Having skied and sailed in beautiful locales like Jackson, Wyoming; Newport, Rhode Island; and Puerto Rico, Jay Shimshack has loved nature ever since he can remember.

So when he turned that love into a career, it felt, well, completely natural.

Lisa Hall is acutely aware of how capital can be used for the betterment of society. Former CEO of the Calvert Impact Capital, Hall has worked in a variety of sectors and developed a unique vantage on inciting social change and economic equality.

The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy is proud to announce the launch of the Batten Benefactors Society, an annual leadership giving program designed to recognize the School’s most generous donors and inspire others to contribute.

The Batten School announced a new partnership with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) to provide emerging Latinx leaders with access to a new model of public policy education explicitly committed to teaching leadership and generating new knowledge to solve the world’s most difficult public policy challenges.

Politics professor Todd Sechser and media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan will direct the two newest labs for interdisciplinary research sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Democracy Initiative.

The complex endgame of negotiations between the major powers and Iran underscores the limited options states have to combat nuclear proliferation, something with which U.S. policy planners are going to have to learn to live.

The American Political Science Association (APSA) recently announced that “Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers” by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman won the prestigious Gladys M. Kammerer Award for best book on U.S. national policy. 

Each year, many students fail to enroll in college, enroll in institutions where they are not positioned for success or drop out before earning a degree. These students often have the academic skills needed and have access to affordable college options, but still face barriers to success.

Mindy Adnot, a graduate student in the Education Policy doctoral program, has been awarded a $20,000 Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Fellowship Program.

Batten School Senior Lecturer Randall Lutter was recently awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the economic value of improvements in cognitive performance attributable to breastfeeding.