Latest news with #VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity
Mint
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Meet Rama Duwaji: The Syrian artist NYC Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani met on Hinge
Rama Duwaji, 27, is a Syrian illustrator and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York — and now, she's also in the public eye as the wife of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic socialist who just won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. The couple's story began not on a campaign trail, but through the dating app Hinge. In an interview with comedian Kaneez Surka, Zohran revealed: 'First is, I found my wife on Hinge. So (dating apps) still work. Just to let people know.' Their connection deepened over a shared love of music and art. They got engaged in December 2024 in Dubai, where Rama's family lives, and tied the knot in early 2025 in a quiet civil ceremony at the New York City clerk's office. Born in Damascus, Syria, Rama Duwaji is an award-winning illustrator whose vibrant work explores identity, heritage, migration, and the everyday intimacy of community. She holds a BFA in Communication Design from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master's in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has worked with top-tier clients including: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, VICE, BBC, Apple, Spotify, Tate Modern and Cartier. Her artistic practice also extends to pottery and ceramics. According to her website, Duwaji's art 'examines the nuances of sisterhood and communal experiences' — themes often reflected in her expressive and deeply personal illustrations. Despite being married to a politician, Rama has kept a low profile throughout Mamdani's mayoral campaign. Her absence from the campaign trail led to criticism from opponents who accused Zohran of 'hiding his wife.' In May 2025, Zohran responded to the backlash with a candid Instagram post, defending Rama's choice to stay out of the spotlight. 'Three months ago, I married the love of my life, Rama, at the City Clerk's office,' Mamdani wrote. 'Now, right-wing trolls are trying to make this race – which should be about you – about her. Rama isn't just my wife, she's an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms.' With Mamdani poised to make history as New York City's first Indian-American, first Muslim, and first Democratic Socialist mayor, Duwaji could become a very different kind of First Lady — one grounded in art, activism, and cultural identity. Though she has remained deliberately out of political limelight, Rama Duwaji's talent and story are already resonating with a new generation of New Yorkers — a quiet but powerful counter to traditional expectations of political spouses. As Mamdani put it: 'You can critique my views, but not my family.'
Time of India
25-06-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Who is basketball rising star Jaylen Martinez? Everything you need to know about the 13-year-old prodigy who tragically passed away
Teenage basketball prodigy Jaylen Martinez passed away unexpectedly at the age of 13 on June 23 in Richmond, Va. Former Virginia Commonwealth University 'legend Joey Rodriguez and cheerleader Ciera Anai's son was about to start his high school at Benedictine in the upcoming fall. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now However, not much has been spoken about the reason behind Jaylen Martinez's unexpected death by his family members officially on any platform. Everything you need to know about the tragic death of Jaylen Martinez According to the media outlet Richmond Times-Dispatch, teenage basketball star Jaylen Martinez's unexpected death has generated waves on the internet. As a teenage basketball prodigy, the former VCU star Joey Rodriguez's son had a great future. As reported by entertainment media outlet People, no details or the actual reason behind Jaylen Martinez's unexpected death has been released Both Joey Rodriguez and his wife, Anna Cerai, haven't given any statement about their 13-year-old son's death on a public platform or social media, but the couple went on to post throwback pictures with their little boy. The comment section was flooded with love and support in the wake of their son Jaylen's unfortunate death. Joey Rodriguez took to his X handle and shared a slew of pictures reminiscing about his time with his late son, Jaylen, whereas his wife, Anna Cerai, posted about Jaylen Martinez on Instagram with a throwback picture. Cerai penned an emotional message for her beloved son. "My purpose in life was to be your mother. Help me get through Jay… Ima see you soon baby boy. I love you. Jaylen Evan, mama got you baby boy. Your legacy made in 13 years will live on forever and I'm going to make sure of it. Keep a spot for me." Jaylen Martinez, Son of VCU Star, Passed Away Unexpectedly At the young age of 13, Jaylen Martinez had achieved so much with his hard work and dedication towards basketball. According to the local station CBS6, Martinez had even represented his team at Liberty Middle School in Ashland, Va., for a county championship in 2024. He even played for the local RockIt Sports league. The 13-year-old phenomenal basketball star had announced that he was about to join the Benedictine Cadets back in March 2026 and had already started practicing with the respective team. Also Read:
