During an interview on “UofL Today with Mark Hebert,” Lennon said he expected to find obese employees costing their companies much more for health care and, in return, being penalized with lower salaries. Instead, Lennon says, he was surprised to find overweight workers aren’t seeing the doctor significantly more than their thinner colleagues and their earnings are similar.

“What I found was a very small wage offset,” Lennon said.

But, Lennon says the United States’ employer-based health insurance does, rightly or wrongly, discriminate against job applicants who are obese, smoke or have health problems.

“If they (companies) have two people who can do the same job it incentivizes them to try and cherry pick the worker who is going to add less to the medical spending and add less to the health insurance costs,” Lennon said. “Economists are very interested in this.” 

Listen to the full interview: 

Hodges is a 1993 and 2001 graduate who oversees volunteer efforts to connect UofL’s 138,000 alumni, more than two thirds of whom still live in the Louisville area. He said most graduates recognize their alma mater has had its share of struggles the past two years but Hodges said they’re getting excited about the new president and new athletics director.

“The enthusiasm around Neeli (Bendapudi) coming in, specifically, has been outstanding,” Hodges said. “And I think the thing Vince (Tyra) and his staff seem to be doing is they are very interested in working together with not just alumni but on campus, in general, with the deans and things that I think are very important.”

Hodges is constantly encouraging alumni to visit the Belknap campus to check out the ongoing construction and see the transformational changes that have happened since they graduated.  

He also says the Alumni Association board is working on a plan to get more graduates active on campus. “We would love to have more mentoring going on with current students and we’d love to have more ways for the working Louisville community to connect with the student body,” Hodges said.

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“In each of these studies, we try to find the most challenging child in the classroom,” said Andy Frey, Kent School of Social Work professor and principal investigator on the studies.

Frey and his team are using an intervention program called First Step Next to see if they can improve the behavior of preschoolers who can’t sit still or are verbally and physically abusive to teachers and classmates. The first study found “on both of these outcomes, reduction of challenging behavior and improvement of social skills, we found consistently that parents and teachers report improvements” according to Frey.

The problem, Frey says, is the improved behavior lasts only 3 months and didn’t stick with the students when they entered kindergarten. Thus, the need for the second study which is currently researching ways to keep kids on the right path.

Hear more about Andy Frey’s research in his interview on “UofL Today with Mark Hebert,” .��