Find the latest information on the University’s response to the coronavirus here.

The University of Virginia has created several new ways for students accepted to the Class of 2024 to learn more about academics, extracurricular activities and student life at the University with a new, virtual “Days on the Lawn” in the age of coronavirus.

Students can choose from a raft of Zoom webinars, including several academic sessions that will introduce accepted students, now and in the coming weeks, to UVA’s undergraduate schools.

They are:

• The College of Arts and Sciences.
• The School of Engineering and Applied Science.
• The School of Nursing.
• The School of Architecture.
• The Curry School of Education and Human Development.
• The McIntire School of Commerce.
• The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
• The School of Data Science.

To join an academic session for the school to which they were accepted, students need only click a link to a live Zoom webinar applicable to them. If the link to the webinar you are interested in is not yet live, check back closer to the date of the event so you can join your desired session. Students accepted to the School of Nursing will receive email invitations to join webinars.

In addition to academic sessions, the Office of Admission is also offering student life sessions with representatives of groups including Residence Life, the Cavalier Marching Band and Echols Scholars, as well as a general panel of current students.

Parents of accepted students can also tune in for an information session that includes representatives from dining, the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Counseling and Psychological Services. That Zoom webinar is scheduled for April 22 at 6 p.m.

A current schedule with sign-up options for all webinars is available here.

On Monday, Jeannine Lalonde, an associate dean of admission who, as “Dean J,” runs UVA’s popular admissions blog, “Notes from Peabody,” moderated a College of Arts & Sciences session. She was joined by six faculty members, including Rachel Most, an associate dean and professor of archeology, and Sarah Kucenas, a professor of biology and the director of the Distinguished Major Program in Biology.

“We want to help you grow,” Kucenas told students in the webinar, urging them, “Use us and all our knowledge and connections!”

All of this engagement would have ordinarily happened during the Office of Admission’s massive welcome program, known as “Days on the Lawn.” Each year, UVA normally welcomes 4,000 to 5,000 students to Grounds for the events, which were to happen over six different days this spring.

Those plans had to be cancelled when UVA announced last month that all face-to-face programming must cease because of the coronavirus.

Lalonde said Rachel Schlachter, a senior admission dean, and Kristen Greer, an assistant dean, moved everything online in just two weeks’ time.

“It’s pretty amazing that when the call was made, they turned around and really just started going down the list to try to get every single session that we had planned into a virtual format,” she said.

The goal was to pivot fast, while still “giving students the connection they need,” Lalonde said.

“I think what has been really inspiring is the way the team has been innovative and creative, and also this realization that doing a virtual program has merit,” Assistant Dean Macy Lenox said. “Obviously, we would rather have people on Grounds, but every year there will be people who are not going to be able to make it to Grounds.” Lenox predicted that in future years, UVA will plan on having a virtual component to Days on the Lawn.

For now, Lalonde and Lenox are encouraging accepted students (and parents) to join the appropriate Zoom sessions and to talk with current students.

“Use your resources,” Lalonde said. “So many departments and schools within UVA – student organizations, teams – have social media accounts,” so accepted students should reach out.

“If they already have interests on the extracurricular side, they should be looking up those accounts and not just looking at what they are posting right now, but look at what they’ve posted in the past year,” Lalonde said. “Also, from what I see, students are very quick to reply to direct messages on Instagram.”

“Open house programs in the spring, after admission offers have been released, are critical for most admission offices,” Greg Roberts, dean of admission, said. “Not only do our Days on the Lawn programs provide an opportunity for admitted students and families to get their questions answered and hear about exciting programs and opportunities, they give our guests the chance to get a feel for the Grounds and our community and culture.

“As we began designing the virtual programs, our intention was to find ways to best connect our students and faculty and alumni with prospective students, across various platforms. Picking a college is highly personal and it can be emotional. Our hope is that these events will offer a personal glimpse of what makes this University and our community special and we hope this will be attractive to students who have excellent college options to choose from.”

So accepted students, check out all UVA has to offer, from the new, student-run TikTok account, to a student-run virtual tour of Grounds, to UVA’s “Student Experience” website. There is also a new "Welcome to Virtual Grounds" page, all designed to give you the virtual welcome we wish we could offer in person.

Find the latest information on the University’s response to the coronavirus here.

Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, would have turned 277 years old on Monday, an occasion the University typically marks with a variety of events. This year, however, looked a bit different.

For example, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals, presented each year on “Founder’s Day” by the University and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, will be awarded in absentia, with all in-person events cancelled.

The medals recognize extraordinary achievements in the fields of architecture, law, citizen leadership and global innovation. The Architecture medal will be awarded to Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi; the Law medal to Sonia Sotomayor, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; the Global Innovation medal to Ted Turner, a media pioneer and philanthropist; and the Citizen Leadership medal to Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation.

As part of this year’s Founder’s Day ceremonies, the School of Architecture will host a virtual public talk by Weiss and Manfredi, co-founders of WEISS/MANFREDI, a design practice credited with redefining the relationship between landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art. Their livestreamed talk will be held April 20 at 5 p.m.

Another annual event, a Founder’s Day tree planting honoring an individual who has made significant and lasting contributions to Grounds, has been postponed until the fall. The 2020 tree-planting ceremony will honor John C. Jeffries Jr., UVA’s senior vice president for advancement.

Jeffries, a 1973 graduate of UVA’s School of Law, joined the faculty at the law school in 1975, after clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Jeffries has written about civil rights, the federal courts and criminal law, as well as a biography of Powell. He was named the Emerson Spies Professor of Law in 1986 and served as dean of the School of Law from 2001 to 2008. Among other initiatives, Jeffries helped establish a new fiscal model and extensive financial aid programs during his time as dean. In 2017, he received the Thomas Jefferson Award for excellence in scholarship, the highest honor given to members of the University community.

Jeffries became senior vice president for advancement in 2018. In that role, he oversees a range of fundraising and alumni initiatives and has been an integral part of the “Honor the Future” capital campaign.

Even though the tree planting and other events have been moved online or postponed, one secret society, The Society of the Purple Shadows, still found a way to mark Founder’s Day as it happened – and address the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic at UVA and beyond.

They issued the following letter to the University community:

Members of the University community,

Today, on the two hundred and seventy-seventh anniversary of Mr. Jefferson’s birth, THE SOCIETY OF THE PURPLE SHADOWS humbly offers this letter as an invitation to consider the meaning of membership in and stewardship of our University. The ever-changing tide of global crisis has pushed our community to confront and redefine who we are. There exists no greater time to renew and reimagine our devotion to service, compassion, humility, and critical reflection.

This crisis has resulted in great loss — first and foremost, the loss of family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Concurrently, we have lost personal security and the power of choice over our immediate futures, forcing many to prioritize safety over comfort. In the face of this uncertainty, students and contracted workers alike have lost jobs and sole sources of income. While impartial in spread, this crisis has accentuated long-standing inequality, leaving the University to reckon with the unfair treatments and unjust realities of those marginalized.

In the face of this reckoning, we acknowledge that inequality should need no crisis to be revealed. We would be remiss not to appreciate the student-led efforts to combat inequality on grounds, including programs to increase access for first-generation, low-income students and the cultivation of spaces for underrepresented communities. Furthermore, the institutional steps taken to make the University more financially accessible serve as aid to the everlasting pursuit towards equity. In our ascension towards justice, these milestones remind us of our progress, yet implore us to push even further.

However challenging this effort may appear, it is possible through a strong commitment to honest, personal reflection. Today, misinformation more easily takes root and draws divisions within our community. Narratives that may not reflect reality become excuses for inaction, and the inability to separate ourselves from bias will push us further into ignorance. We must all interrogate ourselves and become acutely aware of our privileges and prejudices. Change will not come solely through abstract reasoning around these complex issues. rather, real progress will come from the work we perform here and now.

Critical self-reflection and persistent action are necessary in creating an accountable and equitable University community. THE SOCIETY encourages newfound time to be spent with purpose and vigor, for the ultimate pursuit is a unified and just future.

The Society of the Purple Shadows

Find the latest information on the University’s response to the coronavirus here.

Seshi Konu remembers going to Campbell Hall, home of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, early before her class began just so she could walk around the studio and look at the work on students’ desks and on the walls, and at the projects in progress.

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“I was intrigued,” Konu said in an email, writing from Norfolk where she was born and raised. “It was my first time in Campbell Hall – and I haven’t left since.”

Although she has been finishing the semester at home for the last seven weeks since the coronavirus pandemic hit, she talked about school in the present tense.

In her first year as a UVA student enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, Konu said she “was exposed to a range of courses and people who were all pursuing all kinds of studies.”

But that did not include the School of Architecture – at least at first.

A volunteer pursuit, however, took her in a different direction than where she expected, one that led her to an innovative approach in architecture that is gaining momentum: design thinking.

Learning about architecture and design thinking led her to realize she has the power to participate in shaping a better world, one she would like to see – that emphasizes equity and inclusion.

When Konu started volunteering in her second semester with VISAS – Volunteers with International Students, Staff, and Scholars – she happened to be matched with a group of international graduate students in the Architecture School. The students practiced speaking English by presenting their projects and showing their work to her.

“Believe it or not, this was my first real introduction to architecture, other than being a hardcore fan of [interior designers] Candice Olson and Vern Yip [a UVA alumnus] from watching HGTV with my mom,” Konu said.

Her mother and her family are from the Norfolk area and her father is from Accra, Ghana. Growing up, she remembers their home filled with relics, textiles and artifacts of family culture – from kente and other West African cloth to wooden sculptures.

“Architecture as a discipline had never been on my radar. It was still something that I could never really see myself pursuing as a career,” Konu admitted, so transferring into the Architecture School “was a really big shift for me, but I embraced it with open arms and I’m glad I did.”

“Seeing that plenty of students were making thoughtful creations and designs of their own really inspired me. Something just clicked.”

Another college pursuit also encouraged her decision toward architecture: she received a 2½-year fellowship from UVA’s Meriwether Lewis Institute for Citizen Leadership, which requires the 25 students of each cohort to take assistant professor of architecture Elgin Cleckley’s “Foundations of Design Thinking” course. Meriwether Lewis fellows then work on summer projects based on real-world issues using design-thinking principles.

“Design permeates every aspect of our lives,” Konu said, “and holds great power in determining behaviors, emotions and other personal and community trajectories. In many ways, space is a conduit through which we receive messages about who is important and who is not. Structural racism and classicism pervade our systems, and our geographic landscapes are no exception. I am interested in identifying these markers, both covert and overt ones, and working to establish new typologies of public space, housing and infrastructure that reconcile them.

“There are so many forces working around us, and we don’t even realize it most of the time,” Konu said.

It fascinated her to realize she could look at things like the urban landscape of Barcelona, where she spent last fall semester, or the UVA bus routes or the area where Interstate 95 cuts through Richmond and redesign spaces like these to be more beneficial to the people closest to them.

From associate professor Mona El Khafif, who became her thesis adviser, Konu said she learned about “urban scenography” – “to reimagine public space, think about it more theatrically to make the space [come] alive and interactive in new ways.”

El Khafif said she knew a thesis project like Konu’s – about redesigning a devastated neighborhood in Richmond that I-95 passes over – would be novel and experimental. 

“She is a very hard-working student, but you can also see that she truly enjoys to design her project,” El Khafif wrote in email. “She listens carefully and picks up on ideas that we are discussing, but every time when I saw her again in studio I knew that she would bring something new to the table – something that she discovered while working on her project.”

In addition to thinking of the highway redevelopment project in terms of choreography, Konu also has taken into account the history of the area. The construction of Interstate 95, which became one of the busiest highways in the country, ripped a block out of the Jackson Ward neighborhood in Richmond; likely traversed an African burial ground; and ignored the site of the second-largest slave market in the U.S. It’s now largely paved for parking lots or open abandoned space.

Konu is suggesting making it a space of restitution, this small space dealing with all of that history. Any plans for the highway should give the community time to think of the space, located under the elevated highway, as a work in progress, Konu said. At this early stage, she’d have a series of scaffold structures erected for flexible space that could take on different events that could be related to moments in history or other narratives.

This is an American problem, she pointed out, because the interstate highway system is federal. In this project, she tackles it locally and considers solutions for highways at large.

As she finishes her UVA experience from afar and moves on, Konu said her plans for what comes next are still up in the air, but she remains optimistic. She might spend the summer volunteering as she looks for work, possibly using her skills from working as a UVA Career Peer Educator to tutor, counsel and advise younger students. 

Konu worked at the UVA Career Center in this role for two years, helping other undergraduates with résumés, cover letters, and connecting them to helpful resources on or off Grounds, especially with the science and sustainability career community.

“I was inspired to join the team because my own journey has been nonlinear and although I am glad I’m here now; it was not easy. Hands down, the best part of the job is when I can sense a wave of comfort come over my peers, or I can make them laugh, or connect them to an opportunity at UVA.”

Although she had already been doing a lot of schoolwork online, “It has certainly been an adjustment reducing the majority of my life and social interactions to my 15-inch laptop screen,” Konu said.

“It’s this focus, however, that has encouraged me to slow down and connect with those I value and appreciate,” she said. “It has been really nice to reconnect with family near and far and to watch as people come together to encourage and support one another.

“Like many of us, I have turned to the kitchen as a major source of exploration and experimentation to get away from the screens. I have really enjoyed perfecting my marinades and dry rubs.”

Konu said her biggest takeaway from her UVA education has been “to take ownership” of her education.

“Student self-governance for me has really been a lesson in actively shaping the world that we want to see – and I almost mean that literally, as I want to work in architecture and design. Before UVA, I’m not sure I realized my power, but today I walk away with the core beliefs of lifting others as I climb, as a black woman especially, and using my work to promote equity.”

Graduates often leave behind a distinct legacy at the University of Virginia. Andrew Spears’ legacy will be a solar-powered lumber kiln.

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Spears, graduating in May with a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the School of Architecture, envisions trees taken down on the University Grounds being milled and dried, with that lumber used on Grounds, both by students and the Facilities Management crews doing repairs and building furniture.

