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We have met our goal of keeping our COVID-19 testing positivity rates consistently below 4 percent for the past several weeks, and the latest guidance from the CDC indicates that all of our domestic campuses are at the “Low” level of transmission, which now means the CDC no longer recommends that masks be required indoors.

On Sept. 3, 2010, during Welcome Week, more than 1,200 �鶹��Ƶ students showed up to break the Guinness World Record for the world's largest dodgeball game.

It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic news of the death of Michael Buschmann, Eminent Scholar and Chair of �鶹��Ƶ’s Bioengineering Department in the College of Engineering and Computing. A scholar, university leader and man of compassion and integrity; his untimely death saddens all who knew and loved him.

After 18 months of renovations, �鶹��Ƶ's Harris Theatre is once again open for performances.

�鶹��Ƶ has submitted its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), "Transformative Education through Anti-Racist Community Engagement," to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), as part of its upcoming reaffirmation of accreditation.

�鶹��Ƶ honors its COVID-19 surveillance testing team for its efforts during the pandemic.

There’s no shortage of creativity at �鶹��Ƶ, and from March 11-13, students will accelerate innovation at the university’s annual hackathon. This year, two events will take place simultaneously: PatriotHacks, the signature hackathon focused on software programming, and HackOverFlow, a new hackathon with a focus on hardware engineering.

Fairfax County Police are scheduled to land a helicopter on the Fairfax Campus at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 2.

Robinson Professor of Physics James Trefil is a huge proponent of science literacy and has written extensively about science for a lay audience. With his colleague, Robinson Professor of Earth Science Robert Hazen, he created and taught Great Ideas in Science, a popular course for nonscience majors.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Homecoming at �鶹��Ƶ centered around soccer and was held in the fall. Here you see Homecoming King Archie Kao, BA Speech Communication '92, with Homecoming Queen Christina Bartlow and President George Johnson.

The conflict in Ukraine the world is observing now is nothing new to Anton Liagusha. When gun-brandishing, Russia-backed separatists took over the Donetsk National University in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2014, the country’s prime minister hastily relocated the school to a new campus in Vinnytsia, 20 hours away by train. Now the disused former diamond cutting factory is the site of a university that is, technically, in exile.

�鶹��Ƶ’s positivity rate – the percentage of those being tested who are positive for COVID-19 –remains consistently far below the 4 percent threshold, at 0.38 percent. This success, combined with �鶹��Ƶ’s 95-percent overall vaccination rate, as well as the continued overall drop in COVID-19 spread throughout the region and nation, now make the pivot to optional mask-wearing more viable.