On Friday, the University of Virginia marked founder Thomas Jefferson’s 275th birthday by awarding its highest external honors, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals, to honor extraordinary achievements in fields the third president admired.

The University and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello – the independent, nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello – jointly awarded the medals in Architecture, Citizen Leadership and Law during the Founder’s Day festivities on Friday. Each medalist also gave a talk on Grounds.

The 2018 recipients were Sir David Adjaye OBE, a globally acclaimed architect and one of the lead designers of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; Morgan Carrington “Cary” Fowler Jr., an agriculturalist who led the conservation of more than 930,000 seed varieties in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest collection of crop diversity; and Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, known for his expertise in antitrust law, criminal law and procedure and corporate law.   

UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan and Leslie Greene Bowman, president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, presented the medals during a luncheon at the University. Recipients were also honored Thursday with a private dinner at Monticello.

Before the luncheon, Sullivan presided over a tree-planting ceremony honoring Environmental Programs Manager Jeff Sitler. Each year on Founder’s Day, the University plans a tree to celebrate an individual who has made lasting contributions to the UVA community.

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Sitler is retiring from UVA’s Facilities Management department after more than 20 years of service, in which he led innovative changes to the University’s stormwater management practices and educated students and tour groups about green infrastructure and water quality issues.

Later on Friday, Sullivan and other UVA leaders dedicated Yen House, a dormitory in UVA’s International Residence College formerly known as Lewis House. The building was renamed to honor Yan Huqing, known as W.W. Yen, who became the first Chinese student to earn a degree from UVA when he graduated in 1900. He went on to serve as China’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and delegate in the League of Nations before serving as China’s premiere five times.

Below, read more from each medalist’s public talk and the Yen House dedication.

Adjaye Walks Audience Through Some of His Most Exciting Projects

Sir David Adjaye, OBE, spoke with students and community members on Friday afternoon after receiving the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.

School of Architecture dean Ila Berman introduced Adjaye as “truly one of the most prominent and creative designers of his generation.”

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Adjaye, who was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II for services to architecture, has left his mark on major projects around the world. One of his best-known projects to date is the $540 million Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, completed in collaboration with the project team Freelon Adjaye Bond/Smith Group.

As he took the stage in Old Cabell Hall, Adjaye told the crowd that he had been looking forward to seeing the UVA’s architecture in person.

“I am thrilled to finally come to this campus that I have admired for very long, and I cannot think of a better way to come than to have received this medal,” he said.

He focused his presentation on three of his projects – one complete and two ongoing. For each, Adjaye shared his drawings and renderings and walked the audience through the decision-making process that went into the final design.

The first was the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 50-year-old Harlem institution that showcases the work of artists of African descent. Adjaye’s design, which will replace an older building the museum had outgrown, features a modern, modular aesthetic that will create a visually arresting center on Harlem’s 125th street while providing plenty of space for art exhibitions and education. It is expected to complete in 2021.

Next, he took the audience on a virtual tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for which he was the lead designer. It was a massive undertaking that took nearly 10 years and opened to widespread interest and acclaim in 2016.

Adjaye said his design, highlighted by a striking three-tiered exterior wrapped in an ornate bronze corona, was in many ways inspired by the art and artifacts housed in the museum, the stories they tell about Africa and the African-American experience in America and the museum’s mission of finally sharing those stories in a prominent place on the National Mall.

“This museum tries to make this history of invisibility visible,” he said. “For me, the building became more than just a museum, it became a building which was a memorial, a museum and a monument, three systems organized in one.”

The final project Adjaye highlighted is a new commission for the National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra, Ghana. His design was unveiled in March as part of a ceremony marking the country’s 61st year of independence from Britain. The large, modern cathedral will be interdenominational, serving people of all faiths. It will also provide a beautiful space for state functions like inaugurations or state funerals.

Adjaye said the cathedral is part of Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo’s mission to make the country “a beacon of an African renaissance.”

Fowler Discusses Preserving the Global Food Supply

Morgan Carrington “Cary” Fowler Jr., the 2018 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Citizen Leadership, has “devoted his career to safeguarding the world’s food supply,” Allan Stam, dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, told students on Thursday.

Fowler, an American agriculturalist, spoke with students Thursday afternoon about founding and leading the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an Arctic facility that stores more than 930,000 unique crop varieties in a vault protected by permafrost and rock.

“This facility takes in duplicate copies from seed banks around the world and stores them in a safe, secure location, forever and for free,” Fowler said.:

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The seed bank is buried in a mountain near Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is the northernmost destination for any commercial airline. It keeps the seeds at minus-18 degrees Celsius, safeguarding them for up to 20,000 years, depending on the crop variety.

There are seeds from 234 countries, representing nearly every crop in the world. The seeds can be used to replenish crop varieties that are at risk for extinction and supplement the global food supply.

“This room has, by some definitions, the largest collection of biodiversity on earth,” Fowler said, showing students a picture of the vault. “It really is the foundation of agriculture; humanity really does depend on it.”

Fowler and his team believe Svalbard is among the safest – and coldest – locations on Earth for the seed vault. Other seed vaults around the world are at risk from natural disaster or man-made conflict. Svalbard told students of one prominent vault in Aleppo, Syria that he helped evacuate, getting the last seeds out about two weeks before the fighters overtook the facility.

More generally, he said, global agriculture is at risk due to dwindling water supplies, shortages in land and nutrients and climate change, which Fowler said worries him most of all.

“Agriculture faces the largest number of serious challenges since the dawn of agriculture, really,” he said.

He sees the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and other efforts to preserve crop diversity as a key step in protecting agriculture and preparing for whatever unknown changes the future might bring.

“I don’t know what kind of agricultural system we will have 500 years from now,” Fowler said during the question-and-answer portion of the event. “But, any system I can conceive of will require genetic diversity. The best I can do right now is try to conserve that diversity.”

By Caroline Newman

Judge Doubts Supreme Court Bias Favoring Business

A federal appeals court judge, during a talk at the School of Law on Thursday, cast doubt on the idea that the U.S. Supreme Court makes decisions on business cases along ideological lines, or that the court is pro-business at all.

Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, this year’s recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law, painted the high court as more likely to be politically agnostic than polarized in business cases, contrary to recent high-profile research.

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“The world is more complex than left and right,” Easterbrook said.

Easterbrook referenced a recent big-data study that sought to analyze whether justices were increasingly favoring business interests in their rulings. The study crunched decision data between 1946 and 2012. It looked at whether businesses won or lost their cases at the Supreme Court, and whether the results were “liberal” or “conservative.”

“They needed to simplify in order to process larger quantities of data,” Easterbrook said. “They found that the success of business litigants fell during the Warren Court, and has climbed since [1969].”

The study seemed to confirm that the justices became more pro-business over time, and the current court under Chief Justice John Roberts appeared more conservative in such cases than its predecessors.

Easterbrook, one of the most-cited appellate judges in the nation as well as a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School, disputes the study, however.

“Businesses lose major decisions about as much as they win,” he countered.

One reason for the misunderstanding, he said, was how his colleagues’ research was conducted. The methodology for coding such a large data set failed to recognize nuances that might have flagged a case as business-related, or not, he said as one example.

He added that within a set of business cases, many are won on procedural issues that have nothing to do with ideology.

He further stressed that all business cases are not equally important, because they don’t all have the same impact on the business world.

Easterbrook cited his own research published in 1984, which he derived by sampling dockets from each of the three decades prior, as well as his more modern observations. Among his findings:

• About a third of the Supreme Court’s business cases are about procedural, rather than substantive, issues.
• Less than a third of all business cases are about economic issues. More than a third can’t be classified on a liberal/conservative basis.
•  Business litigants are convincing the Supreme Court to grant review more often because of the justice’s collective interest in such cases, which by default increases businesses’ success rate.
• In many cases, a win for the business may also be a win for the consumer.
• Relatively few cases involved open-ended constitutional questions, and the ones that did resulted in an even split for businesses.

Of the majority of cases, Easterbrook said, “These decisions come out of where the [legislatively] enacted text leads.”

He also cited decisions in which Justice Ruth Ginsburg seemingly wrote a “conservative” opinion, while the late Antonin Scalia, a former UVA Law professor, seemed to have written a “liberal” one.

Regardless, Easterbrook found the notion of Roberts, after becoming chief justice, exercising sway over Scalia’s written opinions – per the perceived trend – to be highly unlikely.

“No one else has accused Justice Scalia of being the weak-minded sort who can be easily manipulated by his colleagues,” Easterbrook said. “Surely he learned better than that when he was a faculty member here.”

While he acknowledged his own research involved greater subjectivity than his colleagues’ study, Easterbrook said it is precisely that subjectivity that provides the needed clarity.

Easterbrook was named to the Seventh Circuit, which covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, in 1985. He served as its chief judge and a member of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 2006 to 2013. He is well-known for his writing in the field of corporate law, and for his excellence in legal writing in general. In a brief question-and-answer session that followed the talk, the judge gave law students advice about writing.

By Eric Williamson

Dedication Ceremony Celebrates University’s First Chinese Graduate

Friday’s celebration also included the dedication of a building at UVA’s International Residential College. Formerly Lewis House, the unveiling of a commemorative plaque on the brick façade signaled its renaming to Yen House to honor Yan Huiqing, known as W.W. Yen.

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Yen was the first Chinese student to earn a degree from UVA. Graduating in 1900, he is also the first international student to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University. Yen went on to serve as China’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and as a delegate in the League of Nations before serving as China’s premier five times. 

Speaking to several gathered for the ceremony in the afternoon sunlight, Sullivan called Yen a “true pioneer.”

“In his career and public life, W.W. Yen embodied the best qualities that we strive to instill in UVA students today,” she said, those being “intellectual curiosity; academic excellence; appreciation of other cultures, diplomacy and respect for people from other nations. Mr. Yen was a true global citizen long before ‘global citizen’ became a fashionable term.”

Among those in attendance was Cen Jianjun, the minister counselor for education from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.

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Many relatives of Yen were also there. Among them were UVA Law Professor George Yen, who recently learned he is a grand-nephew of Yen; Diana Yen, a current UVA fourth-year student majoring in economics and politics, who is the great-granddaughter of W.W. Yen’s first cousin; and Kaylie Klein, another relative, who presented Sullivan with a pocket watch that belonged to Yen.

By Jane Kelly

The Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia has announced the winners of its 2018 faculty awards. Six UVA faculty members across five different schools were recognized Thursday at a banquet at the foundation, where they received awards totaling $35,000.

Kambiz Kalantari from the School of Medicine, George Overstreet from the McIntire School of Commerce and Lisa Reilly from the School of Architecture received the foundation’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Gavin Garner and Gary Koenig from the School of Engineering and Applied Science received the Hartfield Excellence in Teaching Award.

David Gies from the College of Arts & Sciences received the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Faculty Prize.

Ben Skipper, director of the foundation’s graduate and undergraduate programs, said, “The foundation established these awards with the sole intention of recognizing exceptional teaching inside the classroom, but as it turns out, the recipients are just as impactful in their research and their outreach beyond the classroom experience. This year’s six recipients exemplify the three criteria that are the pillars of our mission: scholarship, leadership and citizenship.”

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The foundation, known for awarding merit scholarships to outstanding undergraduate and graduate students at the University, has expanded its efforts over the last decade by establishing a series of faculty award programs. Nearly $500,000 has been awarded to 55 UVA faculty members in the College of Arts & Sciences, the Curry School of Education, the Frank Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy, the McIntire School of Commerce, the School of Architecture, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Medicine.

“The foundation recognizes the important role faculty play in making the University a place where outstanding leaders, scholars and citizens want to come to learn,” said Jimmy Wright, president of the foundation. “We administer these awards every year with the understanding that without an exceptional corps of faculty, the foundation could not fulfill its mission to attract exceptional students.”

U.S. Navy Midshipman Maribeth Salinas will earn her University of Virginia degree in architecture on May 20, but instead of designing buildings, she’ll spend her next eight to 10 years in the military. Salinas, however, will head to flight school to reach for the skies, not carrier decks.

She follows her family’s military tradition – her father and sister both attended the U.S. Naval Academy and became Marines. But when she chose architecture as a major, she didn’t predict she’d eventually work on a project in the Pueblo, Colorado neighborhood where her dad grew up.

Her choices might seem unusual, but Salinas successfully maneuvered her way through the courses and activities in her education strategy.

Q. What made you decide to go into Navy ROTC? Are you from a military family?

A. I’m from Stafford, near Fredericksburg. My dad and my sister went to the Naval Academy and then into the Marines. I’ve always been exposed to the military. I know how many great opportunities it gave my family, and some friends, too.

Q. I understand you’re going to flight school after graduating?

A. We had no pilots in the family. Then my sister married a pilot, so he told me about aviation. I thought I’d like it, compared to other possible jobs.

Q. How are you combining this with architecture? Is there any connection between the two?

A. Not exactly. I knew going to college, being in ROTC, I would get a job after college in the military, so I wanted to pursue something I was interested in. Architecture combines some of the technical and critical thinking used in math, which I liked in high school, but you solve problems through design. I also liked art, the design aspect.

The architecture major has two concentrations: pre-professional – specifically buildings – and design thinking, which I chose. I’ve also been doing landscape and urban planning, especially in my design thesis studio.

Q. What is your design thesis project?

A. I’m working on a neighborhood of Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo is where my parents are from, and this neighborhood is where my dad grew up. It’s primarily low-income and Hispanic, and it’s isolated between the highway and the Arkansas River.

About 10,000 people live there, and there’s no grocery store in the area. I’m designing a bridge that would create a hub on one side for the places around there, connecting the neighborhood and downtown. I’m doing a lot of repurposing – for instance, an abandoned industrial area.

My dad is excited I’m doing this. He can see the neighborhood could be improved.

Q. How do you think what you’ve learned in architecture will help you in your military career?

A. I think the skills I’ve learned in the Architecture School will be helpful to any job. In architecture, instead of tests, we have reviews. The final review is more formal in presentation, and they actually bring in outside architects for that. You have to present your work in front of people several times a semester, so I’ve gotten comfortable with that.

