Seth Noar is a professor within the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a researcher at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He studies how people can effectively use communication to change behavior and improve health.

June 1 marked the start of the 2020 hurricane season — and it’s slated to be an active one. In this Q&A, UNC researcher Rick Luettich talks about this year’s above-average hurricane forecast, the impact these storms have on inland populations, and how COVID-19 may affect vulnerable communities.

Since 1984, over 100,000 Karen refugees have fled their homeland of Myanmar to escape civil war. Since then, more than 40,000 have resettled in the U.S., and more than 5,000 live in North Carolina. Such displacement greatly affects lives, and even language — within just three generations their native tongue is barely spoken. Linguistics PhD students Amy Reynolds and Jen Boehm strive to understand this shift and hope to preserve the Karen people’s histories in the process.

Give Marc Callahan an opera and, in return, you’ll get an explosion of color, empathy, and sound — and a bit of mid-century flare snuck in for good measure. As the director of UNC Opera, Callahan teaches his students and audiences that this age-old art form offers so much more than singing on a stage: It’s a craft that requires creative research and a team of people to bring it to life.

Racial discrimination is not only a matter of sight — sound can also be racialized. Petal Samuel’s research traces colonial bans on drums and horns included in slave codes to modern-day noise abatement efforts in black communities.

Emily Hynes is a PhD student in the Department of Music within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. She studies women who made music within prisons of the American South from the 1930s to '40s and creates interactive digital maps to convey this information.

In the past, cochlear implants were employed in people with severe hearing loss, improving their ability to hear the conversations around them. But now, studies show that these devices offer benefits to patients with mild or moderate hearing loss - a group that UNC researchers and doctors are soliciting to receive cochlear implants as part of ongoing clinical trials.

Aaron Anselmo is an assistant professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. He develops new strategies and technologies that alter the microbiome by removing pathogens and increasing beneficial bacteria.

As machines become more autonomous, humans must define the limits of their decision-making. UNC postdoctoral researcher Yochanan Bigman addresses this topic, suggesting where to draw the line when self-governing technology is required to make life-or-death decisions.

Imagine a tool that could cure thousands of genetic illnesses by replacing faulty strands of DNA. What if that same invention could enhance traits like height and intelligence in children through the manipulation of DNA in embryos? CRISPR, a gene-editing technology, is tricky business — and geneticists at UNC are addressing the ethics surrounding it.

In a small corner of Sitterson Hall sits a fleet of pint-size cars that can see and navigate independently, winning races for the team of UNC computer science students that created them. While the stakes are low for these high-tech toys, it's a completely different game when applied to full-size vehicles in the real world — the application of professor Parasara Sridhar Duggirala's research.

How do people distinguish between what’s right and what’s wrong in the world of animal research? It’s not simple, says UNC bioethicist Rebecca Walker. Like most complex issues, this topic has a lot of gray areas — which Walker explores using the ancient philosophical approach called virtue ethics.