The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business earned top-10 placement in 11 categories in rankings, the highest total in the school’s history and its third consecutive year with 10 or more ranked categories.
The results are led by the No. 1 ranking for Best Professors for the third consecutive year. The school also ranked No. 2 for Most Family Friendly, No. 3 for Best MBA for Consulting, No. 4 for Best Administered and No. 4 for Best Campus Environment.
“These rankings are especially meaningful because they reflect what our students experience every day,” former Interim Dean Mike Lenox said. “Being recognized once again for the best professors in the country is an extraordinary honor, but the breadth of these results tells an even fuller story – of exceptional teaching, a demanding and deeply supportive community, and people across Darden committed to helping students thrive. They are a testament to the strength of the school and the momentum carrying Darden into its next chapter.”
The Darden School also remained in the top five for Best Classroom Experience (No. 5) for the sixth consecutive year and moved into the top five for Most Competitive Students (No. 5, up from No. 6). Together, those rankings reflect strong student feedback on the academic experience.
Overall, seven of the school’s 11 Top 10 placements were in the top five, tying the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the most top-five finishes among schools ranked this year.
The Darden School also continued to perform well across career-focused categories. It ranked No. 6 for Best MBA for Management, No. 6 for Best MBA for Finance, No. 6 for Best Career Prospects and entered the Best MBA for Operations category for the first time at No. 10.
Unlike many other rankings, The Princeton Review does not produce an absolute ranking of MBA programs. Instead, the publication selects top programs and evaluates them across 18 categories it considers most relevant to prospective MBA candidates. The top 10 schools in each category are then reported for the published ranking. Some of the individual rankings are based on school-reported data, others on student survey data and others on a combination of both.
Researcher receives gold medal for lifetime contributions to MRI innovation
A UVA professor at the forefront of magnetic resonance imaging technology is the recipient of a career-spanning award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Craig Meyer, a professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and radiology and medical imaging in the School of Medicine, earned the society’s Gold Medal, the highest honor for lifetime achievement and impact in the field of magnetic resonance imaging.
UVA biomedical engineering professor Craig Meyer, a pioneer in magnetic resonance imaging technology, is still breaking new ground in the field. (University Communications photo)
The award was presented at the organization’s annual meeting in May, where Meyer was an invited speaker. The honor recognizes his pioneering work in advancing MRI technology – from foundational innovations in image acquisition to ongoing efforts to use MRI in some of medicine’s most challenging tasks.
Meyer’s work with MRI began at Stanford University during the technology’s earliest days, when researchers were still defining how best to capture and reconstruct images from the human body. During that formative period, he was part of a generation that reimagined how MRI data could be used, improving image quality and increasing the speed and efficiency of scanning.
“Craig is a leader in MRI research to this day, and the number of people whose lives are saved or dramatically improved because of his work is incalculable,” said Shayn Peirce-Cottler, chair of 鶹ƽ Department of Biomedical Engineering.
At UVA, he is exploring how advanced acquisition strategies can be applied to problems that have long posed challenges for conventional MRI techniques.
One such challenge is imaging the lungs – an area that has historically been difficult for MRI due to low signal and constant motion from breathing. Meyer’s current research focuses on refining fast-acquisition methods, including spiral-based approaches he helped develop, to capture high-quality images under those conditions.
He’s also making a difference as a co-founder of Springbok Analytics with fellow biomedical engineering professor Silvia Blemker. The UVA Engineering-spinout company uses proprietary artificial intelligence-based analysis of MRI images to improve muscle health for athletic performance, therapy and treatment of disorders such as facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a common form of muscular dystrophy.
Mariano Garcia-Blanco elected president of the RNA Society
鶹ƽ Dr. Mariano Garcia-Blanco begins his two-year term as president of the RNA Society on Jan. 1. (UVA School of Medicine photo)
Dr. Mariano Garcia-Blanco has been elected president of the RNA Society, an international organization dedicated to fostering research and education in RNA science. He will begin a two-year term on Jan. 1.
The RNA Society, established in 1993, facilitates the innovation, discovery and dissemination of knowledge about ribonucleic acid. It supports a scientific ecosystem that includes molecular, evolutionary and structural biology, biochemistry, biomedical sciences, chemistry, genetics and virology related to the structure and function of RNA – one of three major biological macromolecules essential for life, along with DNA and proteins.
Garcia-Blanco joined the UVA faculty in 2023 as the F. Palmer Weber Medical Research Professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology. He is an expert in virology and RNA biology, including their impact on immunity to diseases. His research includes a discovery identifying key factors that determine a person’s risk for developing multiple sclerosis and findings about how viral RNAs in mosquito saliva affect the transmission of the deadly dengue viruses.
Gulati Elected to American Law Institute
Mitu Gulati is the 36th UVA Law professor to be elected a member of the American Law Institute. (UVA Law photo)
School of Law professor Mitu Gulati has been elected a member of the American Law Institute, becoming the of the UVA Law faculty currently affiliated with the institute.
The organization, which produces scholarly work meant to update or otherwise improve the law, includes judges, lawyers and law professors from the U.S. and around the world who are “selected on the basis of professional achievement and demonstrated interest in improving the law,” according to the institute’s website.
Gulati is the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law and Joseph C. Carter Jr. Research Professor of Law. His work focuses on sovereign debt restructurings and the evolution of sovereign debt contracts over history, pitfalls in mergers and acquisitions and leveraged loan contracts and empirical examination into the various players (lawyers, law clerks and judges) and their different roles in the cases that make it – or don’t – at the U.S. Supreme Court.
American Law Institute members are selected from confidential nominations submitted by the group’s membership.
Chemical engineering chair’s groundbreaking catalysis research wins lectureship
Ayman Karim, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, received the 2026 American Chemical Society’s Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science in Heterogeneous Catalysis for research that sheds new light on one of chemistry’s enduring mysteries: exactly how some catalysts work.
Ayman Karim, chair of 鶹ƽ Department of Chemical Engineering, is being recognized for his work in understanding the mysteries of catalysis. (UVA Engineering photo)
Picture this: It’s the 2026 FIFA World Cup. You see a player dribbling the ball. The very next image you see is the soccer ball in the back of the net – but you have no idea how it happened.
That’s heterogeneous catalysis in a nutshell, said Karim, the Olsen Bicentennial Professor of Chemical Engineering. “You have the starting molecules, the catalyst in some state – possibly with interaction with the reactant molecules – and the final product,” Karim said. “(But) we don’t know how the catalyst enabled this transformation in detail.”
In catalysis engineering, a specially designed material – either a “homogenous” or “heterogeneous” catalyst – is used to facilitate a chemical reaction to achieve a desired result with the least amount of waste, cost, energy or unwanted byproducts. Industrial catalysis is essential for manufacturing valuable products such as fuels and pharmaceuticals, and for reducing pollution, as in automobile catalytic converters.
To improve existing catalyst designs, researchers need to understand what’s happening during reactions. That is usually easier in homogeneous versus heterogeneous catalysis, due to the composition of the catalysts.
In a 2023 paper, Karim and Hongliang Xin, a professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, managed to break down some of the steps that happen to make heterogeneous catalytic transformations possible – sort of like seeing all the frames in that soccer game, Karim explained.