We’re trained in critical thinking and problem-solving of design issues.

We also learn to think three-dimensionally. I think being able to visualize in 3-D should be helpful for aviation.

I was asked to write an article about it for the [Navy ROTC] alumni newsletter.

Q. Where and when will you go to flight school?

A. Pensacola, Florida in September. That’s where the Navy and Marines go. It takes two years to get your wings. I might have to move, depending on what kind of aviation I choose, for part of the training.

I’m keeping an open mind about what aircraft I’ll fly, but I’m leaning toward the P-8. It’s like a 737. Its mission is anti-submarine, and also anti-surface. It doesn’t land on carriers. It would be a good set-up if I decide later to fly with commercial airlines.

Q. How do you feel about your military obligation?

A. You’re there to complete a mission. I share the core values of the military – honor, courage and commitment. You know what you’re getting into, that there’s always risk involved. I’ve had good training.

Q. Professors who made an impression on you?

A. [U.S. Navy] Capt. Christopher Misner, whose class on leadership and ethics I’m taking.

In architecture, my studio professors have really helped shape my interests. I went to Venice for the fall of 2016 [one of the Architecture School’s signature study-abroad programs]. That was amazing! I worked on a landscape architecture project with Bill Sherman [who chairs the architecture department] and he gave me free rein on my project.

[Distinguished Lecturer] Lucia Phinney’s studio in design thinking last fall solidified my interest in landscape architecture, and she really encouraged me.

Q. What will you miss about UVA?

A. I volunteered with the PB&J Fund [a Madison House program]. I’m also in a sorority, Sigma Kappa. I’ve also played on a local soccer organization, or SOCA, team – we’re all UVA students – that’s co-ed. I try to keep playing for fun.

I’ll miss the really good friends I’ve made here.

Charlottesville is one of the best places for college; there are so many things to do.

There’s good food. There’s good hiking. I just went to the Tom Tom Festival. At the farmer’s market, they had an Iron Chef-type competition.

But I’m excited to live by the beach, and for my next steps.

As a child, Andrew Ashcraft loved crawling through the two old houses his family lived in.

One was a farmhouse made of hand-hewn sandstone rocks quarried in Ritchie County, West Virginia, where Ashcraft, the oldest of three brothers, grew up. The other was built in the 1860s by a major in the Union Army who returned to West Virginia after the Civil War.

“I would crawl up in the attics and explore,” said Ashcraft, now a fourth-year student in the University of Virginia School of Architecture. “I learned a lot about how buildings come together, but I also fell in love with architecture, particularly historic architecture.”

By the time he finished high school, Ashcraft knew he wanted to be an architect. He toured Virginia Tech first and felt pretty sure he would end up there.

Then, he saw the Lawn.

“Honestly, I was worried UVA might be too pretentious for me and that I wouldn’t fit in here,” he said. “But once I got to see the Lawn and tour some of the buildings, I knew this was where I needed to be.”

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Four years later, Ashcraft has found his niche at UVA and left his mark on the buildings that captivated him that day, both through his architecture courses and his internship with UVA’s Historic Preservation team, a division of Facilities Management. 

As an intern, Ashcraft is charged with documenting the artifacts and fragments recovered in various projects around Grounds. Some of them, like the column fragments shown above, are now in storage and need to be labeled with as much historical information as possible.

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In addition to cataloguing new finds, Ashcraft has worked with Facilities Management’s historical preservation team on a huge variety of renovation projects around Grounds, from the attic of Carr’s Hill to the roof of Memorial Gymnasium.

He even got to contribute to some designs, such as the ceilings beneath the six suspended Pavilion balconies shown here and the new elevated deck on the porch of Pavilion VI, home to School of Architecture Dean Ila Berman.

The work’s taken him to attics, crawl spaces and other hidden spots all over Grounds, where he has gotten to take in unusual views of UVA’s most iconic spaces, like this view of the Rotunda from a pavilion.

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His favorite view so far has been from the attic of Old Cabell Hall, where he could look down through an ornate false skylight into the building’s grand two-tiered theater.

“I was in the attic, looking down at the stage, and thought, ‘How many people get to see the stage from this view?’” Ashcraft said. “That has been a recurring theme in my work with Facilities.”

According to architecture professor and Vice Provost for Academic Outreach Louis Nelson, Ashcraft’s unique vantage point has been very valuable in class.

Nelson, who taught Ashcraft in three courses, recalled one instance when his class was studying Brown College on Monroe Hill. Ashcraft insisted that the professor accompany him to the crawlspace underneath the building to see some of the work Facilities Management was doing.

“He was exactly right to take me down there, because it completely changed how we understand the building,” Nelson said. “Andrew has an eye for understanding how secreted away, unassuming spaces can transform the way we understand iconic, formal architecture.”

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In addition to cataloguing various artifacts, Ashcraft has helped to digitize photographic slides collected by the late James Murray Howard, a University architect from 1982 to 2002. The thousands of slides, taken by Murray and his interns, have given Ashcraft a detailed, intimate look at many buildings on Grounds through different stages of renovation.

“We decided we wanted that collection to be far more accessible,” said Ashcraft. “Facilities has been working on it for years, digitizing these slides and entering them into a database where we can match them to what we know about the building.”

That database will be made public on Artstor as digitization is completed.

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Ashcraft loves walking around Grounds and seeing little reminders of all that he has learned from Howard, shown here on a Pavilion balcony in an old photograph Ashcraft found.

“I feel a certain command of the history of this place that is fun and powerful,” he said.

More than any one building or detail, though, Ashcraft enjoys his window into the behind-the-scenes decisions that will shape Grounds today and well into the future.

“I get to be part of the conversation about how we steward this place,” he said. “I have gotten to sit in on preservation meetings and in some cases weigh in on what this place should look like and how we can care for it.”

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His own work toward preserving Grounds and the community he has found in the School of Architecture have helped him feel at home at UVA, more so than he could have imagined when he worried about fitting in four years ago.

“The Architecture School can take a really big place like UVA and make it much more intimate,” Ashcraft said. “Coming to UVA, I did not know anyone, but when you go to your first class in architecture, you meet the people you are going to spend the next four years with. Those people are still my friends, still in my studios, and that has been really cool.”

Nelson said he has loved having Ashcraft in class over the years.  

“Andrew has a deep curiosity, a powerful intellect, an unassuming manner and a genuine humility,” Nelson said. “He’s an unbelievable young man, and just so smart.”

Outside of class, Andrew is a co-director of the school’s Freedom by Design Program, a student-led community service organization that designs and builds projects for various community groups that focus on accessibility.

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For example, Ashcraft’s group created a wheelchair-accessible treehouse at Wildrock, a nature therapy playground north of Charlottesville.

Ashcraft is also involved in Chi Alpha, a Christian fellowship on Grounds that he calls “the other half” of his community at UVA.

“Similar to the Architecture School, it has been great for making a big place feel small,” he said.

As graduation approaches, Ashcraft is weighing several job offers from architecture and design firms. He hopes to make a decision in the next few weeks while also savoring his last month at UVA and making the most of time remaining with friends and professors.

“I have loved my time here. It has been an incredible experience,” he said. “The people I have gotten to meet at every level, from friends through faculty and invited guests, have been fantastic, of a caliber I could hardly have anticipated before.”

“Teaching well is the work of a lifetime,” wrote teaching award winner Kateri DuBay, an assistant professor of chemistry.

DuBay joins an economist who tells stories, an anthropologist who took his students to the wilds of Alderman Library for fieldwork and an astronomer comparing stars’ gravity waves to ripples of water in the kitchen sink – University of Virginia professors from across disciplines who bring their enthusiasm and creativity, along with expertise, to students on Grounds every day.

Every year, a new group of innovative and engaging faculty members are chosen by their peers for a series of teaching awards, sponsored by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. Included in the nomination materials with testimonials from colleagues and students is each faculty member’s unique teaching statement.

Below are 13 tips, perspectives and creative methods showing the dedication of these teachers to make their courses a life-changing experience for UVA students, often including hands-on involvement with real-world issues or situations, enabling students to see they’re having an impact.

Along with a banquet held Thursday to recognize this year’s outstanding group of teachers, the awards come with a range of funding for the professors to use in designing or reworking a course of their choosing and with a commitment to share their methods and ideas with their peers in several different ways.

In addition, graduate teaching assistants also receive awards based on advisers’ and especially their students’ input.

Ira Bashkow
Arts & Sciences

Sidney Milkis
Arts & Sciences

Lee Coppock
Arts & Sciences

Kateri DuBay
Arts & Sciences

Phil Arras
Arts & Sciences

Eli Carter
Arts & Sciences

Robert E. Davis
Arts & Sciences

Ali Güler
Arts & Sciences

Jonathan Kropko
Arts & Sciences

Craig Lefanowicz
McIntire School of Commerce

Dan Player
Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

Barbara Wilson
School of Architecture

Emma McKim Mitchell
School of Nursing

NEH Goldsmith Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship:

Ira Bashkow, Professor of Anthropology

Arts & Sciences

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Anthropology professor Ira Bashkow was awarded the NEH Goldsmith Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a three-year appointment, during which he will explore ways of making the humanities more compelling to students by using integrative, real-world tasks and scenarios in lessons, courses and whole curricula.

Bashkow will continue working on exciting, hands-on projects for students in the “History of Anthropology” course, required for majors, and his ethnographic fieldwork course, a popular offering that draws about 60 students each semester. In fall 2016, Bashkow found a new area for their final research project: students working in teams of two focused on the planned renovation of Alderman Library, interviewing students and other patrons, exploring its spaces and uses, and documenting what insights ethnographic fieldwork in the library could reveal that would help in planning it.

In his words:

Although I began teaching the course using the Alderman renovation as a role-playing scenario, in effect encouraging the students to play at being working ethnographic researchers, that scenario has taken on a life of its own, becoming authentic, genuinely. Something truly real has happened, and it has been an amazing experience for me as well as the students.

My pedagogical aim for the course is to give students a powerful learning experience that stimulates their curiosity about human sociality and culture, as revealed through ethnography; gives them a grounded perspective for comparing different modes of scientific and humanistic understanding; prepares them for study abroad and future independent research and cultural experiences; and introduces them in a uniquely engaging way to my field of cultural anthropology – all through an intense engagement with collecting, analyzing and interpreting holistic, qualitative real-world data, toward solving problems that are real and close to their lives.

Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship:

Sidney Milkis, White Burkett Miller Professor of Politics

Arts & Sciences

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On the UVA faculty since 1999, Milkis is among the many professors who have long felt research and teaching are intertwined, and he is committed to faculty and students collaborating “in research and learning about the issues that dog our days and haunt our dreams at night.”

In his words:

With attention to primary sources, leading secondary works and a great deal of ongoing research, every subject I teach explores whether the American Constitution – rooted in natural rights, privacy and limited government – provides adequately for a competent and active citizenry. This question has taken on greater urgency with the development of an executive-centered administrative state over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. As recent developments have poignantly made clear, it remains uncertain whether the “modern” presidency, even with the tools of instant mass communications, can function as a truly democratic institution with meaningful links to the public. My courses on the United States and its relationship to the world, which always have been heavily subscribed, are in greater demand than ever before.

Perhaps my commitment to joining research and pedagogy has resonated with my students because my scholarly interests are broad: all of my work attempts to place American political life in a large context; to probe the deep philosophical and historical roots of contemporary developments that are at the core of the most fundamental issues that shape politics and government in the United States.

Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award:

Lee Coppock, Professor of Economics

Arts & Sciences

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Coppock, who came to UVA in 2003, wrote about the two required courses for economics majors, “Principles of Microeconomics” and “Principles of Macroeconomics”: “It is our job to turn the lights on for students so they, too, can see what economists see. It is our chance to help students fall in love with our discipline.” He also believes in the importance of stories, he wrote in his teaching statement.

In his words:

Economists believe that economic behavior is all around us, and so we should use this to motivate the difficult material from class. When I begin a difficult section that previously caused problems, I open with a lengthy story. The story might be about an entrepreneur, a historical event, a personal experience, or even a reference to a literary work. The story then provides a foundation for discussion and puts meat on the theoretical bones of my lectures. Even though the story takes class time, I have found that it does much of the hard work for me: it carries the theory along, delivers material, and connects the students in ways they understand.

Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award:

Kateri DuBay, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Arts & Sciences

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Respect, trust, organization, and a bidirectional flow of information: I have come to believe that these are the four essential ingredients for keeping students and teachers mutually engaged in any learning venture. I work to actively and visibly trust and respect my students, keep the course organized and transparent, and solicit information and feedback at every turn.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Phil Arras, Associate Professor of Astronomy

Arts & Sciences

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As we discuss the sheer coolness of water-worlds, Tatooine planets, the deafening sound of supersonic weather, and planets being destroyed by their stars, the students also learn about how to think about the world from a scientific point of view. … I am especially interested in the students first learning a piece of physics as it applies to their daily life, and then to discuss how it can be used to understand objects, such as stars and galaxies, far beyond our daily experience. For instance, the same physics used to understand the ripples in water you see in your kitchen sink and in puddles is used to understand tsunami waves in the Earth’s oceans or “internal gravity waves” in stars.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Eli Carter, Assistant Professor of Portuguese

Arts & Sciences

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In my classes, a dialogic structure that situates both teacher and student as intellectual interlocutors replaces the more traditional top-down, teacher/student hierarchy. While the degree to which this occurs depends in large part on the class being taught, I have found that, independent of level, students become more actively engaged in their assignments and class discussion, more supportive of diversity in all its forms, and better prepared to transfer their newly acquired knowledge to their future lives and professional endeavors.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Robert E. Davis, Professor of Environmental Sciences

Arts & Sciences

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Last semester I taught a new class on human biometeorology – a class that not only was new for me, but probably has not been taught previously in the United States. As part of the class, each student (all fourth-years) had to do an entire research project, from conception of the idea and hypothesis development to oral and written presentation of the results. Only one or two of the students (out of 17) had done something like this before. Many of the students chose to work with an entirely new dataset I developed for the class on daily admissions to the UVA Medical Center coupled with weather data. They were excited to learn that this was not a prescribed exercise, but that this dataset had never previously been analyzed by anyone. Not only were the projects consistently excellent and exceeded the students’ own perceptions of what they were capable of doing, but I’m also working with two of the students on publishing the results this semester.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Ali Güler, Assistant Professor of Biology

Arts & Sciences

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The scientific method is meticulous, and groundbreaking discoveries are made on the back of basic research that is performed over decades. More than ever, it is critical for students to be well-informed about the scientific method and able to distinguish between science and science fiction. This requires the ability to sift through an overwhelming amount of information now available in the digital age with unbiased acuity. I design courses so that students learn the language and logic of science, which provides them with the foundation needed to understand and evaluate publicized biomedical research. I hope to also capture their imagination and inspire them to apply the scientific method to any career they enter.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Jonathan Kropko, Assistant Professor of Politics

Arts & Sciences

An instructor needs to understand that the [typical] student in a research methods course is not there because he or she wants to be there, but because the course is either required or the topic is deemed necessary to publish in a particular literature. … It is also crucial to understand that “methods” cause more anxiety than nearly any other topic.

