes blood vessel tumors, by the VHL Alliance.

UVA is the only comprehensive center in Virginia for the care of patients with von Hippel-Lindau disease. The condition is caused by a genetic mutation and leads to the development of both benign and cancerous tumors in the nervous system, kidney, pancreas and adrenal gland, as well as other parts of the body, according to the VHL Alliance.

To earn this recognition, centers must have previously been recognized as Clinical Care Centers by the VHL Alliance and have demonstrated “additional depth of expertise and experience treating VHL and their dedication to a true team approach for VHL patients,” the alliance said on its website.

“VHL is a complex, genetic tumor predisposition syndrome that affects multiple organs and may impact an individual’s life in many ways,” said Dr. Ashok R. Asthagiri, a UVA neurosurgeon and director of the UVA VHL Comprehensive Clinical Center. “At UVA, we offer well-coordinated multidisciplinary management that emphasizes close surveillance and treatments that are tailored to the needs of each individual patient. This truly represents the ‘comprehensive’ nature of the care provided by recognized leaders in VHL-related care.”

UVA’s multidisciplinary care team includes medical experts in neurosurgery, urology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, surgical oncology, radiology, palliative care and otolaryngology. Psychosocial aspects of care and living with VHL are emphasized, and support is provided through an oncology social work team. 

Architecture Professor’s Firm Takes National Design Award

Seth McDowell, an assistant professor in the School of Architecture, and his firm, mcdowellespinosa, won the 2017 Best of Design for Young Architects award given by Architect’s Newspaper.

Some of the work featured in the article includes the firm’s Design and Education Farmhouse Renovation; the winning design for the Chicago Center for Architecture, Design, and Education; and other self-built structures.

Senior Editor and juror Matt Shaw said, “mcdowellespinosa show an inventiveness about space and tectonics that roots their practice firmly in the real, even when it seems implausible.”

UVA Doctor Named Journal’s Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Jason P. Sheehan, a professor of neurological surgery and director of the Gamma Knife Center, has been named editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology.

Sheehan is a rare “quadruple ’Hoo,” having earned four degrees from the University: a B.S. in chemical engineering and an M.S. in biomedical engineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, both in 1992; a Ph.D. in biological physics from the School of Medicine in 1997; and an M.D. from the School of Medicine in 1998.

He has written more than 250 peer-reviewed papers and has published several books and numerous invited manuscripts. He reviews manuscripts for the Journal of Neurosurgery, Neurosurgery, World Neurosurgery, Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Nature Clinical Practice Oncology. He runs an active laboratory pursuing translational and basic science research in the area of brain tumors. He also helps to oversee clinical trials for brain tumor patients.

Sheehan was named to the “Best Doctors in America” list, published by Best Doctors Inc., in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Chief Resident Earns Society’s Award

Dr. Bryce Olenczak, chief resident in the School of Medicine’s Department of Plastic Surgery, received the Bostwick Award from the Southeastern Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, given to the “resident with the best project in the field of aesthetic and reconstructive breast surgery,” with applications accepted from all regional plastic surgery societies.

Olenczak presented his abstract, “Fenestration Improves Acellular Dermal Matrix Biointegration: An Investigation of Revascularization with Photoacoustic Microscopy,” Saturday at the 34th Annual Atlanta Breast Surgery Symposium.

Understanding dyslexia, autism-related disorders, the effects of dopamine on the body clock and the mechanics of concussions, as well as developing new brain cancer therapies and imaging techniques, are among the ambitious projects recently funded with the second round of seed grants from the University of Virginia’s multidisciplinary Brain Institute.

The grants total more than $880,000 and will help 10 cross-disciplinary research teams involving 29 faculty members kick-start their projects in basic and translational brain science. The seed funding program is financed by the UVA Strategic Investment Fund through the Board of Visitors, the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President for Research, as part of the University’s plan to invest in innovative, big-picture projects aimed at solving some of society’s biggest challenges in health and other areas.

“The seed-funding program brings neuroscience investigators together from a range of fields to tackle important questions and perform transformative work that differentiates the University’s research enterprise,” said Dr. Jaideep Kapur, director of the UVA Brain Institute and a chaired professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neurology. “By fostering cross-Grounds collaboration, this seed-funding program catalyzes research efforts and supports novel ideas and approaches between the research groups.”

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Kapur said the funded projects have high potential for making impactful initial discoveries that could lead to significant funding from external sources, including federal and state agencies, foundations and private donors.

The awardees represent the College of Arts & Sciences, the Curry School of Education, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Medicine, all working across the disciplines and across school boundaries.

For example, Ali Güler, a biology professor in the College, is working with pharmacology professor Michael Scott in the School of Medicine on an anti-obesity project to understand how reward-processing neuronal circuits modulate the body’s central circadian pacemaker, thereby affecting metabolism.

“The UVA Brain Institute seed funding gives us the opportunity to convert an interesting idea – one that was discussed over a beer at a retreat – into a high-impact project,” Güler said. “It allows us to do exciting science without the worry of fundability from traditional sources. And because we won funding quickly after submitting our proposal, we have been able to put extra effort and resources into this innovative project in a very short time and have already made significant advancements.”

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Güler said that, as a result, his research team is now able to dedicate a graduate student to full-time research, rather than serving part-time as a teaching assistant.

“This will ensure rapid progress and give us a better chance at publishing high-impact papers and securing federal funding in the near future,” Güler said. “We are very grateful for the support.”

Another project, “Concussion-Induced Inflammation: A Clinical and Mechanistic Study,” is integrating a range of perspectives to investigate the short- and long-term physiological effects of head impacts on the brain, such as those experienced in contact sports like football.

The research team includes physicians in the departments of Emergency Medicine and Neurology; and professors in Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences, Neuroscience, Radiology and Medical Imaging, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and in Kinesiology. Those departments span three schools: Medicine, Engineering and the Curry School of Education.

“The ability to obtain funding for pilot data through the Brain Institute is a game-changer for our research group and UVA,” said Donna Broshek, director of UVA’s Neurocognitive Assessment Lab and a co-investigator on the concussion study. “Funding exploratory studies that bring researchers together from across Grounds will enable us to develop novel, team-based scientific studies with high impact.”

Other projects are investigating recurrent brain cancer using state-of-the-art imaging; epigenetics in early child development; the role of antibodies in activating immune cells for cancer therapy; and others.

