The Board of Visitors’ Academic and Student Life Committee met Thursday to hear presentations from Interim Provost Brie Gertler, Vice President of Research Lori McMahon, and student participants in the Karsh Institute’s Civic Cornerstone Fellowship. The Committee also discussed the terminated research grants, as well as ongoing initiatives related to artificial intelligence.

The Academic and Student Life Committee oversees all University operations related to student affairs — including athletics, campus culture, safety, residential and social life and food services. It is also responsible for shaping policies on education and research, including academic programs and degrees, as well as the recruitment and retention of faculty.

In her opening remarks, Gertler thanked her fellow leaders, dean, and colleagues for their efforts over the past few months, noting how unusual and eventful the period had been.

Gertler also spoke about a group of colleagues, including herself, who have been meeting regularly to address federal-level changes affecting the University.

“Since early this year, a group of colleagues from across the University have met frequently. We now meet once a week … to figure out how to prepare for and respond to changes coming from the federal level,” Gertler said. “These changes affect research, student, financial aid, international students, faculty and staff and our healthcare system.”

McMahon gave a presentation on research funding at the University and addressed the impacts made to research funding from the federal level. She noted that 76 percent of the University’s research funding comes from federal sources, with the remainder coming from the state, industry, foundations and non-profits and foreign donors.

As of Aug. 26, the University has lost $73.6 million in terminated grants, according to McMahon. She explained that the University initially anticipated a $60.2 million loss, including $40 million in grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grants, which have already been cut.

To date, the University has received 45 termination notices and 12 stop-work orders. Of 27 appeals they have submitted, 9 have been successful, while 6 have been rejected.

McMahon reported that the University faculty applied for $2.9 billion in funding for the 2025 fiscal year, a 5.8 percent increase from 2024. She also noted that in FY 2024, the University spent $829 million on research — a 16 percent rise from the previous year. Between July 2024 and June 2025, the University received $570 million in sponsored research awards from various sources, up 3.8 percent from 2024, although this figure does not include recently cancelled grants.

McMahon explained that the University’s current research initiatives do align closely with current federal priorities, such as national defense and security, artificial intelligence, nuclear science and biotechnology. She noted that these are positive indicators. 

“We have weathered this, I think, as best we could have expected, so there are positive indicators,” McMahon said. “We are looking and watching very carefully at what’s coming out from the House and the Senate and appropriations.”

The Committee also heard a report on the Karsh Institute’s Civic Cornerstone Fellowship from Stefanie Georgakis Abbott, director of programming at the Karsh Institute, and Rachel Wahl, a director at the Institute. Two of the fellowship participants, second-year College student Ahryanna McGuirk and Darden graduate student Ross Williams, also spoke. 

The Karsh Institute of Democracy launched the Civic Cornerstone fellowship, formerly known as the Student Dialogue Fellowship, fall 2024 in collaboration with seven different offices and schools at the University. The pilot year had 300 students across 11 of the University’s 12 schools and has grown to 400 students representing all schools.

Abbott noted that 100 percent of Civic Cornerstone Fellowship participants said they would recommend the program, and 86 percent reported an improved ability to engage in political discussions. She also shared that the program was recently awarded an $800,000 grant from Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative, which will allow the Fellowship to expand and reach more universities.

McGuirk and Williams shared their motivations for joining the Civic Cornerstone Fellowship.

“I found that through this fellowship, it was a space for me to engage in honest conversations where everyone’s very open and welcoming to different ideas, different perspectives,” McGuirk said.

Williams offered a similar perspective, noting the value of bringing his background to the discussions.

“Being a Black man from New York. I’m a first-gen graduate, I thought I could bring a very unique perspective to the conversation … I thought I could learn a lot from very intelligent and diverse people,” Williams said.

In a separate discussion, Gertler emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence, and discussed the formation of AI @ UVA — a group of faculty members currently being assembled to explore the role of AI at the University. She noted that both the group and its website are still in development.

“My office is now developing a plan for a standing committee [that] could help us to think through … how we ensure that our students understand how to use AI effectively … and ensure that they understand its limits and the ethical and legal dimensions of this technology,” Gertler said. 

Gertler also noted that Leo Lo, the University’s incoming librarian and dean of libraries, brings valuable expertise in AI and will serve informally as her special advisor on AI literacy. Lo will officially begin his role Monday.

The Committee also approved of five new University professorships, two of which will be the Joseph R. Chambers Distinguished Professorship in Hepatology and the Jack P. Chambers Distinguished Professorship in Surgery. 

Additionally, the Committee approved the Pausic Family Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professorship for the department of systems and information engineering, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professorship in Political Economy, Law and Democracy and the Jon D. Mikalson Professorship in Classics.