“As a student in the Architecture School for the past three years, I have seen quite a bit of need,” he said. “It ebbs and flows, but last semester I was in a class where we all needed to computationally design a structure that was to be built out of wood completely, and then there were some advanced technologies that were creating joints and systems within the wood pieces.”

The wood for the projects came from local lumber yards or scrap left over from other projects, while trees taken down on Grounds were customarily hauled to a University lot on Observatory Hill to be composted, the smaller pieces chipped, with the resulting material eventually used by landscape crews on Grounds.

Spears saw a better use for these resources.

The idea hatched in the spring of 2019 after Mark Kutney, an architectural conservator with Facilities Management, and Andrew Johnston, an architecture professor, led a session on identifying soft and hard wood species of lumber for teaching assistants in Johnston’s “Materials and Culture” course.

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“We look at a bunch of wood samples from different species that are both culturally and historically significant,” Kutney said. “Then we give the students some hands-on familiarity with a few different local species of wood. We rely on the University arborists to supply us with something that has been recently cut. We typically ask for several logs, 16- to 20-inches in diameter, from two to six feet. The students split it up by hand and make some legs for stools, so they are working with green wood.

“At the end of this evening class, we got talking about a lot of the trees that come down at the University.”

Spears was one of the teaching assistants.

“We ended up discussing the idea that there are a bunch of logs sitting up on Observatory Hill doing nothing and how cool it would be if we could mill some of that into lumber that the school could use,” he said. “From there, we gradually worked our way up from just building a mill and then air-drying the wood somewhere else, all the way to applying for grant money to actually build a kiln.

“But mostly it started from trying to find a way to make use of 30 to 50 logs that were sitting up on Observatory Hill.”

Spears sought funding for a wood kiln, and he received $2,500 in a UVA Sustainability Green Initiative Funding Tomorrow grant. Spears said he and Kutney  initially started thinking in terms of a sawmill, but then decided on a kiln, since there were local mills that could be hired, while a kiln is a more permanent. Spears found a set of plans and set out to build the kiln.

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Rich Hopkins, the University’s landscape superintendent, supports Spears’ project and provided space for the kiln at the Observatory Hill yard.

“We remove dozens of trees a year that could be milled,” Hopkins said. “These are landscape trees removed due to their health – they are dead or dying – or trees that are being impacted by construction. And I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more ash as the emerald ash borer becomes more of an issue.”

Spears – aided by friends such as Anson Parker, who works at the University Health Science Library and is also a member of the Charlottesville Tree Commission – is using his carpentry skills to construct the kiln, which is roughly 7 by 14 feet – about the size of a large pick-up truck – with a slanted, PVC-paneled roof. The milled wood will be stacked inside and heated by the sun, with small fans powered by solar panels pulling air out of the structure to remove the moisture. The kiln is designed to dry 1,000 board-feet of red oak, a slow-drying wood.

Conventional kilns heat with electricity or gas; the newest technology microwaves the wood, drying it in days. The solar kiln’s slower process dries the wood in four to five weeks, depending on the thickness of the boards. Spears said there are several solar-powered commercial wood kilns in the region.

“The [solar] kiln is like a greenhouse,” Spears said. “We have a clear roof heating the space; all of the walls inside get covered with a thick, rubberized black paint, so basically the wood is just baking in there. But at the same time, you have fans running, and that is blowing the air around the lumber you have carefully stacked, and draws out that moisture as the kiln heats up.

“One thing that is nice about a solar kiln is it might be hot during the day, but during the night it is going to cool down and release some of those drying stresses and pressures that happen, and so that tends to dry the wood closer to air drying, instead of a commercial ‘let’s-get-this-dried-as-quick-as-we-can.’”

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At this point, the kiln is about half-finished.

“The outside has been painted, but it still needs a solid roof, some interior work, and the doors attached nicely,” Spears said. “The progress was paused as I left the state with my wife at the end of March, to quarantine with her parents in Utah. When I return, I plan to continue working on it, albeit alone.”

Spears said they were not able to get any logs milled before the statewide COVID-19 lockdown, and he hopes to have the kiln completed by the time the logs are milled. He said just before the lockdown began, landscapers delivered to the yard several13-foot poplar logs, with a 55-inch base, taken down near Alderman Library.

Spears and Kutney sited the solar kiln at the Observatory Hill yard, where it is convenient to the downed wood. Once established, there should be a steady supply of wood through the kiln.

“Location is an issue,” Kutney said. “You want it close to where you are cutting the logs to save on transportation, and the Observatory Hill landscape yard seemed to be the best candidate for that, but the power is just not there. Designing a cost-effective process was also one of our goals.”

For Spears, the kiln in an example of how he wants society to rethink its processes.

Spears, of Paeonian Springs, earned a bachelor’s degree in applied biophysics from the College of William and Mary before coming to UVA to explore landscape architecture.

“It was a self-designed major and I came to UVA looking to get a design degree that was close to biology and ecology,” Spears said. “I came in as an absolute know-nothing. I have been here three years and it has been pretty great, with a chance to take on opportunities like this. I also took a class in forest ecology in the environmental sciences department last semester.”

Spears was interested in pursuing bio-mimicry or bio-inspired design, such as examining the foot of a gecko lizard, which can stick to walls, and then reverse-engineering that technology into a glove. Or using the structure of a fish fin to design a propeller.

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“That was my interest coming in, and that has morphed over time as I worked in the woodshop as a teaching assistant,” he said. “There were some of the eye-opening moments in landscape architecture, such as where we walk through the impact of the timber industry on the landscape, or the lithium battery industry. They got me interested in different ways we could build the cities of the future based on our resource use.”

While a graduate student, Spears worked with landscape architect and master craftsman Roger Sherry of Plank Road Studios in North Garden, where he performed a variety of tasks, from woodworking to plantings.

“Sherry is very hands-on and shows how to practically carry out some of the things we have been learning in the classroom,” Spears said.

Spears’ wife, Emily, is finishing a program at the Curry School of Education and Human Development. They plan on remaining in the area, with Spears working as a landscape architect and Emily teaching middle school science.

Spears wants to stay connected with the kiln project and work with other students to carry the project into the future.

“I would like to spend more time with his project, and there are still quite a few logistical things to work out,” Spears said.

Spears said that while pursuing his passions has led him down some rabbit holes, he sees this journey as a success.

“I have learned that given the right set of circumstances, that my being passionately interested in something has the potential to not necessarily change the world, but to make a significant change where I see an opportunity.

“I wouldn’t say that this project has been all me.  There have been people encouraging me and pushing me, but there have been a lot of times when it has been just me. I am pretty happy with myself for sticking with it.”

Find the latest information on the University’s response to the coronavirus here.

The University of Virginia’s Class of 2020 virtual celebration and conferral of degrees will be livestreamed on May 16, blending some features of a traditional Final Exercises ceremony with appearances by two surprise, world-class entertainers and an inspiring, student-driven performance to cap a year unlike any other.

The ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. EDT, opening with the first surprise performer, followed by the premiere of UVA’s traditional Year-in-Review video that will feature highlights from a year unforgettable for so many reasons, and forever influenced by the global reach and impact of COVID-19.

President Jim Ryan and the deans of each of UVA’s 12 schools will then confer degrees to students.

More than 7,000 degrees will be awarded to the Class of 2020. Of the 4,250 baccalaureate degrees being conferred, 167 were earned in three years and five in two years’ time. About 3,000 graduate and professional degrees will be awarded. Approximately 1,200 people in the Class of 2020 are international students. Diplomas will be mailed to students in June.

A rousing, student-led performance will follow the conferral of degrees.

At the request of students and others on the virtual celebration organizing committee, Ryan will then deliver congratulatory and reflective remarks for the event, which serves as the official end of the academic year.

The ceremony’s second surprise entertainer will then perform. The approximately 30-minute ceremony will close with a performance of “The Good Old Song” by the 90-member University Singers, using special technology to merge the large group in a virtual setting.

The planning and execution of the virtual celebration is the result of work by a committee appointed by Ryan that includes students, faculty and staff.

Students, their families and friends can view the ceremony at virginia.edu/live, as well as on the official Facebook and Twitter accounts of the University of Virginia, as well as the accounts of President Ryan and the UVA Office of Major Events. The virtual celebration also will be recorded for viewing following the livestream.

“This is an extraordinary and unusual time, and we are thrilled to have an opportunity to celebrate the many accomplishments of our students – and to mix in some surprises,” Ryan said. “I hope this will be a memorable celebration, but we recognize it’s not the same as walking the Lawn for our graduating students and their families. We are looking forward to gathering again in either October or the spring of 2021 to see the Class of 2020 process down the Lawn for what I think will be one of the most joyful moments in the history of UVA.”

Omar Elhaj is the president of UVA’s Fourth Year Trustees and served on the planning committee. He said the group wanted to be sure to keep everyone’s safety in mind as they considered options to eventually hold a Finals Weekend on the Lawn.

“We needed to be sure that a new date could ensure the safety of students, parents and faculty while being certain that we did not place too much stress on the Charlottesville community and the University community,” he said. 

UVA is holding the weekend of Oct. 9-11 as well as May 28-30, 2021, as options, depending on conditions related to the presence of the coronavirus, and will follow up with more definite information in June.

Nancy Howell Agee and Marion Weiss each experienced an early and strong affinity for their respective fields. From opposite coasts, each chose the University of Virginia as the place they would build the foundation for rewarding careers, reaching levels of leadership where few women are found even now, 45 years after they arrived on Grounds.

As CEO of Roanoke-based Carilion Clinic, Agee, who earned her B.S.N. from the School of Nursing in 1979, is among the 13% of U.S. hospital CEOs who are women.

As co-founder and partner at WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, Weiss, who graduated from the School of Architecture, also in 1979, crafts vital public spaces that embrace infrastructure as well as nature in their designs, earning her equally rare prominence in her field.

The Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center announced this week that it will honor Agee and Weiss as the 2020 winners of the University’s Distinguished Alumnae Award, which recognizes alumnae who have used their talents as a force for positive change. The formal ceremony will be held later this year.

This year marks two significant anniversaries for women at UVA: the 100th anniversary of the Board of Visitors’ 1920 resolution to allow some women to seek degrees in the graduate and professional schools, and 50 years since the transition to full coeducation across Grounds.

As the Women’s Center and the Alumni Association work together to bring to light the full history of women on Grounds in this milestone year, the center found it fitting to break with its own tradition and honor not one, but two distinguished alumnae, said Abby Palko, director of the Women’s Center.

In reviewing the nominations made by each school’s dean, Palko said the award selection committee was particularly struck by the level of distinction Agee and Weiss have achieved and their significant impact on the communities where they work.

Weiss, the first recipient from the School of Architecture, has made “architectural contributions [that] have not only been acknowledged for their aesthetic and experiential distinction, but for their enormous positive societal and civic impact,” Dean Ila Berman, Edward E. Elson Professor of Architecture, said.

Weiss and co-founder Michael Manfredi earlier were named 2020 recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture. Weiss is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a National Academy of Design inductee. WEISS/MANFREDI’s awards include the American Academy of the Arts and Letters Honor Award, the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal and state and national American Institute of Architects awards.

The firm’s work is regularly included in major architecture publications, with projects like the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park earning inclusion in esteemed exhibitions, and numerous awards for urban and environmental design.

Weiss’ designs for such prominent public spaces and her presence as a female leader in the field of architecture are both important drivers of positive change, said Robin Dripps, UVA’s T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture. Dripps noted that Weiss’ work exemplifies the value that the School of Architecture places on “the public realm as a place for a diverse citizenry to develop a shared identity and purpose,” and calls her “a major role model for a generation of women now finding their voices in a profession not always hospitable to women.”

Agee was instrumental in co-leading Carilion’s transformation from a collection of hospitals to a patient-centered, physician-led health care system with more than 1,000 physicians, seven hospitals, and related services such as home health, imaging, pharmacies, and urgent care serving more than 1 million people in Virginia and West Virginia. Carilion is Virginia’s largest private employer west of Richmond and has a $1 billion annual payroll.

Pam Cipriano, Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professor of Nursing and dean of the School of Nursing, said Agee’s election as chair of the Board of Directors of the American Hospital Association (the member association for the nation’s 5,000 hospitals) is evidence that, in addition to being one of very few nurses to rise to hospital CEO, her service within the ranks of hospital leaders has “earned the respect, trust and admiration of a community that continues to be dominated by men.”

Discovering the Joy in Their Fields at UVA

In her teens, Agee affirmed her childhood inclination toward nursing by volunteering as a candy striper in Roanoke and became the first person in her family to graduate from high school, as well as college. The University’s tradition of excellence in educating nurses met with Agee’s interest in Virginia history and the beauty of the place to create a sense of connection that she did not find at other schools, she said.

Growing up in California, Weiss was moved by the harmony of hillside, landscape and architecture in Ernest Kump’s lauded design for Foothill College in Los Altos Hills near her home. As she considered her college options, Kump himself encouraged Weiss to choose the University of Virginia over the West Coast schools on her list, as UVA’s School of Architecture was on the forefront of considering architecture and landscape architecture to be interdependent.

Weiss and Agee both recall foundational lessons learned at UVA that informed the leadership they have gone on to provide in their respective fields. Agee has vivid memories of confronting ethical dilemmas as a nursing student through reading Victor Fuchs’ “Who Shall Live?” This text went on to become a classic over the years, but was at the time a new work that revealed fundamental issues with health care costs and access by applying economic theory in novel ways.

Agee said her professors emphasized intellectual curiosity, encouraging students to question the status quo and keep pushing to know more. Curiosity led Agee to obtain a master’s degree in nursing from Emory University, to gain a range of experiences from research to administration, and to pursue post-graduate studies at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

When she became CEO in 2011 and led Carilion through the process of defining its core values, curiosity emerged as an important characteristic that the workforce and its leader have in common. Compassion, which she also learned about at UVA, is another Carilion value, she said. Agee takes pride in the School of Nursing’s leadership on this front, saying that compassion “differentiates nursing as a profession.”