This is the second year that the Brain Institute is funding multipronged approaches to tackling challenging problems involving the nervous system. Last year, seven projects involving 21 researchers received seed grants.

The UVA Brain Institute was established two years ago as one of currently four new pan-University institutes designed to respond to and help solve major problems and issues affecting society. The other institutes, established under the University’s strategic Cornerstone Plan, are the Data Science Institute, the Global Infectious Diseases Institute and the Environmental Resilience Institute.

The University of Virginia is deploying a new strategy to grow its research enterprise, a program called “Explore-to-Build” that provides seed funding to draw faculty members together from around Grounds to address some of society’s most vexing problems.

Launched in fall 2017 by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost and the Office of the Vice President for Research as part of the pan-University institute initiative, Explore-to-Build seeks innovative, collaborative interdisciplinary projects from groups of faculty with a vision to grow their work into a future institute.

“This effort is part of a larger vision to grow UVA’s research,” Vice President for Research M.K. (Ram) Ramasubramanian said. “The Explore-to-Build initiative serves to bridge the gap from ‘emergence’ to ‘prominence,’ while the pan-University institutes serves to move the research from ‘prominence’ to ‘preeminence.’

“As part of the Explore-to-Build initiative, the teams will have access to mentors to help them enhance their focus and build a collaborative team that is effective.”

Three projects have been selected for seed funding under the Explore-to-Build initiative:

• the InstituteforDynamics of Healthy Development, led by Steven Boker, professor of psychology;
• the Cyber Innovation and Society Institute, led by Jack Davidson, professor of computer science;
• and the Initiative for the Study of Equity Through Community-Engaged Scholarship, led by Dayna Matthew, professor of law.

Each will receive $100,000 to advance their exploratory research by stimulating creative collaborations at a large scale, and to build teams better-prepared to compete in the next pan-University institute funding cycle.

“It is exciting to see Ram expand the overall research strategy in innovative ways,”  Thomas C. Katsouleas, executive vice president and provost, said. “We are eager to work with these dynamic teams and help them grow to be global leaders in their topic.”

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While these researchers are encouraged to apply to become the next pan-University institutes, that process will be open for anyone interested in applying. The round is anticipated to be open in September with submission due in mid-November.

Brief descriptions of the topical areas to be undertaken by the newly funded Explore-to-Build teams are provided below:

Institute for Dynamics of Healthy Development
This institute will organize and promote research that pertains to understanding processes of human development (biological, psychological, educational, social and environmental), and in particular will focus on the trajectories of development in healthy individuals. While preventing and curing disease is important, insufficient resources have been devoted to the variety and complexity of healthy development over the lifespan.

Cyber Innovation and Society Institute
The institute’s mission is to carry out research and education initiatives that focus on the complex technical, social and policy challenges posed by emerging cyber innovations to ensure that cyber technology benefits all of society equally, fairly and dependably.

Initiative for the Study of Equity Through Community Engaged Scholarship
This initiative seeks to produce high-impact scholarship that addresses systemic inequities through community-engaged research. This team will develop ways to translate its research into interventions that contribute to repairing historic inequities, broken trust and trauma experienced in places where leading research universities can apply their intellectual and other resources to educate students, disseminate knowledge and collaborate with communities to build just, sustainable and democratic institutions that support an equitable society.

Three years ago, the University established its first pan-University institutes drawing on the University’s broad and specific intellectual capital to tackle major 21st-century issues. The first, the UVA Data Science Institute, was established in 2014, with the UVA Brain Institute following in 2016 and the Environmental Resilience and Global Infectious Diseases institutes in 2017.

Click here for updates on the pan-University institutes initiatives.

University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan on Monday announced the formation of a new President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.

The commission will “explore and report on UVA’s role in the period of racial segregation that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries,” Sullivan said in remarks given at UVA’s School of Law.

“As with many universities and many states at the time, UVA and the Commonwealth of Virginia were involved in segregation and other practices related to racial inequality,” the president said.

“Virginia was the epicenter of the ‘Massive Resistance’ movement in the 1950s that sought to oppose public school desegregation,” Sullivan added. “During this period, public schools here in Charlottesville were closed to prevent desegregation, although the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals eventually overturned the closings.”

The President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation will complement the work of the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University.

Launched in 2013, the slavery commission is exploring UVA’s historical relationship to slavery and its legacies, setting the table for continued research and education on the subject.

One of the slavery commission’s most tangible outcomes thus far is recommending the creation of the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Fundraising efforts are underway to build the circular stone memorial, the design for which was approved by the University Board of Visitors in June. The names of enslaved laborers who worked at the University will be etched on the interior wall of the memorial, to be located on a grassy slope east of Brooks Hall and across the street from the Corner.

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Last fall, the University held “Universities, Slavery, Public Memory and the Built Landscape,” a large symposium that helped launch UVA’s Bicentennial celebration.

Sullivan told the audience in the packed Caplin Pavilion that there are stories of the University’s complicity in the age of segregation.

For example, in the 1900s Harvey E. Jordan, a former dean of UVA’s School of Medicine, was a proponent of the now-discredited theory of eugenics, which held that those with so-called “undesirable traits” should be discouraged from reproducing. Last year, a medical building named for Jordan was renamed to honor Dr. Vivian Pinn, a 1967 graduate of the School of Medicine and the only African-American female in her class.

Continuing her remarks, Sullivan said there are also stories of “bravery and heroism among many people at UVA who took action to oppose segregation and its underlying beliefs.”

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Stories like those of the late School of Law alumnus Gregory H. Swanson, who gained admittance in 1950 after filing a successful lawsuit, becoming the first African-American student admitted to UVA and the School of Law. Sullivan introduced her new commission at the Law School’s commemoration for Swanson, which is part of UVA’s continuing bicentennial celebration as well as UVA’s Community Martin Luther King celebration. (Swanson died in 1992.)

His enrollment inspired other African-Americans to come to UVA and helped spur the integration of other all-white institutions around Virginia.

“The President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation will explore these and related elements of our shared past,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said the commission is being chartered for four years, and was done so in consultation with and the endorsement of President-elect James E. Ryan, who begins his term as UVA’s ninth president in October. Sullivan’s term as president is set to conclude this summer.

