Industry partnerships present a terrific opportunity for collaborative exploration, with potential outcomes ranging from concrete strategic knowledge to an enriched culture at both the corporation and UVA.
Industry is increasingly looking to universities as partners to produce novel and interesting ideas. University of Virginia is working with our partners to develop cutting-edge knowledge to address specific problems and increase basic scientific understanding in strategic areas of focus. Partnering with UVA gives companies access our students as a source of highly skilled, innovative, future employees poised to enter the global marketplace. As well as our faculty and research staff who offer extensive knowledge and problem solving.
Our industry partners provide access to resources, both financial and technological, that leverages our respective strengths and enhances opportunities for our faculty and students to work on ground breaking research. Currently, we have several robust industry partnerships with corporations such as: AstraZeneca, Vonage, Nike, Alcoa, Lockheed Martin, Altria, Hearst Business Media, Rolls Royce, Johnson & Johnson, ATCC, MeadWestvaco, General Electric and Pfizer.
Vonage: “Universities have the largest concentration of expertise in multiple disciplines making them breeding grounds for innovation, yet these resources remain largely untapped by corporations,” Marc Lefar, Vonage CEO said. “Our work with OpenGrounds will help to harness that creativity to stimulate disruptive thinking and innovation, benefiting business and society.”
AstraZeneca: "We found a happy convergence of leadership styles between AstraZeneca and UVa in our shared philosophy of risk-taking, outcomes focus, and collaboration-based research."
Wallace H. Coulter Foundation: "This program started out as a grand experiment to link the relatively new discipline of biomedical engineering to translational research," Sue Van, president of the Coulter Foundation, said. “We are extremely proud of the advancements achieved by the University of Virginia in moving projects through the Coulter Process so that these advances will benefit patients.”
Universities are among the most diverse organizations on earth and offer comprehensive learning and research opportunities, creating fertile ground for disruptive thinking and integrative advances.
Republican leaders in the House of Delegates are calling for a financial audit of Virginia’s Medicaid program.
A group of Republican leaders is introducing a resolution that requires an operational and financial review of Virginia’s Medicaid program. The resolution would instruct the Joint Legislative Review and Commission to review various parts of the Medicaid program and contract with an outside auditor to conduct a financial audit.
The resolution is being introduced by House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, House Majority Leader Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, Appropriations Committee Chairman Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, Appropriations Committee Vice Chairman R. Steven Landes, R-Augusta, and other members of the Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission (MIRC).
“Medicaid is fraught with fraud and abuse,” Howell said in a statement. “Under no circumstances can you justify expanding a program growing at such an unsustainable level and filled with this much waste, fraud and abuse.”
Monday’s announcement is the latest battle in the war over Medicaid expansion. Last week, Gov. Terry McAuliffe proposed a budget amendment that would give him the final say on whether to expand Medicaid in Virginia if MIRC failed to reach a decision by the end of this year’s session.
The commission is currently considering whether Virginia should expand its Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act. Under the ACA, Virginia’s Medicaid program would be expanded to cover Virginia residents who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — or an annual income of $15,415 for an individual.
Under expansion, the federal government would cover 100 percent of the expansion’s cost through 2017, and then gradually reducing its share to 90 percent.
Republicans in the House have been adamantly opposed to expansion, while McAuliffe made it a major part of his campaign.
When someone’s grief is downplayed by others, it isn’t always an intentional attempt to enforce cheerfulness. Sometimes the bereaved are simply overlooked, their grief downplayed by oversight. Professor of gerontology Kenneth Doka routinely explains in his books and lectures on grief management that “there are circumstances in which a person experiences a sense of loss but does not have a socially recognized right, role, or capacity to grieve. In these cases, the grief is disenfranchised.” Such people often do not receive the comfort they need in order to grieve properly and can be vulnerable to loneliness and serious, long-term depression.
Examples of bereaved persons who may feel disenfranchised include couples who have miscarried or given up a child for adoption; women (or men) whose spouses are missing in military action; and those whose loved ones have died from socially “unacceptable” causes such as suicide.
Divorce also leaves many bereaved in its wake, and the same is true of brain-altering injuries and dementias. The bereaved in these situations may not be grieving the actual loss of physical life but of crucial intangibles, without which their lives and families will never be the same. Grief is grief, despite the fact that each of us will experience it in highly individual ways depending on personality and circumstance.
Often ignored at times of bereavement are young children. Barring the loss of a parent, in which case their grief is usually recognized, their needs may become almost invisible to other bereaved members of the household. If a child has lost a grandparent, aunt or uncle, it may be assumed that there was little attachment, or they may not be expected to understand the permanence of the loss. Even worse, the loss of a child’s own sibling is usually seen primarily as the parents’ loss. When this happens, the surviving children may not only grieve alone but may also be expected to support the parents. Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, in her book The Empty Room, suggests that this mindset is a relic from old Freudian stereotypes about sibling rivalry. “In fact,” she writes, “until the early 1980s, almost every academic article on the subject of siblings took up the topic of rivalry or birth order. That the sibling relationship might meet other needs, or evoke any emotion other than competition, rarely came up.”
Even adult siblings sometimes find their grief dismissed on the unspoken assumption that when individuals establish their own family, their siblings are no longer primary relationships.
The reality, says T.J. Wray, author of Surviving the Death of a Sibling, is that, “like your parents, your brothers and sisters have been beside you from the very beginning. Unlike your parents, however, your siblings are people you assume will be part of your life for the rest of your life, too.” Acknowledging that every family is different, and that there is a wide variety of sibling relationships, she posits that it’s devastating to lose even difficult sibling relationships. “Only your brothers and sisters know firsthand what it was like to grow up in your particular family,” she notes. “Losing a sibling, then, can also mean losing a part of yourself, part of that special connection to the past.”
Unfortunately, even those who suffer socially recognized forms of grief can sometimes feel the pangs of dismissal or disenfranchisement. In particular, when the bereaved have religious beliefs that give them hope for the future, others may assume it is contradictory to faith for them to grieve in the present. If it were, however, there wouldn’t be so many biblical examples of the personal pain and grief of people who are described as “faithful.” Even those who have strong faith in the biblical promise that eventually all sorrow will cease may be painfully aware that such a time hasn’t yet arrived.
Keeping this in mind, it isn’t necessary to question the strength of a grieving person’s faith. Certainly there is a hope that allows for great grief, and a grief that allows for great hope.