I ask the students to critically evaluate the methods we study, and if they can imagine a novel approach I encourage them to explore the idea. I have one student, for example, who studies the efficacy of counter-terrorism by using ecological models that treat government and insurgent forces as predator and prey populations. It’s a brand-new method to study well-known data in international relations.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Craig Lefanowicz, Associate Professor of Accounting

McIntire School of Commerce

I approach each class I teach with enthusiasm, meticulous preparation and an attempt to immerse myself thoroughly not only in the subject material, but in the current events that provide the best context for the material. I hold my students to high standards, but I hope they realize I also hold myself to high standards and that I dedicate myself to helping them achieve those standards. Effective instruction, for me, means respecting my students, pushing them to excel and striving to have them not only grasp, but apply the core concepts of the course with the tools I provide.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Dan Player, Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

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My philosophy can be stated in one sentence: I teach students, not courses. I know I have met my main objective when my students begin to see the world in a different way. In an end-of-course evaluation, a student once described her experience in my class by commenting, “[This course] made me want to learn more about why the world is the way it is.” I consider myself a successful teacher anytime one of my students can echo that sentiment.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Barbara Wilson, Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning

School of Architecture

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Professors guide students as they cleave themselves from parent-driven oversight and into a fully autonomous state of being. With those responsibilities in mind, in my classes students develop skills to become the leaders we need for an uncertain future: they work through complex issues, learn to code-switch across disciplines and difference, and apply their new skills in the service of the public good.

The two graduate core courses I teach, “Methods of Community Engagement and Research” and “Planning Theory and Practice,” ask students to engage directly with the ethical dilemmas inherent in community-based scholarship and in planning practice. Our students are challenged to face their own privilege and come to terms with the mixed legacies of their profession, but after Aug. 12, many former students thanked me for preparing them for reflective practice in tense environments.

Excellence in Education Abroad Award:

Emma McKim Mitchell, Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Global Opportunities

School of Nursing

Important components of my guiding teaching philosophy include the importance of transformative global health immersion experiences and promoting a model of international nursing education rooted in respectful long-term cultural engagement and collaboration.

For too long, global health has focused on “help” for those in developing countries by those in developed countries. Respectful cultural engagement emphasizes an asset-based approach, where we guide students to see locally relevant challenges and importantly, locally relevant and community-defined solutions. This approach could not be more important today, not only in a global context, but also as locally critical.

Graduate Teaching Awards

School of Medicine Resident Teaching Award: Dr. Justin N. Karlin
Class of 1985 Award: Michael Reeks, mathematics 
Frank Finger Award: Justin McBrien, history 
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Social Sciences: Anup Gampa, psychology  
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Humanities: Swati Chawla, history   
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in STEM: Jessica Niblo, chemistry   

All-University Graduate Teaching Awards:

Candace Miller, sociology
Spyridon Simotas, French
Jessica Taggart, psychology
Veronica Shalotenko, mathematics
Alexander Knutson, Batten School
Mariano Echeverria, mathematics
Ross Mittiga, politics
Benjamin Goffin, civil and environmental engineering
Dan Savelle, economics
Elizabeth Stone, art

University of Virginia art and architecture professor Sanda Iliescu still keeps the small American flag that her mother waved when welcoming President Richard Nixon to Romania in 1969.

It was the first time an American president had visited the Communist country, and for Iliescu’s mother – a Romanian dissident – Nixon’s visit was a powerful reminder of the freedom she dreamed of. A few years later, Sanda Iliescu, then 17, and her family fled Romania to chase their own version of the American dream in the United States.

Now, more than 40 years later, that same small American flag sits on a table in Campbell Hall, carefully protected in a Ziploc bag as Iliescu and her students work on creating their own larger version.

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Each year, her “Painting and Public Art” course hosts a public art project as part of their final exam. This year, the class wanted members of the public to come together to paint a new interpretation of a shared icon: the American flag.

“Because of so many national political events, and because of the tragic events here in Charlottesville, we thought this might be a good time to meditate or think about what the United States means and what our country means to us,” Iliescu said, referring to last summer’s white supremacist demonstrations. “That is why we chose the American flag.”

For 10 days, they transformed a corner of Campbell Hall into a temporary art studio, brushes and paint at the ready for anyone who wanted to pick them up.

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The project, called “The American Flag: A Study in Gray,” was originally intended to include mostly gray hues, a neutral color that Iliescu said can reflect a range of emotion. However, the end product was much more colorful.

“That is what is nice about public art. It is out of my hands; I get to let it be what it becomes,” Iliescu said. “I let people choose where and what they want to paint. Some chose to write; some chose to create patterns.”

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Graduate student Lemara Miftakhova said she appreciated the chance to take a step back and think about what the flag means to her and to others.

“It’s interesting to see the result, to see people’s thoughts and feelings in the painting,” she said. “It explains so much without having to say much.”

Miftakhova, who moved to the United States from Russia a few years ago, also appreciated the feeling of community that came from creating something together.

“I really enjoyed imagining such a big community participating in this one piece, with me as a part of it,” she said.

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In addition to painting, Iliescu also asked participants to write a brief response sharing their feelings about the flag.

“I was very curious about what people think about our country,” she said. “I feel like I know the community better, both because of the colors they chose and because of their answers.”

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For Iliescu herself, the flag is a powerful reminder of both the American dream her family cherished and of the obstacles they encountered in their new home. As a new immigrant, Iliescu was both thrilled and disappointed by what she found in America.

“Freedom of the press and freedom to speak your thoughts is amazing in this country, and we are so fortunate to have that,” she said. “On the other hand, I was really shocked by the number of homeless people, the poverty, the extreme difference between the very poor and the very rich, and by the racism.”

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The anonymous public responses reflect a similar range of positive and negative reactions, encompassing emotions like pride and thankfulness alongside serious concerns about social and political problems.

“The American flag reminds me of childhood and July 4^th cookouts. It brings to mind memories of watching the Summer Olympics. I think of presidential elections, of politics, even of war,” one person wrote. “But as I have grown older, the identity of the flag has become marred. The flag ultimately represents a nation with a number of flaws. Inequality, racial prejudice, gender discrimination. All of these issues, along with many others, are woven into the stars and stripes.”

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Another respondent wrote: “The American flag reminds me that our dreams are made of steel. The prayer of every man, woman and child is to know how freedom feels. I feel very fortunate and blessed to live in the United States of America.”

Another saw the flag as a reminder of civic duty: “A call to participate in a culture that needs to become a place of freedom for all. If I am here as a citizen, I have a responsibility to contribute to the good for all.”

This summer, pairs of University of Virginia student researchers will examine corrosion in aluminum alloys, probe the social and economic impact of large urban development in the Middle East and develop new therapies to treat multiple sclerosis.

The University has awarded 23 “Double ’Hoo” research awards, which fund pairings of undergraduate and graduate students who collaborate on research projects. Each project is awarded up to $6,000 toward research expenses, plus $500 to compensate a faculty mentor.

This year’s winners were selected from a pool of 52 pairs of applicants. The research grants were funded through the University’s Cornerstone Plan, which supports many student, faculty and staff aspirations organized around the theme of leadership.

Some students will continue research they have already started; for others, it will be an opportunity to expand what they have been doing or to start something new. Nine of last year’s teams had their grants renewed to help fund the presentation and continuation of their research.

“The Double ’Hoo Award fosters meaningful interactions between the University’s undergraduate and graduate students,” said Brian Cullaty, director of UVA’s Office of Undergraduate Research. “The graduate students gain valuable mentoring skills that will serve them well in their future careers, and the undergraduate students benefit from the learning that comes from serious scholarly inquiry.

“The relationships also provide an opportunity for the undergraduate students to learn more about the life of a graduate student and inform their decisions as they consider their own future education,” he added.

Archie Holmes, UVA’s vice provost for academic affairs, said academic scholarship is one of the more exciting endeavors in which undergraduates can get involved at the University.

“Recent research has highlighted the importance of having students engage in experiential learning for their long-term well-being,” Holmes said. “Such participation leads to our graduates finding fulfillment in their professional endeavors and having strong social relationships and access to the resources people need, feeling financially secure, being physically healthy and taking part in a true community.”

Holmes views undergraduate research as an excellent experiential learning activity because students learn to collect and assimilate information and knowledge needed to answer questions in their area of interest, think clearly through complex issues and present their findings in a clear manner.

“These are invaluable skills that prepare students for whatever the student chooses to do in their professional and personal life,” he said. 

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While undergraduate research generally involves students and a faculty mentor, the Double ’Hoo grants add a different twist. “In addition to the benefits that pursuing research provides, the Double ’Hoo program also helps graduate students develop skills in supervision and management which will be important as they take on leadership roles in industry or academia upon graduation,” Holmes said.

This year’s Double ’Hoo winners are:

• Caroline Alberti of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a third-year student majoring in global studies, environments and sustainability and in French, and Fatmah Behbehani of Kuwait City, Kuwait, a doctoral student studying urban and environmental planning in the School of Architecture, who are researching private-public partnerships in the provision of housing projects in Morocco, particularly the impact the private-public partnership model has on community development and how civic partners affect the delivery of housing projects.

• Patrick Beck of Ashburn, a second-year biomedical engineering student, and Jeremy Shaw of Cortland, Ohio, a fourth-year biomedical sciences graduate student in the School of Medicine, who are experimenting with a new drug as a treatment for head and neck cancer, in an effort to find how the drug works, who might be resistant, and possibly find new drug combinations to treat cancer.

• Megan Chappell of Fredericksburg, a second-year neuroscience and biology double-major, and Anthony Fernandez-Castaneda of Pico Rivera, California, a fifth-year medical student, who are working on discovering novel therapeutics for diseases such as multiple sclerosis. 

• Demitra Chavez of Richmond, a third-year developmental psychology major, and Cat Thrasher of Alexandria, a second-year developmental psychology graduate student, who will research how mothers regulate their children’s emotions, measuring the effect of a mother’s presence on risk-taking behaviors and brain responses in a group of young competitive gymnasts, in an effort to determine how variations in early care-giver availability might change a child’s understanding of his or her environment in the long-term.

• Connor Fitzpatrick of Arlington, a second-year economics major with a minor in government, and Nicholas Jacobs of Herndon, a Ph.D. candidate in politics and government, who are researching how individuals make sense of differences in federal spending from state to state, operating on the hypothesis that Americans are resentful of disparate spending and that this reinforces state identity.

• Raewyn Haines of Vienna, a third-year systems engineering major, and Matthew McMahon of Rochelle, Illinois, a second-year doctoral student in materials science engineering, who are focusing on understanding and mitigating unexpected failure in modern aluminum alloys currently used by the U.S. Navy, to assess the causes of the failure and determine protective coatings to prevent this.

• Lauren Harkins of Harleysville, Pennsylvania, a second-year biomedical engineering major minoring in chemical engineering, and Nathanael Sallada of East Greenville, Pennsylvania, a third-year biomedical engineering Ph.D. candidate, who are experimenting with engineering a fungal protein that behaves as a biosurfactant for specific, tailored applications.

• Kate Haynes of Springfield, a third-year neuroscience and psychology major, and Caroline Kelsey of Greenwich, Connecticut, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology, who are studying infants’ brain responses to social eye cues and how that responding is affected by race.

• Joyce Hong of Vienna, a second-year biology major, and Hyewon Choi of Seoul, South Korea, a fourth-year psychology and social psychology graduate student, who are studying what “cues” people use to judge others’ happiness.

• Jeewoo Kim of McLean, a second-year neuroscience major, and Sihan Li of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, a second-year biochemistry and molecular genetics major in the School of Medicine, who are studying a protein to uncover more information about hearing loss mechanisms.

• Nayoung Lee of Springfield, a second-year biochemistry major and a religious studies minor, and Kathryn LeCroy of Pleasant Grove, Alabama, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in environmental sciences, who are studying the diversity, health and behavior of native and exotic mason bee species in Virginia, in an effort to find why common mason bees are facing population decline.

• Alexandra Levin of Troy, Michigan, a third-year American studies and psychology major, and Diane-Jo Bart-Plange of Kansas City, Missouri, a second-year social psychology graduate student, who are researching the effects of bearing witness to police shooting news coverage through analysis of emotional regulation mechanisms and measurements of racial attitudes.

• Chelsea Li of Oakton, a second-year human biology major, and Corey Williams of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a second-year graduate student in biomedical engineering, who are seeking to develop a system to tag intermediate stem cells based on their identity, and see which cell types the intermediate cells are capable of differentiating into.