The commission will provide advice and recommendations on appropriate documentation and recognition of this historical period. Sullivan is seeking nominations for commission membership, and appointments will be made this spring. Information about the nomination process will be forthcoming.

A new comprehensive literature review by University of Virginia faculty members reveals that female athletes could have an increased risk of suffering sports-related concussions.

Other gender differences in how concussions are experienced and treated are inconclusive, reinforcing that concussion requires highly personalized care.

In recent years, the topic of sport-related concussions – particularly surrounding football and the NFL – has risen from near-obscurity to the front page of the New York Times, best-selling books and blockbuster movies. But when everyone’s talking about football, where do female athletes fit in?

The answer might surprise you. In a comprehensive literature review published in the October issue of the journal Clinics in Sports Medicine, Curry School of Education professor Jacob Resch and his co-authors report that female athletes have an increased risk for sport concussion, and tend to report more severe symptoms compared to male athletes.

Researchers analyzed nearly 160 studies on sport concussion in female athletes – a relatively understudied area, where individual studies have shown conflicting results. Resch said the goal was to provide an unbiased, thorough summary of where the research stands on the question, “Are there differences in how male and female athletes experience sport concussion?” The research encompassed three stages of concussion: before injury (predisposition), at the time of injury (symptom burden) and recovery.

Resch said the data consistently show that female athletes report concussions at a higher frequency than male athletes. According to Resch, this was true throughout the majority of articles that included sports played by both males and females, such as basketball, hockey or soccer.

Reasons for this difference are still unclear. Possible factors include biological differences, such as hormone fluctuations or neck strength. Some studies suggest that women may simply be more likely to report their symptoms than men. Most likely, a combination of several factors are involved. The bottom line, Resch said, is that much more concussion research is needed – and most importantly, health care professionals should always treat each case individually.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re male or female – everyone is going to bring their own set of predisposing factors or symptoms or mood states to the injury,” he said. “We still have a lot to learn about concussion, period, in addition to how sex may contribute to the injury. At the end of the day, concussions are and should be treated on an individual basis.”

Susan Saliba, a Curry School professor of kinesiology and an experienced physical therapist and athletic trainer who has also studied concussion, said that the nature of the injury makes conclusive findings rare. Many personal factors – such as age, access to health care, medication and anxiety – can affect how an athlete experiences concussion, as well as how quickly they are likely to recover.

“One of the problems [with concussion] is that the diagnosis is based on symptoms,” she said. “If we could identify the actual presence and severity of a concussion, it would certainly help. We are at the point where we understand that this is a really big deal, but we still don’t have all of the tools that we need.”

That’s why, she said, it’s important to continue studying concussion. More information only helps clinicians, athletes and families understand the norms and expectations of an injury, which in turn informs discussions and allows them to ask deeper, more specific questions.

This is particularly important for female athletes. If men and women do experience concussion differently, Resch said, clinicians must be aware in order to measure their symptoms and recovery against the most accurate baseline. In fact, a common misconception is that male athletes are more susceptible to concussion, when the opposite appears to be true.

“This information, and learning how to better care for the female athlete, is really important,” Resch said. “If you look at women’s ice hockey, it’s three times the risk of football. But, unfortunately, you don’t see media coverage highlighting women’s ice hockey, which leads to limited attention.”

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The senior author on the paper, Donna Broshek, a clinical neuropsychologist and professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences in UVA’s School of Medicine, directs the Neurocognitive Assessment Lab and co-directs the Acute Concussion Evaluation Clinic at UVA. She said this type of research makes advances along the path toward more effective treatments.

“It is important to study female athletes because such research might identify risk factors for concussion that could potentially be modified to reduce risk of concussion, or to identify ways of managing or treating their concussions that might be distinct or unique,” she said. “For example, if female athletes have different symptoms depending on the phase of their menstrual cycle, that might have some treatment implications. There are many factors that affect recovery, however, and clinical management should be individualized.”

For any athlete, dealing with a concussion can be scary and confusing. The key, Resch said, is how clinicians interpret the research and present it to athletes and their parents.

For example, imagine the difference between a doctor saying, “You will take longer to recover because you’re a woman” versus “You may take longer to recover, but I want you to understand that it’s normal, and may be expected. We’re tracking your individual symptoms in order to be certain of your recovery.”

“The delivery of that information is so key, because you want an athlete to walk away from that appointment feeling empowered,” Resch said. “It’s a matter of understanding the risks and consequences and what’s normal. That kind of candid conversation is what I think sometimes is missed.”

In all concussion cases, Resch cautions clinicians to make informed, evidence-based choices, to look at the breadth of articles on the topic, and to avoid stereotyping any athlete into a particular recovery paradigm.

As for athletes and their parents? “Take a deep breath,” he said. “If you’re concerned about sport concussion, the best thing to do is to talk to your health care provider, such as your school’s certified athletic trainer, to understand what is currently being done to assess your child prior to, following and throughout recovery from a concussion. If absent, request a pre-injury assessment based on clinical measures of cognition (memory, reaction time, information processing), balance and symptoms.

“Also, discuss who is involved with your school’s concussion management team and the roles that they play. Parents should be aware of what resources are available to better inform themselves about concussion. If an informational session is being held about concussion or other injuries, plan on attending.”

Of course, this is relevant advice for all athletes and their parents. The more knowledge an athlete has to help them make informed medical decisions, the better – male or female.

Valentine’s Day brought another sadly familiar hail of deadly, semi-automatic gunfire at a school, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The alleged shooter, a former student, killed 17 people.

Sobering scenes of weeping parents and children and students evacuating their school in a line, hands on the shoulders of the classmate in front of them, again stoked the heated national debate about mass killings at schools in the United States. Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut – the scene of the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting – reminded his colleagues that “this happens nowhere else other than the United States of America.”

University of Virginia forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell is the architect of the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines, which are widely adopted by schools in Virginia and help teachers and administrators assess and address lower-level threats like bullying and teasing before they escalate to deadly levels.

Cornell, whose expertise in threat assessment has been featured on the “PBS News Hour,” The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and elsewhere, participated in a Facebook Live session on Thursday to discuss school safety.

One of his greatest takeaways was that there is a huge imbalance in the resources allotted to school security and those given to violence prevention. A big believer in the need to support school security, Cornell said “prevention has to start before there is a gunman at your door.”