The Committee approved renaming the David M. LaCross Professorship to the David M. LaCross Dean’s Chair of the U.Va. Darden School of Business. Darden alumni David and Kathleen LaCross donated $44 million to the school in 2022 and pledged a total commitment of over $100 million in 2023 — the largest gift in Darden’s history.

The Committee is scheduled to reconvene at the next Board meeting Dec. 4-5. 

In a discovery that’s turning heads across the archaeological world, researchers have used artificial intelligence to uncover 303 previously unknown Nazca geoglyphs in the Peruvian desert, nearly doubling the number of documented ancient figures etched into the arid landscape.

The findings, detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in PNAS, mark a major leap forward in the study of the enigmatic Nazca culture and suggest a far more complex ceremonial and social use of these sprawling ground drawings than previously thought.

The project, a collaboration between Yamagata University in Japan and IBM Research, relied on deep learning to scan over 629 square kilometers of high-resolution aerial and drone imagery. The AI system, trained on a relatively small dataset of known geoglyphs, was able to detect faint, shallow, and weathered relief-type figures—many as small as 9 meters across—that have eluded human researchers for decades.

“This technology has allowed us to condense nearly a century of archaeological progress into just six months,” said Professor Masato Sakai, lead archaeologist at Yamagata’s Institute of Nazca.

The Overlooked Geoglyphs That Reshaped Archaeological Thinking

Unlike the more famous line-type Nazca geoglyphs—large stylized animals like monkeys, hummingbirds, and whales that stretch up to 90 meters and were first studied from the air in the early 20th century—the newly discovered figures belong mostly to the lesser-known relief-type category.

These smaller figures, meticulously outlined by removing surface stones to expose the lighter earth beneath, depict a range of human-related motifs: humanoids, decapitated heads, and domesticated animals like camelids. In fact, over 80% of the new finds depict human-modified subjects, in stark contrast to the wildlife-centric themes of the larger geoglyphs.

Crucially, these relief-type geoglyphs are often located within 43 meters of ancient foot trails, suggesting they were designed to be viewed by individuals or small groups traveling across the Nazca Pampa—not by aerial observers or large congregations. This supports earlier hypotheses proposed by German mathematician and Nazca researcher Maria Reiche, who posited that many geoglyphs were tied to ritual processions.

By contrast, the massive line-type figures tend to cluster around linear and trapezoidal paths, believed to be part of community-wide ceremonial networks. These findings lend weight to the idea that Nazca geoglyphs served a dual-purpose landscape: intimate, localized rituals and broader, communal pilgrimage activity.

AI’s Role in Rewriting Ancient Narratives

The AI’s success in detecting such difficult-to-spot figures came down to clever engineering and a bit of patience. Because of the limited training data—just over 400 known geoglyphs at the time—researchers fine-tuned a model pre-trained on conventional photographs, enhancing it with custom algorithms that scanned the imagery in 5-meter grids. A geoglyph probability map was then generated, helping archaeologists prioritize field surveys.

The team manually examined over 47,000 AI-flagged image boxes, spending more than 2,600 labor hours on screening and field verification. The payoff was significant: 303 new figurative geoglyphs confirmed between September 2022 and February 2023, alongside 42 new geometric figures and dozens of new groupings not previously documented.

This approach also revealed that many geoglyphs cluster in narrative scenes—for example, humanoids interacting with animals or symbolic decapitation motifs—further supporting the idea that the Nazca used these trails and figures to transmit cultural memory and ritual significance through motion and space.

“AI doesn’t replace the archaeologist,” said Dr. Alexandra Karamitrou, an AI researcher at the University of Southampton not involved in the study. “But it radically expands what’s possible, especially in places as vast and harsh as the Peruvian desert.”

Cultural Heritage Under Threat and a Race Against Time

This technological advance comes at a pivotal moment. The Nazca geoglyphs, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, face growing threats from climate change, unauthorized vehicle incursions, and flash flooding—phenomena becoming more frequent in the desert due to shifting weather patterns.

Preserving these fragile expressions of ancient Andean culture is now as much about data as it is about dirt. The AI-assisted survey not only improves the mapping of known figures but also highlights potential hot spots for future discoveries, many of which lie just beneath the surface of satellite scans.

With roughly 1,000 AI-flagged candidate sites still awaiting verification and many trails only partially mapped, researchers expect hundreds more figures may remain undiscovered. If so, we’re only beginning to grasp the cultural sophistication of a civilization that, over 1,500 years ago, etched stories into stone—not for us, but for the gods, the landscape, and each other.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, and we seemingly can’t escape.

I’ve never (and will never) use AI to write articles on Windows Central, beyond perhaps using Copilot to quickly check the specs on a product I’m reviewing — but even that often requires additional review, due to the hallucinations AI seems prone to. It seems like we might be increasingly in the minority, though.