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Invited speaker, John Hessler of the Library of Congress, discusses the use of artificial intelligence for the reconstruction of ceramics and inscriptions in archaeology for the Scholars' Lab speaker series, University of Virginia, Spring 2021. Recorded via Zoom web video communications interface in the presence of a live audience of 60+ attendees.
Keela Boose is an English Professor at Norfolk State University and a self-described “child of historically Black colleges and universities.” Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1958, Booses’s parents taught Education and Psychology at Grambling State University, Alabama State College, and later, Norfolk State. In this 2023 interview, Boose discusses the mentors who inspired her love of reading. She recalls the social and political contexts of Civil Rights-era Montgomery, Alabama, and her memories growing up in what was then a racially-mixed neighborhood of Campostella Heights in the Southside of Norfolk. Boose pursued college and graduate work at Alcorn State University in Mississippi and at Northern Illinois University. The interview was conducted in her home along the Elizabeth River, which her parents bought in 1966 and she later inherited. In the interview, she describes how sea level rise and the practices of developers buying rights to the water has impacted the shoreline of her neighborhood.
Kim Sudderth is a community leader and advocate for racial justice with the Norfolk branch of the NAACP, and the first Black woman to serve as Vice Chair of the Norfolk Planning Commission, beginning in 2022. She was the Repair Lab’s inaugural Practitioner-in-Residence in 2021. Born in 1971, Sudderth grew up in Norfolk and spent some of her adult years in Virginia Beach before returning home to Norfolk.
Track 1: In this oral history, Sudderth discusses her childhood years growing up on the naval base near Ocean View in Norfolk, and her memories of her mother’s softball league. In her later adult years, Sudderth began advocating for environmental justice cases with Mothers Out Front. Sudderth shares her perspectives on power and change-making, and discusses the connected and widespread issues of housing and the environment, as well as the lessons she has learned through organizing.
Track 2: In this interview Sudderth discusses her experience with a representative of the city in conversation about the proposed downtown Norfolk seawall and the absence of structural mitigations for flooding for the predominantly Black Southside neighborhood, where she resides. Sudderth also addresses Norfolks’ Vision2100 document, a neighborhood planning guide created in response to forecasted sea-level rise and the resulting changes in the city’s geography.
In summer 2013, UVA landscape architecture graduate students Harriett Jameson and Asa Eslocker travelled to Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California, three landscapes with the highest life expectancy in the world, to explore these places' physical, spatial, and material qualities-topography, plant communitites,urban form-and also the personal attachments that seniors in these sites have to their cultural landscapes. The people in these locales have long been studied for their genetics, diets, and recreation habits. But until Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker arrived, no one had inquired into or demonstrated in these settings the critical role of place in healthy longevity. Through study of these distinctive landscapes and the personal stories of elderly residents, the pair arrived at insights that may help communities rethink and redesign public landscapes to cultivate a culture of health and well being that spans infancy through old age.
In this Medical center hour, Ms. Jameson and Mr. Eslocker focus on how place contributes to healthy aging and preview parts of their full-length documentary film, Landscapes of longevity, which will premiere in Charlottesville in November.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Center for Design + Health, School of Architecture, UVA
Lathaniel Kirts was born in 1988 and grew up in the Norview community of Norfolk, Virginia. In this oral history interview, he describes his experiences as an honor roll student in Norfolk public schools while he and his family were navigating homelessness. Kirts was granted a scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he studied political science and worked in public service. While serving as a Deputy Clerk in courtrooms in Richmond and in Norfolk, he witnessed the school-to-prison pipeline. This interview includes Kirts’s reflections on his work for Communities and Schools, an organization dedicated to providing social services and mentorship for students in K-12 settings, around housing and food insecurity, and his decision to attend seminary school at Virginia Union, where he graduated in 2015. Kirts is an active community advocate for protecting residents living next to CSX rail yards against coal dust pollution. He served as the Repair Lab Practitioner-in-Residence (2023-2024). This oral history was conducted at Pay First Church, the church that Kirts and his wife lead in Newport News.