“If you are thinking about ‘What if we have a gunman?’ that’s fine, but that’s not prevention,” he said. Think of the people who are troubled, those who are distressed and need help, Cornell added. The armored vehicles that were dispatched to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Wednesday could fund “many, many schools’ professional development and school counseling resources to help kids.”

After the Sandy Hook massacre and the shootings at Virginia Tech, Virginia became the first state to require threat assessment teams in every public school, partnering with Cornell, a professor in UVA’s Curry School of Education, who has been studying school safety for more than 26 years.

A recent study from Cornell found the vast majority of threats made in Virginia public schools were judged to be not serious. Schools want to avoid both overreacting to the student threats that are not serious and underreacting to the threats that are, he said.

Another of his studies found that Virginia public schools that employ Cornell’s threat assessment technique had smaller racial disparities in their long-term suspension rates and that successful threat assessment was associated with lower rates of out-of-school suspension overall.

Gun control, mental health, violence prevention, and the Second Amendment surged to the front lines of passionate national debate this month about what can or should happen in response to the Florida school massacre that left 17 dead.

Thursday brought the news that both President Trump and Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s chief executive, support arming teachers as a potential way to prevent school shootings. “We have to harden our schools, not soften them,” Trump told media.

Tish Jennings, an expert with extensive research on the effects of stress on teachers, is an associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. She shared her views with UVA Today on teachers, stress and arming educators.

Q. What does your research reveal about the level of stress in the teaching profession? 

A. Teacher stress is at an all-time high. Nearly 50 percent of teachers report high daily stress during the school year. This stress is caused by dwindling school budgets that impact their resources and salaries, growing numbers of students coming to school with challenging educational and behavioral problems, demanding parents and unsupportive administrations. On top of this, measures that apply untested and questionable accountability measures and reduce teacher autonomy and instructional creativity have resulted in dramatic reductions in job satisfaction and an increase in teacher burnout and turnover. Indeed, the nation is facing a serious and growing teacher shortage.

Q. How does stress affect the quality of instruction?

A. Teachers’ stress interferes with their performance and the quality of instruction in several ways. Teachers are asked to manage their emotions in one of the most difficult contexts imaginable. They must maintain their professionalism in a room full of kids that is both emotionally and attentionally demanding, where no one can leave – they are all virtually captive – and they have no privacy. In other professions, when we are faced with an emotionally challenging situation, we can usually take a break and calm down. Stress is contagious. When teachers are feeling stress, their students are feeling stress, too, and we now know that the stress response interferes with brain functions that are critical to academic learning. The stress response also interferes with perception. Stressed out teachers often misinterpret student behaviors and may take them personally, scenarios more likely to result in unfair disciplinary measures and interefere with student-teacher relationships. Teacher turnover also negatively impacts student learning. The cost of teacher turnover is estimated to be over $7 billion per year, costs our schools, faced with dwindling resources for instruction, cannot afford.

Q. What’s your early evaluation of how arming teachers with guns would affect the learning environment and stress situation?

A. Given what I know as a former teacher and a scientist who studies teacher stress, I would expect that more guns in schools wielded by teachers would be extremely dangerous and would negatively impact the learning environment. Teachers spend a great deal of time and energy creating and maintaining an emotionally supportive learning environment because they know that kids learn best when they feel safe and connected to their school community. When a teacher is feeling stress and she over-reacts to student behavior, her reaction erodes the relationships with her students and the healthy school environment.

The trained law enforcement officer who was stationed at the Parkland, Florida, school froze, rather than using his training to protect the students. If a trained officer froze, how likely would teachers freeze under similar conditions, especially when their stress response is already heightened.

More weapons in schools pose an additional danger. How will they be kept safe? Over the past 50 years, our schools have been designed to look more like prisons than warm learning environments. I’m afraid that arming teachers will put the last nail in the coffin. I agree with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School math teacher Jim Gard quoted in the Washington Post: “If it gets to the point where we have to arm our teachers, then we have completely failed, completely failed as a society.”

Q. Your research shows stress already is leading to teacher burnout and contributing to teachers leaving the profession. How would a plan to train and arm some teachers with firearms affect the ability to grow the teaching profession?

A. We become teachers because we care about kids and want to support their growth, development and learning. Young people come to the teaching profession with altruistic motives and the best intentions. But it takes years of higher education, experience and ongoing professional learning to become an excellent teacher, who could burnout within five years, as is the case for 50 percent of U.S. teachers today. If we add law enforcement duties to their already demanding and underpaid jobs, more experienced teachers like Mr. Gard will quit or retire and fewer young people will choose teaching as a profession. Arming teachers would fuel an already developing “perfect storm,” increasing burnout and attrition and decreasing numbers of young people joining the profession – that will have negative impacts on our schools for years to come.

President Trump has suggested giving bonuses to teachers who carry guns in schools. If some teachers get a bonus for carrying a gun, it will create an unfair situation for teachers. Why would gun-carrying be more highly valued than any other extra skill that a teacher brings to her profession? This will create tension among school staff.

In one of her most recent studies, Tanya Evans faced a Herculean task: She needed to convince 6-year-olds to stay completely still for minutes at a time.

As a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, Evans works with data gathered through magnetic resonance imaging machines, or MRIs, which require a subject to stay completely still. While convincing young children not to wiggle around in the machine can be a challenge, the reward is a rich set of brain data that sheds light on how our brains process information.

In that particular study, as each child solved arithmetic problems, Evans was able to record their brain activity – a physiological marker of learning, happening in real time.

Evans is a new addition to UVA’s Curry School of Education faculty and the research team at CASTL, the Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning. A researcher in the emerging field of educational neuroscience, she focuses on studying the brains of children who struggle to learn reading and math.

Here, she shares how brain data adds a new dimension to education research, the value of working across disciplines and why it’s never too late to learn something new.

Q. Your background is in chemical engineering, neuroscience and medicine. How did you end up at an education school?

A. I’ve always been interested in K-12 education and learning more generally. Before beginning graduate school, I spent some time teaching K-12 students. Pursuing neuroscience research with my graduate school mentor, an expert in learning disabilities, was a natural synthesis of multiple interests.

I’ve also always loved research and science, but for me, there was something unsatisfying about studying chemicals and machines; I find the complexity of human behavior much more interesting. So educational neuroscience ended up being the perfect way for me to apply my scientific background to a field focused on human development.

Chemical engineering is fundamentally about understanding systems, and as an educational neuroscientist, I’m applying that ability to understand systems to the study of something that’s a bit more tangible – learning and education.

Q. Educational neuroscience is a relatively new area of study. What does it mean exactly, and where did it come from?

A. I think of educational neuroscience as an endeavor in the science of learning. Applying neuroscience knowledge and methodologies in educational research gives additional insight into how learning happens, physiologically, in the brain.

Neuroscience can be studied on a number of levels – some neuroscientists will spend an entire career studying just one tiny part of the brain. Combining decades of research in the study of learning with a greater understanding of higher-order cognitive systems allows for insights to be brought to bear on research questions relevant to a child sitting in the classroom.

Interdisciplinary science requires willingness from multiple fields; it takes both neuroscientists and educational researchers who are willing to learn how to speak a common language. Neuroscience needed to mature enough as a field to bring the understanding and tools relevant to questions being asked in educational research.  

Q. What can neuroscience data add to applied education research?

A. Neuroscience adds value to classroom measurements and behavioral tests because with brain data, we’re able to add information about the physiological mechanisms that drive skills or behaviors.

For instance, let’s say a study is able to increase children’s literacy skills through a reading intervention. The addition of brain data allows you to explore at the brain level what is was driving that effect. We can see if it’s connected to memory systems, phonological processing, object perception or even a combination of factors.

A physiological marker of learning, intervention effectiveness or skill level in a particular domain can provide solid insight into why we see certain behaviors. It can be particularly useful in instances where measurements are limited, or where results are inconsistent at a behavioral level – in these cases, brain data can be an adjudicating factor.

Q. Can you share an example from your recent work?

A. In a recent study published with my colleagues at Stanford University, we looked at the relationship between children’s attitudes toward math, their math performance and their brain function. Essentially, we found that children who have positive attitudes toward math perform better on math assessments – and this is mediated by brain systems involved in memory. We expected involvement in emotional and affective regions of the brain, but finding a relationship between a child’s attitudes and beliefs and their core learning systems is fascinating.

Q. As a neuroscientist, what benefits does a position within a school of education offer you and your work?

A. I’m incredibly excited to work more closely with educational researchers. It would be naïve of me, as a neuroscientist, to think that I can come up with the most relevant research questions without input from those with extensive experience working with students and educators in classrooms. I think that these collaborations will give rise to some exciting research.

For example, in the past, I’ve worked on teams designing educational interventions where everyone in the room was a neuroscientist. In one project that my colleagues and I are working on now, we have clinical psychologists, developmental scientists and experts in curriculum design, as well as parents and teachers at the table. This open dialogue is extremely important.

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I’m excited by the potential to do what I see as high-impact work. The prospect of collaborating with educational researchers who are engaged in educational policy, and to be able to do science that could make have a direct impact on children’s lives, is incredibly inspiring.

Q. Interdisciplinary work inevitably involves a lot of collaboration with people who might not think the same way that you do. Why is that important, and what kind of collaborations are you looking forward to?

A. As an educational neuroscientist, I am truly immersed in interdisciplinary science. The work that I do requires people to come together from disparate fields and speak a common language. It’s pretty valuable to take people who were trained in different disciplines and put them together to work toward a common goal. If you always surround yourself with like-minded people, then your ability to think outside of the box and ask relevant questions is limited.

When I first came to Curry, I didn’t realize the extent of the diversity of faculty research and training. There are many researchers within Curry who are studying human development more generally, as well as those with a focus on student motivation, classroom instruction, educational equality and access, school transitions, policy, nutrition and exercise.

I’m also really excited about connecting with researchers across Grounds through UVA’s interdisciplinary initiatives, such as the Brain Institute and the Data Science Institute. I think that UVA is a unique place in that it has such strengths in disciplines that all cross my interests – education, medicine and psychology. I feel very fortunate to be here.

Q. What’s one thing that you’d like everyone to know about the science of learning?

A. With children in particular, I think we need to get away from the idea of fixed capability – that we are born with certain strengths and weaknesses that cannot be changed. Children come into a classroom with a high degree of capability, but not always the right tools and the right skills.

Neuroscience research has shown us that the brain is not modular – in other words, one particular brain region isn’t responsible for one particular function. Your brain is comprised of a network of regions that work in concert to accomplish a given task, and its plasticity and malleability are astounding.

This month, University of Virginia developmental psychologist Tish Jennings traveled to India to share her latest research on mindfulness and teacher stress with the Dalai Lama. In itself, the opportunity is an honor and an accomplishment. For Jennings, it’s also a moment nearly 15 years in the making.

In many ways, the story begins in 2000, when the 14th Dalia Lama, the former Tenzin Gyatso, held a meeting with experts and researchers on the topic of destructive emotions. Out of that meeting, a question emerged: Could helping teachers manage their own stress improve classroom environments, and, in turn, student learning? The question became a research project called “Cultivating Emotional Balance,” which aimed to reduce stress in teachers through mindfulness training.

Meanwhile, as a Ph.D. student studying developmental psychology, Jennings took a listserv management job with the Mind & Life Institute, a nonprofit organization co-founded by the Dalai Lama that works to advance the fie­ld of contemplative science. Jennings caught wind of the Cultivating Emotional Balance project and was immediately intrigued. The project’s leaders had chosen to focus their research on teachers, largely on the assumption that happier teachers probably teach better, which could lead to better student learning outcomes.

As a former teacher and long-time mindfulness practitioner, Jennings recognized the assumption. She wanted to test it. So, after graduation, she joined the team – and began a career that would eventually land her in India, presenting her research to the Dalai Lama himself.

The Dalai Lama & Mindfulness

Since before he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the Dalai Lama has made education a central component of his teachings. In particular, he has been a leading advocate for social-emotional learning – or as he often describes it, educating both the mind and the heart. In a 2017 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote: “My wish is that, one day, formal education will pay attention to the education of the heart, teaching love, compassion, justice, forgiveness, mindfulness, tolerance and peace.”

Mindfulness itself is one tool in the social-emotional learning toolkit. With origins in Eastern spiritual practices, today’s Westernized secular form of mindfulness is both a type of meditation and a mindset. In essence, it’s the learned ability to experience the present moment with openness and curiosity and without judgment. Evidence has shown that practicing mindfulness can improve emotional regulation and reduce stress.

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“It’s no longer a fringe thing,” she said.

While mindfulness has many applications, Jennings’ work has focused primarily on teachers. As a former classroom teacher, she knows just how stressful that environment can be. Imagine being confined to a room, charged with controlling a classroom full of young students – each with his or her own set of emotional, behavioral and cognitive challenges – while under constant pressure to improve test scores, all within a school day.

Even in the best scenarios, Jennings said, a teacher’s attention is pulled in many directions at once as she attends to all of these competing needs, all while keeping track of the content she is teaching. She may not take time to check in and monitor how she is feeling. The body’s physical stress response can arise without her even noticing, and suddenly, she’s feeling frustrated and more likely to overreact to student disruptions.

“When you’re in the heat of that angry moment, your mind is telling you that you have all the right in the world to be angry at that person, and you don’t see what you’re looking at clearly,” Jennings explained. “It distorts your perception.”

In a learning environment, stress management matters. “When your stress response is triggered, whether you’re a student or a teacher, the priority is not learning,” Jennings said. “The part of your brain – the prefrontal cortex – that you need to focus your attention on learning just kind of goes offline.”

Practicing mindfulness gives you the skills to see a situation more clearly and respond thoughtfully, rather than automatically reacting. For teachers, whose jobs rely on connecting with their students, this can make or break a career.

CARE for Teachers

Back at the Cultivating Emotional Balance project in 2004, Jennings received a Varela Award grant from the Mind & Life Institute to study the training’s effects. Jennings and her colleagues planned a pilot program to test whether or not mindfulness practices for teachers would translate to real differences in the classroom.

In order to do that, they needed a classroom measurement tool. They turned to the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS, an observational instrument developed by now-Curry School Dean Robert Pianta to assess classroom quality in classrooms from pre-kindergarten through high school.

“That’s when I first became familiar with Pianta’s work and the Curry School,” Jennings said. 

Ultimately, Jennings’ pilot project, as well as a follow-up study, did not find the impacts on classroom interactions for which she had hoped. But instead of giving up, she consulted with Paul Ekman, one of the leaders of the original Cultivating Emotional Balance project. Together, they realized one important puzzle piece was missing from their training: classrooms.

“When you reduce stress, it’s not necessarily going to result in someone behaving differently,” Jennings said, “unless you teach them how to manage the stress of that particular context.”

In other words, in order to help teachers improve their classrooms, you have to show them how to apply mindfulness concepts in the classroom.

Jennings moved to the nonprofit Garrison Institute, where she put that idea into action by co-founding a program called Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education, or CARE for Teachers. CARE for Teachers is a professional development program for teachers that combines mindful awareness and compassion practices with emotional skills instruction – specifically addressing the challenges and demands teachers face in the classroom.

“We took the mindfulness and the emotional skills training that were a part of [Cultivating Emotional Balance], but then we added some elements that connected to their understanding of what triggers their own stress in the classroom,” Jennings said. “We started realizing that, with training, teachers can manage that stress better.”

Since joining the Curry faculty in 2014, Jennings has continued to expand, study and improve the CARE program. CARE for Teachers offers an annual five-day summer retreat, or four daylong sessions spread out through a semester. Teachers practice role-playing stressful scenarios, learn to identify their personal triggers and practice techniques to manage stress.

Through CARE, Jennings and her team have trained countless teachers in how to maintain a supportive learning environment. Jennings herself has led training sessions in Charlottesville and throughout Virginia, and she’s also conducted numerous studies examining the program’s effects.

“I think what we’ve learned over this last decade or so is that, to promote learning, we really have to pay attention to the social-emotional environment – and a big part of that is the teacher’s own well-being,” Jennings said. “The CARE program is designed to help teachers understand that, practice it, and apply it to their daily teaching.“

Francien Vigour, a fifth-grade math teacher at Walker Upper Elementary School in Charlottesville, said the five-day training transformed her ability to handle stressful situations in the classroom. Small changes to her routine, like setting intentions on her morning commute, translate to big changes in the classroom.

“I learned to take care of myself first,” she said. “This year has been really difficult, and the reason I’m making it is because of CARE.”

A Dialogue with the Dalai Lama

Earlier this month, Jennings presented her research at the annual Mind & Life Dialogue, held at the Dalai Lama’s personal residence in Dharamsala, India. This year’s theme, “Reimagining Human Flourishing,” aimed to “focus on education, in light of His Holiness’ longstanding priority and deep commitment to secular ethics education initiatives.”

The dialogue lasted five days, and included both faculty presentations and discussions. Jennings was one of 17 professors selected to present their research on social-emotional learning.

Jennings presented some of her latest findings – and this time, the effects are clear. In results from a large randomized control trial, teachers who had participated in CARE reported direct positive effects on their psychological distress, stress associated with time urgency, mindfulness and emotional regulation, as compared to a control group. In addition, classroom interactions of teachers trained in CARE were independently observed to be significantly more emotionally supportive and productive.

“We collected teacher reports on over 5,000 students, and we found significant improvements in engagement among students who were in CARE classrooms compared to others,” Jennings said.

In addition, students initially low on social skills improved in reading competence.

“That, to me, is really exciting,” Jennings said. “Because for kids who don’t have the support at home like they need, it could make a big difference.”

Mainly, Jennings appreciated the opportunity to highlight her research and raise awareness about teacher stress and the positive effects of programs like CARE for Teachers. “The more positive attention that comes to these concerns, the more people get on board, and the more policymakers get it on their radar,” she said.

But personally, the trip holds even more significance. Beginning with the creation of the Creating Emotional Balance project, the Dalai Lama’s advocacy for the value of peaceful, happy classrooms has been a connecting thread throughout Jennings’ career. From her work with that project, to the professional network she built through the Mind & Life Institute, to the development of CARE – Jennings said his influence has been critical in shaping not only her field of research, but also the trajectory of her own career.

Sharing her research with the Dalai Lama himself represented a full-circle moment: an opportunity to discuss her life’s work with the person who, in many ways, started it all.

“How often do you get invited to do something like that?” Jennings asked. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

Members of the University of Virginia’s Class of 2022 are so excited – and they just can’t hide it.