• Jenny Lim of Richmond, a second-year politics honors and economics major, and Rémy Furrer of Geneva, Switzerland, a first year Ph.D. candidate in social psychology, who will investigate the way emotions and beliefs shape the way people process information, self-regulate and make social decisions.

• Madeleine “Maddi” Mitchell of Richmond, a third-year psychology major minoring in French, and Meltem Yucel of Istanbul, Turkey, a third-year developmental psychology Ph.D. candidate, who are researching children’s moral and normative behavior and why, when and how they behave morally.

• Ahmed Osman of Fruitland, Maryland, a third-year civil and environmental engineering major, and Mohamad Alipour of Mashad, Iran, a fourth-year civil engineering Ph.D. student, who are researching automated inspection of critical infrastructure, such as bridges, using computer vision techniques to develop models that can detect cracks, corrosion and other defects for smart city and infrastructure applications.

•  Leila Rayyan of Fredericksburg, a second-year biostatistics major, and Wenfan Ke of Fujian Province, China, a second-year graduate student in cell and molecular biology, who will investigate cellular and genetic mechanisms that cause diet-induced obesity – in particular using systems biology and functional genomics approaches to discover genes that are responsible for fat accumulation under a high-fructose diet.

•  Leah Silverman of Reston, a second-year double major in global studies (environments and sustainability track) and economics, and Abeer Saha of New Delhi, a third-year graduate student in history, who will research environmentally destructive concentrated feeding operations to provide a basis for cattlemen and policymakers to make informed decisions about the health of the American food system while remaining stewards of the environment. 

• Neil Singh of Brockport, New York, a first-year systems engineering major, and Zhaonan Sun of Jinan, China, a third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate student, who are researching the application of a human body model to determine the effects of traffic accidents on obese passengers in an effort to spur the design of safer cars.

• Yuxin “Alicia” Wu of Xi’an, China, a first-year computer science major, and Sarah Mosseri of Comer, Georgia, a sociology graduate student, who are teaming up to explore how women make trade-offs between family and employment and to identify middle-ground strategies.

• Jonathan Zheng of Manassas, a second-year chemical engineering major with a minor in materials science and engineering, and Gordon Brezicki of Hickory, North Carolina, a fourth-year graduate chemical engineering major, who are developing a catalyst to achieve conversion of methane to higher-value, easily transportable products such as methanol.

• Zeming “Eileen” Zheng of Chantilly, a third-year neuroscience major, and Piotr Przanowski of Warsaw, Poland, a post-doctoral student in the School of Medicine, who will attempt to optimize small molecule inhibitors against protein-coding genes and restore some morphology alterations of Rett syndrome neurons.

• Max Zheng of Herndon, a second-year computer science and economics major, and Zhiqiu Jiang of Ya’an, China, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in transportation planning in the School of Architecture, who will combine data gathered from social media as well as an on-site questionnaire to assess the public’s opinion towards driverless technology, to be used in transportation planning and policy decision-making.

The University of Virginia is preparing to welcome tens of thousands of people to Grounds for graduation weekend. Here’s what’s on tap.

May 18: Valedictory Exercises

The festivities will kick off Friday at 3 p.m. with Valedictory Exercises on the Lawn. National Football League great and UVA alumnus Chris Long will address the crowd. Long studied sociology and played for the Cavalier football team from 2004 to 2007 before going on to win two Super Bowls, most recently in February with the Philadelphia Eagles.

In addition to his success on the field, Long is a passionate philanthropist. The defensive end donated his entire 2017 season salary to charity. He donated his first six game checks to fund scholarships in Charlottesville in a strong rebuke of the white nationalist rally that took place in Charlottesville in August. He and his wife Megan said in a statement at the time, “We decided to try to combat those actions with our own positive investment in our community.”

Later that season, he announced he would give his remaining 10 checks to help needy youths in the three cities where he has played professionally: Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis.

His Chris Long Foundation also raises money for “Waterboys,” an initiative he founded to bring clean water to villages in East Africa.

Valedictory Exercises also will include the presentation of various awards and the bestowing of the 2018 class gift, to be accepted on the University’s behalf by President Teresa A. Sullivan, who is stepping down in July. Admission is free and the public is welcome to attend.

To provide a safe environment for degree candidates, faculty, family and guests, the University has implemented a clear bag policy– similar to the policy used at athletic events and other large gatherings – and is utilizing metal detectors for Valedictory Exercises as well as Final Exercises.

May 19 and 20: Final Exercises

On Saturday, degree candidates in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences will begin their Final Exercises on the Lawn at 10 a.m.

Sunday’s ceremony, also beginning at 10 a.m., will feature degree candidates from UVA’s other schools (and from the Data Science Institute):

• School of Architecture
• Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy
• School of Continuing and Professional Studies
• Curry School of Education
• Darden School of Business
• School of Engineering and Applied Science
• School of Law
• McIntire School of Commerce
• School of Medicine
• School of Nursing

Sullivan will deliver the keynote address at both Final Exercises ceremonies. This continues a long University tradition of outgoing presidents delivering the commencement address. Sullivan took office in 2010 as the University’s eighth president and the first woman to hold that position.

The University will bestow 7,072 degrees this year:

• 4,238 baccalaureate degrees (103 earned in three years, five in two years)
• 457 first professional degrees 
• 2,377 graduate degrees, including 323 Ph.D.’s, 13 Doctor of Education degrees, 24 Doctors of Nursing Practice and four Doctors of Juridical Science degrees.
• 1,107 of this year’s graduates are international students.

Following Final Exercises, individual schools and departments will have diploma ceremonies. Check here for the locations of Saturday’s departmental ceremonies. Attendees can find Sunday’s ceremony locations here. The links also include information about rain locations.

In the event of severe weather, Valedictory and Final Exercises will take place at John Paul Jones Arena.

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For text alerts about programming and weather-related developments, text “uvagrad” to 79516.

Public parking will be available at several locations, including Scott Stadium and the John Paul Jones Arena. Shuttle bus service to the Lawn is provided. (More information here.)

Food stands will be located throughout Grounds on Finals Weekend. Light breakfast items will be offered for sale Saturday and Sunday mornings. Food stands will be open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Lunch items will be available beginning mid-morning.

Guests may watch live broadcasts of both Final Exercises ceremonies in these climate-controlled, remote viewing locations: the Alumni Hall ballroom, Chemistry Building Auditorium, Culbreth Theatre, Gilmer Hall auditoriums (rooms 130 and 190), the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library Auditorium, Newcomb Hall Ballroom and Theatre, the Student Activities Building and Zehmer Hall Auditorium. Additionally, there is a dedicated remote viewing site for persons with limited mobility on the third floor of Newcomb Hall.

Visit the Finals Weekend website for further information.

Cory Paradis transferred to the University of Virginia with a mission: he wanted to make homes, buildings and cities more accessible to people like him.

Paradis, who will graduate from the School of Architecture on Sunday, was born with cerebral palsy and has been in a wheelchair most of his life. He knows firsthand how uneven sidewalks, non-automated doors or steep hills can turn what should be a simple journey into an obstacle course.

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As a child, those obstacles were an accepted part of his life. Then, when he started taking a few architecture and drafting classes in high school, he realized that he could make a career of solving the same problems that he ran into every day.

“At first, growing up, you don’t really understand what the problems are, because they have always been there,” he said. “Once I realized that I could do something to change these issues, impact the built environment in a positive way and get rid of barriers to make it easier for people to move through their daily lives, that was pretty intriguing to me.”

Paradis, who grew up in Fredericksburg, originally attended Longwood University but struggled in some of his classes and realized that he had not been quite ready for the transition from high school to college. He came back to Fredericksburg and enrolled in nearby Germanna Community College, where he excelled and built up enough credits to transfer to UVA in the fall of 2015.

“Even though neither of my parents went to college, I have a lot of other family members who have gone to UVA,” he said. “I had always known about UVA, the traditions here and how good of a school it is.”

He also knew exactly what program he wanted to transfer into: urban planning in the School of Architecture.

“I’ve really fallen in love with urban planning – it’s such a cool field,” he said. “I always thought I wanted to do architecture, and now I think of urban planning as large-scale architecture, with more of an opportunity to impact the built environment in a positive way.”

Throughout his three years in the urban planning program, Paradis concentrated on issues of accessibility. In one class with architecture professor Anselmo Canfora, Paradis served both as a research assistant and a student as he encouraged classmates to consider accessibility concerns early in their design process. He told them about the challenges he faces each day, gave feedback on their designs and even shared his wheelchair for a few hours so that students could experience obstacles firsthand.

“I think it helped to give them an actual person they were designing for, instead of an abstract concept,” he said. “It was really cool for me to be able to share my experiences with them and give them a glimpse into some of the issues I deal with. I tried to help them see that is really a design problem, and that you can build a design around it.”

Canfora – a Chicago Cubs diehard who loves to talk baseball with Paradis, a Washington Nationals fan – called the student’s impact on his class “absolutely transformative.”

“Students were already committed to developing inclusive, accessible designs, but Cory was critical in giving them a much more realistic, clearer understanding of the challenges that people with disabilities face on a daily basis,” he said. “He really dedicated an amazing amount of time and effort to giving feedback, in addition to completing the course as a student.”

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Paradis also wrote papers exploring what an ideal city might look like, in terms of accessibility, and studied the Americans With Disabilities Act and how it applies to universities like UVA.

“All of my professors have been so supportive, and have let me explore accessibility and ADA issues,” he said. “They have given me a lot of creative freedom to write about things that really interest me.”

Already, Paradis is seeing the fruits of his labor around Grounds. He did accessibility studies of Brown College, where he lives, and UVA’s Arts Grounds to help pinpoint problems and possible solutions, and he also served on the University’s Barrier-Free Access Committee.

That committee, which includes administrators, faculty members and students, makes recommendations and provides oversight to ensure the University’s compliance with the American With Disabilities Act. Among other innovations, the committee created the Report A Barrier tool to allow any member of the University community to easily report accessibility issues online.

Paradis realizes that some of his reform proposals won’t take effect until after he graduates, but he finds a lot of satisfaction in knowing that he has smoothed the way for the students who will follow him.

“One of the things I really stressed when I first started working with other students in the Architecture School was that this was not just for me,” he said. “This is for anybody that might come after me.”

Canfora said that attitude was typical of Paradis.

“Cory has an amazing spirit. … He is very optimistic and a realist at the same time,” the professor said. “He understands the challenges and how the system works, and he is willing to commit a lot of time and effort to improving that.”

After graduation, Paradis hopes to continue and expand his work to the broader Charlottesville community. He is in the process of applying to several ADA compliance jobs in the area and wants to continue calling the city home.

“I want to stick around Charlottesville, if I can,” Paradis said. “I really like the community and the culture here, and I’m really grateful for the experience I have had here.”

Near the end of the University of Virginia’s spring semester, Katie Watts had a choice between writing a final paper or undertaking 16 more hours of labor on the model of UVA’s original Rotunda dome that her class was completing.

To her own surprise, Watts – who earned her master’s degree in architectural history from the University in May – chose the 16 hours of construction work.

“As a historian, I was much more comfortable with the idea of writing a paper,” Watts said, noting that the closest thing she had to construction experience was building her Ikea furniture. “But I decided to go outside my comfort zone and work on the dome instead.”

Watts, together with 14 other graduate and undergraduate students in Benjamin Hays’ “History of American Building Technology” course, built a replica of the original wooden dome that perished when the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda caught fire in 1895. It was replaced by a tile dome out of concern for future fires.

As UVA celebrates its bicentennial, visitors can now see what that original wooden dome would have looked like, thanks to more than 400 hours of work by Hays’ students, aided by several outside architects and builders.

The model dome, which will be on display on the Lawn until the end of June, was created with support from UVA’s Bicentennial Commission and Castleton Farms in Rappahannock County. At one-third the scale of the real Rotunda dome, it’s an imposing structure and a tangible reminder of founder Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the University 200 years ago.

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“Everything is to scale and the structure is true to Jefferson’s original specifications,” said Hays, a lecturer in the School of Architecture and the University Building Official. “It’s thrilling to be able to tell that story in a very visible way, and to show people what it would have looked like.”

Jefferson’s designs for the original dome were inspired by the work of 16^th-century French architect Philibert Delorme, who pioneered the technique of using wooden ribs to create beautiful and sturdy domes. UVA’s future founder learned of Delorme in 1786 while serving as the American ambassador to France. His friend Maria Cosway took him on a tour of Paris that included the Halle aux blés, an indoor marketplace capped by an impressive Delorme-style wooden dome.

Captivated, Jefferson bought Delorme’s handbook and eventually had America’s first Delorme dome installed at Monticello in 1801. The Rotunda dome followed in 1824. It was about 75 feet wide and made of wide 16- to 18-inch oak beams intersected by numerous smaller pieces, all held together with long iron nails manufactured at Monticello.

Hays and architect Douglas Harnsberger, who has spent much of his career studying Delorme’s work, used Jefferson’s original notes, housed in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, to plan their model. The result is a 25-foot wide structure composed of more than 1,100 pieces of white oak carefully fitted together using historically accurate nails similar to those in the original dome.

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Though this was the largest model Hays had built, it was not the first time he had built a Delorme dome. He led students in another modeling project two years ago, building smaller-scale models of both the wooden Delorme dome and of the tiled dome installed after the fire, which was designed by Spanish-American architect Rafael Guastavino.

Hays returned to the modeling project because creating the historic structures helped students understand the underpinnings of modern building technology.

“One of my biggest pedagogical beliefs is that we don’t just learn through lectures or readings,” Hays said. “Significant insight can come by actually building something.”

His students learned not only about the craft of building, but about the craftsmen – many of them enslaved laborers – who built the original Rotunda dome.

“My favorite part of the project was stepping into the craftsman’s shoes,” second-year architectural history graduate student Tabitha Sabky said. “Working with my hands and engaging with history through physical materials allowed me to approach the history of building construction not through the designer’s perspective, but through the everyday worker’s perspective. Each issue that we faced forced us to step into the mindset of a Jefferson-era craftsman and learn the processes of workers who have been largely ignored in the architectural history narratives.”

