When Mike McConnell decided what he wanted to spend his career working on, he was 29, inspired to begin his Ph.D. – and flat broke. He’d learned from his biology classes that immune cells in the body constantly rearrange their own DNA: it’s what allows them to protect us by making receptors in the right shapes to bind to invasive pathogens. As he wrapped up a master’s degree in immunology in the late 1990s, he’d obsess about it over beers with his roommates. “Suddenly this idea kind of clicked,” McConnell recalls. 
That preliminary report is promising, says Debbie-Ann Shirley, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at the University of Virginia and medical director of the COVID-19 clinic. Side effects from the vaccine were similar to those seen in older children with most being “brief, quickly resolved and mild.”
A lawyer for a man once charged in the deaths said she believes DNA that would lead to the killer of Julie Williams and her partner, Lollie Winans, 26, in Shenandoah National Park in 1996 still sits stashed away, all but untested, in an evidence locker at the FBI lab in Quantico. “They have male DNA on a gag, they have hairs,” said Deirdre Enright, founder and director of the Innocence Project at 鶹ƽ School of Law.
Early adulthood holds many of life’s achievements — the start of a career, the keys to a new home, the first sparks of romance. For [UVA alumnus] Lloyd F. Stamy Jr., those milestones are long behind him, but the Fox Chapel novelist is nowhere close to resting on his laurels. Stamy, who retired after decades in the institutional investment industry, has published a series of semi-autobiographical novels that touch largely on the passage of time. His latest book, “Strangers No More” (Word Association Publishers, $17.95), explores the way relationships ebb and flow across the course of a lifetime...
(Commentary) Long before she became an urban planner, Ebony Walden saw color-coded differences written into the landscape. As an 8-year-old traveling from her working-class Black and Latino community in Hempstead, N.Y., to whiter, more affluent spaces on Long Island, the future UVA alumna noticed that the homes were larger; the schools and shopping, better; the liquor stores, fewer. Years later, after moving to Richmond, she observed similar disparities but felt empowered to do something about it. The result is Richmond Racial Equity Essays, a multimedia project to create a Richmond “absent of...
(Co-written by Emily Oksen and Kristin O’Donoghue, students at the University of Virginia and interns with the High Atlas Foundation) All individuals and people who share a common identity have a right to be remembered, to protect and preserve their cultural heritage, and to have autonomy over the safeguarding of their collective experience, cultural artifacts, oral and written history.
The Center for Civic Innovation has announced its 2021 Fellowships, recognizing 13 community leaders. According to a release, these leaders address various issues in Charlottesville, such as poverty, equality, access to services and environmental issues. This is the second year CCI has announced fellowships for individuals or teams, aiming to encourage them to create change in their communities.This year’s Fellows include a team of University of Virginia students: Marissa Harris-Turner, Anson Parker, Allison Weiderhold, Michelle Miles, Taylor Frome and BJ Pendleton.
A University of Virginia fourth year student started a program that is making a difference for many. When Chris Obolensky started his journey on Grounds, he noticed public speaking skills were an expectation. He says there were only a few ways to nurture those skills built into the curriculum, especially for underclassmen. This led him to begin the UVA Speaking Center.
If anyone is sceptical about this, watch the Netflix documentary “Surviving Death.” The sixth episode, titled “Reincarnation,” features the research of Professor Jim B. Tucker, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia.
(Commentary) “Death is the most tangible and most painful of losses. In our reactions to death, we unwittingly coexist with the remnants of our deconstructed, imposed or rushed divisions in our past in our subconscious. Mourning is not just a response to death. Mourning is the psychological response we give to any subduction or change and the compromises we make so that we can adapt between our inner world and reality,” says Dr. Vamik Volkan, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia.
(Commentary) The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by the Senate and now pending in the House that has an overreaching definition of ‘broker’ also contains an overlooked “digital assets” provision. If this bill becomes law, that would be a disaster, said Abraham Sutherland, an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an adviser to the Proof of Stake Alliance.
The constant flow of email, and expectations around responsiveness to emails, is a large distraction in my daily life. Several strategies I use to combat the distraction include: devoting specific times to email (and not first thing in the morning), blocking specific working times where email is closed and setting boundaries for answering emails past certain hours in the evening. - Ashley Williams, University of Virginia Darden School of Business
Both GOP nominee Glenn Youngkin and former democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe claimed victory after the debate, but Larry Sabato, director of 鶹ƽ Center for Politics, says the answer is simple. “You don’t call a winner unless there was a big goof on one side or the other and there wasn’t,” he added.
Today’s urban-rural divide is decades in the making, the result of New Deal infrastructure projects, interstate highways, and government programs that attracted jobs to metro areas in the Mountain West and South, according to Guian McKee, associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
(Subscription may be required) At the same time, he cut a cosmopolitan figure in world capitals. “He was young, very fashionably dressed, with boots, and he would typically smoke a large cigar,” said William B. Quandt, a professor emeritus of politics at the University of Virginia who was on the National Security Council under presidents Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter. 
(Subscription may be required) Sylla, unconvinced, was planning to sign up for another test date when Jessie arranged a Zoom chat with Jeannine C. Lalonde, associate dean of admission at UVA. Sylla peppered her with skeptical questions, saying she was sure the university would punish applicants without scores. Lalonde acknowledged her concerns. Then she explained that applying without a score wouldn’t put her at a disadvantage. She walked Sylla through 鶹ƽ review process, describing how admissions officers emphasize an applicant’s transcript, the courses taken and the grades earned, far more...
(Commentary) Emerson Stevens owes his freedom to the efforts of two attorneys affiliated with the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia Law School, Deidre Enright and Jennifer Givens. Enright first started on the case in 2009. In addition to preparing and filing the numerous briefs, they, especially Enright, spent countless hours investigating the case and digging up the new evidence needed to prove his innocence.
mRNA vaccines’ positive safety profile is based on millions of deployed doses and experience shows it can induce an immune response that leads to protection from symptomatic disease, University of Virginia professor of pediatrics Dr Steven Zeichner added.
Seventeen medical professionals sued the state over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, citing religious objections related to abortion. Their attorney, Thomas More Society Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara, argues the mandate violates federal law. But Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, says the government can make a case against religious exemptions for an infectious disease.
Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia Law School states that “no major organized religious group has officially discouraged the [COVID] vaccine and many, like the Catholic Church, have explicitly encouraged them.”