On Thursday evening, the Office of Admission released its “regular action” admissions decisions – those for applicants who participated in the normal, non-early-action admissions cycle.

Using the hashtag #UVA22, the newly admitted students took to social media to share their excitement.

A total of 37,222 students applied for admission – an increase of 423 applicants from 2017 – and 9,850 were offered a place in the class that will enter this fall.

The offer rate decreased by nearly 1 percent to 26.5 percent, though wait-listed students have yet to be factored in.

At 34 percent, the School of Architecture had the highest offer rate, followed by the School of Engineering and Applied Science (30 percent), the College of Arts & Sciences (26 percent), the Curry School of Education (19 percent) and the School of Nursing (12 percent).

Accepted students had a mean SAT score of 1,431, with 93 percent ranking in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class.

The Class of 2022 speaks to the University’s commitment to making an affordable, world-class education available to high-achieving students from all walks of life. Ten percent of all newly admitted students are first-generation college students and 35 percent come from minority backgrounds.

The enrollment target for the class is 3,725 students, with 67 percent coming from Virginia.

All students offered admission have until May 1 to accept their offers.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at the University of Virginia and we are thrilled to offer admission to this diverse and accomplished group of high school seniors,” Dean of Admission Gregory W. Roberts said. “We are confident that those who select UVA will be transformed by their experience and will leave a lasting impact on this university and our community as undergraduates.”

Moments after the electronic admissions notifications went live online, new students were flooding UVA’s social media channels using the hashtag #UVA22.

Here’s a sampling:

From studying attitudes toward malaria in South Africa to promoting water filtration in South Africa and Guatemala, 57 University of Virginia students will use Center for Global Health scholarships this summer to address public health problems with local partners around the globe.

The UVA Center for Global Health’s University Scholar Awards, evaluated and awarded by an interdisciplinary committee, fund projects up to $5,000 for an individual and $15,000 for a group. This year, the center has funded 27 projects in 13 countries, which include a study of the feasibility of telemedicine in several countries, a public health perspective on violence in St. Kitts & Nevis and an examination of cardiac disease during pregnancy in Rwanda. Several projects build on previous years’ work – such as assessing cancer treatment in Peru or studying the impact of bison grazing on the environment of the Great Plains.

The scholars, who represent multiple schools and disciplines, will conduct six- to eight-week, intensive, mentored research projects that allow students to engage in community-based projects with collaborative researchers who provide critical mentoring, guidance and support.

The University Scholar awards, the Center for Global Health’s largest single program, encourage students to combine their interests, concerns and ideas. Students travel to Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and communities in the Unites States, where they engage in community-driven inquiry and form local partnerships.

“The CGH University Scholar Awardees are a fantastic group of students,” said Dr. Rebecca Dillingham, the center’s director. “The quality of the applications improves each year. We are delighted to help to support the students’ collaborations with community partners, as they work toward identification, development and evaluation of potential solutions to global health challenges.”

Candidates must complete a comprehensive application describing their projects and personal goals, as well as undergo an interview by a selection committee consisting of faculty from across Grounds and a former University Scholar.

“While conducting their projects, the students learn about the communities’ health challenges and ideas for addressing them, and about how they, the students, can partner with the communities to imagine, design and implement solutions,” Dillingham said. “This experience is consistently described as transformative by CGH student scholars. The students hone skills not only in global health research and evaluation, but also in cultural humility, teamwork and resilience.”

This year’s scholars are:

• Onyedikachi Aligbe of Lagos State, Nigeria, a first-year medical student; Navya Annapareddy of Haymarket, a first-year biomedical engineering student; and Sarah Hour of Lynchburg, a first-year medical student, who will work in Rwanda analyzing the medical history of pregnant women with heart disease who are referred to the University of Rwanda-allied hospitals. Additionally, they will identify the effects of cardiac disease during pregnancy on adverse fetal and neonatal outcomes.

• Simran Budhwar of Woodbridge, a second-year public affairs major, and William Burris of Richmond, a third-year nursing student, who will examine factors leading to patients acquiring diseases in the intensive care units of Rwandan hospitals, and how these can be limited.

• Grace Alexandra Brown of Alexandria, a first-year medical student, who will study advanced emergency airway management skills in Rwanda.

• Piper Emily Shifflett of Mechanicsville, a third-year global public health and biology student, and Sara Grace Krivacsy, of Northport, New York, a second-year global public health major, who will assess the initial knowledge and attitudes of study participants toward malaria in South Africa.

• Megan Dombrowski of Marstons Mills, Massachusetts, a second-year student in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, also majoring in global security and justice, and Charlotte Brake of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, a second-year student in the Batten School, also majoring in global development studies, who will contribute to a study on alcohol-related sexual risk among University of Venda students in Limpopo, South Africa, with the interviews providing a larger-scale survey methodology to be applied to the province beyond the university setting.

•  Merly Konathapally of Virginia Beach, a second-year biochemistry major, and Olivia Jones of Lorton, a third-year biomedical engineer major, who will further analyze the long-term impact of the PureMadi point-of-use water technology intervention, examining the environmental water quality and surveying the existing household water storage to estimate the process’s effects on the health of children in Limpopo, South Africa.

• Lauren Greenwood of Arlington Heights, Illinois, a third-year human biology major, who will examine young people’s management of uncertainty – specifically, how young people in Khayelitsha, South Africa, think and speak about their futures given the uncertainty of their circumstances, especially including education, employment and sexuality.

• Cameron Haddad of Tucker, Georgia, a third-year economics major, and Kamwoo Lee of Seoul, South Korea, a Ph.D. candidate in systems and information engineering, who will examine behavior of the traditionally religious or those with dual beliefs and their interaction with the health system in Limpopo, South Africa.

• John Hensien of Charlottesville, a third-year human biology major, who will study whether early malnutrition and stunting contributes to a later risk of metabolic syndrome amongst the Malnutrition and Enteric Disease cohort in Tanzania, building on previous research.

• Michelle Walsh of Charlottesville, a Ph.D. candidate in religious studies, who will explore the relationships between culture, mental health and Buddhist practices in Bhutan. While Buddhist meditation practices have been used as interventions to address mental health issues worldwide, the impact of contextual factors has not been adequately studied and Bhutanese officials report there is an increase in the rate of suicide.

