Sarah Ramdeen
Sarah Ramdeen is a doctoral candidate in the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Her research focuses on the information-seeking behavior of scientists who use physical data sources within the geosciences such as cores, cuttings, fossils, and other specimens. She successfully defended her dissertation on July 28.
Blossom Damania
Blossom Damania is the vice dean for research and Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor within the UNC School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the biological mechanism behind cancer-causing viruses.
In Sync
12,340 miles separates the North Pole from the South Pole. But many geophysicists believe the two points are connected. How has always been a mystery, but UNC geophysicist José A. Rial has a hypothesis — they actually “talk” to each other through a natural process called synchronization.
Casey Berger
Casey Berger is a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. She is a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and a William Neal Reynolds Fellow within The Graduate School’s Royster Society of Fellows. She uses high-performance computing to simulate interactions between particles to understand situations that arose in the early universe — and still occur inside our atoms, stars, and special materials like superconductors.
Alive: The Life Cycle of a Painting
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what is a nearly 500-year-old painting worth? “Portrait of a Young Lady” sat in storage at the Ackland Art Museum since its arrival there in 1968 — until UNC art history professor Christoph Brachmann pulled it from the vaults last year. He immediately sensed the potential importance of this piece, thought to be created in 1522 by Barthel Bruyn, a German Renaissance painter.
Morgan Vickers
Rising senior Morgan Vickers is an undergraduate research assistant for the Community Histories Workshop in the Digital Innovations Lab. She is a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow double-majoring in American studies and communications studies, with a minor in creative writing within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on mapping historic cities now underwater, with attention to factors like racial dynamics, changing town infrastructure, and occupations.
Conserving Rare Plants: It Takes an Army
Fort Bragg, the largest military installation in North Carolina, spans 500 square miles packed with sand dunes, longleaf pines, and a handful of rare and endangered plants. To protect the vital vegetation covering training lands, the army base has partnered with the North Carolina Botanical Garden to reintroduce four species endemic to the region.
Measuring the Health of a Marsh
Carter Smith, a PhD candidate at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, uses underwater sonar to count fish in low-visibility environments - a good indicator for the overall health of a marsh ecosystem.
Carter Smith
Carter Smith is a PhD student at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. Her research focuses on the benefits of living shorelines, which use natural materials like plants, sand, or rock to stabilize the seashore.
Katie Stember
Katie Stember is a PhD student in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine within the UNC School of Medicine. She is also the founder of Scientists of North Carolina, a social media platform striving to bridge the gap between scientists and the community. Her research focuses on the disease-causing role of T cells in ANCA vasculitis, an autoimmune disease that affects blood vessels throughout the body.
Eyes in the Sky
Ever since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina has proudly proclaimed to be “first in flight." Less well-known is Carolina’s connection to deep space — from the first astronomical observatory on a college campus, to the first planetarium in the South, to one of the first administrators at NASA, UNC scientists have long been connected to and inspired by the night sky.
Nur Shahir
Nur Shahir is a PhD student in the Curriculum in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology within the UNC School of Medicine, as well as a member of the UNC Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity. Her research focuses on computational and statistical methods to investigate the role of the gut microbiome in inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease.