Our Highlanders are using their education to do extraordinary things. In this column, we highlight some notable mentions from local, regional, national and international news media. Whether our students, alumni, faculty and staff are featured as subject matter experts in high-profile stories or simply helping make the world a better place, we’ll feature their stories.
Ticked off
As Virginia makes its way through peak tick season – April through September, largely – one local expert on the subject continues her crusade to curb illnesses spread by the small, sticky external parasites.
That authority is Jenny Hall, an associate professor of public health and healthcare leadership at Radford University at Carilion in Roanoke.
“Ticks are terrible this year,” Hall recently said in a Franklin News-Post story, which also ran in The Roanoke Times, the Martinsville Bulletin and the Charlottesville Daily Progress.
Hall’s insights provide the foundation for an extensive article on the four key species of ticks in Southwest Virginia, the different health problems they can cause (such as alpha-gal syndrome, ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever) and the various ways people can avoid exposure to them.
Readers who don’t have access to those news sites can still find a wealth of free information about the clingy critters through Ticks in Virginia, an educational resource Hall founded in 2023 as a means of interpreting and sharing scientific information, statistics and advice.
Late last month, Hall was also interviewed by WFIR for a story on the regional rise in alpha-gal syndrome cases.
Stress tests
When the Beach Boys’ main brain Brian Wilson died last month at 82, one of his crowning achievements was “Good Vibrations,” a sprawling and sunny 1966 pop song that has a unique backstory.
Wilson has often said that when he was a child, his mom told him dogs will bark at some people because the pets “pick up vibrations” from humans, and thus the seed of the song was sown.
According to recent work by Radford University Assistant Professor of Psychology Tanya Mitropoulos, there may just be something to that.
Working with Allison Andrukonis, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mitropoulos has published the results of a study that found that dog owners potentially can transfer their sadness, anxiety and depression to their pets through their own attitudes.
Assembling a group of 107 adults, 85 of which both work and own a dog, the researchers asked their study sample to compare their pets’ behavior on days when they came home stressed versus their more upbeat returns; participants’ responses showed that the animals had clear reactions to tension, which included whimpering and changes in appetite.
While some of this appears related to sound, another aspect is silent – canines can apparently detect rising levels of cortisol, a hormone that human adrenal glands produce in reaction to anxiety.
“Given most people view their pets as family, protecting them against stress may encourage them to resist engaging in ruminative thoughts about work,” Mitropoulos has written.
Articles about her report recently ran on a number of sites, including Yahoo! Life as well as The New York Post, but you can also read the full study on Nature.com.
Side note: Those other 22 people from the 107 subjects in the study? They happened to own cats, and Mitropoulos has determined those animals remain largely unaffected by their human keepers’ moods. But if you’ve ever spent extended time with a feline, you probably already suspected that anyway.
“The plan is to fan this spark into a flame….”
Actor and performer Tyler Fauntleroy did not attend Radford University as a student, but even so he still traces a key inspiration in his career back to the school’s campus.
Fauntleroy, of Hampton, Virginia, is just about to wrap up a stint as the founding father who holds the title role in “Hamilton,” which on July 6 concludes a 20-day run at Cleveland, Ohio’s Playhouse Square.
It’s a part he coveted for a long time, one of the reasons he hit the stage in the first place, and it follows a stretch that started in early 2023, when – after auditioning for a Virginia version of the show – he landed the dual role of Philip Hamilton and John Laurens.
In a Daily Press (Virginia) story from that spring, Fauntleroy talked about his early entry into acting while in high school, and how as a student he was accepted into Virginia’s Governor’s School for Performing Arts and Humanities at Radford.
Cut to two years later: A June 13 News-Herald (Ohio) article finds Fauntleroy topping “Hamilton’s” cast list as Alexander Hamilton, our county’s inaugural treasury secretary, and once again citing his formative moments at Governor’s School, which he noted as the first time he received formal theater training.
“That summer really changed my life because I think that was the stepping stone to [thinking], ‘Oh, I can’t NOT do this,’” he told the paper. “I have to at least try.”
The rest is history, both for Fauntleroy and for his character.
And as the curtain closes on his recent success, coincidentally, yet another in a years-long series of Governor’s Schools is underway at Radford, with still one more band of promising young people slated to complete their summer stays on July 12.