• Reanna Panagides of Sterling, a second-year nursing student; Annika Rhinehart of Abington, a third-year nursing student; Christine Guzman of Culpeper, a third-year nursing student; Mira Sridharan of Chantilly, a second-year economics and biology major; and Abigail Maclin of Destin, Florida, a third-year global health major, who will work on developing a curriculum focused on sexual/reproductive health in Nicaragua’s Southern Atlantic Autonomous Region.

•  Imani Morgan Marks-Symeonides of Glen Allen; Danielle Morrone of Charlottesville; Shernai Banks of Norristown, Pennsylvania; and Charlotte Pitt of Charlottesville, all third-year Master of Science in Nursing/Clinical Nurse Leader students in the School of Nursing, who will explore the care continuum of cervical cancer, from screening to detection to colposcopy and through follow-up treatment, in Bluefields, Nicaragua.

• Mary Collins of Arlington Heights, Illinois, a fourth-year biology and Italian studies major; Elizabeth Watt of Yorktown, a fourth-year anthropology and global studies major; Patrick Robinson of Fairfax, a third-year global studies major; and Lina Hong of Brookeville, Maryland, a second-year global public health major, who will produce, with the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, a pilot curriculum to improve the understanding that the association’s rural women have of occupational health and safety, including what their exposures are and how to address them.

•  Jack Capra of Vienna, a fourth-year chemistry and religious studies major, and Jessica Duska of Charlottesville, a fourth-year religious studies major, who will work in the Dominican Republic to better understand the community’s knowledge of diabetes and its impacts, in an effort to develop tactics to address diabetes and treatment options based off the perceived causes of diabetes among the community.

• Caroline Shermoen of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a fourth-year biomedical engineering major, and Carolina Gomez Grimaldi of Newport News, a fourth-year biology major, who will seek to identify barriers keeping low- to middle-income, underserved women in Peru from proper access to breast and cervical cancer interventions.

• Andria Li of Charlottesville, a second-year Spanish and biology major; Parker Brodsky of Virginia Beach, a second-year biology and global public health major; and Anna Buttaci of Broussard, Louisiana, who will travel to communities in San Lucas Tolíman, Guatemala, to evaluate the effectiveness of water filtration systems implemented in previous years, assessing community perceptions of the water filters and educating people on them.

• Mariam Gbadamosi of New Castle, Delaware, a second-year prospective human biology major, and Hannah Sweeney of Wilbraham, Massachusetts, a first-year biology major in the School of Medicine, who will follow up on previous research of the effectiveness of the Women’s Reproductive Health course in the South Lake Atítlan Basin region of Guatemala.

• Madison Orlow of Fairfax, a fourth-year Spanish major, and Nicholas Aldredge of Charlottesville, a first-year student in the School of Medicine, who will investigate the impacts of the widespread use of resource-limited electronic medical records and the prevailing attitudes regarding the current version implemented at the Totonicapán Hospital in Guatemala.

• Krista Hartmann of Lynchburg, a third-year biology and studio art major, and Maeve Buni of Roseland, a third-year Spanish and biology major, who will examine the feasibility and reliability of telehealth connections between the Totonicapan Hospital in Guatemala and the United States. The project aims to ensure that the UVA Guatemala Initiative and UVA’s Karen S. Rheuban Center for Telehealth [could confidently initiate a high-quality, professional tele-ultrasound teaching program.

•  Megan Eisenfelder of Sea Ranch Lakes, Florida, a second-year global development studies major; Claire Kirchoff of Nashville, Tennessee, a fourth-year educational psychology major in the Curry School of Education; Charlotte Scharfenberg of Middleburg, a second-year global development studies and youth and social innovation major; Alexis Tilot of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a third-year Spanish and environmental sciences major; and Samuel Willis of Gering, Nebraska, a second-year math major, who will investigate whether bison grazing in South Dakota is better for the tall grass prairie on Native American reservations in economic, environmental, cultural and health terms.

• Maya Lezzem of McLean, a second-year undeclared major, who will explore decreasing the maternal and infant mortality rate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo through telemedicine systems that link to the UVA Health System to enable implementation of a training course for nurse midwives.

• Trina K. Kumodzi of Baltimore, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in nursing at the School of Nursing, who will create a profile of homicide victims and perpetrators in Nevis and describe the circumstances, motives and weapons used in the individual acts of homicide from 2000 to 2017.

•  Diana Wilson of Clayton, Delaware, a fourth-year sociology and women’s studies double-major; Maame Esi Eghan of Lorton, a second-year student; and Ernest Addy-Nettey of Dumfries, a second-year computer science major, who will provide 10 college women at the University of Ghana, Legon, with skills in finance or technology, mentorship and leadership development to prepare them for internships at top firms in Ghana.

• Kpankpando Anyanwu of Roanoke, a third-year anthropology and women, gender and sexuality major, who will study how a stroke may trigger the onset of depression characteristics, either major or minor, in Nigeria.

• Harshini Pyata of Aldie, a first-year student in the School of Medicine, who will work with mentors at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda to evaluate the financial sustainability of community health cooperatives.

• Sam Powers of Herndon, a third-year biostatistics and religious studies major, who will contribute to multiple projects led by mentors at the University of Global Health Equity, including an assessment of the role of churches in community health-seeking behavior, and data analysis for a study on malnutrition in Rwanda between 2005 and 2010.

•  Shannon Barter of Charlotte, North Carolina, a first-year student in the School of Medicine, who will participate in a study on glucose monitoring in surgical pediatric patients, seeking to potentially improve pre-operative protocols.

The scholarships are supported by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, the Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, the Healthy Appalachia Institute, the University’s International Studies Office, the UVA Medical Alumni Association, the UVA Global Surgery Initiative in Rwanda and the UVA Guatemala Initiative. Donations are also received from The Class of 1985 Nancy Walton Pugh Scholarship Fund, The Glenn and Susan Brace Center for Global Health Scholarship Fund, The Joy Boissevain Scholar Award for Global Public Health, K.C. Graham and Family, The Lyle Global Health Scholar Award, The Pamela B. and Peter C. Kelly Award for Improving Health in Limpopo Province, The Ram Family Center for Global Health Scholar Award, The Richard and Nancy Guerrant Center for Global Health Scholar Award, and The Sister Bridget Haase, O.S.U. Center for Global Health Scholarship, Catherine and James MacPhaille, and Glen and Susan Brace.