women in science

Vidya Venkataramanan

Vidya Venkataramanan is a PhD student studying environmental sciences and engineering within The Water Institute at UNC. Her research focuses on understanding the application and effectiveness of sanitation behavior change interventions, specifically Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).

Wizdom Powell

Wizdom Powell is a health behavior professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, as well as a trained population health disparities research scientist and clinical psychologist. Her research focuses on addressing the social determinants of health inequities among boys and men of color.

Avery Paxton

Avery Paxton is a marine ecologist, conservation biologist, and doctoral candidate at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences. Her research uses a combination of field, laboratory, and analytical methods to address fundamental, mechanistic questions in marine ecology, such as how species use their habitat and how communities are structured.

Meaghan Nazareth

Rising senior Meaghan Nazareth is a biostatistics major and chemistry minor within the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She conducts research with the UNC STARx Program, which seeks to understand self-management and transition from pediatric to adult-focused health care.

Diane Pozefsky

Diane Pozefsky is a research professor and director of undergraduate studies in the UNC College of Arts & Sciences Department of Computer Science. Pozefsky’s expertise includes software engineering and the social, legal, and ethical issues concerning information technology. She also helped build the networks for the 1998 Nagano Olympics and the IBM Corporation.

Margaret Jones

Margaret Jones is a graduate student studying geological sciences in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. Her thesis work involves developing a shoreline-change model to determine coastal responses to climate change.

Uma Shankar

Uma Shankar is a research associate in the Center for Environmental Modeling for Policy Development within the UNC Institute for the Environment. Her research focuses on air quality and its climate impacts.

Susan Girdler

Susan Girdler is a psychiatry and psychology professor and director of the UNC Psychiatry Stress and Health Research Program within the UNC School of Medicine. Her research focuses on reproductive mood disorders in women. She helped create the Women in Science Deserve Opportunities and Mentoring (WISDOM) program and is president of the Association for Professional Women in Medical Sciences.

Rukmini Deva

Senior Rukmini Deva is a SURF recipient and undergraduate researcher in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences majoring in biology, with a minor in religious studies. Her research focuses on monastic silence — a lifetime of voluntary commitment to silence and/or “stillness.” Last summer, she traveled to a Trappist monastery in South Carolina and a Yogoda ashram in India to explore why silence is used as a vehicle of deeper thought and spiritual experience.

Jane Weintraub

Jane Weintraub served as the dean of the UNC School of Dentistry from July 2011 through June 2016. Upon exiting, she returns to her joint appointment with School of Dentistry’s Department of Dental Ecology and the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research has helped shape scientific guidelines regarding the sealants and fluoride that have become a part of mainstream dental and public health practices.