Health, Medicine, and Nursing

In honor of International Day of the Girl (October 11), Abby Palko shares reflections on ways that authors explore the complexities of girlhood. Ms. Palko is Director of the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center at the University of Virginia. This article, reprinted with permission, is from the blog PALKO POV: Fictional Friends Who Embolden Us […]

Written by John Lyons, Commonwealth Professor of French, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Each fall, thousands of excited, confused, worried, rushed first-year students arrive at the University, usually happy, but haunted by a distracting urgency.  It seems that everything has to be done at once and that a whole host of opportunities […]

Written by Gretchen Ki Steidle. Steidle, founder and President of Global Grassroots, teaches an experiential course each J-Term on “Conscious Social Change”. Students learn mindfulness-based leadership practices for self-awareness and design a conscious social enterprise as a team. Steidle is the author of the new book Leading from Within: Conscious Social Change & Mindfulness for Social […]

Written by Abby Palko, Director of the UVA Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center. This has been reposted with permission from the Women’s Center blog. Originally posted December 6, 2017. In a world where Facebook has recorded so much of my family’s year, I treasure this time of year as an opportunity to really reflect on […]

Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? UVA psychologist Peter Sheras offers some tips for beating the ‘holiday blues.’ Reposted with permission from UVA Today, December 4, 2017. Written by Jane Kelly, University News Associate, Office of University Communications. The words seem to contradict one another: holiday depression. Yet each year, people around the world suffer from the condition, […]

Written by Sarah Kucenas, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience and Director of the Department of Biology Distinguished Majors Program, University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences   The nervous system is the single most important organ system in the human body. It controls our ability to move, […]

  Written by George S. Bloom, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences   Alzheimer’s disease (AD) attacks neurons (nerve cells) in the brain, and sometime in early 2013 it became the most expensive disease […]

Written by Alice Hoyt, MD, UVA Allergy and Clinical Immunology Fellow Food allergy is a strange disease. Foods are meant to nourish man, so why in the past 20 years has there been an increase in food allergies? That is the question I’m most commonly asked, and parents of children with food allergies often ask […]

When we think about our goals in a “new” time period, we neglect the constraints. Written by: Benjamin A. Converse, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Department of Psychology; Director, Social Behavior and Decisions Lab Ilana Brody, fourth-year Psychology and Economics major, working on a […]

Author: Charlotte Chapman, LPC, is the program director for Counseling at the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center and the Chair of Programs. She is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT) and has been using this approach for fifteen years. Contact: cmc5nq@virginia.edu One of the approaches being used by faculty, staff and […]

Written by: Scott Lilienfeld, Ph.D., Emory University, and Bethany A. Teachman, Ph.D., Professor, University of Virginia Department of Psychology Clinical science is grounded in the belief that a scientific approach should guide the many roles of a clinical psychologist, including providing psychotherapy, conducting assessments, and conducting research, teaching, mentoring, consulting, or program evaluation. One need […]

by Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, RN, FAAN Tussi and John Kluge Professor in Contemplative End-of-Life Care Director, UVA Compassionate Care Initiative University of Virginia School of Nursing Adjunct Faculty, University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies Author, Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully With Serious & Life-Limiting Illness Through Mindfulness, Compassion, & Connectedness (New Harbinger, 2011) The […]

By Dorrie K. Fontaine, Dean of the School of Nursing (adapted from Dean Fontaine’s Convocation address, JPJ Arena, Sept. 28, 2013) Many of us certainly recall Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” – a 1938 play about two families experiencing life’s many junctures — birth, marriage, work, death – in fictitious Grover’s Corners, an imaginary turn-of-the-century New […]

by Dorrie K. Fontaine The Daily Progress Posted: Sunday, January 6, 2013 12:15 am Can compassion be taught? It’s a question asked by parents, educators and employers, by anyone who watches or reads the news, listens to school bus taunts, or pays attention to politics. But more importantly, it’s a poignant query from patients caught up […]

Unusual version of disease-linked amyloid-beta slows destruction in mouse brains By Laura Sanders http://www.sciencenews.org/ Web edition : Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 Scientists have caught tiny amounts of a strangely shaped protein — a relative of a well-known suspect in Alzheimer’s disease —spreading destruction throughout the brains of mice. If a similar process happens in the […]

News from The American Society for Cell Biology 52nd Annual Meeting San Francisco, California December 15–19, 2012 by George S. Bloom, University of Virginia, Department of Biology The loss of neurons in the brain is what causes the devastating symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A typical patient loses ~30% of the neurons responsible for memory […]