a young African-American woman works on her laptop in a library

Jordan Dodson

Senior Jordan Dodson is double-majoring in computer science and information science within the UNC School of Information and Library Science. She is a research assistant in the Interactive Information System Laboratory. Her research focuses on how collaborative agents like chatbots can assist people in their information-seeking processes.
a blond woman holds two fingers up to a toddler, trying to teach her how to count

The One Doing the Talking

Across the nation, data indicate that meaningful conversations between teachers and students from kindergarten to third grade are limited to an average of 28 total minutes per day — something that prevents children from developing their ability to communicate in important ways. The Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute’s FirstSchool initiative strives to change that.

The Evolution of a Research Center

More than 225 students and scientists have received educational training and advanced their research at the Galapágos Science Center — a collaborative partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.
a young African-American woman

Ariana Rivens

Senior Ariana Rivens is an undergraduate researcher within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences majoring in psychology and neuroscience, with minors in social and economic justice and history. She is also a McNair Scholar. Her research focuses on the risk and resiliency of marginalized racial and ethnic populations as they react to and cope with stress.
seven men from a widowed fathers support group stand together and pose for a photo

Brotherhood of Hope

In October 2010, seven men embarked on a rare and unexpected journey — they joined a support group for widowed fathers. The experience was so instrumental in their healing that the group’s organizers, UNC researchers Don Rosenstein and Justin Yopp, wrote a book about it called, “The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life.”
a young girl wearing a winter hat pulls a Carolina blue 3-D printed sculpture of the UNC Patterson Bell Tower out of a 3-D printer

Abby Gancz

Junior Abby Gancz is an undergraduate researcher studying biostatistics within the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and anthropology within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. Within the Research Laboratories of Archaeology, she focuses on integrating new digitization and modeling technologies into archaeology and understanding how researchers and educational institutions can utilize them.
a female exercise and sport scientist holds a girls hand in front of her face to check and checks her balance

Johna Register-Mihalik

Johna Register-Mihalik is an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. She is also a research scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. Her research focuses on the prevention, education, consequences, and clinical management of recreation- and sport-related traumatic brain injury.

Making Scientists

Thanks to an industry partnership with Eastman and the Eastman Foundation, UNC’s BeAM makerspace program provides the resources for free 3-D printing to all students, faculty, and staff — encouraging a culture of creativity at Carolina.
a young female researcher holds a frog

Catherine Chen

Catherine Chen is a PhD student in the Department of Biology within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Karin Pfennig Lab. Her research focuses on how visual and auditory signals affect the mating decisions of female spadefoot toads.
a handful of complex physics equations like E = mc2 on a background of the universe (lots of stars)

Speaking Math

Imagine a sentence so long that it would take an entire lifetime to read it — that’s the kind of problem Joaquín Drut faces every day. The UNC physicist works with numbers too large to compute in an effort to better understand the way our universe works.

Career Aquatic

At the end of his 40-year career at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, Dive Safety Officer Glenn Safrit reflects on the most important lessons he learned — and taught — in the ocean.
a blacklight makes everything purple while a gloved hand places a test tube full of yellow fluid into a a test tube tray

Generating Power Like Plants

When plants absorb sunlight, they convert carbon dioxide into energy-rich organic compounds. What if humans could do the same thing? What if we could pull CO2 out of the air and use it to build organic molecules? This revolutionary idea is still just that — an idea. But organic chemists at UNC are laying the groundwork for turning it into reality.