PhD Student

A Crystal Ball for Chemistry

Jack Sundberg has created a software to help chemists uncover the best materials for their experiments — a potential game-changer for minimizing time and costs.

The Layers Beneath the Church

Michelle Freeman uncovers how clergy and laity revered saints in the fourth to sixth centuries to improve cultural understanding today.

RUNC: Julianne Davis

Julianne Davis studies how water, sediment, and the landscape influence one another.

Bringing Bivalves Back

Oysters have been dying off for the last century, and PhD candidate Mark Ciesielski wants to know why — and how to stop it.

RUNC: Samuel Akau

PhD student Samuel Akau engenders creative, participatory public policies.

Farnosh Mazandarani

Farnosh Mazandarani is a PhD student in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She studies popular pornographic media content in the U.S. and how trends in popularity coincide with societal and cultural events, advances, and movements.

Eduardo Tadafumi Sato

Eduardo Tadafumi Sato is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He studies how music is defined across national borders and unpacks the social and political definitions of what makes music “national,” specifically within Brazil.

A Project of Her Own

Most UNC-Chapel Hill PhD students oversee their own research projects for their dissertations. But Kriddie Whitmore did it in a foreign country — and with the added challenges of a language barrier, bad weather, and limited equipment. This past summer, Whitmore traveled to the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, tackling their demands with incredible tenacity and creativity.

Zardas Lee

Zardas Lee is a PhD student in the Department of History within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. They explore how people from small colonies in South and Southeast Asia pursued dreams of freedom and independence in the 1940s and ’50s while empires and superpowers dominated the world order.