She said she is proud of all Carilion does to “support people in their compassionate work” by providing the means for care providers to keep making the deeply rewarding human connections that initially drew them to the field.

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Weiss recalls her School of Architecture education as an extraordinary one that combined a focus on the rigor of form with extensive study of history and theory.

A moment not long before graduation stands out as a seminal one, she said.

The four years Weiss spent working with great care in the architecture studio had seemed unconnected to the sense of herself as an artist that Weiss had found through figure drawing. She had so enjoyed the fluid process of thinking and making at the same time in the late Carlo Pelliccia’s figure-drawing course that she took the course over and over – well past the point where there were any more credits to be earned.

As a studio critic in Weiss’ last year at UVA, Pelliccia encouraged her to try something new: to begin and end a design wherever it mattered most, as she did in figure drawing. His questioning of the painstaking and linear fashion in which she worked a design through from start to finish brought together the seemingly unrelated things she had been doing in architecture studio and in figure drawing. It finally made sense.

Honing that intuition to identify and fine-tune key elements of a design has served Weiss well. She went on in that spirit to distinguish herself while earning her master’s degree at Yale University and to eventually approach design competitions for complex, high-profile public projects.

As prestigious awards, firm achievements and career impact have accrued, Weiss continues to see each project with the fresh eyes that allow her to find the opportunity for “something unprecedented, something that could exist nowhere else,” she said.

Opening Avenues for Others to Learn

Today, Agee is consistently recognized as an influential leader by Modern Healthcare and awarded health care’s high honors such as the National Center for Healthcare Leadership’s Gail L. Warden Leadership Excellence Award. She leads Carilion in earning similar accolades from Becker’s Hospital Review, Truven and U.S. News & World Report.

But her greatest impact may lie in the future well-being of the Roanoke region’s people and its economy. Long before becoming CEO, she championed transformative public-private partnerships aimed at addressing several of the area’s interrelated challenges. The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech-Carilion are now engaging community members, educating practitioners, improving care and attracting research funding. According to studies conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Carilion Clinic contributed more than $3.2 billion to the state’s economy in 2018 and the effect of the Virginia Tech Carilion health sciences campus on the state’s economy is projected to grow from $214 million to $465.2 million annually over the decade from 2017 to 2026.

Weiss has served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn School of Design since 1991 and has taught design studios at Harvard, Yale and Cornell universities over the course of her career. In addition to guiding students, she teaches the broader public through many of her designs.

This part of her work dates back to the founding of WEISS/MANFREDI, also in 1991, and the design that she and Michael Manfredi proposed for the Women’s Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Now hailed for the way it opened space within an existing historic structure for what Weiss calls “stories in need of telling,” the memorial honors nearly 3 million women who have served or are serving in or with the U.S. armed forces, starting with the American Revolution.

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Thanks to the visionary leadership of retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier Gen. Wilma L. Vaught, president of the memorial’s foundation from 1987 to 2016, the fledgling WEISS/MANFREDI firm had the opportunity to participate fully in the multi-stakeholder project and to see its winning design realized.

That process prepared them for the firm’s many public projects since then, to the immeasurable benefit of countless visitors to Arlington and the other communities served by the firm’s designs for parks and educational spaces all over the country.

Continuing to Lead

Weiss’ leadership in the design of urban parks and educational spaces turns now to a new master planning project for Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits, a long-term, multidisciplinary effort that will include designers, horticulturalists, paleobotanists, artists, naturalists and others. Cities’ increasing urgency to address rising sea levels and other pressures intensified by climate change will likely bring her more projects like Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, along the East River in Long Island City.

As 400,000 previously uninsured Virginians are now covered by Medicaid, Agee’s advocacy is making a difference for those who lacked access to care in the past. She sees the need and the possibility for a system that meets Americans’ everyday health needs as well as the U.S. system has traditionally delivered acute care. Agee said caring for an aging population and addressing chronic illnesses are challenges to be confronted by addressing health disparities that are long-standing, but currently made more glaring by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As announced by the Alumni Association in April, the University community is encouraged to discover more stories of UVA alumnae through Retold, a recently launched effort to tell the full, nuanced story of women’s experiences at UVA and beyond, honoring the diversity of the alumnae experience over the past 100 years. As public health and University operations allow, the transformational impact of UVA alumnae will be celebrated with a variety of events, open to all.

Photo above published under Creative Commons.

You’ve probably noticed them on road trips: abandoned buildings, dilapidated barns, rowhouses in older impoverished neighborhoods.

There are “places whose walls and floors, attics and yards silently record untold histories,” especially of marginalized and oppressed people, said University of Virginia architectural history professor Louis Nelson, places like “field quarters collapsing in pine stands, cotton warehouses slipping into river deltas, [and] Northern tenements in redlined neighborhoods” that received waves of immigrants and refugees.

Although architectural historians and local communities have shown rising interest in capturing information about these cultural landscapes, the fieldwork needed to study them requires a lot of hands-on effort and resources. 

A new UVA project in partnership with the Vernacular Architecture Forum has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to document and interpret these buildings and landscapes, training a new generation of students in conducting the fieldwork necessary for documenting suppressed and erased architectural histories and integrating social justice commitments, while involving the relevant communities in the process. (“Vernacular architecture” refers to architecture of the everyday whose histories do not focus on the architect or designer, but the people who build and use the buildings.)

Nelson, UVA’s vice provost for academic outreach, will lead the national three-year, $750,000 initiative to develop summer institutes, starting with three field schools, devoted to “Recovering Erased Histories,” as the project is called. He is also immediate past president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, which has about 800 members, including professors, practitioners, public employees and others who work in historic preservation and cultural resource management. He has also been editor of the forum’s journal, Buildings and Landscapes, where some of the work of the field schools will likely be published.

“It is a great honor to have the support of the Mellon Foundation,” Nelson wrote in email, “in the long goal of better understanding the historic architecture and cultural landscapes of those communities who have lived in the margins of the American experience. So often their histories and their stories are not found in archives, so documenting their buildings, engaging their places, and recording their histories adds greater character to what we call historic, especially here in the American South.”

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UVA Provost Liz Magill said, “This collaborative project aligns with the University’s commitment to research, community engagement and a closer examination of our nation’s racial history. Engaging students, scholars, community members and others in documenting and studying the material lives of marginalized groups helps us as a community and a nation.”

The Mellon grant will fund three different field schools for graduate and undergraduate students; the schools will differ in location and type of architectural content, but all will contribute to the goal of examining architectural relevance to social history. Nelson will head a committee comprising forum members who will review proposals from potential field-school academic directors experienced in this kind of work. They should have community connections and research interests in an area, enabling them to elicit support from a local partnering organization.

Each field school, starting next summer, will accept 10 to 15 students who will conduct their physical documentation and research over two summers for about four weeks each time, and use the third summer to process the data and produce a scholarly publication. The teams also will share their findings in a report for the local community with whom they will have worked.

The students will learn traditional and new methods used in this fieldwork, from making measured drawings and taking photographs to using the latest digital-capture and visualization techniques. They also will learn ethical guidelines and community engagement methods for working with residents in collecting oral histories.

Nelson’s interest and expertise in this kind of fieldwork has developed over almost 20 years. After an initial project in 2003 to document a deteriorating building in Falmouth, Jamaica, he created the Falmouth Field School and worked there for more than 10 summers with more than 150 students on a variety of projects. His fieldwork in Jamaica, and in the Leeward Islands, resulted in some of the first systematic recording of 18^th- and 19th-century architecture in the British Caribbean.

“Standing at the heart of this proposal is the assumption that architectural historians have an important opportunity and responsibility to engage the contested histories of race in America,” he wrote in the proposal.

“This series of summer programs will provide an important catalyst for the fields of historic preservation, and for social justice scholars who endeavor to uncover suppressed and erased histories of marginalized people, as we train the next generation of scholars and practitioners in the fieldwork techniques that characterize Vernacular Architecture Forum’s close study of the built environment.”

Kelsie Chaudoin still remembers a conversation she had during her fourth year at the University of Virginia, where she was a student in the School of Architecture and one of the rowing team’s captains.

She was meeting with Phil Gates, then the life skills director for the UVA athletics department. “He said, ‘Kelsie, there’s glue on the streets here. You’re going to be back someday,’” Chaudoin recalled Sunday, “and I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, whatever.’”

She laughed. “But here I am, heading back.”

A 2008 graduate of UVA, Chaudoin spent the past five seasons on the coaching staff of Stanford University’s powerful women’s rowing program, most recently as associate head coach. She’s still on the West Coast, but this is her first week as UVA’s associate head coach and recruiting coordinator.

She and her fiancé, Corey Hennegan, will move to Charlottesville early next month, along with her dog, Riptide. They wanted to relocate sooner, but concerns about flying during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a change of plans. And so Chaudoin will be telecommuting for the next several weeks, with head coach Kevin Sauer’s blessing.

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Chaudoin and Hennegan had planned to be married on Sept. 19 in California. Then came the pandemic. They’ve rescheduled their wedding for August 2021.

“We’re hoping that it’s more accessible for everybody,” Chaudoin said. “We didn’t want to put people in a tough position to have to decide if they’d fly out.”

Chaudoin, 33, filled the spot on Sauer’s staff that opened when Emily Ford resigned after the abbreviated 2019-20 season to be closer to family in Oregon.

As an undergraduate, Chaudoin rowed for Sauer, and she remained close with him and his wife, Barb, after leaving Charlottesville.

“I’ve always looked up to Kevin,” Chaudoin said. “People say it all the time, but he’s a great coach because he cares so much about his athletes, not only as rowers but as people, and that’s something that I’ve always really admired about him. I just think he’s a top-notch leader, so I’m really excited to learn from him as a co-worker and to see everything behind the scenes that I wasn’t able to witness as an athlete. And I’ve always loved Charlottesville.”

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Rounding out the staff are assistant coaches Erin Neppel and Caroline King, graduate assistant Anne Campbell, director of boathouse and program operations Jeff Mork and volunteer assistant Roger Payne. A revered figure in the rowing world, Payne was the Cavaliers’ boatman when Chaudoin was in college.

Chaudoin has met the other members of the staff, and “I’m just pumped to be able to work with them, too,” she said.

Sauer and Chaudoin were on the United States’ coaching staff at the under-23 world championships last summer, and he’d followed her rise in the profession with interest.

“She’s proven herself as a coach first, but then as a recruiter, too,” Sauer said. “She’s got great relationships with kids and with their parents. I’m looking forward to her taking that banner.”

After graduating from UVA, where she minored in Spanish, Chaudoin continued her competitive career, training at the USRowing center in Princeton, New Jersey. (In 2008, she won a gold medal at the U23 world championships in the women’s eight.) Back then, she didn’t see coaching in her future.

“Not at all,” she said. “When I graduated and I moved to Princeton, I was actually interning at architecture firms and thought that that was the path I was going to go when I retired from competitive rowing.”

In 2012, she moved to the Bay Area to train with the California Rowing Club. In 2013, she started coaching novice boys in the Oakland Strokes Rowing Club “just to earn some extra cash,” Chaudoin said.

She also worked at Stanford’s summer rowing camps, at which she got to know Yasmin Farooq, then head coach of the Cardinal’s women’s program, and Nate Rooks, one of Farooq’s assistants.

By the summer of 2015, Chaudoin was ready to retire as a rower, and Rooks was preparing to leave Stanford. He encouraged Farooq to hire Chaudoin, as did Sauer.

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“I just told Yaz that Kelsie’s a great kid with a strong work ethic and a team-first attitude, and she’ll relate with the kids really well,” Sauer recalled. “When someone is talented in the rowing realm and also the interpersonal realm, you’re going to have a winner, and that’s played out.”

Chaudoin said: “I was a very risky candidate, but [Farooq] took a chance on me. That kind of launched me into coaching at Stanford, and I just fell in love with it.”

When she arrived at UVA in 2004, Chaudoin knew little about the sport. She’d been a volleyball standout at Houston High School in Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis.

“I had opportunities to play volleyball in college,” Chaudoin said, “but I chose not to, because I wanted to go to UVA so badly, and I wasn’t good enough to be on their team.”

Chaudoin, who’s 6-foot-4, was at first-year orientation when former UVA rower Jodi Neuhauser, the team manager that year, spotted her. An introduction to Sauer followed, and Chaudoin joined the team as a walk-on. She didn’t expect to last long.

“Honestly, I planned to quit after the first year, because I knew Architecture School would get too intense,” she said. “But Kevin helped me figure out how to make it work, so I’m very grateful to him for that.”

A novice rower as a freshman, Chaudoin moved up to the second varsity eight, the team’s No. 2 boat, as a sophomore. “Kevin totally took a risk on me,” she said. “I had no idea what I was doing.”

She bounced between the second varsity eight and the varsity eight, the team’s top boat, as a junior. She rowed in the varsity eight as a senior. The Wahoos were crowned ACC champions in each of Chaudoin’s four years in the program, and as a senior she was named an All-American and the ACC’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year for rowing.

By then, she’d become a team leader. As a newcomer in the program, though, Chaudoin rarely opened her mouth.

“Kevin and Barb like to joke that when I was a first-year, and even when I was a second-year, they don’t think they ever heard me say a word,” Chaudoin said. “I was a pretty quiet athlete, but the way that Kevin develops the culture there, he really teaches you to believe in yourself, not make excuses, figure out how to get things done.

“Believing in myself, and the trust that was created by the team, allowed me to feel like I could be more vocal as I got older.”

Sauer said: “Eventually she opened up a little bit as she got more comfortable. She wasn’t necessarily the most vocal person on the team, for sure. She led by example. She just put her head down and worked hard. But she was very good relationally. She could talk to kids one on one. They knew they could trust her. It’s kind of like the old EF Hutton commercial. It was the same with Kelsie. When she did say something, people would be like, ‘Oh, it must be important.’ That’s the kind of leader she was.”

In 2007, Virginia placed second overall at the NCAA championships. In 2010, the Hoos broke through, winning the program’s first NCAA team title. They’d also been second in 1999 and 2005.

