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Lane Rasberry is an activist, scientist, dreamer, and true-blue believer in the transformational power of information. As Wikipedian-in-Residence at UVA’s School of Data Science, he supports the school as they engage with the sprawling online information site Wikipedia. His ultimate ambition is to promote a more equitable society by championing the open movement exemplified by Wikipedia, which seeks to address the world’s most pressing problems in a spirit of transparency, collaboration, re-use, and free access. Rasberry’s breadth and depth of expertise has drawn attention and funding from major philanthropic institutions, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Fralin Museum of Art has been awarded $125,000 from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support “O’Powa O’Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell.” The grant marks the first award for The Fralin and the University of Virginia (UVA) from the Terra Foundation for American Art and will fund the traveling exhibition and scholarly exhibition catalog. The Fralin partnered with the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) to organize “O’Powa O’Meng.” The exhibition will be on view at Mia from September 2024 to January 2025, and at The Fralin Museum of Art from February to June 2025. Two additional venues are anticipated.

About one-third of autistic people are unable to communicate using speech, and most are never provided an effective alternative. However, a new study from scientists at the University of Virginia suggests that many of these individuals are literate, raising the possibility that they could learn to express themselves through writing.

UVA School of Education and Human Development Associate Professor Michael Lyons, University of Illinois Chicago Assistant Professor and co-principal investigator Aisha Griffith, and colleagues have been awarded a $75,000 Vision Grant from the Spencer Foundation...

Dr. Andrea Roberts, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL), has been awarded a $3 million grant by the Mellon Foundation to launch the Out(sider) Preservation Initiative, emerging from her research and scholarship on grassroots Black descendent preservation...

For the second summer in a row, a diverse group of several dozen people from Charlottesville embarked on an eight-day journey by bus through the South. Together, they toured historical sites significant to the ongoing struggle for racial justice, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project and professor of religious studies at UVA, described the unique experience of the tour.

To understand the present-day racial climate in higher education, we must first look to the past. Juan Carlos Garibay, an associate professor at the UVA School of Education and Human Development, is passionate about issues of diversity, equity, and social justice in higher education. His latest endeavor, Project SHARPE – The Slavery Histories and Reparations in Postsecondary Education Project – explores how universities’ legacies contribute to the experiences of students of African descent and documents how institutions are engaging with those histories. 

Students who are motivated to persist through difficulties and challenge themselves academically are likely to embrace a “learning mindset” – the combination of beliefs someone has about their ability to overcome challenges, their purpose and how they fit in.

The University of Virginia’s Motivate Lab conducts research in this area, and this week announced that it has received a $2.46 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand its efforts to help programs that support student ability to develop a learning mindset.

When first embarking on his graduate studies at the School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2013, Wade Jensen had no idea what materials science was—nor that it would become his career after he earned his doctorate in 2018. Thanks to a grant from the II-VI Foundation, however, he found his calling...

Think of the difference between a list of ingredients and a recipe or the difference between a census and an interactive map showing where people live, work, shop and travel. That gives you a clearer picture of how the field of cell biology’s understanding of the body has advanced in the last 20 years.

The Charlottesville Civil Rights Tour visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, the first memorial in the United States dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, lynching victims and African Americans harmed by racial segregation.

Just downstream from a bend in the Potomac River, as it widens into the estuary that empties into the Chesapeake Bay, lies the small riverfront town of Colonial Beach, Virginia. Located on a side peninsula of a larger peninsula—known as the Northern Neck—water surrounds the community on three sides...

A $250,000 grant given to an institution bearing the name of a prominent Roanoke family will help to give the Roanoke Valley a better understanding of its precolonial history.

The Andrew W Mellon Foundation Art Museum Futures Fund recently awarded a $200,000 grant to the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection to expand the promotion of Indigenous Australian art and culture, as well as enhance the leadership of Indigenous people within the museum.

From the Amazon to experimental physics, from the Black Lives Matter movement to youth resilience, a new cohort of postdoctoral fellows reflects the University of Virginia’s commitment to expand research and teaching about issues of race and equity and to bring scholars who are underrepresented in their fields to Grounds.

The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has created a new Rising Scholars fellowship program, with support from the University’s Race, Place and Equity grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional funds.