Harpers Bazaar Arabia
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Harpers Bazaar Arabia
Qatari Calligrapher Maryam Altajer Shares Her Life Lessons As A Regional Creative
From self-care secrets and splurges to temptations and tomes, Maryam shares personal and professional learnings Maryam looks through a unique introspective lens, exploring a multitude of realms that are then reflected in her contemporary pieces. The Doha-based creative, who holds both a BFA and MFA in Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, delves into the contrast between our superficial selves and the depths within, prompting reflection on self-discovery and the transient nature of our internal dialogues. Maryam's innovative approach to portraying abstract Arabic calligraphy, has garnered recognition both the Middle East and internationally in galleries and exhibitions, with the artist citing a Ramadan collaboration with Bvlgari – a recent career highlight. Is it more important to be liked or respected? Respect is more important. And the most important form of respect is self-respect so you can be content with the way you live your life. What book changed your life? Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren. It helped me understand that beauty can be imperfect and that there's no need to explain what you find beautiful, whether it's aesthetically pleasing or not. What did your last Spotify Wrapped look like? Ambient pop for mellow ethereal vibes and R&B. What is your motto? Love what you do and do it from the bottom of your heart. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I'd like to slow down and not overwhelm myself with work. Find more balance even though I enjoy the fast-paced life. What's your biggest extravagance? Time off and a self-care splurge. What are you proudest of? My dedication to trying new things and the courage I've cultivated to expand my boundaries. What does success mean to you? Loving what I do, and doing what I love full time. What would you ban if you had the chance? Stress and procrastination. What's your most treasured possession? An album documenting my achievements. It reminds me to trust the process helps me realise how far I've come. If you could be anyone else, who would it be? I would still choose to be myself! I would want to experience the same things and enjoy every step of the journey. What's your guiltiest pleasure? Binge eating excessive amounts of dark chocolate. What inspires you most about your job? The freedom to transform raw emotion into abstract art. What experience taught you most about life? Meaningful lessons often come from unexpected situations – good or bad. If you could only wear one brand for the rest of your life, what would it be? Sticking to one brand is boring. I enjoy changing and mixing things up. What do you consider to be overrated? Minimalism is killing the beauty of details, patterns, and textures around us… erasing this sense of history and different periods of time. What would you tell your younger self? Stay dedicated and enjoy the process.
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Who's the real invasive species: us or them? Ecologists are rethinking urban biodiversity
Climate change is already having a profound impact on cities, as global urbanization pushes more and more people to live in them. The animals who cohabitate with human, whether we appreciate their presence or not, are changing too. Specifically, there's been an increase in invasive species — a term used to describe introduced organisms that bring dramatic and often destructive changes, and sometimes can drive other species to extinction. But here's the thing: Invasive species don't stop evolving themselves. Consider the infamous brown rats of New York City, which have evolved longer noses and shorter upper molar tooth rows, the better to enjoy the Big Apple's colder weather and higher-quality food. Other invasive species are adapting behaviorally, physically and genetically to life in cities as well. While invasive species pose major public health implications and can certainly affect humans' quality of life, their adaptive abilities can rival those of human migrants and pose a puzzling question: Who's the real invader here? Brian Verrelli, a professor in the Center of Biological Data Science at Virginia Commonwealth University, sees many of these questions as philosophical. "What does it mean to invade something, right?" he