Lawrence Turner was born and raised in the southeast community of Newport News. In this interview, Turner describes how his life has been shaped by mentorship he has received within his community, and also the impact environmental racism in Newport News has had on his life. Turner recalls that for at least once a year between 2002 and 2018, sea level rising would impact residents' daily lives, including water lines coming up the third stair of his home during high tides when he lived in the Salters Creek area of Newport News. Turner’s interview contains descriptions of his mentors, teachers, and athletic coaches throughout his secondary education and college experience. Turner graduated from the Call Me MISTER (Men Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models) program at Longwood University, in Farmville, Virginia. His work as a high school counselor at schools in Newport News and Mansassas empowered students both in athletics and in post-high school work and education. Within his numerous community advocacy roles, Turner has helped develop a Toxic Tour, highlighting sites in the southeast community of Newport News contributing to air pollution. This oral history also includes Turner’s reflections on Newport News interstate traffic, gun violence, and how it impacted his family and mental health.
Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a Great Society, an America free from poverty and racial injustice and full of equality of opportunity and social mobility for all. Many legislative planks of his Great society platform--civil and voting rights, educational opportunity, fair housing practices, urban planning, mass transit, and health care --represent what we today consider "social determinants of health." This Medical center hour with bioethicist Erika Blacksher reviews how Americans are faring today in relation to key aspirations of LBJ's Great Society, especially those that bear on health. Americans generally live shorter, less healthy lives than their counterparts in peer nations, and within the U.S. health varies dramatically among social and economic groups and from region to region. What ethical concerns are raised by significant health disparities? Are such disparities unjust, as many in public health assume? If so, what are our responsibilites, and what ethical limits might constrain our pursuit of a more equitable distribution of health?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series and the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life
Even as the University of Virginia and other medical schools across the U.S. prepare to graduate a new wave of physicians, what will be these doctors' roles and responsibilities in a health care system increasingly stressed by social and political pressures, cultural challenges, and financial shortfalls? And what will be—what should be—expected of physicians and the medical profession in years to come, in their practice, in communities, in policy circles, in the public square? In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Christine Cassel, a longtime leader in medicine and medical education, offers her perspectives on what should be expected of physicians and other health professionals in coming years--in their practice, in their communities, in government and policy circles, and in the public square.
Twenty-first century physicians and other clinicians who are caring for patients in an era of unlimited knowledge, rapid knowledge turnover, and ever-more-sophisticated artificial intelligence (Watson!) increasingly need new skills and strategies. Such practitioners need too a renewed capacity for compassion. In this Medical Center Hour, eminent physician leader Dr. Steven Wartman, 2019 recipient of UVA's Brodie Medical Education Award, maps this critical juncture and challenges educators and other health professional leaders to reimagine and reengineer how we prepare doctors and other health care practitioners.
The Brodie Medical Education Award Lecture
These are two recordings from 2022-09-07 made at the Bremo Enslaved Cemetery, Upper Bremo Farm, Fluvanna County, Virginia. The video includes two letters, one from Liberia to the former Bremo plantation written by Peyton Skipwith (1834) and the other coming from Lower Bremo former plantation to Liberia by Jack Creasy (1840). Both men were enslaved at the former Bremo plantations in the early 19th century. The Creasy letter is read by Horace Scruggs of the Fluvanna Historical Society and descendant of the Bremo enslaved. The Skipwith letter is read by Thomas Nynweph Gmawlue Jr, visiting student from Liberia participating in UVA Landscape Architecture class ALAR 8993 : Cultural Landscape Networks Across the Black Atlantic, lead by Professor Allison James. The readings were done as part of a collaborative field trip between ALAR 8993, ARH 5600 : 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics, lead Professor Will Rourk of the UVA Library and the Fluvanna Historical Society. Sources for the letter were provided by Tricia Johnson, executive director of the Fluvanna Historical Society. The source of the Creasy letter is from the Fluvanna Historical Society Bremo papers and the Skipwith letter is from UVA Library Special Collections.