“It was really exciting for the alums to see them finally get over that hump,” Chaudoin said.

In 2012, the Cavaliers added a second NCAA team crown. Since then, in an increasingly competitive sport, UVA has finished third once, fifth four times, 10^th once, and 11^th once at NCAAs. The Hoos’ pursuit of a third championship continues.

“Kevin hasn’t talked to me about it, but I kind of feel like nothing has changed in the last 10 or 12 years since I’ve been there,” Chaudoin said. “I would expect his goals are that the program gets back on the podium and wins again. I also think that UVA has all of the pieces in place to be successful, and I’m really excited to come back and work with the team.”

Six University of Virginia students received an option to study abroad, thanks to the U.S. Department of State.

Five students received Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships to study abroad and a sixth was named a Gilman-McCain Scholar.

The Gilman Scholarship recipients are Kelena Lewis-Matthews of Brooklyn, New York; Gabriel Mallari of Virginia Beach; Min Woo “Denny” Jeong of Centreville; Rodrigo Giron of South Riding; and Rachel Jeffers of Midlothian. John MacLeod of Virginia Beach received the Gilman-McCain Scholarship.

Gilman Scholarships, available to students who receive Pell Grants, provide funding for overseas research, while the Gilman-McCain Scholarship is for students who are dependents of an active-duty member of the military. This year, the study-abroad opportunities were cancelled in the spring because of the COVID-19 virus. This year’s Gilman recipients, who were notified in late July, can delay their projects or seek out virtual alternatives.

Gilman Scholars worked with the International Studies Office in planning their research trips.

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“Even though the pandemic has put a halt to any study-abroad plans for the moment, I am thrilled to see so many students now applying for the Gilman and Gilman-McCain,” Andrus G. Ashoo, director of UVA’s Office of Citizen Scholar Development, said. “These students put in the hard work and are still working on alternative plans to take advantage of the award. Of course, we know more students are eligible to apply and the Gilman could be the difference that makes study abroad possible for many students. We are ready to support students with their materials and so are our wonderful colleagues in the International Studies Office, who are vital to helping students understand and simplify possibilities for study abroad.”

The Office of Citizen Scholar Development and the International Studies Office will host an online Gilman Scholarship information session on Wednesday at 4 p.m.

“I think a lot of students hear that it’s competitive and automatically rule themselves out, like, ‘I don’t have a super-high GPA’ or ‘I don’t have a leadership position in any CIOs,’” said Annia Dowell-Wiltshire, an education abroad adviser. “But the great thing about the Gilman is that they aren’t looking for the students with the highest GPAs or the ‘right’ résumé-boosting activities. Around 30% of the UVA students who have historically applied for the Gilman have received funding.”

Dowell-Wiltshire advises students to put together their best application, with the assistance of Office of Citizen Scholar Development and the International Studies Office.

“Numerically the odds are a lot better than I think most students believe that they are,” Dowell-Wiltshire said.

This year’s Gilman Scholarship recipients are:

• Min Woo “Denny” Jeong of Centreville, a fourth-year foreign affairs major with an East Asian studies minor, who wants to study Mandarin through virtual classes while remaining in Charlottesville. He hopes to know his options by early October.

“I felt strongly that studying abroad would further my language-learning goals,” Jeong said. “I am not entirely sure what a virtual internship might look like, but I will have a better understanding in the coming weeks.”

Jeong chose Mandarin because of its importance in East Asian politics.

“I already speak Korean, so it only made sense that I study Mandarin, considering China’s increasing influence in international politics,” he said. “I would like to pursue a greater knowledge on China’s foreign relations.”

Jeong had sought a residential program because he believes in the efficacy of immersion for learning language.

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“My family and I immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea,” he said. “We quickly adapted to life here. Although my young age allowed me to adapt and learn English more easily, my parents and my older sister have demonstrated to me that immersion is critical in language learning.

Jeong is a current member, former secretary and former president of the Virginia Glee Club, as well as a member of Alpha Phi Omega, a gender-inclusive service fraternity.

• Rodrigo Giron of South Riding, a fourth-year politics and foreign affairs major, who wants to study politics in Valencia, Spain, in the spring semester.

“Spain, or Europe in general, has one of the most unique and intricate styles of government and politics on the planet,” Giron said. “I plan to study and research heavily on how political life operates there; taking a foreign policy perspective will allow me to grow in my field. Seeing how Spain interacts with not only the world, but its neighbors and fellow European Union members, in a diplomatic way, firsthand, will be extremely interesting.” 

Noting that the COVID-19 virus has forced the scholars to be flexible, Giron said while he can use the scholarship funds for a virtual program, he would still like to go to Spain, maybe in early 2021.

“Valencia caught my eyes, not only because it looks like a beautiful city, but also because I hope to become fluent in Spanish during my study abroad,” Giron said. “I am sure we will have to follow rigorous protocols and guidelines throughout our entire experience, but it will be worth it when it comes to an opportunity like this.

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“This award doesn’t only advance my personal goals, but it will also have a massive impact on my career,” he added. “It is awarded by the State Department, where my dream career could be. The experiences I will be able to live, paired with the education I have received at UVA, will, without a doubt, shape me into the person needed to be successful in my career and life.”

Giron has been heavily involved with Volunteers with International Students, Staff, and Scholars program, which works with international residents in the Charlottesville community.

He is also active in the International Relations Organization, a student-run nonprofit designed to spread awareness on international issues, as well as the Autism Allies and the University Democrats.

• Rachel Jeffers of Midlothian, a fourth-year foreign affairs major, who sought to work with a non-governmental aid agency in Prague. She has deferred her study abroad until 2021 because of COVID-19.

“I planned to spend the summer working for an NGO called People in Need,” she said. “This Prague-based organization focused on delivering humanitarian relief and developmental assistance in more than 20 countries as well as supporting democratization and human rights protection in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Egypt, Libya and Vietnam.”

Jeffers said that as a foreign affairs major, she is interested in international human rights and social justice, as well as the political economy of developing areas.

“Working for People in Need was truly a great opportunity to combine those interests as well as gaining cross-cultural awareness and real-world experience with international development relations,” she said.

Cross-cultural awareness is important to Jeffers.

“As a Black, first-generation college student, I felt it was important for me to take advantage of the many study-abroad opportunities that are offered while in school,” Jeffers said. “The Gilman program has had such a monumental impact on the lives of so many students of color because this program makes study-abroad opportunities financially accessible and allows us to have the same life-changing experiences as students of higher socioeconomic backgrounds.”

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Jeffers plans to pursue a graduate program in international relations, but not immediately.

“I plan to take a gap year to figure out my plans for the future and to get involved in organizations/projects that primarily focus on systematic racial inequality and the economic opportunity gap for African Americans,” Jeffers said.

Jeffers had a fellowship with the Virginia Student Power Network, that leads voter registration efforts on Grounds. She has been the chief financial officer of the Black Student Alliance and a volunteer at the Haven Homeless Shelter in Charlottesville.

• Kelena Lewis-Matthews of Brooklyn, New York, a second-year nursing and African American and African studies major, who wants to study at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana, for the summer session.

“As a transfer, non-traditional student, I did not think that studying abroad would be possible for me during my matriculation,” she said. “Once I realized that I get to determine what my undergraduate experience is going to be, I did research into where I wanted to go. I was disheartened to learn that as a nursing major, there are currently no opportunities to study abroad in West Africa. I decided to forge my own way and apply to an outside study-abroad program.”

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She worked with the International Studies Office in crafting her study program and applied for the Gilman Scholarship.

“Receiving this award will allow me to fulfill my dream of traveling to Ghana while pursuing my educational aspirations,” she said. “I want to experience Ghana beyond the tourism aspects. Studying abroad for the summer semester, and taking classes at the University of Ghana, will allow me to spend more time learning Ghanaian culture and customs.”

A transfer student from South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Lewis-Matthews served as a practical nursing specialist in the U.S. Army, as well as a behavioral health assistant at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, and as a biomedical technician at the Kings College Hospital in London.

The recipient of a Posse Veteran Scholarship and a Theresa A. Thomas Nursing Scholarship, Lewis-Matthews is a member of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority. She plans to pursue a master’s degree in public health and aspires to ultimately become a women’s health nurse practitioner and  certified nurse midwife.

• Gabriel Mallari of Virginia Beach, a third-year computer engineering major who wants to gain technical experience, said the Gilman offered him an opportunity to explore his research interests in South Korea.

“I was hoping to intern at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology as a research assistant in its Robotics Department,” he said. “I am interested in medical devices [and] embedded computing, and pursued the opportunity. I was also interested in living in South Korea and experiencing the culture. After talking to a previous participant in the research-abroad program and researching the university, I felt it was a perfect fit for my schedule during the summer.”

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Mallari planned to immerse himself in South Korean culture, in which he could explore the city of Daegu and travel, but his research trip to South Korea was canceled by the U.S. travel advisory before he knew he had received a Gilman Scholarship. Mallari did work as a software developer at the National Security Innovation Network last summer instead of researching abroad, but he still hopes to travel to Daegu.

“Because of the uncertainty of my situation, I am also exploring virtual, credit-bearing study-abroad opportunities and possibly studying abroad next spring or during my fourth year,” Mallari said, “While I would like to say that I got something beyond the recognition of being a recipient, all of my study-abroad plans are put on an indefinite hold until things calm down. If given the opportunity to safely study abroad in Korea, I will definitely pursue it.”

He is currently the treasurer of the Taekwondo Club at UVA and was undergraduate research assistant in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and at the Link Lab. The recipient of a STEM Bridge Scholarship, an International Studies Office Scholarship and a Donald and Jean Heim Scholarship, Mallari wants to gain technical experience as a software engineer before deciding his career path.

“I do have an interest in web development, data science, product management and technical consulting,” Mallari said. “Despite this opportunity being canceled by COVID, I was nevertheless happy that my effort to display my interest in robotics research and Korean culture was received well. I will consider other, possibly virtual, opportunities to help further my own career.”

This year’s Gilman-McCain Scholarship recipient is:

• John MacLeod of Virginia Beach, a third-year urban and environmental planning major, with a minor in historical preservation, in the School of Architecture, who plans to study affordable housing and sustainability.

“Given that our circumstances can change so quickly, it’s hard to imagine what kind of opportunities will be available in the coming months.” he said. “Right now, however, I hope to do some form of a three-week program or internship over the summer relating to the fields of sustainability, urban planning, and/or public policy. Many firms abroad offered virtual opportunities this past summer, so I’m hoping that they’ll do the same this year should COVID-19 still remain an eminent problem.”

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MacLeod’s first choice is to study in Morocco.

“Ideally, I’d like to intern with an organization or do research that focuses on issues akin to those I would have studied this past summer, such as affordable housing and its connection with sustainability,” MacLeod said.  “Morocco is my top choice and I’d love to work with the Urban and Environmental Planning Department to make that happen.

“Other potential places include the Netherlands, Denmark and Bangladesh, which are all encountering similar problems, but with the added impact of subsidence and sea-level rise.”

MacLeod said that in Morocco he can study forms of urbanism and sustainability that are relatively unknown in the United States.

“My aim is to understand the relationships between the natural and the built environments in a context different from what we have here at home,” MacLeod said. “My urban planning education is inherently about surroundings and the process of place-making. This means that a lot of the time, I only get to interact with more familiar, immediate landscapes like Charlottesville or other domestic metropolises like New York City.

“Although it never came to fruition, my plan to study abroad on Morocco this past summer meant a lot to me, and I had the opportunity to challenge the fundamental assumptions that my classroom experience at UVA rests upon.” he said. “The ultimate hope was to leave with a broader, more nuanced understanding of how to help create equitable cities.”

MacLeod plans to pursue a masters’ degree in urban and environmental planning.

“My current interests revolve around addressing urban inequities across racial and class lines, with a keen focus on concepts like historic preservation, climate change, food justice, land use and education,” he said. “I truly have no clue where I see myself after receiving a masters’ degree. I’m trying to take things day by day for now, but I hope to help build community and foster inclusion wherever I go.”

MacLeod is a member of the University Guide Service and was an orientation leader for Orientation and New Student Programs in 2019. He is a member of the men’s club volleyball team, Phi Delta Theta fraternity and the Virginia No-Tones. He also works part-time at a local architecture firm and for a small farm in Scottsville.

In recent years, University of Virginia researchers have combined forces across disciplines to address the challenges facing one of the most rapidly changing and important regions of the world, far north of Charlottesville, Virginia. The northernmost settlement in the U.S. Arctic, the city of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, is home to more than 4,000 people who are coping with the atmospheric and human impacts of climate change in a community built upon thawing permafrost along the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

The Alaskans’ efforts are being assisted by UVA’s newly formed Arctic Research Center, a collaboration of researchers and students who are studying everything from the environmental effects of extreme climate and climate change on Arctic ecosystems to the design of buildings, towns and cities, as well as the best ways for interdisciplinary researchers to collaborate on these goals with Arctic residents.

Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation, through its “Navigating the New Arctic” initiative, awarded the Arctic Research Center a five-year, $3 million grant to design and monitor a network of integrated meteorological, aquatic and geotechnical sensors throughout Utqiaġvik. These monitors will help UVA researchers from the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Environmental Sciences, the School of Architecture’s Arctic Design Group, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Data Sciences collect data to assist the Arctic community in developing design guidelines for future buildings and infrastructure that increase community resilience while minimizing environmental impacts.

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Environmental sciences professor Howard Epstein, who has been conducting projects in the Arctic for 24 years, said the Arctic Research Center represents the efforts of a vibrant group of UVA researchers interested in addressing challenges in the region, with a warming climate leading to sea ice melts, new shipping routes and a growing human population. It also represents a concerted effort to collaborate directly with community leaders and residents of Utqiaġvik on producing knowledge to meet these challenges.

“What we’ve discovered is that many of the interesting questions facing the Arctic occur at the intersection of different disciplines,” said Epstein, principal investigator of the NSF award. “And you can’t understand all the different components that interact between the natural and built environments without also understanding how people operate within that realm. One of our hopes for this project is to collaborate with a local community that has a long history of involvement with a variety of federal agencies and universities on scientific research.”

A Growing Recognition of UVA’s Arctic Researchers

Epstein is joined in the Arctic Research Center by four other co-principal investigators from different UVA schools. Landscape architecture assistant professor Leena Cho and architecture associate professor Matthew Jull, co-founders of the UVA-based Arctic Design Group, which has been carrying out research on the design of the built environment in the north since 2012, join the Arctic Research Center from the School of Architecture. Luis Felipe Rosado Murillo is an associate researcher in UVA’s School of Data Science, and Caitlin Wylie is an assistant professor of science, technology and society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Claire Griffin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Sciences, is also involved.

Their previous efforts together received multiple grants, including funding from UVA’s Environmental Resilience Institute and the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, which led to the establishment of a new Education Partnership Agreement between UVA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory.

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Most recently, a multi-day symposium titled “Bridging Science, Art and Community in the New Arctic” last September offered a hybrid platform for their cross-disciplinary approach. The meeting provided an opportunity for eight young adults from Alaska to visit UVA and share their perspectives on living and working in Arctic communities; it also featured an eco-acoustics session by UVA music professor and Alaska native Matthew Burtner.

This month’s NSF grant signals growing recognition of the impact of UVA researchers’ work in the Arctic, Jull said.

“There has been Arctic-focused research going on at UVA for four decades, but this is really the first time that the National Science Foundation has given a very large grant to a collaborative, multidisciplinary research group here, and that’s exciting for us,” Jull said. “This puts the University of Virginia on the map in terms of our Arctic research.”

Adapting to a Changing Environment

Within Alaska’s North Slope Borough region, the traditional Inupiaq culture has thrived in the cold. Gordon Brower, the North Slope Borough’s director of planning and community services, said there is a need now to better understand the changing dynamics of the permafrost upon which their community is built.

“We depend to a large degree on traditional foods that are stored in the ground, because using modern walk-in freezers does not age the food in a way that a traditional cellar in the permafrost would. But we’re seeing changes underground in traditional cellars, and the food is going bad. It’s alarming,” Brower said. “Finding a way to address these concerns is very important as climate impacts continue, from coastal erosion to the loss of sea ice, and we face an ever-increasing need to adapt to the change in how we construct homes, where we select lands for subdivisions and to gain a better understanding of how to interact with the change in the permafrost. I am glad these efforts are under way that may, perhaps in working with traditional cultural activities, provide some answers.”

Cho, Jull and Epstein all said this is an essential time to study and assess the impacts of climate change and increased economic interest in the Arctic. With coastal erosion and rising temperatures leading to the thawing of the permafrost upon which their communities are built, Arctic cities and towns face critical decisions about their future. And the people of Utqiaġvik will play a critical role in the Arctic Research Center’s efforts to plan, place and maintain the network of environmental sensors funded by the NSF project, Cho said.

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“At the end of the day, we want to make sure that our discoveries and findings can be synthesized into something that is useful for communities that are facing these challenges,” Cho said. “We have been developing a working relationship with the people living there the past seven years, because they are the ones experiencing the challenges, physically and materially. Working with them, it’s important to listen and learn the specific areas of the community to identify the best locations where to install the project’s sensors and set up to collect this wealth of data over the next five years.”

Wylie, a social scientist, will study how the UVA team and community members collaborate. A substantial part of the project consists of building and fostering a “research data commons” in collaboration with Alaskan communities, Murillo said, “and this is what we will work on for the purposes of indigenous data sovereignty.”

“Understanding a problem as complex as climate change requires all kinds of expertise, including residents’ lived experience and a variety of academic disciplines,” Wylie said. “So it’s crucial for us all to learn each other’s ways of understanding the environment so that we can truly integrate our work.”

The founder and president of an Inupiaq-owned consulting business, Lars Nelson serves as the Arctic Research Center’s primary Utqiaġvik collaborator. He said the Arctic Research Center’s plan to install and monitor sensors that collect information in real time has the potential to drive significant changes in Arctic designs.

“I have had the pleasure of working with Matthew [Jull] and the UVA Arctic focus groups for a few years now,” Nelson said.  “UVA recognizes the importance of local collaboration and involvement, not only for implementation of innovation, but to help gauge feasibility, scalability and practicality.”

In the future, the Arctic Research Center’s project aims to offer opportunities for UVA students – Ph.D. and master’s candidates, and undergraduates – to travel to Utqiaġvik to assist with the NSF project.

“Going to the Arctic to understand firsthand what it’s like working with the community, what the environment is like and what are the challenges they’re facing – that can have huge ripple effects for our students,” Jull said. “Some of them may go into policy work or all sorts of different careers as leaders in their fields. The decisions that get made – down the road in terms of the Arctic and its environment – will be influenced by the experiences they have, and that’s a really important part of this research ecosystem we’re forming.”

Steve Milone was helping two of his children, both University of Virginia undergraduates, move in for the fall semester last month when he thought, well, maybe he should join them.

Not in the literal sense.

Certainly, a 58-year-old father of two moving in with college kids – even during these strange times – would be considered a bit odd, kind of like the late actor Rodney Dangerfield’s character in the movie, “Back to School.”

But being on Grounds made Milone – a career United States Navy officer – wonder if it was the right time to try and finish something he had started more than 20 years before: earning his master’s degree in urban and environmental planning from UVA’s School of Architecture.

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Between 1998 and 2004, Milone had been taking evening courses at UVA’s Northern Virginia Center satellite campus in Falls Church, but a series of deployments kept him from earning his final credits.

So as his son, Will, a rising fourth-year student, and his daughter, Charlotte, a rising second-year, prepared for classes in September, Milone had an overriding thought:

“I was like, ‘Hey, I should try and look into this myself,’” Milone said.

When Milone returned home to Alexandria, he reached out to UVA’s School of Architecture.

“They looked at my classes and said, ‘Twenty years is much longer than we would normally let somebody take to complete a master’s,” Milone said with a chuckle, “but a lot of the classes are the same, so let’s see what we can do.’”

It was determined that Milone would need to take four more courses, two in the fall and two in the spring, to earn his degree.

And so, just a short time later, Milone found himself enrolled in a virtual course, “Ethics of Cities and Environment,” taught by Timothy Beatley, a professor who taught Milone’s very first course more than two decades earlier.

“I certainly remembered him very well,” Beatley said. “He was a great student, and I didn’t realize that he hadn’t graduated.”

In a funny twist, it turned out Milone’s son had also taken one of Beatley’s classes.

Will Milone, who is majoring in architectural history and preservation, calls the whole thing “surreal.”  

Recently, Milone said a few of his friends told him they saw his father in their class.

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“I don’t think I fully realize that my dad is enrolled in the same university as my sister and I,” he said. “I wish I could fully process it because it's certainly a funny story!”

“I’ll usually FaceTime my parents every week and after my dad asks me how my classes are, I’ll ask him the same thing,” said Charlotte Milone, a psychology major in the College of Arts & Sciences. “In the beginning of the semester, he was telling me how he was having trouble navigating UVA Virgo (the library’s online card catalog) and having difficulty finding assignments on Collab, which I found pretty funny.” 

Steve Milone, who also has a daughter, Katie Rose, a high school senior, grew up in Laurel Springs, New Jersey – a town just outside of Philadelphia – and attended Paul VI High School in nearby Haddonfield. A first-generation college student, he went on to study civil engineering at Drexel University for two years before deciding to go to the Naval Academy.

After attending flight school, Milone served as an “ECMO” – an electronic countermeasures officer – on a carrier-based jet aircraft called an EA-6B Prowler.

During his career, Milone flew nearly 3,000 hours, leading missions that sometimes included squadrons from all over the world. In the time since he started the master’s program, he worked his way up from lieutenant to lieutenant commander, to commander, and then to captain.

Milone was living in Alexandria and on active duty in the Prowler reserve squadron at Joint Base Andrews when he met his wife, Jasmine, an Iranian-American who had come to the United States with her family during the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University.

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After a shift to reserve duty in 1998, Milone – who had always been interested in architecture – decided to pursue a master’s in urban and environmental planning at UVA’s satellite campus in Falls Church.

Milone’s first course was Beatley’s environmental policy course. He then took one in planning theory with professor Daphne Spain.

“I was like, ‘This is great! I really love this,’” Milone said.

Milone, with Spain’s encouragement, took a job as a zoning official in Alexandria. He loved it and wound up working for the city in various capacities for nearly 15 years while simultaneously working in the Navy Reserves.

During his time in the master’s program, Milone was deployed on several occasions.

In 1998, he was needed to deliver a Prowler to an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf for what wound up being the Operation Desert Fox in Iraq. In 1999, with just 96 hours of notice, he was deployed to Kosovo. In 2000, there was another deployment to Iraq.

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“The professors were great,” Milone said. “They said, ‘We understand, do what you have to do and when you get back, we’ll figure it out.’

“When I got back, I went right into my next semester’s classes, but I was behind on my civilian job, behind on training and other responsibilities for both the reserves and my planning job in Alexandria, and the kids were little at the time.”

And, right around then, the program was discontinued at the Falls Church location. Unfortunately, Milone was unable to complete his final few classes.

Over the years, Milone always had it in the back of his mind that he would like to finish what he started, especially when he would apply for certain jobs and not be able to check off the box indicating he had attained a master’s degree.

When the pandemic shifted many courses from in-person to online, Milone saw the perfect opportunity.

“Everything is so tied into urban and environmental planning – climate change, global warming, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic,” he said. “So much of it is tied into what that job and career field is.

“There’s so much opportunity to make things better.”

Beatley said he has loved reconnecting with Milone.

“It’s wonderful that he’s come back to do this,” Beatley said. “He’s been a really great participant and very active in the class. He adds a lot to the mix. He’s had a career and has attained a lot of life wisdom.

“The pandemic is a terrible thing for a lot of reasons, but it does make something like this possible in that he’s able to join in from Northern Virginia.”

Milone retired from the Navy two years ago. He now has a civilian job for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Milone said that he hopes to leverage his UVA degree toward work in the planning sector, perhaps something within the National Park Service, the federal Department of the Interior or in Housing and Urban Development.

Milone believes many of the things he learned at the Naval Academy (he’s a 1987 graduate), such as persistence and perseverance, drove his desire to finish his UVA degree.

Both Will and Charlotte Milone said they are proud of their dad.

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“I definitely feel connected to him in a way that I have not felt before, since we are somewhat peers,” Charlotte Milone said. “I’m sure it’s going to feel really weird for my brother, though, when he graduates with my dad!”

Milone has his fingers crossed about that. Depending on how things go with the pandemic, he’s hoping to walk the Lawn with Will this spring.

Last spring, he rented a house in Charlottesville for graduation weekend, not knowing that he, too, would have something to celebrate.

“I said, ‘Will, I don’t want to take anything away from you,’” Milone said, “but he said, ‘No, it will be fun.’”

Down the road, Milone isn’t ruling out further education, with pursuing a doctorate a possibility. For now, though, he’s just elated to be back in school.

“The classes are as robust as when you’re there, I think,” he said. “Some of the information we’re reading is the same as my classes 20 years ago, but a lot of it is new.

“For me, it’s a fantastic opportunity. I find it really interesting to be in school with younger students. It’s been great for me. I love school.”

A three-year collaboration between two University of Virginia School of Architecture professors and Albemarle County’s Baker-Butler Elementary School helped the school earn a National Blue Ribbon School Award last week, given by the U.S. Department of Education.

Baker-Butler was one of four schools in Virginia to receive the Blue Ribbon Program’s Exemplary Award for Closing Achievement Gaps. It is the first time a Virginia school has been awarded this honor for success in closing achievement gaps between a school’s overall student population and English language learners, special education students and students from economically disadvantaged homes.

UVA assistant professor of architecture and design thinking Elgin Cleckley, who leads the mpathic design practice, and associate professor Jennifer Chiu have worked with Baker-Butler administrators and teachers to bring design-thinking principles into elementary classrooms, building what Baker-Butler Principal Seth Kennard described as a project-based learning approach that emphasizes not just the answer to a problem, but the process of getting that answer. Kennard credits the approach as a big part of the success that led to the recent award.

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“Students must deeply understand the purpose and meaning behind what they are trying to accomplish and use their new content knowledge to get there,” he said. “This generates a level of ownership on the part of students, that, in turn, leads to high levels of understanding.”

Design thinking is a problem-solving method that applies architects’ and designers’ creative thinking to social problems. UVA Darden School of Business professor Jeanne Liedtka is among the earliest scholars whose work on design thinking has helped define the field, and Cleckley and Chiu are among those who have incorporated the concept into the School of Architecture. 

Dr. Steve Saunders, who served as Baker-Butler’s principal from 2014 to 2019, which included the three-year award period, brought design-thinking principles to the school through the collaboration with Cleckley, Chiu and their UVA students. The UVA scholars and Baker-Butler administrators and teachers worked together in professional development sessions, and cohorts of teachers came to UVA for three-day sessions with Cleckley’s design-thinking course, funded by a grant from UVA’s School of Education and Human Development.

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Together, they developed problem-solving frameworks designed to help students build creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills, and to develop empathy for others.

For example, in one exercise second-grade students brainstormed ways to improve the end of the school day for their peers, asking questions like, “What problems are we trying to solve?,” “Who is affected?” and “What are some possible solutions?”. Teachers displayed students’ answers in Post-It notes that could be moved around various boards, helping them visualize the decision-making process.

Second-grade teacher Lisa Baker said the design-thinking process helps her students to take risks and find creative solutions.   

“Over the past several years, teachers and administrators have joined together to transition project-based learning projects into design thinking projects,” Baker said. “Students empathize, define the project, make prototypes, test their projects and share the final project. Establishing a sense of empathy for others has helped to encourage students to take risks and feel supported by our school community.”

The approach has been so successful that Cleckley and the UVA team are hoping to replicate it at other schools. They recently received a Jefferson Trust Award to continue this approach in collaboration with Saunders and Greer Elementary School, where Saunders now serves as principal.  

