spotlight

For Kaden Stenger, a West Virginia University College of Law student, helping West Virginians has always been his mission, whether it’s in a classroom or the courtroom.

Skylar Braithwaite, the new director of the West Virginia University Office of Campus and Community Life, always knew she wanted to make a difference, but she wasn’t sure how. She found just that in her current role leading a group that helps students handle life’s unexpected challenges.

WVU alumnus Aidan Priest knows what it means to be a Mountaineer. Thanks to that mindset, he is connecting students, alumni and communities to a shared identity that unites generations under the WVU banner as outreach events program coordinator in the University’s offices of Corporate Relations and Government Relations.

For trailblazing robots and West Virginia University students alike, the first step is the hardest. That was the case for Camndon Reed, a robotics engineering and mathematics major from Watertown, Massachusetts, who designs autonomous robots that navigate hiking trails.

When the West Virginia University Hub opened its doors in November 2015, George Yanchak was already there — probably with a to-do list in hand — waiting to welcome students. He’d started just 15 days earlier and has never really stopped moving since then.

Growing up in rural McDowell County, Dr. Nicholas Baker, associate professor of thoracic surgery with the West Virginia University Department of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery in the School of Medicine and the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute, saw few options for his future. He chose college — encouraged by his mother — a path that led him to medical school, then robotic thoracic surgery and, eventually, back to his home state.

A West Virginia University connection comes full circle this week when Fairmont-based painter Lauren Adams returns for her second year as a juried artist at the WVU Mountaineer Week Arts & Craft Fair.

Despite being in just his second year on campus, Aidan Forget is already a junior in the West Virginia University College of Applied Human Sciences and has immersed himself in research in his field of study — sport, exercise and performance psychology.

It’s not just any song played by the West Virginia University Mountaineer Marching Band at Milan Puskar Stadium. “Simple Gifts” is a cue that game day is officially underway, a clarion call that pulls the attention of Mountaineer Nation directly to “The Pride of West Virginia” with an arrangement crafted more than five decades ago by alum David McCullough.

For West Virginia University undergraduate researcher Kasia Jaczynska, who grew up in Morgantown, “WVU has always felt like home.” Now a senior, she came to the University fascinated by chemistry and the access that discipline gave her to the invisible world of molecules and atoms.