Health

From the mountains of West Virginia to cities and towns across the country and around the world, West Virginia University graduates and their families gathered around computers and other smart devices to attend Mountaineer Graduation Day on Saturday (May 16). The online experience, created due to social distancing restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, provided an opportunity for graduates to mark an important milestone and share familiar commencement traditions.

Two pediatric specialists who graduated from the West Virginia University School of Medicine are paying tribute to their alma mater and more with a $100,000 gift to the new WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital.

The West Virginia University School of Public Health and the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Bureau for Public Health are partnering on an initiative to recruit participants for a newly developed online course, Contact Tracing and Pandemic Response.

Jillian Blair from Wheeling Park High School, Olivia Dowler from Weir High School, Bethany Knight from Notre Dame High School, Rushik Patel from George Washington High School and Sarah Sweeney from Spring Mills High School are the 2020-21 cohort of WVU Foundation Scholars.

Carolyn Eberly Blaney, a loyal West Virginia University alumna who carried on a longstanding family tradition of philanthropy, passed away Friday (May 8) at the age of 96.

Breastfeeding may “rewire” babies’ brains in ways that help them acquire language, suggests a new study from the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. Using MRI, the researchers scanned the brains of 4-to-8-year-old children and surveyed their parents about their breastfeeding history. They found that the longer a baby was breastfed, the more white matter he or she developed in language-associated parts of the brain.

Envisioning a return of students to its three campuses in the fall, the West Virginia University Board of Governors announced Friday (May 1) that base tuition and fees will remain unchanged for the academic year beginning in August.

Anticipating and meeting patients’ needs can take an emotional toll on nurses, even without COVID-19 as an added stressor. A new study led by Marian Reven, a Ph.D. student in the WVU School of Nursing and a registered nurse with WVU Medicine, suggests aromatherapy may reduce nurses’ feelings of stress, anxiety and fatigue on the job.

The West Virginia University School of Public Health and the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Bureau for Public Health are partnering on an initiative to recruit participants for a newly developed online course, Contact Tracing for COVID-19.

When COVID-19 started depleting stockpiles of medical gear in hotspots like New York and New Jersey, the West Virginia National Guard took notice – and reached out to experts at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University to help prevent that from happening in the Mountain State.