UVA professor David Danks has been named a 2026 AI2050 Senior Fellow by Schmidt Sciences, one of six researchers worldwide chosen for this honor. The three-year, $1 million fellowship will fund his interdisciplinary research into how AI systems, designed to reflect human values, may actually reshape those values over time.
Four University of Virginia School of Engineering faculty have received prestigious NSF CAREER Awards for research tackling major societal challenges through AI. Jason Bates, Chen Chen, Yu Meng, and Tianhao Wang are exploring nitrate conversion, disease forecasting, learning from imperfect data, and privacy-protecting synthetic datasets, respectively, each backed by roughly five-year, $600,000-plus grants.
UVA doctoral candidate Elizabeth Mirabal won the Latin American Studies Association’s 2026 Best Article Award for her research on Puerto Rican writer Dolores Rodríguez de Tió’s poetic herbarium. Discovered during archival research in San Germán, the dried-plant collection reveals how exile, memory and nostalgia intertwine, offering fresh insight into ecocriticism and displaced writers’ connections to home.
UVA researchers have received the first $4 million of a potential $12 million NIH award to build MOSAIC, an open-source computational tool modeling how sex hormones affect drug effectiveness. Led by Jason Papin, the project will test predictions on bacterial vaginosis and fatty liver disease, aiming to accelerate personalized, sex-specific drug development.
Two UVA School of Data Science faculty members have received $53,300 in Apple support for machine learning research at the School of Data Science.
Postdoctoral fellow William “Tré” Mills III, PhD, has received an NIH K99/R00 grant to study how microglia regulate blood flow in the brain’s smallest vessels, a key factor in Alzheimer’s disease. Working in Ukpong Eyo’s lab at UVA, Mills aims to identify precise drug targets for safer, more effective Alzheimer’s treatments.
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UVA Engineering’s Yu Meng has won a five-year, $769,711 NSF CAREER Award to develop AI systems that learn effectively from imperfect, incomplete or inconsistently labeled data. His “weak supervision” research could transform fields like healthcare and finance while reducing costly manual data annotation, with findings integrated into new curricula and K-12 outreach programs.
Two University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty members, Scott Acton and Michael L. King, have been elected to the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine. They will be inducted during the academy’s October summit, which focuses on advancing innovation, access, affordability and trust in health care.
Three University of Virginia computer science professors, Matthew Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum and Mary Lou Soffa, have been named among the 80 inaugural members of the Software Engineering Academy, a new honor society from ACM SIGSOFT recognizing profound, lasting contributions to software engineering research, practice and education worldwide.
Yaohua Yang, PhD, of UVA’s Department of Genome Sciences has been awarded a five-year, $3.5 million NCI R37 MERIT grant to study RNA modifications called m6A marks and their role in lung cancer risk.
From smartphone apps to hospital patient records, personal data are collected throughout daily life. These data can help organizations build better artificial intelligence systems, improve healthcare and inform public policy. […]
Patricia Nguyen and Natasha Heller were awarded prestigious Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Public Impact Grants for projects that connect Buddhist scholarship with wider audiences.