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The class spent a lot of time troubleshooting at first, but eventually, she said, they got the hang of it.

“One of my favorite parts of the project was seeing the progress we made as a group from the first day we tried to assemble the ribs to the next weekend, when we could quickly get a rib together in about 30 minutes,” Watts said.

“With any construction project, there are issues that force you to adapt,” Sabky said. “However, it was these issues that were the most instructive, because they allowed for creative thought and ingenuity.”

Though the project took longer than expected, a few students stayed in Charlottesville to finish it with Hays and Harnsberger in the weeks after graduation. On Tuesday, they moved everything to the Lawn to assemble the final dome there.

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Now, it stands as a reminder of both Jefferson’s original design for the Rotunda and his expansive influence on American architecture. After Jefferson used Delorme domes at Monticello and UVA, more and more of them began cropping up along the East Coast.

“Jefferson’s promotion of Delorme’s dome went far beyond Charlottesville in impacting the fledgling American neoclassical architecture tradition,” Harnsberger wrote in a summary of the model.

His evangelism of Delorme’s method contributed to the first Delorme domes at the U.S. Capitol, the Baltimore Cathedral, the Monumental Church in Richmond, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and several more.

“It is no understatement to say that Jefferson’s fascination with the Delorme dome at the Halle aux blés grain market in Paris resulted in the creation of the first American neoclassical domes,” Harnsberger said.

In late June, the dome will travel to Castleton Farms, where it will be displayed throughout the rest of the summer.

You likely know about The Stonewall Inn, home of the 1969 riots that marked a key turning point in the modern fight for gay rights in the United States.

However, you might not know about the hundreds of other places in New York City that have played an important role in LGBTQ history, from one of America’s oldest gay bars, Julius,’ to grim sites like the street corner where Julio Rivera was murdered in a 1990 hate crime that sparked the first Queens Pride Parade.

Uncovering and recognizing those sites is the biggest and most rewarding part of Amanda Davis’s job.

Davis, who graduated in 2004 from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, recently was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “40 Under 40: People Saving Places” list. She is the project manager for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, founded in 2015 by architectural historians Andrew Dolkart, Ken Lustbader and Jay Shockley to educate residents and tourists about LGBTQ history in New York City.

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Together with the founders, Davis – the project’s only full-time employee – finds and researches sites, adds them to the project’s interactive map and prepares nominations for the National Register of Historic Places, which is the federal government’s honorary list of historic places around the country deemed significant to American history.

We caught up with her earlier in June – recently designated as “Pride Month” in New York City – to learn more about her work.

Q. When did you first become interested in architectural history?

A. In some ways, it was a happy accident. I had not decided what I wanted to major in and I needed another class to take during the second semester of my first year. Scrolling through the course catalogue, I happened upon [former architectural history lecturer] Camille Wells’ class, “Thomas Jefferson, Architect.”

It was fascinating. I loved learning about history through the built environment, and I transferred into the School of Architecture the next year to study architectural history.

Q. How did you get involved in the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project?

A. I was working as an architectural historian for a nonprofit in Greenwich Village when I heard about the project manager opening. One of the founders was my professor in graduate school at Columbia [University], and another was a former coworker. I thought it was a great opportunity to work on history that had not really been explored.

Within the field of historic preservation, I knew of only a few LGBTQ projects in California at that time. The LGBTQ community is such a big part of New York, but so much of its history has not been discovered. I wanted to be part of bringing that history to light.

Q. What kind of day-to-day work does that mission require?

A. There is a lot of archival research and sleuthing. I lead survey efforts to identify and research sites, relying on historical documentation, reports from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, public library archives and other sources.

We also hold a lot of public events, reaching out to various groups around the city to tell them about what we are learning and also get ideas from them about sites we should research.

Once I have the research, I work on updating our website and interactive map and also nominate sites for honorary recognition by the state or federal government or for official protection at the local level by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. A grant we received from the National Park Service requires us to write seven nominations for the National Register of Historic Places; we have completed five so far.

Q. How many sites have you explored so far?

A. We launched our new website last year with information on about 100 sites. Now, we have prioritized about 350 additional sites for further research and recognition. It’s a pretty diverse list, representing different boroughs, ethnic groups and time periods from the 17^th century to the year 2000.

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Q. If you were to pick a few sites for someone visiting New York to discover, what would they be?

A. A lot of people know about The Stonewall Inn, but there are so many other sites that can tell us a lot about LGBTQ history and about members of the gay community who have positively impacted New York City and American culture.

There are other historic bars like Julius,’ near Stonewall, where four gay rights activists from the Mattachine Society conducted a “sip-in” in 1966, modeled after the sit-ins happening in the civil rights movement. They wanted to bring attention to the discrimination that gay men and lesbians faced in bars.

There is a great house museum, the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, where we recently worked with staff to add LGBTQ history to the narrative the museum portrays. Austen, a celebrated turn-of-the-20^th-century photographer, had lived with her partner of 53 years, Gertrude Tate, but until recently Gertrude was erased from the narrative.

I also loved working on the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Caffe Cino, the birthplace of off-off-Broadway and a pioneer in the development of gay theater at a time when depicting homosexuality on stage was illegal.

Another interesting and poignant site is the corner where Julio Rivera, a gay Latino man, was murdered in Jackson Heights in 1990. That crime really galvanized both the Latino and the gay communities in Queens and eventually inspired the Queens Pride Parade, which began in 1993.

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Q. What do you find most rewarding about the work you do?

A. It has been amazing to see how people respond to the project and how far it has come. We held a workshop for public schoolteachers last week who were very enthusiastic about using our site in their classrooms. We also give historic tours to young people; on a recent tour one teen told me that she thought she was alone until she learned about some of this history.

It’s amazing to see – time and again – how the information can impact people.

Q. Anything else to add?

A. We are always adding more places and have a suggestion form on our website where anyone can submit historic sites they feel should be included on our map. I would love to hear from people.

U.S. Navy Midshipman Maribeth Salinas will earn her University of Virginia degree in architecture on May 20, but instead of designing buildings, she’ll spend her next eight to 10 years in the military. Salinas, however, will head to flight school to reach for the skies, not carrier decks.

She follows her family’s military tradition – her father and sister both attended the U.S. Naval Academy and became Marines. But when she chose architecture as a major, she didn’t predict she’d eventually work on a project in the Pueblo, Colorado neighborhood where her dad grew up.

Her choices might seem unusual, but Salinas successfully maneuvered her way through the courses and activities in her education strategy.

Q. What made you decide to go into Navy ROTC? Are you from a military family?

A. I’m from Stafford, near Fredericksburg. My dad and my sister went to the Naval Academy and then into the Marines. I’ve always been exposed to the military. I know how many great opportunities it gave my family, and some friends, too.

Q. I understand you’re going to flight school after graduating?

A. We had no pilots in the family. Then my sister married a pilot, so he told me about aviation. I thought I’d like it, compared to other possible jobs.

Q. How are you combining this with architecture? Is there any connection between the two?

A. Not exactly. I knew going to college, being in ROTC, I would get a job after college in the military, so I wanted to pursue something I was interested in. Architecture combines some of the technical and critical thinking used in math, which I liked in high school, but you solve problems through design. I also liked art, the design aspect.

The architecture major has two concentrations: pre-professional – specifically buildings – and design thinking, which I chose. I’ve also been doing landscape and urban planning, especially in my design thesis studio.

Q. What is your design thesis project?

A. I’m working on a neighborhood of Pueblo, Colorado. Pueblo is where my parents are from, and this neighborhood is where my dad grew up. It’s primarily low-income and Hispanic, and it’s isolated between the highway and the Arkansas River.

About 10,000 people live there, and there’s no grocery store in the area. I’m designing a bridge that would create a hub on one side for the places around there, connecting the neighborhood and downtown. I’m doing a lot of repurposing – for instance, an abandoned industrial area.

My dad is excited I’m doing this. He can see the neighborhood could be improved.

Q. How do you think what you’ve learned in architecture will help you in your military career?

A. I think the skills I’ve learned in the Architecture School will be helpful to any job. In architecture, instead of tests, we have reviews. The final review is more formal in presentation, and they actually bring in outside architects for that. You have to present your work in front of people several times a semester, so I’ve gotten comfortable with that.

We’re trained in critical thinking and problem-solving of design issues.

We also learn to think three-dimensionally. I think being able to visualize in 3-D should be helpful for aviation.

I was asked to write an article about it for the [Navy ROTC] alumni newsletter.

Q. Where and when will you go to flight school?

A. Pensacola, Florida in September. That’s where the Navy and Marines go. It takes two years to get your wings. I might have to move, depending on what kind of aviation I choose, for part of the training.

I’m keeping an open mind about what aircraft I’ll fly, but I’m leaning toward the P-8. It’s like a 737. Its mission is anti-submarine, and also anti-surface. It doesn’t land on carriers. It would be a good set-up if I decide later to fly with commercial airlines.

Q. How do you feel about your military obligation?

A. You’re there to complete a mission. I share the core values of the military – honor, courage and commitment. You know what you’re getting into, that there’s always risk involved. I’ve had good training.

Q. Professors who made an impression on you?

A. [U.S. Navy] Capt. Christopher Misner, whose class on leadership and ethics I’m taking.

In architecture, my studio professors have really helped shape my interests. I went to Venice for the fall of 2016 [one of the Architecture School’s signature study-abroad programs]. That was amazing! I worked on a landscape architecture project with Bill Sherman [who chairs the architecture department] and he gave me free rein on my project.

[Distinguished Lecturer] Lucia Phinney’s studio in design thinking last fall solidified my interest in landscape architecture, and she really encouraged me.

Q. What will you miss about UVA?

A. I volunteered with the PB&J Fund [a Madison House program]. I’m also in a sorority, Sigma Kappa. I’ve also played on a local soccer organization, or SOCA, team – we’re all UVA students – that’s co-ed. I try to keep playing for fun.

I’ll miss the really good friends I’ve made here.

Charlottesville is one of the best places for college; there are so many things to do.

There’s good food. There’s good hiking. I just went to the Tom Tom Festival. At the farmer’s market, they had an Iron Chef-type competition.

But I’m excited to live by the beach, and for my next steps.

As a child, Andrew Ashcraft loved crawling through the two old houses his family lived in.

One was a farmhouse made of hand-hewn sandstone rocks quarried in Ritchie County, West Virginia, where Ashcraft, the oldest of three brothers, grew up. The other was built in the 1860s by a major in the Union Army who returned to West Virginia after the Civil War.

“I would crawl up in the attics and explore,” said Ashcraft, now a fourth-year student in the University of Virginia School of Architecture. “I learned a lot about how buildings come together, but I also fell in love with architecture, particularly historic architecture.”

By the time he finished high school, Ashcraft knew he wanted to be an architect. He toured Virginia Tech first and felt pretty sure he would end up there.

Then, he saw the Lawn.

“Honestly, I was worried UVA might be too pretentious for me and that I wouldn’t fit in here,” he said. “But once I got to see the Lawn and tour some of the buildings, I knew this was where I needed to be.”

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Four years later, Ashcraft has found his niche at UVA and left his mark on the buildings that captivated him that day, both through his architecture courses and his internship with UVA’s Historic Preservation team, a division of Facilities Management. 

As an intern, Ashcraft is charged with documenting the artifacts and fragments recovered in various projects around Grounds. Some of them, like the column fragments shown above, are now in storage and need to be labeled with as much historical information as possible.

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In addition to cataloguing new finds, Ashcraft has worked with Facilities Management’s historical preservation team on a huge variety of renovation projects around Grounds, from the attic of Carr’s Hill to the roof of Memorial Gymnasium.

He even got to contribute to some designs, such as the ceilings beneath the six suspended Pavilion balconies shown here and the new elevated deck on the porch of Pavilion VI, home to School of Architecture Dean Ila Berman.

The work’s taken him to attics, crawl spaces and other hidden spots all over Grounds, where he has gotten to take in unusual views of UVA’s most iconic spaces, like this view of the Rotunda from a pavilion.

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His favorite view so far has been from the attic of Old Cabell Hall, where he could look down through an ornate false skylight into the building’s grand two-tiered theater.

“I was in the attic, looking down at the stage, and thought, ‘How many people get to see the stage from this view?’” Ashcraft said. “That has been a recurring theme in my work with Facilities.”

According to architecture professor and Vice Provost for Academic Outreach Louis Nelson, Ashcraft’s unique vantage point has been very valuable in class.

Nelson, who taught Ashcraft in three courses, recalled one instance when his class was studying Brown College on Monroe Hill. Ashcraft insisted that the professor accompany him to the crawlspace underneath the building to see some of the work Facilities Management was doing.

“He was exactly right to take me down there, because it completely changed how we understand the building,” Nelson said. “Andrew has an eye for understanding how secreted away, unassuming spaces can transform the way we understand iconic, formal architecture.”

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In addition to cataloguing various artifacts, Ashcraft has helped to digitize photographic slides collected by the late James Murray Howard, a University architect from 1982 to 2002. The thousands of slides, taken by Murray and his interns, have given Ashcraft a detailed, intimate look at many buildings on Grounds through different stages of renovation.

“We decided we wanted that collection to be far more accessible,” said Ashcraft. “Facilities has been working on it for years, digitizing these slides and entering them into a database where we can match them to what we know about the building.”

That database will be made public on Artstor as digitization is completed.

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Ashcraft loves walking around Grounds and seeing little reminders of all that he has learned from Howard, shown here on a Pavilion balcony in an old photograph Ashcraft found.

“I feel a certain command of the history of this place that is fun and powerful,” he said.

More than any one building or detail, though, Ashcraft enjoys his window into the behind-the-scenes decisions that will shape Grounds today and well into the future.

“I get to be part of the conversation about how we steward this place,” he said. “I have gotten to sit in on preservation meetings and in some cases weigh in on what this place should look like and how we can care for it.”

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His own work toward preserving Grounds and the community he has found in the School of Architecture have helped him feel at home at UVA, more so than he could have imagined when he worried about fitting in four years ago.

“The Architecture School can take a really big place like UVA and make it much more intimate,” Ashcraft said. “Coming to UVA, I did not know anyone, but when you go to your first class in architecture, you meet the people you are going to spend the next four years with. Those people are still my friends, still in my studios, and that has been really cool.”

Nelson said he has loved having Ashcraft in class over the years.  

“Andrew has a deep curiosity, a powerful intellect, an unassuming manner and a genuine humility,” Nelson said. “He’s an unbelievable young man, and just so smart.”

Outside of class, Andrew is a co-director of the school’s Freedom by Design Program, a student-led community service organization that designs and builds projects for various community groups that focus on accessibility.

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For example, Ashcraft’s group created a wheelchair-accessible treehouse at Wildrock, a nature therapy playground north of Charlottesville.

Ashcraft is also involved in Chi Alpha, a Christian fellowship on Grounds that he calls “the other half” of his community at UVA.

“Similar to the Architecture School, it has been great for making a big place feel small,” he said.

As graduation approaches, Ashcraft is weighing several job offers from architecture and design firms. He hopes to make a decision in the next few weeks while also savoring his last month at UVA and making the most of time remaining with friends and professors.

“I have loved my time here. It has been an incredible experience,” he said. “The people I have gotten to meet at every level, from friends through faculty and invited guests, have been fantastic, of a caliber I could hardly have anticipated before.”

“Teaching well is the work of a lifetime,” wrote teaching award winner Kateri DuBay, an assistant professor of chemistry.

DuBay joins an economist who tells stories, an anthropologist who took his students to the wilds of Alderman Library for fieldwork and an astronomer comparing stars’ gravity waves to ripples of water in the kitchen sink – University of Virginia professors from across disciplines who bring their enthusiasm and creativity, along with expertise, to students on Grounds every day.

Every year, a new group of innovative and engaging faculty members are chosen by their peers for a series of teaching awards, sponsored by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. Included in the nomination materials with testimonials from colleagues and students is each faculty member’s unique teaching statement.

Below are 13 tips, perspectives and creative methods showing the dedication of these teachers to make their courses a life-changing experience for UVA students, often including hands-on involvement with real-world issues or situations, enabling students to see they’re having an impact.

Along with a banquet held Thursday to recognize this year’s outstanding group of teachers, the awards come with a range of funding for the professors to use in designing or reworking a course of their choosing and with a commitment to share their methods and ideas with their peers in several different ways.

In addition, graduate teaching assistants also receive awards based on advisers’ and especially their students’ input.

Ira Bashkow
Arts & Sciences

Sidney Milkis
Arts & Sciences

Lee Coppock
Arts & Sciences

Kateri DuBay
Arts & Sciences

Phil Arras
Arts & Sciences

Eli Carter
Arts & Sciences

Robert E. Davis
Arts & Sciences

Ali Güler
Arts & Sciences

Jonathan Kropko
Arts & Sciences

Craig Lefanowicz
McIntire School of Commerce

Dan Player
Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

Barbara Wilson
School of Architecture

Emma McKim Mitchell
School of Nursing

NEH Goldsmith Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship:

Ira Bashkow, Professor of Anthropology

Arts & Sciences

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Anthropology professor Ira Bashkow was awarded the NEH Goldsmith Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a three-year appointment, during which he will explore ways of making the humanities more compelling to students by using integrative, real-world tasks and scenarios in lessons, courses and whole curricula.

Bashkow will continue working on exciting, hands-on projects for students in the “History of Anthropology” course, required for majors, and his ethnographic fieldwork course, a popular offering that draws about 60 students each semester. In fall 2016, Bashkow found a new area for their final research project: students working in teams of two focused on the planned renovation of Alderman Library, interviewing students and other patrons, exploring its spaces and uses, and documenting what insights ethnographic fieldwork in the library could reveal that would help in planning it.

In his words:

Although I began teaching the course using the Alderman renovation as a role-playing scenario, in effect encouraging the students to play at being working ethnographic researchers, that scenario has taken on a life of its own, becoming authentic, genuinely. Something truly real has happened, and it has been an amazing experience for me as well as the students.

My pedagogical aim for the course is to give students a powerful learning experience that stimulates their curiosity about human sociality and culture, as revealed through ethnography; gives them a grounded perspective for comparing different modes of scientific and humanistic understanding; prepares them for study abroad and future independent research and cultural experiences; and introduces them in a uniquely engaging way to my field of cultural anthropology – all through an intense engagement with collecting, analyzing and interpreting holistic, qualitative real-world data, toward solving problems that are real and close to their lives.

Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship:

Sidney Milkis, White Burkett Miller Professor of Politics

Arts & Sciences

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On the UVA faculty since 1999, Milkis is among the many professors who have long felt research and teaching are intertwined, and he is committed to faculty and students collaborating “in research and learning about the issues that dog our days and haunt our dreams at night.”

In his words:

With attention to primary sources, leading secondary works and a great deal of ongoing research, every subject I teach explores whether the American Constitution – rooted in natural rights, privacy and limited government – provides adequately for a competent and active citizenry. This question has taken on greater urgency with the development of an executive-centered administrative state over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. As recent developments have poignantly made clear, it remains uncertain whether the “modern” presidency, even with the tools of instant mass communications, can function as a truly democratic institution with meaningful links to the public. My courses on the United States and its relationship to the world, which always have been heavily subscribed, are in greater demand than ever before.

Perhaps my commitment to joining research and pedagogy has resonated with my students because my scholarly interests are broad: all of my work attempts to place American political life in a large context; to probe the deep philosophical and historical roots of contemporary developments that are at the core of the most fundamental issues that shape politics and government in the United States.

Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award:

Lee Coppock, Professor of Economics

Arts & Sciences

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Coppock, who came to UVA in 2003, wrote about the two required courses for economics majors, “Principles of Microeconomics” and “Principles of Macroeconomics”: “It is our job to turn the lights on for students so they, too, can see what economists see. It is our chance to help students fall in love with our discipline.” He also believes in the importance of stories, he wrote in his teaching statement.

In his words:

Economists believe that economic behavior is all around us, and so we should use this to motivate the difficult material from class. When I begin a difficult section that previously caused problems, I open with a lengthy story. The story might be about an entrepreneur, a historical event, a personal experience, or even a reference to a literary work. The story then provides a foundation for discussion and puts meat on the theoretical bones of my lectures. Even though the story takes class time, I have found that it does much of the hard work for me: it carries the theory along, delivers material, and connects the students in ways they understand.

Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award:

Kateri DuBay, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Arts & Sciences

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Respect, trust, organization, and a bidirectional flow of information: I have come to believe that these are the four essential ingredients for keeping students and teachers mutually engaged in any learning venture. I work to actively and visibly trust and respect my students, keep the course organized and transparent, and solicit information and feedback at every turn.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Phil Arras, Associate Professor of Astronomy

Arts & Sciences

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As we discuss the sheer coolness of water-worlds, Tatooine planets, the deafening sound of supersonic weather, and planets being destroyed by their stars, the students also learn about how to think about the world from a scientific point of view. … I am especially interested in the students first learning a piece of physics as it applies to their daily life, and then to discuss how it can be used to understand objects, such as stars and galaxies, far beyond our daily experience. For instance, the same physics used to understand the ripples in water you see in your kitchen sink and in puddles is used to understand tsunami waves in the Earth’s oceans or “internal gravity waves” in stars.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Eli Carter, Assistant Professor of Portuguese

Arts & Sciences

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In my classes, a dialogic structure that situates both teacher and student as intellectual interlocutors replaces the more traditional top-down, teacher/student hierarchy. While the degree to which this occurs depends in large part on the class being taught, I have found that, independent of level, students become more actively engaged in their assignments and class discussion, more supportive of diversity in all its forms, and better prepared to transfer their newly acquired knowledge to their future lives and professional endeavors.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Robert E. Davis, Professor of Environmental Sciences

Arts & Sciences

Last semester I taught a new class on human biometeorology – a class that not only was new for me, but probably has not been taught previously in the United States. As part of the class, each student (all fourth-years) had to do an entire research project, from conception of the idea and hypothesis development to oral and written presentation of the results. Only one or two of the students (out of 17) had done something like this before. Many of the students chose to work with an entirely new dataset I developed for the class on daily admissions to the UVA Medical Center coupled with weather data. They were excited to learn that this was not a prescribed exercise, but that this dataset had never previously been analyzed by anyone. Not only were the projects consistently excellent and exceeded the students’ own perceptions of what they were capable of doing, but I’m also working with two of the students on publishing the results this semester.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Ali Güler, Assistant Professor of Biology

Arts & Sciences

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The scientific method is meticulous, and groundbreaking discoveries are made on the back of basic research that is performed over decades. More than ever, it is critical for students to be well-informed about the scientific method and able to distinguish between science and science fiction. This requires the ability to sift through an overwhelming amount of information now available in the digital age with unbiased acuity. I design courses so that students learn the language and logic of science, which provides them with the foundation needed to understand and evaluate publicized biomedical research. I hope to also capture their imagination and inspire them to apply the scientific method to any career they enter.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Jonathan Kropko, Assistant Professor of Politics

Arts & Sciences

An instructor needs to understand that the [typical] student in a research methods course is not there because he or she wants to be there, but because the course is either required or the topic is deemed necessary to publish in a particular literature. … It is also crucial to understand that “methods” cause more anxiety than nearly any other topic.

I ask the students to critically evaluate the methods we study, and if they can imagine a novel approach I encourage them to explore the idea. I have one student, for example, who studies the efficacy of counter-terrorism by using ecological models that treat government and insurgent forces as predator and prey populations. It’s a brand-new method to study well-known data in international relations.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Craig Lefanowicz, Associate Professor of Accounting

McIntire School of Commerce

I approach each class I teach with enthusiasm, meticulous preparation and an attempt to immerse myself thoroughly not only in the subject material, but in the current events that provide the best context for the material. I hold my students to high standards, but I hope they realize I also hold myself to high standards and that I dedicate myself to helping them achieve those standards. Effective instruction, for me, means respecting my students, pushing them to excel and striving to have them not only grasp, but apply the core concepts of the course with the tools I provide.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Dan Player, Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy

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My philosophy can be stated in one sentence: I teach students, not courses. I know I have met my main objective when my students begin to see the world in a different way. In an end-of-course evaluation, a student once described her experience in my class by commenting, “[This course] made me want to learn more about why the world is the way it is.” I consider myself a successful teacher anytime one of my students can echo that sentiment.

All-University Teaching Awards:

Barbara Wilson, Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning

School of Architecture

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Professors guide students as they cleave themselves from parent-driven oversight and into a fully autonomous state of being. With those responsibilities in mind, in my classes students develop skills to become the leaders we need for an uncertain future: they work through complex issues, learn to code-switch across disciplines and difference, and apply their new skills in the service of the public good.

The two graduate core courses I teach, “Methods of Community Engagement and Research” and “Planning Theory and Practice,” ask students to engage directly with the ethical dilemmas inherent in community-based scholarship and in planning practice. Our students are challenged to face their own privilege and come to terms with the mixed legacies of their profession, but after Aug. 12, many former students thanked me for preparing them for reflective practice in tense environments.

Excellence in Education Abroad Award:

Emma McKim Mitchell, Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Global Opportunities

School of Nursing

Important components of my guiding teaching philosophy include the importance of transformative global health immersion experiences and promoting a model of international nursing education rooted in respectful long-term cultural engagement and collaboration.

For too long, global health has focused on “help” for those in developing countries by those in developed countries. Respectful cultural engagement emphasizes an asset-based approach, where we guide students to see locally relevant challenges and importantly, locally relevant and community-defined solutions. This approach could not be more important today, not only in a global context, but also as locally critical.

Graduate Teaching Awards

School of Medicine Resident Teaching Award: Dr. Justin N. Karlin
Class of 1985 Award: Michael Reeks, mathematics 
Frank Finger Award: Justin McBrien, history 
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Social Sciences: Anup Gampa, psychology  
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Humanities: Swati Chawla, history   
Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in STEM: Jessica Niblo, chemistry   

All-University Graduate Teaching Awards:

Candace Miller, sociology
Spyridon Simotas, French
Jessica Taggart, psychology
Veronica Shalotenko, mathematics
Alexander Knutson, Batten School
Mariano Echeverria, mathematics
Ross Mittiga, politics
Benjamin Goffin, civil and environmental engineering
Dan Savelle, economics
Elizabeth Stone, art

University of Virginia art and architecture professor Sanda Iliescu still keeps the small American flag that her mother waved when welcoming President Richard Nixon to Romania in 1969.

It was the first time an American president had visited the Communist country, and for Iliescu’s mother – a Romanian dissident – Nixon’s visit was a powerful reminder of the freedom she dreamed of. A few years later, Sanda Iliescu, then 17, and her family fled Romania to chase their own version of the American dream in the United States.

Now, more than 40 years later, that same small American flag sits on a table in Campbell Hall, carefully protected in a Ziploc bag as Iliescu and her students work on creating their own larger version.

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Each year, her “Painting and Public Art” course hosts a public art project as part of their final exam. This year, the class wanted members of the public to come together to paint a new interpretation of a shared icon: the American flag.

“Because of so many national political events, and because of the tragic events here in Charlottesville, we thought this might be a good time to meditate or think about what the United States means and what our country means to us,” Iliescu said, referring to last summer’s white supremacist demonstrations. “That is why we chose the American flag.”

For 10 days, they transformed a corner of Campbell Hall into a temporary art studio, brushes and paint at the ready for anyone who wanted to pick them up.

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The project, called “The American Flag: A Study in Gray,” was originally intended to include mostly gray hues, a neutral color that Iliescu said can reflect a range of emotion. However, the end product was much more colorful.

“That is what is nice about public art. It is out of my hands; I get to let it be what it becomes,” Iliescu said. “I let people choose where and what they want to paint. Some chose to write; some chose to create patterns.”

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Graduate student Lemara Miftakhova said she appreciated the chance to take a step back and think about what the flag means to her and to others.

“It’s interesting to see the result, to see people’s thoughts and feelings in the painting,” she said. “It explains so much without having to say much.”

Miftakhova, who moved to the United States from Russia a few years ago, also appreciated the feeling of community that came from creating something together.

“I really enjoyed imagining such a big community participating in this one piece, with me as a part of it,” she said.

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In addition to painting, Iliescu also asked participants to write a brief response sharing their feelings about the flag.

“I was very curious about what people think about our country,” she said. “I feel like I know the community better, both because of the colors they chose and because of their answers.”

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For Iliescu herself, the flag is a powerful reminder of both the American dream her family cherished and of the obstacles they encountered in their new home. As a new immigrant, Iliescu was both thrilled and disappointed by what she found in America.

“Freedom of the press and freedom to speak your thoughts is amazing in this country, and we are so fortunate to have that,” she said. “On the other hand, I was really shocked by the number of homeless people, the poverty, the extreme difference between the very poor and the very rich, and by the racism.”

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The anonymous public responses reflect a similar range of positive and negative reactions, encompassing emotions like pride and thankfulness alongside serious concerns about social and political problems.

“The American flag reminds me of childhood and July 4^th cookouts. It brings to mind memories of watching the Summer Olympics. I think of presidential elections, of politics, even of war,” one person wrote. “But as I have grown older, the identity of the flag has become marred. The flag ultimately represents a nation with a number of flaws. Inequality, racial prejudice, gender discrimination. All of these issues, along with many others, are woven into the stars and stripes.”

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Another respondent wrote: “The American flag reminds me that our dreams are made of steel. The prayer of every man, woman and child is to know how freedom feels. I feel very fortunate and blessed to live in the United States of America.”

Another saw the flag as a reminder of civic duty: “A call to participate in a culture that needs to become a place of freedom for all. If I am here as a citizen, I have a responsibility to contribute to the good for all.”

This summer, pairs of University of Virginia student researchers will examine corrosion in aluminum alloys, probe the social and economic impact of large urban development in the Middle East and develop new therapies to treat multiple sclerosis.

The University has awarded 23 “Double ’Hoo” research awards, which fund pairings of undergraduate and graduate students who collaborate on research projects. Each project is awarded up to $6,000 toward research expenses, plus $500 to compensate a faculty mentor.

This year’s winners were selected from a pool of 52 pairs of applicants. The research grants were funded through the University’s Cornerstone Plan, which supports many student, faculty and staff aspirations organized around the theme of leadership.

Some students will continue research they have already started; for others, it will be an opportunity to expand what they have been doing or to start something new. Nine of last year’s teams had their grants renewed to help fund the presentation and continuation of their research.

“The Double ’Hoo Award fosters meaningful interactions between the University’s undergraduate and graduate students,” said Brian Cullaty, director of UVA’s Office of Undergraduate Research. “The graduate students gain valuable mentoring skills that will serve them well in their future careers, and the undergraduate students benefit from the learning that comes from serious scholarly inquiry.

“The relationships also provide an opportunity for the undergraduate students to learn more about the life of a graduate student and inform their decisions as they consider their own future education,” he added.

Archie Holmes, UVA’s vice provost for academic affairs, said academic scholarship is one of the more exciting endeavors in which undergraduates can get involved at the University.

“Recent research has highlighted the importance of having students engage in experiential learning for their long-term well-being,” Holmes said. “Such participation leads to our graduates finding fulfillment in their professional endeavors and having strong social relationships and access to the resources people need, feeling financially secure, being physically healthy and taking part in a true community.”

Holmes views undergraduate research as an excellent experiential learning activity because students learn to collect and assimilate information and knowledge needed to answer questions in their area of interest, think clearly through complex issues and present their findings in a clear manner.

“These are invaluable skills that prepare students for whatever the student chooses to do in their professional and personal life,” he said. 

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While undergraduate research generally involves students and a faculty mentor, the Double ’Hoo grants add a different twist. “In addition to the benefits that pursuing research provides, the Double ’Hoo program also helps graduate students develop skills in supervision and management which will be important as they take on leadership roles in industry or academia upon graduation,” Holmes said.

This year’s Double ’Hoo winners are:

• Caroline Alberti of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a third-year student majoring in global studies, environments and sustainability and in French, and Fatmah Behbehani of Kuwait City, Kuwait, a doctoral student studying urban and environmental planning in the School of Architecture, who are researching private-public partnerships in the provision of housing projects in Morocco, particularly the impact the private-public partnership model has on community development and how civic partners affect the delivery of housing projects.

• Patrick Beck of Ashburn, a second-year biomedical engineering student, and Jeremy Shaw of Cortland, Ohio, a fourth-year biomedical sciences graduate student in the School of Medicine, who are experimenting with a new drug as a treatment for head and neck cancer, in an effort to find how the drug works, who might be resistant, and possibly find new drug combinations to treat cancer.

• Megan Chappell of Fredericksburg, a second-year neuroscience and biology double-major, and Anthony Fernandez-Castaneda of Pico Rivera, California, a fifth-year medical student, who are working on discovering novel therapeutics for diseases such as multiple sclerosis. 

• Demitra Chavez of Richmond, a third-year developmental psychology major, and Cat Thrasher of Alexandria, a second-year developmental psychology graduate student, who will research how mothers regulate their children’s emotions, measuring the effect of a mother’s presence on risk-taking behaviors and brain responses in a group of young competitive gymnasts, in an effort to determine how variations in early care-giver availability might change a child’s understanding of his or her environment in the long-term.

• Connor Fitzpatrick of Arlington, a second-year economics major with a minor in government, and Nicholas Jacobs of Herndon, a Ph.D. candidate in politics and government, who are researching how individuals make sense of differences in federal spending from state to state, operating on the hypothesis that Americans are resentful of disparate spending and that this reinforces state identity.

• Raewyn Haines of Vienna, a third-year systems engineering major, and Matthew McMahon of Rochelle, Illinois, a second-year doctoral student in materials science engineering, who are focusing on understanding and mitigating unexpected failure in modern aluminum alloys currently used by the U.S. Navy, to assess the causes of the failure and determine protective coatings to prevent this.

• Lauren Harkins of Harleysville, Pennsylvania, a second-year biomedical engineering major minoring in chemical engineering, and Nathanael Sallada of East Greenville, Pennsylvania, a third-year biomedical engineering Ph.D. candidate, who are experimenting with engineering a fungal protein that behaves as a biosurfactant for specific, tailored applications.

• Kate Haynes of Springfield, a third-year neuroscience and psychology major, and Caroline Kelsey of Greenwich, Connecticut, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology, who are studying infants’ brain responses to social eye cues and how that responding is affected by race.

• Joyce Hong of Vienna, a second-year biology major, and Hyewon Choi of Seoul, South Korea, a fourth-year psychology and social psychology graduate student, who are studying what “cues” people use to judge others’ happiness.

• Jeewoo Kim of McLean, a second-year neuroscience major, and Sihan Li of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, a second-year biochemistry and molecular genetics major in the School of Medicine, who are studying a protein to uncover more information about hearing loss mechanisms.

• Nayoung Lee of Springfield, a second-year biochemistry major and a religious studies minor, and Kathryn LeCroy of Pleasant Grove, Alabama, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in environmental sciences, who are studying the diversity, health and behavior of native and exotic mason bee species in Virginia, in an effort to find why common mason bees are facing population decline.

• Alexandra Levin of Troy, Michigan, a third-year American studies and psychology major, and Diane-Jo Bart-Plange of Kansas City, Missouri, a second-year social psychology graduate student, who are researching the effects of bearing witness to police shooting news coverage through analysis of emotional regulation mechanisms and measurements of racial attitudes.

• Chelsea Li of Oakton, a second-year human biology major, and Corey Williams of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a second-year graduate student in biomedical engineering, who are seeking to develop a system to tag intermediate stem cells based on their identity, and see which cell types the intermediate cells are capable of differentiating into.

• Jenny Lim of Richmond, a second-year politics honors and economics major, and Rémy Furrer of Geneva, Switzerland, a first year Ph.D. candidate in social psychology, who will investigate the way emotions and beliefs shape the way people process information, self-regulate and make social decisions.

• Madeleine “Maddi” Mitchell of Richmond, a third-year psychology major minoring in French, and Meltem Yucel of Istanbul, Turkey, a third-year developmental psychology Ph.D. candidate, who are researching children’s moral and normative behavior and why, when and how they behave morally.

• Ahmed Osman of Fruitland, Maryland, a third-year civil and environmental engineering major, and Mohamad Alipour of Mashad, Iran, a fourth-year civil engineering Ph.D. student, who are researching automated inspection of critical infrastructure, such as bridges, using computer vision techniques to develop models that can detect cracks, corrosion and other defects for smart city and infrastructure applications.

•  Leila Rayyan of Fredericksburg, a second-year biostatistics major, and Wenfan Ke of Fujian Province, China, a second-year graduate student in cell and molecular biology, who will investigate cellular and genetic mechanisms that cause diet-induced obesity – in particular using systems biology and functional genomics approaches to discover genes that are responsible for fat accumulation under a high-fructose diet.

•  Leah Silverman of Reston, a second-year double major in global studies (environments and sustainability track) and economics, and Abeer Saha of New Delhi, a third-year graduate student in history, who will research environmentally destructive concentrated feeding operations to provide a basis for cattlemen and policymakers to make informed decisions about the health of the American food system while remaining stewards of the environment. 

• Neil Singh of Brockport, New York, a first-year systems engineering major, and Zhaonan Sun of Jinan, China, a third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate student, who are researching the application of a human body model to determine the effects of traffic accidents on obese passengers in an effort to spur the design of safer cars.

• Yuxin “Alicia” Wu of Xi’an, China, a first-year computer science major, and Sarah Mosseri of Comer, Georgia, a sociology graduate student, who are teaming up to explore how women make trade-offs between family and employment and to identify middle-ground strategies.

• Jonathan Zheng of Manassas, a second-year chemical engineering major with a minor in materials science and engineering, and Gordon Brezicki of Hickory, North Carolina, a fourth-year graduate chemical engineering major, who are developing a catalyst to achieve conversion of methane to higher-value, easily transportable products such as methanol.

• Zeming “Eileen” Zheng of Chantilly, a third-year neuroscience major, and Piotr Przanowski of Warsaw, Poland, a post-doctoral student in the School of Medicine, who will attempt to optimize small molecule inhibitors against protein-coding genes and restore some morphology alterations of Rett syndrome neurons.

• Max Zheng of Herndon, a second-year computer science and economics major, and Zhiqiu Jiang of Ya’an, China, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in transportation planning in the School of Architecture, who will combine data gathered from social media as well as an on-site questionnaire to assess the public’s opinion towards driverless technology, to be used in transportation planning and policy decision-making.

The University of Virginia is preparing to welcome tens of thousands of people to Grounds for graduation weekend. Here’s what’s on tap.

May 18: Valedictory Exercises

The festivities will kick off Friday at 3 p.m. with Valedictory Exercises on the Lawn. National Football League great and UVA alumnus Chris Long will address the crowd. Long studied sociology and played for the Cavalier football team from 2004 to 2007 before going on to win two Super Bowls, most recently in February with the Philadelphia Eagles.

In addition to his success on the field, Long is a passionate philanthropist. The defensive end donated his entire 2017 season salary to charity. He donated his first six game checks to fund scholarships in Charlottesville in a strong rebuke of the white nationalist rally that took place in Charlottesville in August. He and his wife Megan said in a statement at the time, “We decided to try to combat those actions with our own positive investment in our community.”

Later that season, he announced he would give his remaining 10 checks to help needy youths in the three cities where he has played professionally: Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis.

His Chris Long Foundation also raises money for “Waterboys,” an initiative he founded to bring clean water to villages in East Africa.

Valedictory Exercises also will include the presentation of various awards and the bestowing of the 2018 class gift, to be accepted on the University’s behalf by President Teresa A. Sullivan, who is stepping down in July. Admission is free and the public is welcome to attend.

To provide a safe environment for degree candidates, faculty, family and guests, the University has implemented a clear bag policy– similar to the policy used at athletic events and other large gatherings – and is utilizing metal detectors for Valedictory Exercises as well as Final Exercises.

May 19 and 20: Final Exercises

On Saturday, degree candidates in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences will begin their Final Exercises on the Lawn at 10 a.m.

Sunday’s ceremony, also beginning at 10 a.m., will feature degree candidates from UVA’s other schools (and from the Data Science Institute):

• School of Architecture
• Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy
• School of Continuing and Professional Studies
• Curry School of Education
• Darden School of Business
• School of Engineering and Applied Science
• School of Law
• McIntire School of Commerce
• School of Medicine
• School of Nursing

Sullivan will deliver the keynote address at both Final Exercises ceremonies. This continues a long University tradition of outgoing presidents delivering the commencement address. Sullivan took office in 2010 as the University’s eighth president and the first woman to hold that position.

The University will bestow 7,072 degrees this year:

• 4,238 baccalaureate degrees (103 earned in three years, five in two years)
• 457 first professional degrees 
• 2,377 graduate degrees, including 323 Ph.D.’s, 13 Doctor of Education degrees, 24 Doctors of Nursing Practice and four Doctors of Juridical Science degrees.
• 1,107 of this year’s graduates are international students.

Following Final Exercises, individual schools and departments will have diploma ceremonies. Check here for the locations of Saturday’s departmental ceremonies. Attendees can find Sunday’s ceremony locations here. The links also include information about rain locations.

In the event of severe weather, Valedictory and Final Exercises will take place at John Paul Jones Arena.

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For text alerts about programming and weather-related developments, text “uvagrad” to 79516.

Public parking will be available at several locations, including Scott Stadium and the John Paul Jones Arena. Shuttle bus service to the Lawn is provided. (More information here.)

