Last fall, UNC professor Maureen Berner visited food banks across Belgium to learn how they handle issues of poverty and food insecurity. This scholarly exchange was also a home exchange, as University of Antwerp historian Maarten Van Ginderachter came to Carolina to work on his new book and collaborate with professors.

Nena Peragallo Montano is the dean of and professor within the UNC School of Nursing. Her research focuses on health disparities in HIV prevention among Latinos, as well as translating research into best practice within the community.

In December, graduate students from the UNC Department of Marine Sciences spent 10 days transplanting corals on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef in southern Belize. The data they collect from this research could impact coral reef conservation efforts in the future.

Elizabeth Wayne is a postdoctoral fellow in the Carolina Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery within the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Her research focuses on using nanomedicine to manipulate the natural behavior of immune cells for the delivery of therapeutics.

How do you preserve gun owner rights, but also prevent firearm deaths? It's a question three UNC researchers are trying to answer.

Allison Mathews is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Medicine within the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. Her research focuses on the use of crowdsourcing to learn how to better engage communities about the social and ethical implications of HIV cure clinical trials, HIV testing, and other health services.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.