19-20 Magazine

Climate Game-Changers

October 3, 2019

For thousands of years, the northern Andes Mountains have acted as a carbon sink, preserving organic matter as thick soil. As the planet warms, what will happen to all that carbon? This past summer, Carolina undergraduates traveled to Ecuador to take a closer look.

Eleftheria “Ria” Kontou

August 28, 2019

Eleftheria “Ria” Kontou is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of City and Regional Planning within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. She uses transportation models to uncover whether ride-sourcing platforms like Uber and Lyft affect city road crashes, injuries, fatalities, and DUI rates to help urban planners identify solutions for safe, efficient mobility.

Juan Carlos González Espitia

August 21, 2019

Juan Carlos González Espitia is an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. In his historical study of syphilis in the Spanish-speaking world, he explores the ways the disease affects private and public life, literature, the arts, medical discourse, politics, and public policy.

The Known Unknowns

August 6, 2019

In 2016, a group of North Carolina researchers published evidence of high rates of PFAS in the Cape Fear River basin. While this unregulated family of chemicals is used in the production of everyday goods, its impact on human health is largely unknown. For the past year, scientists from UNC-Chapel Hill, five other UNC system universities, and Duke University, have researched these potentially dangerous chemicals found in drinking water sources across the state.

Combating Concussions

June 4, 2019

There are a thousand ways service members can receive mild traumatic brain injuries during training and active duty. Ten years ago, basic concussion testing protocols didn’t account for the intense activities required of this population. UNC researcher Karen McCulloch has worked to change that.

Sea Turtle Secrets

May 2, 2019

How do sea turtles navigate using Earth’s magnetic fields? To shed light on this incredible ability, UNC PhD student Kayla Goforth observes the orientation of their eggs — often in the middle of the night.

A Tooth for a Tooth

April 9, 2019

When an adult loses a front tooth, dentists can replace it with an implant. What about children, who have years of development ahead of them? The answer: relocate an existing tooth to the site of the missing tooth. UNC dentists are the first in the U.S. to try this innovative procedure, called autotransplantation.

Confronting Conflict with Creativity

March 7, 2019

From Chapel Hill to the Democratic Republic of Congo, music professor Chérie Rivers Ndaliko empowers students to come together and use creativity as a touchstone for social change.

An Origin Story

January 14, 2019

Most theoretical physicists don’t see their predictions confirmed in their lifetimes, as it can take centuries to discover the physical phenomena that mark them true. But that hasn’t been the case for UNC's Laura Mersini-Houghton, who’s seen six of her predictions about the origins of the universe verified in the last decade — a feat that’s grabbed everyone’s attention, from documentary filmmakers to the late Stephen Hawking.

Carpe Datum

November 2, 2018

Every day, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. How do we protect, store, and transfer it all? A team at RENCI has spent the last decade developing the Swiss Army knife of data management, called iRODS, that does all those things — and it’s used by a variety of institutions across the globe.