Food stands will be located throughout Grounds on Finals Weekend. Light breakfast items will be offered for sale Saturday and Sunday mornings. Food stands will be open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Lunch items will be available beginning mid-morning.

Guests may watch live broadcasts of both Final Exercises ceremonies in these climate-controlled, remote viewing locations: the Alumni Hall ballroom, Chemistry Building Auditorium, Culbreth Theatre, Gilmer Hall auditoriums (rooms 130 and 190), the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library Auditorium, Newcomb Hall Ballroom and Theatre, and the Student Activities Building. Additionally, there is a dedicated remote viewing site for persons with limited mobility on the third floor of Newcomb Hall.

Visit the Finals Weekend website for further information.

Cory Paradis transferred to the University of Virginia with a mission: he wanted to make homes, buildings and cities more accessible to people like him.

Paradis, who will graduate from the School of Architecture on Sunday, was born with cerebral palsy and has been in a wheelchair most of his life. He knows firsthand how uneven sidewalks, non-automated doors or steep hills can turn what should be a simple journey into an obstacle course.

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As a child, those obstacles were an accepted part of his life. Then, when he started taking a few architecture and drafting classes in high school, he realized that he could make a career of solving the same problems that he ran into every day.

“At first, growing up, you don’t really understand what the problems are, because they have always been there,” he said. “Once I realized that I could do something to change these issues, impact the built environment in a positive way and get rid of barriers to make it easier for people to move through their daily lives, that was pretty intriguing to me.”

Paradis, who grew up in Fredericksburg, originally attended Longwood University but struggled in some of his classes and realized that he had not been quite ready for the transition from high school to college. He came back to Fredericksburg and enrolled in nearby Germanna Community College, where he excelled and built up enough credits to transfer to UVA in the fall of 2015.

“Even though neither of my parents went to college, I have a lot of other family members who have gone to UVA,” he said. “I had always known about UVA, the traditions here and how good of a school it is.”

He also knew exactly what program he wanted to transfer into: urban planning in the School of Architecture.

“I’ve really fallen in love with urban planning – it’s such a cool field,” he said. “I always thought I wanted to do architecture, and now I think of urban planning as large-scale architecture, with more of an opportunity to impact the built environment in a positive way.”

Throughout his three years in the urban planning program, Paradis concentrated on issues of accessibility. In one class with architecture professor Anselmo Canfora, Paradis served both as a research assistant and a student as he encouraged classmates to consider accessibility concerns early in their design process. He told them about the challenges he faces each day, gave feedback on their designs and even shared his wheelchair for a few hours so that students could experience obstacles firsthand.

“I think it helped to give them an actual person they were designing for, instead of an abstract concept,” he said. “It was really cool for me to be able to share my experiences with them and give them a glimpse into some of the issues I deal with. I tried to help them see that is really a design problem, and that you can build a design around it.”

Canfora – a Chicago Cubs diehard who loves to talk baseball with Paradis, a Washington Nationals fan – called the student’s impact on his class “absolutely transformative.”

“Students were already committed to developing inclusive, accessible designs, but Cory was critical in giving them a much more realistic, clearer understanding of the challenges that people with disabilities face on a daily basis,” he said. “He really dedicated an amazing amount of time and effort to giving feedback, in addition to completing the course as a student.”

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Paradis also wrote papers exploring what an ideal city might look like, in terms of accessibility, and studied the Americans With Disabilities Act and how it applies to universities like UVA.

“All of my professors have been so supportive, and have let me explore accessibility and ADA issues,” he said. “They have given me a lot of creative freedom to write about things that really interest me.”

Already, Paradis is seeing the fruits of his labor around Grounds. He did accessibility studies of Brown College, where he lives, and UVA’s Arts Grounds to help pinpoint problems and possible solutions, and he also served on the University’s Barrier-Free Access Committee.

That committee, which includes administrators, faculty members and students, makes recommendations and provides oversight to ensure the University’s compliance with the American With Disabilities Act. Among other innovations, the committee created the Report A Barrier tool to allow any member of the University community to easily report accessibility issues online.

Paradis realizes that some of his reform proposals won’t take effect until after he graduates, but he finds a lot of satisfaction in knowing that he has smoothed the way for the students who will follow him.

“One of the things I really stressed when I first started working with other students in the Architecture School was that this was not just for me,” he said. “This is for anybody that might come after me.”

Canfora said that attitude was typical of Paradis.

“Cory has an amazing spirit. … He is very optimistic and a realist at the same time,” the professor said. “He understands the challenges and how the system works, and he is willing to commit a lot of time and effort to improving that.”

After graduation, Paradis hopes to continue and expand his work to the broader Charlottesville community. He is in the process of applying to several ADA compliance jobs in the area and wants to continue calling the city home.

“I want to stick around Charlottesville, if I can,” Paradis said. “I really like the community and the culture here, and I’m really grateful for the experience I have had here.”

Near the end of the University of Virginia’s spring semester, Katie Watts had a choice between writing a final paper or undertaking 16 more hours of labor on the model of UVA’s original Rotunda dome that her class was completing.

To her own surprise, Watts – who earned her master’s degree in architectural history from the University in May – chose the 16 hours of construction work.

“As a historian, I was much more comfortable with the idea of writing a paper,” Watts said, noting that the closest thing she had to construction experience was building her Ikea furniture. “But I decided to go outside my comfort zone and work on the dome instead.”

Watts, together with 14 other graduate and undergraduate students in Benjamin Hays’ “History of American Building Technology” course, built a replica of the original wooden dome that perished when the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda caught fire in 1895. It was replaced by a tile dome out of concern for future fires.

As UVA celebrates its bicentennial, visitors can now see what that original wooden dome would have looked like, thanks to more than 400 hours of work by Hays’ students, aided by several outside architects and builders.

The model dome, which will be on display on the Lawn until the end of June, was created with support from UVA’s Bicentennial Commission and Castleton Farms in Rappahannock County. At one-third the scale of the real Rotunda dome, it’s an imposing structure and a tangible reminder of founder Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the University 200 years ago.

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“Everything is to scale and the structure is true to Jefferson’s original specifications,” said Hays, a lecturer in the School of Architecture and the University Building Official. “It’s thrilling to be able to tell that story in a very visible way, and to show people what it would have looked like.”

Jefferson’s designs for the original dome were inspired by the work of 16^th-century French architect Philibert Delorme, who pioneered the technique of using wooden ribs to create beautiful and sturdy domes. UVA’s future founder learned of Delorme in 1786 while serving as the American ambassador to France. His friend Maria Cosway took him on a tour of Paris that included the Halle aux blés, an indoor marketplace capped by an impressive Delorme-style wooden dome.

Captivated, Jefferson bought Delorme’s handbook and eventually had America’s first Delorme dome installed at Monticello in 1801. The Rotunda dome followed in 1824. It was about 75 feet wide and made of wide 16- to 18-inch oak beams intersected by numerous smaller pieces, all held together with long iron nails manufactured at Monticello.

Hays and architect Douglas Harnsberger, who has spent much of his career studying Delorme’s work, used Jefferson’s original notes, housed in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, to plan their model. The result is a 25-foot wide structure composed of more than 1,100 pieces of white oak carefully fitted together using historically accurate nails similar to those in the original dome.

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Though this was the largest model Hays had built, it was not the first time he had built a Delorme dome. He led students in another modeling project two years ago, building smaller-scale models of both the wooden Delorme dome and of the tiled dome installed after the fire, which was designed by Spanish-American architect Rafael Guastavino.

Hays returned to the modeling project because creating the historic structures helped students understand the underpinnings of modern building technology.

“One of my biggest pedagogical beliefs is that we don’t just learn through lectures or readings,” Hays said. “Significant insight can come by actually building something.”

His students learned not only about the craft of building, but about the craftsmen – many of them enslaved laborers – who built the original Rotunda dome.

“My favorite part of the project was stepping into the craftsman’s shoes,” second-year architectural history graduate student Tabitha Sabky said. “Working with my hands and engaging with history through physical materials allowed me to approach the history of building construction not through the designer’s perspective, but through the everyday worker’s perspective. Each issue that we faced forced us to step into the mindset of a Jefferson-era craftsman and learn the processes of workers who have been largely ignored in the architectural history narratives.”

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The class spent a lot of time troubleshooting at first, but eventually, she said, they got the hang of it.

“One of my favorite parts of the project was seeing the progress we made as a group from the first day we tried to assemble the ribs to the next weekend, when we could quickly get a rib together in about 30 minutes,” Watts said.

“With any construction project, there are issues that force you to adapt,” Sabky said. “However, it was these issues that were the most instructive, because they allowed for creative thought and ingenuity.”

Though the project took longer than expected, a few students stayed in Charlottesville to finish it with Hays and Harnsberger in the weeks after graduation. On Tuesday, they moved everything to the Lawn to assemble the final dome there.

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Now, it stands as a reminder of both Jefferson’s original design for the Rotunda and his expansive influence on American architecture. After Jefferson used Delorme domes at Monticello and UVA, more and more of them began cropping up along the East Coast.

“Jefferson’s promotion of Delorme’s dome went far beyond Charlottesville in impacting the fledgling American neoclassical architecture tradition,” Harnsberger wrote in a summary of the model.

His evangelism of Delorme’s method contributed to the first Delorme domes at the U.S. Capitol, the Baltimore Cathedral, the Monumental Church in Richmond, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and several more.

“It is no understatement to say that Jefferson’s fascination with the Delorme dome at the Halle aux blés grain market in Paris resulted in the creation of the first American neoclassical domes,” Harnsberger said.

In late June, the dome will travel to Castleton Farms, where it will be displayed throughout the rest of the summer.

You likely know about The Stonewall Inn, home of the 1969 riots that marked a key turning point in the modern fight for gay rights in the United States.

However, you might not know about the hundreds of other places in New York City that have played an important role in LGBTQ history, from one of America’s oldest gay bars, Julius,’ to grim sites like the street corner where Julio Rivera was murdered in a 1990 hate crime that sparked the first Queens Pride Parade.

Uncovering and recognizing those sites is the biggest and most rewarding part of Amanda Davis’s job.

Davis, who graduated in 2004 from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, recently was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “40 Under 40: People Saving Places” list. She is the project manager for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, founded in 2015 by architectural historians Andrew Dolkart, Ken Lustbader and Jay Shockley to educate residents and tourists about LGBTQ history in New York City.

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Together with the founders, Davis – the project’s only full-time employee – finds and researches sites, adds them to the project’s interactive map and prepares nominations for the National Register of Historic Places, which is the federal government’s honorary list of historic places around the country deemed significant to American history.

We caught up with her earlier in June – recently designated as “Pride Month” in New York City – to learn more about her work.

Q. When did you first become interested in architectural history?

A. In some ways, it was a happy accident. I had not decided what I wanted to major in and I needed another class to take during the second semester of my first year. Scrolling through the course catalogue, I happened upon [former architectural history lecturer] Camille Wells’ class, “Thomas Jefferson, Architect.”

It was fascinating. I loved learning about history through the built environment, and I transferred into the School of Architecture the next year to study architectural history.

Q. How did you get involved in the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project?

A. I was working as an architectural historian for a nonprofit in Greenwich Village when I heard about the project manager opening. One of the founders was my professor in graduate school at Columbia [University], and another was a former coworker. I thought it was a great opportunity to work on history that had not really been explored.

Within the field of historic preservation, I knew of only a few LGBTQ projects in California at that time. The LGBTQ community is such a big part of New York, but so much of its history has not been discovered. I wanted to be part of bringing that history to light.

Q. What kind of day-to-day work does that mission require?

A. There is a lot of archival research and sleuthing. I lead survey efforts to identify and research sites, relying on historical documentation, reports from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, public library archives and other sources.

We also hold a lot of public events, reaching out to various groups around the city to tell them about what we are learning and also get ideas from them about sites we should research.

Once I have the research, I work on updating our website and interactive map and also nominate sites for honorary recognition by the state or federal government or for official protection at the local level by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. A grant we received from the National Park Service requires us to write seven nominations for the National Register of Historic Places; we have completed five so far.

Q. How many sites have you explored so far?

A. We launched our new website last year with information on about 100 sites. Now, we have prioritized about 350 additional sites for further research and recognition. It’s a pretty diverse list, representing different boroughs, ethnic groups and time periods from the 17^th century to the year 2000.

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Q. If you were to pick a few sites for someone visiting New York to discover, what would they be?

A. A lot of people know about The Stonewall Inn, but there are so many other sites that can tell us a lot about LGBTQ history and about members of the gay community who have positively impacted New York City and American culture.

There are other historic bars like Julius,’ near Stonewall, where four gay rights activists from the Mattachine Society conducted a “sip-in” in 1966, modeled after the sit-ins happening in the civil rights movement. They wanted to bring attention to the discrimination that gay men and lesbians faced in bars.

There is a great house museum, the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, where we recently worked with staff to add LGBTQ history to the narrative the museum portrays. Austen, a celebrated turn-of-the-20^th-century photographer, had lived with her partner of 53 years, Gertrude Tate, but until recently Gertrude was erased from the narrative.

I also loved working on the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Caffe Cino, the birthplace of off-off-Broadway and a pioneer in the development of gay theater at a time when depicting homosexuality on stage was illegal.

Another interesting and poignant site is the corner where Julio Rivera, a gay Latino man, was murdered in Jackson Heights in 1990. That crime really galvanized both the Latino and the gay communities in Queens and eventually inspired the Queens Pride Parade, which began in 1993.

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Q. What do you find most rewarding about the work you do?

A. It has been amazing to see how people respond to the project and how far it has come. We held a workshop for public schoolteachers last week who were very enthusiastic about using our site in their classrooms. We also give historic tours to young people; on a recent tour one teen told me that she thought she was alone until she learned about some of this history.

It’s amazing to see – time and again – how the information can impact people.

Q. Anything else to add?

A. We are always adding more places and have a suggestion form on our website where anyone can submit historic sites they feel should be included on our map. I would love to hear from people.