asked in a video interview. "What does it mean for humans to invade one area or another? Are there areas that we invade, or are humans welcome freely to move around the planet? We know that's the case in some places, and certainly not the case in others. "It's a bit of an interesting, hypocritical conversation," Verrelli added, given that "we are facilitating the movement of these organisms around the planet." Rats have invaded new continents because ships carrying them in the hold. Spiders move across continents inside our cars. And we have all literally "translocated" organisms from one place to another, Verrelli said, because we wanted to — flowers and household pets, for example. "Traveling globally, one can notice the same suite of species in many cities around the world — biological invasions creating a kind of global Cuisinart where the urban biota becomes homogeneous," Laura Meyerson, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies invasive species and ecological restoration, told Salon. " She cited the nearly ubiquitous tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which is found in cities around the world. "This introduced tree is threatening important ancient ruins such as the Roman Colosseum. Interestingly, it is the host plant in its native range for the spotted lanternfly," an invasive pest that has recently gotten a lot of attention in North America. "Other common species in urban areas globally are Norway rats and English pigeons, both of which can spread disease," Meyerson said, along with "European starlings and the common reed (Phragmites australis), both of those being aggressive introduced species that displace native species." But Verrelli believes that if we can't exactly determine who counts as an invader, we also can't really say what's being invaded. That might sound like an abstruse philosophical argument, but he says it's a hot debate within the scientific community. "We have what are called 'stud books' for our primates at zoos all over the world," Verrelli said. "We don't count that as invasion, but we are directly facilitating that. I'm hitting this note because it very much underlies our idea of invasion and gene flow, how genetics moves around and what it means to point to an organism and say it belongs to a certain species." Verrelli has studied the spread of black widow spiders, an increasing medical health concern in cities along the West Coast. People now encounter these potentially deadly spiders, which used to be found in isolated desert areas, in urban or suburban garages and yards. "As we're altering the landscape within cities, these areas are becoming attractive to black widows," Verrelli said. "They're all around us now, so we need to be able to understand what's happening as they're moving into cities." There are important health and environmental questions about whether black widows are becoming more deadly or displacing other arachnid species, but Verrelli raises a different question: "They were here first. Are they really invading the urban area? Yes, because we plopped the urban area down in the middle of the desert." Verrelli spent nine years in Arizona, an arid environment where many organisms struggle to survive, but that has now been altered and made more hospitable by human habitation. Indeed, the American Southwest is particularly vulnerable to invasive species, including highly adaptive species that can affect human health, largely thanks to the rapid spread of urbanism — which can bring water to desert environments while also creating artificial heat islands in colder climates, and allowing tropical species to expand their ranges. Meyerson defines invasive species as "non-native species introduced either intentionally or accidentally by humans outside of their native range," while noting a crucial distinction between non-native but non-invasive species — tulips were imported to North America from Europe, for example, but do no ecological harm — and invasive ones. Most invasion scientists aim "to prevent introductions of harmful invasive species in the first place through public education, better screening tools and risk assessments," she said. But once such species are introduced, detecting and eradicating them quickly becomes the goal. If that doesn't work, the next goal is about managing and containing them, preventing further spread, and supporting native species by managing green spaces and natural habitats within the urban environment. "Urban areas can also be important stopover sites for migrating species," she added. "We need to manage these areas to help support these seasonal migrations." It's no longer reasonable, Verrelli believes, to draw a neat line between urban and wild spaces. "For a very long time, even most scientists studying urban areas as ecologists didn't really treat urban areas as 'natural' environments, because humans lived in them," he said. "That's something that I