“Our partnership with [Cleckley and Chiu] at Baker-Butler was foundational to our staff becoming innovative, flexible and creative problem-solvers,” said Saunders, a UVA graduate with degrees from the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Education and Human Development. “Working with Elgin and Jennie allowed us to innovate quickly and I really appreciate the partnership.”

Chiu was enthusiastic about the partnership and the results at Baker-Butler so far.

“What I love about a design-thinking approach applied to educational settings is that it supports optimism and agency with students and teachers to solve difficult and important problems,” she said. “Design-thinking approaches help to empower teachers and students to make a difference in their schools and local communities with a focus on empathy and need-finding.

“The results at Baker-Butler are very promising and demonstrate the hard work of the administration, teachers and students. I'm eager to continue our work and research with Steve Saunders at Greer Elementary.”

Democracy in danger. Climate justice in cities. Race, protest and the media. An ongoing pandemic.

Covering relevant topics like these, an innovative program of “Signature” courses for January Term – in the works as part of the University of Virginia’s academic response to the coronavirus pandemic – is coming to fruition.

Professors from across Grounds, as well as guest instructors, are teaming up to offer interdisciplinary courses designed to appeal to a range of students by addressing some of today’s most urgent issues.

“These courses will explore some of today’s most relevant topics – from the science of pandemics, to racial justice, to the importance of democracy, to an examination of sustainable cities of the future,” Provost Liz Magill said in last week’s UVA Weekly video.

Among UVA’s many changes this year due to the pandemic, the shift to online instruction will apply to all 2021 J-Term classes, as it did for summer session and most fall classes.

Enrollment for the J-Term session, to be held Jan 4 through 15, opens Nov. 9. Course descriptions can be viewed online here.

As the administration first explained to the University community in June, this year’s regular tuition includes one J-Term course and one course in this summer’s Summer Session I at no additional charge, as long as students earn no more than 33 credits during the academic year. This plan is meant to accommodate students who might want to take a reduced courseload during the fall and spring semesters, depending on their circumstances, so they can stay on track academically.

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“Students might feel added pressure to keep up because of the compressed timeline of the semesters, but this path gives them more flexibility to succeed,” said Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Maïté Brandt-Pearce, also a professor of electrical engineering.

Brandt-Pearce and Brie Gertler, a philosophy professor who has held several administrative posts in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, including as acting dean in fall 2019, led a small committee of faculty to select the Signature courses.

Receiving some 90 submissions, the committee was “impressed by the range of creative proposals,” Gertler said.

The Signature J-Term courses will be offered in addition to regular January-term courses, which often focus on more specific topics.  

“These Signature J-Term courses are the opposite,” Brandt-Pearce said. “They cover broad, timely subjects, addressing current issues in our society, and are meant to appeal to a lot of students.”

“We know that both students and faculty thrive in the intensive learning format of J-Term,” said Dudley Doane, who directs UVA’s international, summer and special academic programs, “and are consequently excited to see increased access to J-Term and the introduction of new courses.”

Gertler and Brandt-Pearce said they anticipate higher-than-usual enrollment in J-Term. The 11 Signature courses being offered are designed to be accessible regardless of school or academic background. Some of them have co-instructors from different Arts & Sciences departments or different schools, including Architecture and Engineering.

“These courses will explore some of today’s most relevant topics – from the science of pandemics, to racial justice, to the importance of democracy, to an examination of sustainable cities of the future.”

- Provost Liz Magill

“We see this as an opportunity,” Gertler said, “for students to expand their horizons beyond what they would ordinarily take.”

Shilpa Davé, an assistant professor of media studies and American studies, and Camilla Fojas, who chairs the Department of Media Studies and is also part of the American studies program, will teach “Race, Protest and the Media.” The course will explore key historical moments from the 1960s to the present, analyzing ways that different media frame and influence how protests centered on racial justice become touchstone generational events, Davé said.

She and Fojas are excited to teach together for the first time and to expand upon their efforts in hosting a fall 2019 conference on a similar topic.

“We were able to bring race and media scholars from different universities with some of our own faculty in Charlottesville [in 2019] to discuss the complex relations between race and media,” Davé said in an email. “The course is a chance to continue the conversation from scholars to our undergraduate students.”

“Contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, marches against Asian xenophobia, and successful groundbreaking texts related to them, including ‘Black Panther’ comics and films and the book ‘Undocumented and Unafraid,’ about the immigrant youth movement, can be framed through key media moments of historical protest,” Davé said.

Fojas added, “It’s exciting to have the opportunity to continue conversations around race and media through the lens of protest.”

In the arena of science, associate professors of psychology Jessica Connelly and James Morris will teach “How to Build a Healthy Human Brain.”

This course, as described in the online list, “examines how early life experience shapes the function of our genome, impacts the development of brain systems involved in the complexities of human life, and sets the stage for our abilities to forge new social bonds that promote healthy lives and rewarding personal experiences.”

Connelly said, “It seemed particularly important in a time when many are struggling with understanding what is going on in the world around them” to offer a course like this. “Deep biological understanding about how you came to be provides a chance to better understand others, their actions and their choices,” she wrote in email.

She and Morris, her husband, have collaborated in research, but not in teaching a course. Both have taught separate courses as College Fellows in the New Curriculum that Arts & Sciences has adopted.

“This course is unlike any we have imagined,” Connelly said. “Teaching online the past two semesters has really opened our eyes to new formats and new ways to create thought in the classroom. It is our hope that bringing science to students at UVA through guest lectures by the scientists who have led the fields we will explore will engage students in a way that is deep and memorable.”

Other Signature courses include: “Climate Justice in Cities: Designing for Systems Change,” co-taught by Barbara Brown Wilson and Jeana Ripple in the School of Architecture; “Whiteness: History of a Racial Category,” co-taught by religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt and Andrew Kahrl, a professor of history and African-American studies; and “Pandemics Beyond the Headlines: COVID-19,” co-taught by chemical engineering professor Roseanne Ford and politics professor David Leblang, who has faculty appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Miller Center.

Last but not least, politics professor Larry Sabato will give a special two-hour evening lecture in early January dedicated to the 2020 presidential election. Course instructors will be encouraged to assign this event to their students, Brandt-Pearce said.

As the new program launches, Brandt-Pearce said she has been heartened by “the creativity and generosity of the faculty and their willingness to step up, to do this for the students and for the University.”

The moment had come for Leigh Hassler to remove a painstakingly constructed steam chamber created to surround one of the ornate Carrara marble capitals that adorn UVA’s Pavilion VIII.

During the building’s original construction, Thomas Jefferson ordered these capitals from Carrara, Italy – the same source as the recently replaced capitals that front the Rotunda. Hassler and her team were six hours into an intense paint-removal process. A palpable sense of anticipation hung in the air.

As the team got down to business, briskly removing the chamber’s box around the capital, steam rose into a crisp, blue fall sky.

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While Hassler, a 2000 graduate of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, and colleagues Lee Dunsmore and Andrew Fearon of Philadelphia-based Materials Conservation are well-versed in a myriad of historic preservation projects – they once moved and restored a 15-foot wall mural painted by famed author Maurice Sendak – UVA’s capital restoration was a special project. The team was asked to create and build a custom-fitting steam chamber to remove decades of old paint from the Pavilion VIII capitals. The process works by using the steam to suffuse tiny cracks between paint layers and provide a barrier against the marble as the team gently peels them away.

Even for these consummate professionals, the unknown is always a factor when dealing with historic preservation and restoration. According to Hassler, in this instance, the biggest challenge was to remove the paint without harming the marble underneath.

Good news: The steam was successful, softening up multiple layers of paint for removal before it all began to dry again. Hassler compared it to using a slow cooker: “If you steam it or cook it long enough, the meat, or in this instance the paint, should just fall off the bone.”

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After peeling away large swaths of the most pliable layers of paint, the team worked quickly, using dental tools and micro-spatulas to scrape off the rest. After four days of scraping, chipping and applying multiple applications of a neutral pH paint stripper to remove the oldest layers, the team restored the capital to its original form. 

Jefferson based the design for these capitals on the Corinthian Order of the Baths of Diocletian, but he never intended for them to be painted.

“We aren’t sure exactly when or why they were painted,” said James Zehmer, a 2002 Architecture graduate and one of UVA’s historic preservation project managers, “but we speculate it was to cover up soiling and staining from atmospheric pollutants of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Hassler considers the exacting work needed to restore these 200-year-old capitals to their original state to be a small price to pay for the opportunity to work on the Academical Village.

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“This is really where it all began for me, in terms of my interest in architectural history, architecture, and conservation,” she said. “I’m just thrilled to be able to play a small role in the restoration efforts here, whenever they need us. I support this effort and I hope everyone else does, too.”

Since graduating from the School of Architecture, Hassler has participated in several historic restoration projects at UVA. In 2008, she helped with laser-cleaning the column capitals on Pavilion II, subsequently working on the Rotunda capitals survey and projects focused on Pavilion III, Cabell Hall and Clark Hall.

Hassler combines her love for UVA with an abiding respect for the architecture of the Academical Village. As a professional conservator, she finds it inspiring that countless people can connect to the site on many different levels.

“The thing that strikes me the most about Jefferson’s design is not only is it a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it is a UNESCO site that has maintained its functional integrity. It is still functioning as originally intended, which is really rare,” she said. “The energy that goes into making that happen is remarkable and it’s a testament to the staff here. I really consider it to be one of the most significant sites in the country.”

Hassler and her team plan to return to work on Pavilion VIII’s three remaining capitals next spring. She’s proud of the steam removal process her team developed, but hopes it never has to be repeated.

Her professional advice? “Never paint Carrara marble. It won’t happen again.”

In addition to releasing his first-ever peer reviewed rap album, University of Virginia professor of hip-hop A.D. Carson has seen another example of his work climb the music charts this year.

Carson, who joined the faculty of the McIntire Department of Music in 2017, recently posted his second top-10 hit. “Ohana,” a song he wrote with Hawaiian reggae artist Akoni – Carson also performs on the single – reached No. 6 on the iTunes reggae downloads list on Dec. 2.

This is the second time Carson has charted in the last six months. In July, a comedy rap album he performed on, “Doors,” by Handsome Naked, reached No. 2 on iTunes and was the No. 10 comedy album in the Billboard rankings.

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This summer – three years after releasing an album as his Ph.D. dissertation – Carson released the first peer-reviewed rap album ever published by an academic press: “i used to love to dream” (University of Michigan Press), the third album in his “Sleepwalking” series. It explores Carson’s hometown, Decatur, Illinois, and its effect on him as his career has taken off and taken him further from where he grew up, including to Clemson University, where he earned his Ph.D., and now to Charlottesville and UVA, where he is the assistant professor of hip-hop and the global south in the McIntire Department of Music.

Media Studies Professor Tapped to Help Choose Peabody Award Winners

The University of Georgia has invited Aswin Punathambekar, associate professor of media studies, to serve on its 18-member Board of Jurors for the George Foster Peabody Awards, the oldest and most prestigious award for broadcasting and electronic media in the world.

The university’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication administers the awards program. The board – comprising academics, media executives, writers, critics and journalists – annually reviews entries in television, radio and the web, across genre, platform and origin, selecting 30 winners. (The 2019 honorees can be found here.)

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Punathambekar’s research and teaching focus on the impact that globalization and technological change have on the workings of media industries, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. He is the author of “From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry” (NYU Press, 2013); co-author of “Media Industry Studies” (Polity, 2020); and co-editor of “Global Bollywood” (2008), “Television at Large in South Asia” (2013); and most recently, “Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia” (2019). He is currently working on a co-written book, provisionally titled “The Digital Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Networked India.”

He edits the peer-reviewed journal Media, Culture and Society, and co-edits the Critical Cultural Communication book series for NYU Press.

At UVA, Punathambekar is working toward establishing a Global Media Studies Collaboratory, a cross-disciplinary hub for academics, students, media practitioners and others to explore the global impact of media and communication technologies, cultures and industries in a comparative and historical fashion.

Punathambekar will serve on the Board of Jurors for a three-year term. Winners of the 2020 Peabody Awards are scheduled to be announced in April.

Nursing Dean Earns Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Fellowship

Pamela Cipriano, the sixth dean of UVA’s School of Nursing, has been named a Fellow Ad Eundem of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in Dublin, Ireland.

The fellowship is bestowed upon individuals for their contributions and achievements in nursing, education and research. Cipriano – Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professor of Nursing, two-term president of the American Nurses Association and current first vice president of the International Council of Nurses – has long been a voice for nurses, an advocate for clinician well-being and resilience, a leading voice to normalize clinicians’ pursuit of mental health care and a champion of expanding nurses’ influence in health care policy.

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Over her four-decade career, Cipriano has focused on improving nurses’ care by ensuring a healthy, safe and supportive work environment, and encouraging healthy behaviors to promote well-being. A leader in the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience, she was instrumental in advancing strategies to reduce regulatory burden and revamp electronic documentation to relieve clinicians of unnecessary work. Since the pandemic, she helped the collaborative focus on mitigating the effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of all clinicians by reducing the stigma of seeking mental health care as primary prevention for burnout syndrome and depression. 

Cipriano’s advocacy for the nursing profession is well-recognized. She serves as an adviser to Times Up Health Care, a group that aims to eliminate sexual harassment and gender inequality in health care; was a public-sector adviser in the U.S. delegation to the 69th World Health Assembly; and the inaugural editor of the ANA’s American Nurse Today. Named one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” by Modern Healthcare for four consecutive years (2015-18), she earned a post among the “Top 25 Women in Healthcare,” was a Distinguished Nurse Scholar in residence at the Institute of Medicine, and earned the American Academy of Nursing’s Healthcare Leader Award in 2018.

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’s Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery will induct Cipriano as a fellow at a virtual ceremony in mid-December led by the college’s dean, Michael Shannon. 

STAT Honors ‘Wunderkind’ for Pioneering Work at UVA on Focused Ultrasound, Cancer

Health news site STAT named Natasha Sheybani as one of the next generation of scientific superstars for her work in focused ultrasound, cancer immunology and nuclear medicine while a UVA graduate student.

STAT made Sheybani, now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, as one of its 2020 “Wunderkinds” as part of an annual competition celebrating promising young scientists. She is one of 26 award recipients this year.

“It is incredibly inspiring and motivating to be in the company of such remarkable early career scientists who share a desire to bear meaningful impact on patient lives through research,” she said. “I owe a great deal to the many mentors – most notably my Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Richard Price – who have championed my ambition to bring focused ultrasound and imaging to the forefront of immuno-oncology.”

At UVA, Sheybani played an instrumental role in pioneering research into the use of highly focused soundwaves as a potential treatment for breast cancer and brain tumors being conducted in Price’s biomedical engineering lab. UVA is seeking approval to launch a clinical trial based on her breast cancer work.

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In nominating his then-student for the award, Price called Sheybani “a transformative presence” in his lab. 

“Through both coursework and collaborations with colleagues in the UVA Human Immunotherapy Center, Dr. Sheybani has become highly proficient in cancer immunology and has been my ‘go-to’ source for immunology questions for the past two years,” he said. 

He noted that Sheybani pioneered the use of an imaging technology, immuno-positron emission tomography, to assess how focused ultrasound enhances drug delivery in brain tumors. Even after the pandemic struck, she worked tirelessly to maintain productivity in her research endeavors. “With regard to publications and productivity, Natasha is the most prolific student I have encountered in my 22 years on the faculty,” Price said.

He also saluted Sheybani for her role mentoring undergraduate students, noting that she led multiple undergraduate teams completing intensive “capstone” projects. “Given her proclivity for mentorship,” Price said, “as she advances into her independent career, she will embrace the opportunity to mentor women engineering and science students to become leaders in the field.”

Originally from Richmond, Sheybani received her Ph.D. this summer from UVA’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint program of UVA’s schools of Medicine and Engineering. Her dissertation examined how focused ultrasound can benefit immunotherapy for solid cancers.

UVA Receives Two Grants to Support Burgeoning Field of Public Interest Technology

Two UVA proposals have received Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge grants to support the new field of public interest technology. 

UVA is among 25 colleges and universities in the network, who are seeking to advance the use of technology for the public benefit.

One of the funded proposals, which received $87,500, seeks to create a “Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas,” using “participatory methods to engage a wide cross-section of community members to help us evaluate and advance” the project, according to the proposal’s abstract. It envisions mentoring high school and college students as part of the project.

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“An Equity Atlas serves as a data and policy tool for leaders and advocates to advance a more equitable community while helping citizens hold decision-makers accountable, bringing more data to bear in evaluating equity in policy choices and outcomes,” the proposal states.

The co-principal investigators are Michele Claibourn, director of research data services and the social, natural and engineering sciences at the UVA Library; and Barbara Brown Wilson, director of UVA’s new Equity Center and an assistant professor in the School of Architecture. Their collaborators include Nancy Deutsch, a professor in the School of Education and Human Development, director of Youth-Nex and a faculty director of the Equity Center; Bonnie Gordon, associate professor of music and another faculty director of the Equity Center; and Kimalee Dickerson, a post-doctoral scholar in the School of Education and Human Development, who also is affiliated with Youth-Nex and the Equity Center.

The second project, “A Community Fellows Program for Public Interest Technology,” received a $44,430 award.

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Led by the Charlottesville-based nonprofit Center for Civic Innovation, the fellows program invites community members to bring their projects and ideas in public interest technology to the center, which then enlists the aid of volunteer mentors, coaches and supporters – many from the University – to advance their proposals.

The grant will allow the program to hire a part-time program director, who will “oversee, grow and formalize” it, while also identifying “best practices, strategies, and a curriculum that other communities can easily adapt.”

The principal investigator is John Goodall, an engineering professor. His collaborators include Lucas Ames, founder of Smart Cville.

Data Scientists Honored for Use of Technology to Review Gut Video, Diagnose Disease

A team of UVA data scientists received an award at a pediatric gastroenterology conference, sponsored by the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition, for its work in automating diagnosis of gastroenterology disease.

They presented their research, “Computer-Aided Detection of Gastrointestinal Anatomy and Pathology via Use of Deep Learning Algorithms for Video Capsule Endoscopy Interpretation,” on Nov. 6 at the conference, held virtually this year.

The project uses computer deep learning to recognize key features of disease by automatically analyzing hours of endoscopy videos taken within the gastro-intestinal tracts of patients, with the ultimate goal of giving real-time diagnostic data in the clinic.

The project was born within UVA’s Gut Intelligence Lab, a collaboration between the labs of Dr. Sana Syed, assistant professor of pediatric gastroenterology, and Donald Brown, W.S. Calcott Professor of Engineering Systems and the Environment. The lab includes a diverse team of medical students, graduate students in engineering and senior research assistants – all with the common goal of using artificial intelligence to better inform diagnostics in gut disease. The lead author of the honored study is Michelle Yeghyayan, a fourth-year medical student in Syed’s lab.

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Yeghyayan and colleagues have been able to show proof of concept that deep learning can detect key diagnostic features in disease with greater than 95% accuracy. Their future goals include optimizing programming so that this technique can be used quickly in the clinic. 

Yeghyayan’s co-authors include Dr. Dylan Hyatt, a former UVA medical student and now a resident in pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego; Dr. Lubaina Ehsan, senior researcher; James Jablonski, a systems engineering Ph.D. student; Sodiq Adewole, a Ph.D. candidate in systems and information engineering; Dr. Andrew Copland of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Division; and corresponding authors Brown and Syed.

Cancer Center Specialist Named ‘Rural Health Fellow’

The National Rural Health Association has selected Bryan Price, a Danville-based outreach and engagement specialist for the UVA Cancer Center, as one its new 2021 Rural Health Fellows.

After a competitive review process, the association selected 16 fellows to participate in this yearlong, intensive program aimed at developing leaders who can articulate a clear and compelling vision for rural America.

“Once again, this class represents various levels of rural health expertise,” National Rural Health Association CEO Alan Morgan said. “With the successes achieved by the previous classes, we look forward to continuing the tradition of building rural health care leaders through this valuable program.”

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The Rural Health Fellows meet in person three times throughout the year to undergo intensive leadership and advocacy training. In addition, fellows take part in monthly conference calls to supplement their training, receive updates on legislative and regulatory concerns that impact rural health, and participate in a mentorship program with current members of the association’s Board of Trustees.

The class of Rural Health Fellows will meet in January, Price said, then will break into smaller groups to work on a yearlong policy project.

Price also is the current vice president and incoming 2021 president of the Virginia Rural Health Association.

The National Rural Health Association is a nonprofit organization working to improve the health and well-being of rural Americans and providing leadership on rural health issues through advocacy, communications, education and research. Its membership is made up of more than 21,000 individuals and organizations, all of whom share the common bond of an interest in rural health.

Librarians Collaborate on International Award-Winning Digital Preservation Project

Bradley Daigle and Lauren Work of the UVA Library are key members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance group that won the Digital Preservation Coalition’s International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation. The award, given at the coalition’s Digital Preservation Awards 2020 ceremony, was announced Nov. 5 to coincide with World Digital Preservation Day.

Daigle, UVA’s digital initiatives librarian and strategic and content expert for APTrust, accepted the award on behalf of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance as the chair of the NDSA Leadership and chair of the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation Working Group, to whom to the award was given. Work, digital preservation librarian in the library’s Preservation Services Unit, has an integral role in the project as a member of both the Curatorial Subgroup and the newly formed Steering Group for the Levels, whose role it is to provide an ongoing, up-to-date version.

The Levels of Digital Preservation Working Group was recognized for its work on the Levels of Digital Preservation Revision project, which represents an update to the Levels of Digital Preservation that codifies current technological practices for long-term preservation of digital resources in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The guidelines are presented in an easily digestible format designed for experts as well as newcomers to the field.

As Daigle notes, “The Levels are an extremely easy method for an organization to measure their progress in digital preservation good practice. It points out the key activities that need to occur for an organization to implement their own digital preservation in a progressive manner and map that current landscape of what they can do now to what they want to accomplish.”

The Levels working group comprises more than 200 contributors in six separate groups that span several continents. Daigle initiated the revision process in October 2018 and has managed and guided the ongoing effort since that time. The first set of products were released in 2019, and new additions and additional research components were released at the annual Digital Preservation Conference held Nov. 12.

The Digital Preservation Coalition Awards are given every other year. The International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation is a highly competitive award, with an international panel of experts judging the finalists. The award includes a cash prize of £1,000, which will be donated to the non-profit Council on Library and Information Resources to subsidize travel stipends to attend the NDSA’s annual conference.

From living and aging well to navigating conversations in our divided era; from a new assessment of Leonardo da Vinci to how we get hooked on all kinds of art and popular culture –a University of Virginia authors published some fascinating new books in the latter half of 2020.

Here is a sample that might appeal to a range of readers, culled mainly from the list of new faculty books on the Office of the Vice President for Research Top Shelf page and including a few books by UVA alumni as well. The list is arranged alphabetically by author.

• Ian Baucom, dean of Arts & Sciences and professor of English, “History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene.”
  
  The “Anthropocene” is a recent term to describe the current geological era since human activity became the dominant influence on the environment. In this scholarly work, Baucom argues that climate science, Black studies and postcolonialism are all intertwined.
• Timothy Beatley, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities in the School of Architecture, “The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats.”
  

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  Beatley takes readers on a global tour of cities that have created urban design with birds in mind. Efforts span a breadth of approaches in public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more.
  
  Some of Beatley’s examples include “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy back yards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes on glass façades.
• Daniel Becker, professor of general medicine, geriatrics and palliative care, “2nd Chance.”
  
  A physician for more than 30 years who tried to retire but keeps going back to work, Becker is also a poet. In this book, his poems cover the full spectrum of medical care and seek to understand and honor what medical professionals and patients experience.
• Joseph E. Davis, research professor of sociology and member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and Paul Scherz, Catholic University, editors, “The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well.”
  

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  “We all, barring accident or illness, will face the problems and opportunities of aging,” Davis said in a recent interview in Psychology Today. For lay readers as well as professionals, this book’s essays explore how individuals can change as they approach these later years, and how they can view lost abilities as chances for growth and continue to be involved in their relationships and communities.
• Rita Felski, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, “Hooked: Art and Attachment.”
  
  “What’s the hook?” is a question often asked about why a song or film is popular. Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Drawing on a variety of examples – from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to “Thelma and Louise” – Felski brings the language of attachment into her discussion of what connects audiences to works of art.

• Francesca Fiorani, art history professor, “The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint.”
  
  Fiorani seeks to dispel the misconception that da Vinci abandoned art for science and to emphasize how he explored scientific subjects like optics in his painting. Taking a fresh look at his notebooks, as well as other sources, Fiorani argues that da Vinci explored scientific concepts when he was still an apprentice in a Florence studio.
  
  A leading authority on Renaissance art and the application of computer technology to the humanities, Fiorani also created the digital platform, “Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting.”
• Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus, “The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis.”
  

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  This book collects short essays Gallagher wrote for the Civil War Times history magazine, beginning in 2009. He addresses issues about the Civil War era that continue to be relevant today, such as ongoing controversies over Confederate statues. The tension between history and memory forms a theme throughout the essays.
  
  “I stress the importance of what actually happened, while also showing that successive generations remember historical events and personalities in starkly different ways,” he writes in the introduction.
• Claudrena N. Harold, professor of history and of African American and African studies, “When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras.”
  
  Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions and political assertions that have transformed gospel music, and revisits debates about groundbreaking recordings and the genre’s incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop and other popular forms.
  
  Reviewer Robert M. Marovich wrote, “‘When Sunday Comes’ is the book we’ve been waiting for – a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of the impact contemporary singers, songwriters and musicians have made, and continue to make, on gospel music.” 
• E. D. Hirsch, professor emeritus of education and humanities, “How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation.”
  
  More than three decades after his controversial book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” urged educators to emphasize in their teaching what he deemed the most important facts about America, Hirsch again argues that relying on “child-centered learning” leaves out essential knowledge about topics such as history, geography, science and civics, contributing to the achievement gap.
• Micheline Aharonia Marcom, English professor in the Creative Writing Program, “The New American.”
  
  This novel recounts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan American college student, a “dreamer,” who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California.
• Jeanne Martinet, 1980 alumna, “Mingling With the Enemy: A Social Survival Guide for Our Divided Era.”
  

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  In a nation that is more polarized than ever, with most of us overwhelmed by social media and the 24/7 news cycle, our social lives are taking a hit – even before the pandemic made typical gatherings unsafe or cancelled them. Martinet sees our courtesy and compassion eroding and aims to help with her new book, providing a road map, with insight and humor, for steering through interactions to avoid hurting each other and to encourage connections.
• Daniel Mendelsohn, 1982 alumnus, “Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.”
  
  Mendelsohn’s new book, published by UVA Press, is a hybrid of memoir, criticism, biography and fiction. It weaves together the lives of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own: François Fénelon, Erich Auerbach and W.G. Sebald.
• J. Kim Penberthy, Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Science, and J. Morgan Penberthy, yoga and meditation instructor who works at the American Psychological Association, “Living Mindfully Across the Lifespan: An Intergenerational Guide.”
  
  With a mix of empirical data, humor and personal insight, the authors (who happen to be mother and daughter) cover a significant topic or question in each chapter, including self-worth, anxiety, depression, relationships, personal development, loss and death. Along with exercises that clients and therapists can use in daily practice, they include personal stories and case studies, interwoven throughout with their distinct intergenerational perspectives. 
• Dennis Proffitt, Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of Psychology, and Drake Baer, journalist and editor, “Perception: How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds.”
  

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  Over decades of study, Proffitt, who’s still doing research in his perception lab, has shown that we are each living our own personal version of “Gulliver’s Travels,” where the size and shape of the things we see are scaled to the size of our bodies, and our ability to interact with them. Stairs look less steep as dieters lose weight, baseballs grow bigger the better players hit, hills look less daunting if you’re standing next to a close friend, and learning happens faster when you can talk with your hands.
  
