U.Va. names director of Northern Virginia operations

Professor Gregory B. Fairchild will be the first director of Northern Virginia operations for the University of Virginia.

Fairchild, the Isidore Horween Research Associate Professor of Business Administration at U.Va.’s Darden School of Business, will oversee the university’s programs and facilities in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, including those currently offered by Darden, the McIntire School of Commerce and the School of Continuing and Professional Studies and others.

“I have spent the last three years working on the launch of Darden programs in the area,” Fairchild said in a statement. “My excitement at being part of the larger portfolio of U.Va.’s efforts in Northern Virginia is without parallel, and my early conversations with partners across Grounds have only strengthened my sense of the possibilities.”

Fairchild – recently named the Poets & Quants 2017 MBA Professor of the Year – will retain his current academic appointment at Darden throughout his two-year term as director and continue his work in the classroom.

His appointment is indicative of the university’s growing presence in the Washington region.

Darden opened new facilities in Rosslyn last year, which support the school’s executive MBA and executive education program and provide event space for students, faculty members and alumni. Those facilities will serve as Fairchild’s home base.

Also last year, the university announced a partnership with the Inova Health System, a large nonprofit health care system based in Falls Church. The partnership includes a research institute, the Global Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Institute, created by Inova, U.Va. and George Mason University to support work in genetics and genomics, bioengineering and biology.

U.Va. will also establish a U.Va. School of Medicine regional campus, expected to open in March 2021 at Inova Farifax Hospital. The new campus will eventually accommodate up to 72 medical students for their clerkship and post-clerkship rotations in the last 2½ years of medical school.