smile at, because if we don't believe humans are part of the natural world, we're in trouble. Most of our natural world is going to be consumed by humans, in which case we're ignoring a major influence on how organismal biodiversity is successful." Patterns of evolution play out in urban environments. A classic example often taught in high school biology classes is that of industrial melanism in the peppered moth, a British species tha looks, well, "peppered," with black dots on a mostly white background. There had always been occasional all-black moths, but from the mid-19th century, observers began to see more and more black moths in the industrial cities of England and Scotland. The mostly white moths stood out in the sooty environment and became easy prey for predators. Ultimately, the ones able to blend in were more likely to survive and reproduce. This is an adaptation — in evolutionary biology, a trait that arose due to natural selection. But when we casually talk about species adapting to life in the big city, that's not always what we're describing. A bear that overturns your trash can and figures out how to get your leftovers isn't "adapting"; it's just repurposing a behavior that evolved in its natural or ancestral environment. This kind of transfer of an evolutionary adaptation to a new context is called "exaptation." "It's really important that we know the difference between these two," Verrelli said. "We're not just trying to classify for the purpose of classification. If we can tell the exaptations versus the adaptations, then we are going to really understand the selective agents." Verrelli cites the work of Kristen Winchell at NYU, who has studied anoles lizards moving from forests into urban areas in Puerto Rico. In cities, she found, these lizards evolved longer legs relative to their body size, allowing them to crawl up metal pipes. That's not an exaptation, where the same structures that let them climb trees are applied to the new setting, but actual evolutionary adaptations. In Verrelli's view, understanding this difference isn't about discouraging these animals' presence, but making it easier for us and them to live in harmony and reasonable comfort. If an urban lizard can't climb up a pipe, an urban cat may select it right out of existence. "How do we design the urban environment to make them more readily livable to these organisms?" Verrelli asks. "What kind of surfaces should we be developing? What kind of areas? Where do we put light, where do we not put light?" Such questions will be "very important to understanding how organisms can move through urban environments." Sometimes our attempts to address invasive species can be counterproductive: Meyerson cites the example of the American elm, a formerly popular street tree appreciated not only for their beauty but also their hardiness under harsh urban conditions. But Dutch elm disease, an invasive fungus spread by bark beetles to which the native trees had no defense, has decimated the elm by tens of millions across the continent. "Ironically, many of these street trees were replaced by other introduced invasive species such as Norway maple or callery pear," she said, "which in turn have their own impacts." Introduced species are wreaking havoc due to similar lack of evolved defenses in the American beech, many amphibian species and North American bats of different kinds. Generalist creatures, those that can thrive in a variety of environments, will most easily adapt to city life and may go on to decimate native species. There is general agreement that we are no longer dealing with either a purely urban, human environment or a purely wild and untouched one. But while Verrelli belongs to one side in the ongoing debate among conservation biologists, the other includes those who believe cities are an incurable blight and that their spread must be reduced or reversed. His side, roughly speaking, sees urbanization as a permanent reality and harmonious biodiversity — sharing these spaces with our plant and animal relatives — as the most important goal. They see the distinction between wild spaces and urban spaces collapsing, which is happening anyway, not always harmoniously. "In understanding invasion, we need to learn more about cities," Verrelli said. "We need to learn more about invaders. We need to learn more about how they're doing, what they're doing. That's why we study things like bedbugs and black widows, because these are good models to learn about how this is happening, and because it's going to keep happening. "Instead of the idea of, let's go study things outside of cities, because this are the important areas we need to conserve, I'm on the other side. We need to study invasions in cities, because this is largely the future, whether we like it or not. As we move into the future, we're preparing a new landscape that's evolving all the time. Let's prepare biodiversity for it as well."
