News

Lora Henderson Smith, assistant professor at the UVA School of Education and Human Development's Youth-Nex research center, and Dustina Gill, founder and director of the Native American non-profit youth organization, Nis'to Incorporated, will continue their longstanding partnership with new funding from the Spencer Foundation.

You know that feeling when you can’t quite remember a fact – or when curiosity strikes about something super specific? Or maybe you’re caught in a debate over a little detail.  

Who – or what – do you turn to? The answer for all those scenarios is likely the same: Wikipedia.

Whether you click through to one of Wikipedia’s six million-plus English language articles – or query the AI bot in your phone – much of our factual questions get answered by the site.  

The School of Engineering and Applied Science has been chosen to receive a $900,000 grant from the Educating Character Initiative to build character strength in students. The Institutional Impact grant, awarded by Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character and supported by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., will fund the creation of the University of Virginia Engineering Character Strength Initiative. 

One year ago, the University of Virginia hired Raphael (Ralph) Malbrue, DVM, as the attending veterinarian and director of the Center for Comparative Medicine. He is responsible for animal care and protocols that support innovative research and discoveries at the University, leading to life-saving new treatments for patients.

Assistant Research Professor of Pharmacology, Vlad Serbulea, has received an American Heart Association Career Development Award for his research on Glucocorticoids. This award supports highly promising healthcare and academic professionals, in the early years of their first professional appointment, to explore innovative questions or pilot studies that will provide preliminary data and training necessary to assure their future success as a research scientist.

Twelve major neuroscientific research projects related to “The Science of Perception Box™” are being funded by Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, each project receiving three consecutive years of funding of up to $900,000. This latest group of studies marks the second consecutive year that Tiny Blue Dot Foundation is funding projects related to The Science of Perception Box.

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...