  The positive effects of viewing ourselves from this embodied perspective include greater athletic, academic and professional achievement, more nourishing relationships and enhanced personal well-being.
• Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, “Poetry in a Global Age.” 
  
  Building on his previous work in “A Transnational Poetics,” Ramazani broadens his lens to discuss modern and contemporary poems in relation to world literature and current debates over ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism and cultural geography.
• Lindsay Dare Shoop, 2003 alumna, “Better Great Than Never: Believing It’s Possible Is Where Champions Begin.”
  
  Shoop, who hails from Charlottesville, writes that when she discovered rowing, it changed her life. She dedicated the book to Kevin Sauer, the head coach of UVA’s varsity rowing program and Shoop’s coach when she was a student-athlete.
  
  In her book, she shares what she has learned about practicing self-care to address mental and physical stress and live a full life.
  
  Shoop went on from UVA to win Olympic gold in rowing (the women’s eight) in 2008. Now she is a rowing coach at the University of Miami, a speaker and lifelong athlete, as well as a National Rowing Hall of Fame inductee.
• Lisa Russ Spaar, professor of English, director of Creative Writing Program and of the Area Program in Poetry Writing, editor, “More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary Self-Portrait Poems.”
  
  Spaar, who edited this volume and wrote the introduction, started exploring the topic while teaching a January term course several years ago, “Selfies Old and New: The Self-Portrait in Visual Art and Poetry.” The collection presents self-portrait poems from mid-20^th century to present day.
• Brian Teare, associate professor of creative writing, guest editor, “Best New Poets 2020: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers.”
  

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  This annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The 50 poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some 2,000 additional poems submitted through an open online competition.
  
  The “Best New Poets” series has been published for 15 years under the leadership of Jeb Livingood, associate director of UVA’s Creative Writing Program.
• William Wylie, Commonwealth Professor of Art and director of the studio art department, “A Prairie Season.”
  
  In Wylie’s sixth book of photography, he presents a new subject: small-town high school football. In this book, he follows one season of the Prairie School near New Raymer, Colorado, capturing glimpses of the team’s camaraderie and communal rituals, set against the vast horizon.
  
  “On Friday nights in fall,” he writes, “with a moon rising over the plains, surrounded by all that space, and the families and teachers and ranchers and rough-necks gathered in the bleachers under the lights to watch a game, there might not be any better place to be.”

The love that entrepreneurs Brandon Wooten, Brad Uhl and Dan FitzHenry have for the University of Virginia is pretty obvious – just check out their coffee.

The medium roast blend that they created at Charlottesville’s Grit Coffee is called “1819” – an homage to the year UVA was founded.

The coffee’s flavors include toasted almond, vanilla and a “subtle hint” of black cherry that, according to its website, is “great for sipping on The Lawn or cheering on the Hoos” – a blend that is a “celebration of the founding spirit and the pursuit of excellence.”

Wooten, Uhl and FitzHenry certainly seem to have the founding spirit thing down pat.

Ten years ago, the alumni founded a design firm in Charlottesville called “ID Company” – a business designed to help other businesses via a wide range of services, including web development, marketing and rebranding.

Today, their portfolio includes six Grit Coffee locations and The Wool Factory, a newly opened hospitality destination in Charlottesville’s newly renovated Woolen Mills, a property once owned by Thomas Jefferson that featured working mills; they later produced military uniforms for the Confederate States of America before being torched by Union forces.

On the surface, the businesses don’t seem as if they would be related, but, interestingly, they have all been designed to work in tandem with each other.

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At UVA, Wooten, a 2004 grad from Waynesboro, majored in religious studies and minored in architecture; Uhl, a 2007 grad from West Chester, Pennsylvania, majored in economics and religious studies prior to earning his MBA at the Darden School of Business in 2015; and FitzHenry is an alumnus of The College of William and Mary, who worked at the Department of Defense before earning his MBA from Darden in 2018.

UVA Today caught up with the trio to learn more about how they got started, their approach to business and how their time at UVA shaped them.

Q. What services did ID Company provide when you first started it, and what has that expanded to now?

BU: ID Company started out as a fairly straightforward creative services firm, mostly focused on developing brand identities, website design and print collateral. We still do all of those things, with a bit more focus on communication and content strategy on behalf of our clients.

In many ways, we started ID Company with the idea of continuing to do creative services for clients, but also to develop brands of our own. Grit and The Wool Factory were definitely extensions of that idea, and those are for sure the places where we’ve seen that vision come to fruition. 

Q. Can you talk about the synergy of the businesses and why they work so well together? Was this by design or did it just sort of work out that way?

BW: All of our businesses have grown out of relationships, and all complement each other in some way. I met Brad and we complemented each other’s skill sets and it was fun to see the sum of those parts help others as we provided design and brand management for clients. We started ID Company to eventually do those same things for ourselves and very early on realized that we couldn’t do that without surrounding ourselves with talented and passionate people. The ‘ID’ stands for “integrated design” – in other words, ID Company was always meant to be a design arm integrated into a larger company.

When Dan joined us, he brought the operational piece we needed to grow. Along the way, we’ve partnered up with more and more talented people, which has allowed us to grow as a company.

Q. Can you take me through some specifics of how your businesses are mutually beneficial to each other?

DF: We are fortunate to work with incredibly talented people in all of our companies. One thing we’ve been able to do is find good people who are great at what they do, and plug them into a structure that allows them to thrive. We can plan and map out as much as we want, but a lot of what we’ve built has come together by jumping at the right opportunity at the right time when the right partner comes along.

Our businesses are symbiotic because of connections that naturally flow from one opportunity into the next, but it also takes discipline not to stray too far away from what we’ve built and commit to an opportunity that would actually distract from what we’re already doing.

The advantage of the symbiosis between our businesses is that everyone gets to where they want to be faster than if they did it on their own. For example, we didn’t roast our own coffee in the early days of Grit’s existence, but it was long a goal of ours. When the opportunity to hire a very talented coffee roaster presented itself, it meant building something completely new that we had never done before. Because we had four shops at the time, that created immediate demand for the roastery’s product, which then lowered the risk of standing up a coffee roastery from scratch, which then increased our margins on coffee sales at our shops.

We’ve since built out the wholesale and e-commerce side of our business on top of that, in addition to growing our own retail footprint.

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The same thing happened when we had the opportunity to hire an incredible executive pastry chef for The Wool Factory. If you took each side in a vacuum, it probably wasn’t a perfect fit. At the time, we weren’t really planning on dedicating resources to starting a bakery operation, and she was interested in starting her own brand, but would be starting from scratch. By working together, everyone was able to get where they wanted to go much faster, so we formed a joint venture called Cou Cou Rachou.

Now, The Wool Factory benefits from her enormous talent, she’s building her own brand, and she had an immediate customer base right off the bat in The Wool Factory and our Grit Coffee shops, and has quickly built upon that.

Q. I got a chuckle out of reading something that said you guys just keep creating businesses you wish existed. But there’s a lot of truth to that, right?

BU: There definitely is. We’ve all chosen to settle in Charlottesville for the long haul (I personally never left after undergrad), and there’s an aspect of what we do that involves creating the types of businesses, both physical spaces and specific offerings, that we enjoy frequenting ourselves. It’s been really fun with the newest Grit locations and The Wool Factory in particular to be able to sit in those spaces and feel like they turned out the way we were all envisioning throughout.

Q. How much have your personal interests influenced your business ideas, and, in general, what are some tips you might give people who are contemplating a business that revolves around something they really like or are passionate about? I imagine there are some risks there.

BU: I think more than anything, we’ve always tried to create things that are the best representation of what that particular business or product or space can be, while at the same time avoiding the temptation to have any of them try too hard to be something they’re not.

I think the challenge is to avoid making decisions in a vacuum. We’ve been fortunate enough to have extremely talented individuals jump on board along the way. I’m more of a generalist at heart, but when you have people on the team like Brandon, with his strategic insights and creative direction, or Tucker Yoder and Rachel De Jong creating amazing things in the kitchen at The Wool Factory, or Travis Mason, Grit’s director of coffee, sourcing dozens of incredible coffees, it’s hard not to want to push those ideas forward.

There’s definitely risk involved in all of that, and trust me, we’re good at sitting together and convincing ourselves that we’re geniuses, but we have an amazing team that has worked tirelessly to put things forward that we’re proud of and hopefully resonate with our clients and customers.

With Grit, we are always aiming to be approachable, but also to make sure we do our best to showcase the coffees themselves. The sheer amount of effort that went into these coffees before they ever make it to our roastery or into your cup is incredible, and Travis and the entire Grit barista team do an amazing job bringing out the best of each coffee in an effort to let the finished product speak for itself.

At The Wool Factory, we had an opportunity to highlight such a unique historic space in our town. We really wanted to let the original structure do as much of the talking as possible. Add to that a group of amazing professionals with decades of hospitality and food and beverage experience – seriously, it’s a dream team – and we couldn’t be prouder of how things turned out. It’s obviously not been the launch we had hoped for, but we’re all eagerly awaiting the opportunity to share the full property with guests in the months and years ahead.

Q. How have your businesses been affected during the pandemic, and how do you see the future of brick-and-mortar businesses? Have you had to pivot?

BW: For Grit, we went from almost all of our sales being in our shops to pivoting to an entirely e-commerce-driven company during the stay-at-home orders. As we’ve slowly opened our shops back up (currently carryout-only still), we’ve been able to continue to grow e-commerce, which has been great. We had been working on a new shop in Richmond prior to the pandemic; we had to push that opening back, but did eventually open that a few months back.

For The Wool Factory, we were supposed to open in April with a wedding, and that obviously got pushed back. We eventually opened Selvedge Brewing and The Workshop under strict COVID protocols in June and those two aspects of the business have gone well thus far. As primarily an event space, we’ve had to shift our focus out of necessity. We have hosted a few micro-weddings and other small events, but we’ve basically had to pivot and grit it out until it’s safe to fully open the property and start hosting events.

As for the future of brick-and-mortar retail – I think there’s always going to be a need for physical touchpoints for brands. What that footprint looks like I think will likely change. I think having complementary e-commerce or alternative revenue streams is going to be essential for small businesses moving forward.

Like most industries, I think the pandemic has also highlighted some things specific to the restaurant industry that have needed to change for a while anyway – mainly income instability for its hourly employees. Prior to the pandemic, we had already been talking about potential models to address that for The Wool Factory and ended up implementing a property-wide service fee model which allows us to provide a predictable living wage to our entire team – cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders, baristas, etc. The response to that model has been surprisingly well-received.

Q. What was your UVA experience like, and how do you think it prepared you for what you are doing now? Any professors or classes that inspired you?

BW: I loved my time at UVA and continue to relish the friendships I was able to make. I sang in The Virginia Gentlemen and was able to travel to some amazing places and experience a level of food and hospitality that I don’t know that I would have been exposed to otherwise. Those experiences definitely shaped my journey with food and hospitality.

I didn’t quite have a grasp for what I wanted to do post-graduation, so I ended up just taking classes that I enjoyed and were interesting. I remember Architecture 101 being a class that opened my eyes to different ways of seeing things. 

BU: In undergrad, I started out in the Engineering School and ultimately wound up in econ, primarily because I liked the idea of a more generalist approach. “Product X” and “Price Y” always felt like it left so many doors open when compared to a more defined field or area of expertise. I learned a lot about myself in that regard once I realized how much I liked being able to plug into any type of business instead of a specific one.

I decided to go to Darden to gain some of the experience I felt I had missed not leaving Charlottesville, and it definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities of finance, small business, entrepreneurship, etc. in a whole new way.

A mentor once challenged me to stop complaining about constantly feeling like I was spinning plates, when in fact I liked being a “plate spinner.” Once I became more comfortable owning that, it made everything a lot more fun, and it’s also helped us figure out how to craft a career around that particular skillset. I like problem-solving and making sense of what otherwise seems like chaos, and most of what we do is just that.

DF: My experience at Darden was one of the most valuable learning experiences I’ve had. The program gave me the hard science of business, from accounting to leadership to corporate finance to operations and everything in between. The breadth of knowledge the Darden professors bring to the program is incredible. Additionally, I was surrounded by my fellow students who had different experiences, different ways of thinking and approaching problems, and were generally some of the best people I’ve had the good fortune to be around. I learned as much from them as I did from our professors.

I never thought it would be the case while I was learning it, but the professor and class that has stuck with me the most is accounting, taught by Paul Simko. Accounting is important when you run one business. When you run several separate, yet interconnected businesses, you become very familiar with the real-world implications of even the most arcane accounting principles Professor Simko teaches. It isn’t the fun, exciting part of running a business, but accounting touches every aspect of everything we do, and it’s crucial to get right.

Q. What are your long-term goals?

BU: With our group, it seems we’re never short on new ideas, so I’m excited to see what’s next. A few years ago we just had ID Company, and then Grit stormed onto the scene. Similarly, we were focused on building out our roasting operation to support our cafes, and suddenly Woolen Mills became a viable opportunity. Now that a few aspects of The Wool Factory are open … I’m looking forward to getting all of our businesses back up and running fully and then assessing what possibilities await us.

Beyond the great coffees coming out of Grit, we’re excited to share more of Tucker’s food at Broadcloth next year, as well as Rachel’s recently launched bakery, Cou Cou Rachou, featuring her amazing pastries.

Longer term than that, I’d love to eventually get to a place where we can make connections with people who are passionate experts in some way and help them get something off the ground. As much as we love hospitality, food and beverage (and coffee specifically), we love seeing someone or something realize its full potential – and that takes a team.

BW: My personal long-term goals are to continue working alongside talented and passionate people to do great work and build strong brands and excellent products that people connect with.

DF: Keep building upon what we’ve created. Doing what we do requires a lot of energy, thought and long hours, but we get to be around and learn from such wonderful people, and it doesn’t really feel like work in the traditional sense. I guess my goal is to keep that going as long as possible and help to create something that gives all of us a sense of pride and accomplishment.