Forbes
06-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Higher Ed's AI Evolution Starts With Asking The Right Questions
When students interact with artificial intelligence in the classroom, something interesting happens. In Pearson's new Asking to Learn report, researchers examined nearly 130,000 student queries to AI-powered study tools. The research showed that most students begin prompting AI with quick requests such as definitions, summaries, and straightforward clarifications. But a striking number go further. About one-third of student inputs reflected more advanced cognitive complexity, and 20% of all inputs were at levels consistent with higher-order critical thinking. This means that while 80% of queries focused on basic factual or conceptual knowledge, one in five went further, which demonstrates students actively using AI to engage in deeper inquiry, connect ideas, or challenge assumptions. Yet these moments of curiosity don't arise by accident. They're shaped—and either encouraged or constrained—by the systems and cultures that surround students. The future of higher education with AI depends not just on which tools institutions adopt, but on whether they build environments that reward questioning at every level. Some campuses are already leading the way, moving beyond technology for efficiency's sake to redesign the student experience itself. Their goal: to put inquiry and agency at the heart of learning. At Virginia Commonwealth University, the rollout of an AI-powered advising tool marked a turning point. Instead of simply automating course drop requests, the system shows students the downstream effects of each decision—credits lost, graduation timelines shifted, financial aid implications. What was once a perfunctory task is now a moment for students to pause, reflect, and ask, 'What if?' Students leave with answers, but more importantly, with the habit of questioning their own choices and understanding the consequences. Virginia Commonwealth University is a member of the University Innovation Alliance, a national coalition of public research universities focused on expanding student success through innovation. As Executive Director, Bridget Burns guides the UIA's collaborative efforts—including VCU's work—to pilot and scale AI-driven strategies for student engagement and support. She captures the ethos that the UIA aims to encourage: 'Every one of my institutions should be actively using AI and not hiding from it… in ways that are rigorous but ambitious.' AI, used intentionally to support student decision-making, can turn routine administrative moments into formative learning experiences. The technology becomes an inspiration for self-reflection and thoughtful decision-making, not just a means to create efficiency. A few years ago, South Carolina State University faced declining enrollment and the threat of closure. Instead of retreating, SCSU, in partnership with Ed Advancement—a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening mission-driven colleges and HBCUs—invested in a robust CRM and a 24/7 chatbot, making it effortless for students to ask about deadlines, billing, resources, or academic roadblocks—anytime, anywhere. The result was transformative. First-year enrollment grew by 32% in a single year, fueled by a staggering 176% increase in applications. Total enrollment jumped 13% after the first year, with another 15% increase the following year. The number of new students surged by 57% in year one alone. These technology-driven changes didn't just fill seats—they generated over a million dollars in new tuition and fees in 2023 and freed up more than 400 hours of administrative staff time. Behind every metric—enrollment gains, reduced summer melt—was a simple shift: students were empowered to ask, and the institution was ready to listen and respond. As Cecilia Marshall of Ed Advancement explains, 'For us it was really about meeting with the institutions, understanding what their needs were to grow enrollment and increase retention and then going into the space and seeing what [supports] Lesson: Removing barriers to inquiry is a force multiplier for student success. When students can ask questions without friction or delay, they're more likely to take ownership of their education and persist. Digital Promise focuses on a deeper challenge: ensuring that AI doesn't just make education faster or more convenient, but richer. Their approach is to train faculty and students alike to treat AI as a thinking partner. Through research-practice partnerships and the creation of inclusive, AI-powered courseware, Digital Promise is raising the bar. Here, students are guided to ask better questions, critique AI responses, and reflect on their own reasoning. Inquiry isn't just permitted—it's required. Barbara Means of Digital Promise is blunt about the risks: 'We don't believe in banning [AI] because it's ineffectual… but if we don't attend to how students use AI—and really scaffold the metacognitive side—we're actually likely to increase equity gaps rather than closing equity gaps.' She's clear about the essential skills: 'Just because you can get the answers from generative AI doesn't mean that students don't need to have their own deep domain knowledge and expertise in those fields in order to be sort of well equipped to use the tools.' While quantitative outcomes from Digital Promise's programs are still emerging, their focus on faculty development and metacognitive scaffolding is aligned with evidence showing AI can increase students' engagement in higher-order thinking. Lesson: The most meaningful uses of AI in education do more than deliver answers—they sharpen metacognition and critical thinking. The goal isn't just digital literacy, but AI literacy: developing learners who question, adapt, and think about their own thinking. Across all these innovations—whether it's a late-night study tool, an advising dashboard, or a campus chatbot—the common thread is clear. When students have the freedom and encouragement to ask, reflect, and connect, technology becomes a launchpad for agency and deeper learning. Pearson's data makes the case: when AI is woven into a culture that values curiosity and self-awareness, it's not just a tool for efficiency—it's a catalyst for equity, engagement, and transformation.
