The genome of a fruit fly is strikingly similar to that of a human — so much so that scientists have been studying these tiny insects for over 100 years, in search of treatments for diseases like spinal muscular atrophy and neurological disorders. UNC geneticist Bob Duronio is one of those scientists.

Nicole Gardner-Neblett is an advanced research scientist with the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. She is also a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on investigating factors that promote children’s language and literacy development.

Rebecca Tippett is the founding director of Carolina Demography, a research consulting service at the Carolina Population Center. Her research focuses on informing decisions at local, state, and national levels through analyzing demographic data on topics like where and why people move, educational attainment and employment rates, and the housing market.

Teresa Edwards is the assistant director for survey research within The Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC. She conducts web and mail surveys for principal investigators within and outside the university, teaches within the graduate Certification Program in Survey Methodology, and provides survey research consultations to faculty, staff, and students across campus.

Yaiza Canzani is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the behavior of wave functions that solve Schrodinger’s equation — the mathematical formulation for studying the energy levels of quantum mechanical systems like atoms.

Kimiko Suzuki is a PhD student in the Curriculum for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. She works in both the Dohlman and Elston labs located in the Department of Pharmacology at the UNC School of Medicine. Her research focuses on predicting how intracellular signaling pathways respond to stress.

Carly Moreno is a PhD student studying marine science within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on using molecular sequencing to study the environmental factors that regulate phytoplankton growth in Antarctica.

Streambeds act as natural water filters by trapping particles and pollutants. To better understand the dynamics of these small yet complex systems, a UNC hydrologist is creating (and clogging) her own stream.

Students across the United States graduate with, on average, $30,000 of student loan debt, which can take years — sometimes decades — to pay off. How this affects the Latino community, specifically, is an under-reported story. But the UNC Center for Community Capital has partnered with UndiosUS in an effort to change that.

Sophomore Sweta Karlekar is an undergraduate researcher majoring in computer science within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Chancellor's Science Scholar. Her research focuses on building an artificial intelligence program that can automatically identify early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia through a person's speech.

During the 2016 presidential election, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft all hired dedicated teams of partisan staffers to work one-on-one with campaigns to target voters. UNC journalism professor Daniel Kreiss explains their motives in a first-of-its-kind study.

Since she was 14 years old, Liah McPherson has studied the lives of wild dolphins. This past summer, the freediving fanatic and UNC junior worked as a field assistant with The Wild Dolphin Project in the northern Bahamas — where she photographed and researched four generations of Atlantic spotted dolphins.