Creation of accessible materials is essential to compliance with UVA's standards and guidelines; moreover, it is critical to creating an inclusive and engaged learning environment for all students. Join us for this workshop, led by UVA Library's Accessibility Designer, Jack Kelly. He'll discuss guidelines and best practices for multimedia accessibility that will guide your OER project development. This session is recommended for those embarking on the creation of open instructional resources.
H5P is a digital toolset for authoring content online. Content creators can design interactive videos, presentations, quizzes, and much more. H5P is used for interactive content creation in OER, and this workshop will introduce instructors to H5P and provide examples of how it is being used to engage students. This session serves as an excellent starting point for those new to the technology and those who need a refresher on some of the key functionalities.
Creating a roadmap for your OER project work is a foundational step towards a well-structured project. In this session, we will discuss best practices for planning your OER project, how to set realistic and achievable goals, and ways to manage your workflow and communicate with collaborators in a streamlined and effective manner. This session is recommended for all those embarking on the creation of OER materials.
Libra is UVA's institutional repository for scholarship. Depositing your work in Libra makes it available to the world while providing safe and secure storage. In this session, Winston Barham, Open Access Librarian, will provide the foundations for getting started in Libra with an eye towards OER deposits of text and media. In addition, he will introduce you to ORCID, a unique researcher identifier that you may use to connect your scholarship throughout your professional life. You will leave the session with concrete knowledge of how both Libra and ORCID can impact the sharing of your OER scholarship.
Video integration is an effective way to take OER creation to the next level. Creating videos in a manner that allows for reuse and remixing requires a mindful approach to planning, recording, and distribution. In this session, Learning Design & Technology’s Jessica Weaver-Kenney will discuss actionable steps to create reusable and adaptable video. This session is recommended for individuals interested in creating open video content.
Adverse events and poor patient outcomes occur for all doctors, regardless of subspecialty, regardless of educational and training pedigree, and despite best intentions. Such occurrences often exact a significant and sometimes lasting emotional toll on doctors, even apart from any culpability or potential medicolegal ramifications. In this Medical center hour Dr. Farnaz Gazoni demonstrates that adverse events in clinical care and their impact on physicians have substantial, widespread repercussions affecting quality of care and patient safety. But her research and experience show too that, by simply cultivating awareness of this issue, health care institutions and individual practitioners are taking important first steps toward culture change.
The Jessie Stewart Richardson Memorial Lecture, School of Medicine
In observance of National Quality Week (19-25 October), and co-presented with the Patient Safety Committee, UVA Health System
This Richardson Memorial Lecture's origins are the hospital death of infant Lola Jayden Fitch and her family's journey to evoke change. The hour is anchored in the stories of Lola's parents--her mother, who questioned her intuition, and her father, who chose to continue working in the hospital where Lola's death occurred--and in a review of medical staff communication errors that tragically affected Lola's care.
How can we prevent communication breakdowns, improve teamwork, and foster greater transparency and true partnership with families to make health care better and safer, especially for the most vulnerable patients? How can Lola's Song and similar stories--those of patients, families, health professionals, and others--help us to accomplish this important work?
www.lolassong.com
The Jessie Stewart Richardson Memorial Lecture of the School of Medicine
Co-presented with the Office of Quality and Performance Improvement, UVA Health System
It's Love Data Week! At UVA Library’s Research Data Services we help researchers understand how to keep their data organized and well-managed. For Love Data Week 2025, we talked to Kristen Schwendinger, Director of Research Integrity and Ethics at UVA’s Office of the Vice President for Research, to help us understand the intersection of data management and research integrity.
In this podcast, she provides research ethics advice that benefits all data stakeholders. There is a related blog post at UVA Library that includes links and associated resources.
In the making of a doctor, the residency is the principal formative experience. Its three to nine years of supervised practical learning are the crucible in which medical graduates acquire specialty knowledge and skills, forge a professional identity, and develop the values, attitudes, and behaviors for a lifetime of practice. While there have long been tensions within and around residency, physician-historian Kenneth Ludmerer's new book, Let Me Heal, a history of residency in the U.S. since its 19th century origins, comes at a time when training programs are pressured as never before by government regulation, workforce changes, shifts in disease patterns and sites of care, and highly commercialized health care. In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Ludmerer mines the history of residency for lessons to address current concerns about medical education and to assure we can make the best doctors for the 21st century.
The Joan Echtenkamp Klein Memorial Lecture in the History of the Health Sciences
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series
In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old English girl on a lark in Switzerland with a married man and her stepsister began writing a story that would outlive her by centuries. Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818, still fascinates and confounds us today, told and retold in so many genres that even those who have never read the original know the story. This Medical Center Hour marks Frankenstein's 200th anniversary by exploring two of the many reasons for its apparent immortality. First, this novel probes the central quest of medicine and biology: What is life? Second, it asks—but leaves for us to answer—the essential ethical question: Should we as human beings manipulate the spark of life?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
In June 2018, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a budget bill that gives 400,000 low-income Virginians access to government health insurance through Medicaid. This action marked an upbeat, bipartisan close to a bitter, four-year battle in the General Assembly. An Affordable Care Act option, Medicaid expansion makes additional low-income persons in participating states eligible for care that is funded chiefly with federal dollars. Virginia’s decision to join 32 other participating states hinged on a legislative compromise with Republicans that imposes work requirements on Medicaid recipients. While a few other states have taken similar positions, debate about work requirements continues in government, policy circles, and the courts. This Medical Center Hour looks at Medicaid expansion in Virginia—to be implemented in January 2019—from policy, political, and health care perspectives, with a focus on what it means locally, in Charlottesville and Central Virginia.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
American medical education can be proud of its accomplishments. Its graduates populate a sophisticated medical system that often sets global standards in teaching and self-regulation. doctors the world over compete to train and practice in the U.S. There are nearly three applicants for every one place in U.S. medical schools. Things are good. But are they? The U.S. medical system is now by far the world's most expensive, a drag on the economy and a major contributor to accumulating national debt. Physician-writer Atul Gawande notes that the doctor's most expensive instrument is the pen, ordering costly, and sometimes unnecessary, diagnostics and therapeutics. We import a quarter of our doctors, yet major portions of the country are short of physicians. All is not well in medical education. In this Brodie Medical Education Lecture, distinguished physician and health policy expert Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan addresses the technical, cultural, and moral challenges facing American medical education today, and how they go straight to the soul of medicine.
Co-presented with the Brodie Medical Education Committee, the Department of Medicine, and the Academy of Distinguished Educators, as part of UVA's Medical Education Week
Thirty years ago, the medical school at East Carolina University created a readers' theater program in which short stories about medicine were adapted as theatrical scripts. Medical students performed a story by reading it aloud, then actors and audience--often a community group--together discussed the drama and the ethical and social issues it raised. These plays and post-performance discussions enlivened and changed how future physicians and audiences--prospective patients all--approached and learned from one another.
The best way to learn about medical readers' theater? Just do it. In this Medical Center Hour, UVA medical student actors present a dramatic reading of physician-poet William Carlos Williams's 1938 short story, "A Face of Stone." Following the performance, the audience joins in, as everyone responds to and discusses the play and the ethical, social, and cultural concerns it explores.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Sloane Society for Medical Humanities, UVA
As a UVA undergraduate (Class of 2010), Pennsylvania native Matthew Miller had a catastrophic, near fatal cycling accident on the Blue Ridge Parkway while training for an Ironman triathlon. He lost control of his bike as a caravan of classic cars passed by in the opposite lane; Miller plowed into an oncoming Porsche, breaking every bone in his face. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Vitez's articles about Miller for The Philadephia Inquirer (reprinted in the Charlottesville Daily Progress) led to his book, The road back: a story of grit and grace (2012). This compelling narrative of Miller's remarkable survival and recovery. He is now a third year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania not only celebrates the strength and resiliency of the human spirit but also vividly attests to the power of medicine at its best. This Medical center hour, with Michael Vitez and UVA surgeon J. Forrest Calland, one of Miller's doctors, suggests that the best way to explore and explain what's happening in medicine may be to tell stories of ordinary people, patients and professionals meeting extraordinary challenges.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture