Carolina Arts & Sciences fall 2019 by UNC College of Arts and Sciences

ARTS SCIENCES CAROLINA

FALL

•

2019

Celebrating Carolina Firsts

National honors for first-gen efforts

ALSO INSIDE: • Gen Ed, Reimagined • Faculty Second Acts • Probing Climate Change in Ecuador

T H E

U N I V E R S I T Y

O F

N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

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C H A P E L

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FROM THE DEAN

Kristen Chavez

Uniquely Carolina

This issue celebrates the tenacity of our first-generation students — and a few of the uniquely Carolina programs that support them during their time on campus. I am enormously proud of the national recognition we are receiving for our longstanding commitment to help first-

Taking a sip from the Old Well on the

generation, rural, transfer and underserved

first day of class to mark the start of

students overcome barriers to access and

my first academic year as dean.

affordability and to graduate on time. I am also impressed with the students

I have met in these programs. They are making the most of their time as Tar Heels by delving deeply into research opportunities, studying abroad, serving the community and participating in academic internships. I am profoundly grateful to the inspired alumni whose generosity made possible some of these student success programs. Our new general education curriculum, known as IDEAs in Action, is another uniquely Carolina undertaking. If you’re not familiar with the term, the gen ed curriculum is the core coursework all students take regardless of their major. Our new curriculum, three years in the making, has been boldly reimagined: new interdisciplinary courses for first-year students, more opportunities to conduct research and empirical investigations, more encouragement to take part in global education. It won’t be fully implemented until next year, but we are piloting key courses now. You can read more about the new curriculum in this issue, too. I also believe the deep-rooted dedication of our faculty to their students and their work is another uniquely Carolina trait. For what I mean, see our feature story on three faculty who have retired but continue to shine a light on UNC through impressive research productivity, course development and student mentoring.

Sincerely,

CAROLINA ARTS & SCIENCES | FALL 2019 | magazine.college.unc.edu

Director of Communications: Geneva Collins Editor: Kim Weaver Spurr ’88, Associate Director of Communications Staff Multimedia Specialist: Kristen Chavez ’13 Editorial Assistant: Lauren Mobley ’22 Designer: Linda Noble Carolina Arts & Sciences is published semi-annually by the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and made possible with the support of private funds. Copyright 2019. | College of Arts & Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box 3100, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3100 | 919-962-1165 | college-news@unc.edu

College of Arts & Sciences • • • • • • • •

Terry Rhodes, Interim Dean Jaye Cable, Senior Associate Dean, Natural Sciences Chris Clemens, Senior Associate Dean, Research and Innovation Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Senior Associate Dean, Social Sciences and Global Programs Elizabeth Engelhardt, Interim Senior Associate Dean, Fine Arts and Humanities Abigail Panter, Senior Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education Robert J. Parker, Jr., Senior Associate Dean, Development, and Executive Director, Arts & Sciences Foundation Kate Henz, Senior Associate Dean, Operations and Strategy

Arts & Sciences Foundation Board of Directors, Fall 2019 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

William T. Hobbs II ’85, Charlotte, NC, Chair M. Steven Langman ’83, London, UK, Vice Chair Terry Rhodes ’78, Chapel Hill, NC, Interim President Chris Clemens, Chapel Hill, NC, Interim Vice President Robert J. Parker, Jr., Chapel Hill, NC, Executive Director and Secretary Manish Kumar, Chapel Hill, NC, Treasurer Eileen Pollart Brumback ’82, New York, NY Sunny H. Burrows ’84, Atlanta, GA Bruce W. Carney, Chapel Hill, NC Thomas C. Chubb III ’86, Atlanta, GA Ann Rankin Cowan ’75, Atlanta, GA Andrew Cowin, Greenwich, CT William R. “Rusty” Cumpston ’83, Monte Sereno, CA Eva Smith Davis ’85, San Francisco, CA Joseph W. Dorn ’70, Washington, DC Druscilla French ’71, ’78, Chapel Hill, NC J. Henry Froelich III ’81, MBA ’84, Charlotte, NC Cosby Wiley George ’83, Greenwich, CT John C. Glover ’85, Raleigh, NC Steven H. Kapp ’81, MBA ’90, Philadelphia, PA Leon O. Livingston ’91, Memphis, TN Alexander D. McLean ’92, Memphis, TN Molly Monk Mears ’84, Atlanta, GA John T. Moore ’88, Saint James, NY Andrea Ponti ’85, London, UK John A. Powell ’77, New Orleans, LA William M. Ragland ’82, Atlanta, GA R. Alexander Rankin ’77, Goshen, KY Ashley E. Reid ’93, Greenwich, CT David S. Routh ’82, Chapel Hill, NC Grace Schott ’86, Portola Valley, CA Linda C. Sewell ’69, Raleigh, NC James Lee Sigman ’85, Charlotte, NC Thomas E. Story III ’76, Park City, UT Benjamin J. Sullivan, Jr. ’75, Rye, NY Marree Shore Townsend ’77, Greenwich, CT James A. Wellons ’86, Philadelphia, PA Alexander N. Yong ’90, New York, NY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Celebrating Carolina Firsts

UNC-Chapel Hill has been

recognized nationally for its efforts

to support first-generation students,

who make up about 20% of the

undergraduate student population.

Donn Young

More features:

A bounty of good poems

Educating to empower

Climate game-changers

Second acts

Plus:

Alyssa LaFaro

A Tar Heel who helped develop

the atomic bomb, an annual

conference that celebrates Jane

Austen, two College initiatives that

tackle difficult topics and a new

book by Habitat for Humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CEO.

Cover Photo

Departments 20-26

Students, Faculty and Alumni Up Close

28-35

The Scoop

Chapter & Verse

inside back cover

Finale

Summer 2019 Cumpston Fellows

and leaders celebrate in the Genome

Sciences Building at an orientation

event for first-generation students

during the first week of fall classes.

(Photo by Donn Young)

Stay Connected to the College via web, social media Magazine: magazine.college.unc.edu News: college.unc.edu Social media: @unccollege Interim Dean Terry Rhodes on Twitter: @TerryERhodes

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Celebrating Carolina Firsts By Kim Weaver Spurr ’8 8

Carolina has been recognized nationally for its efforts to support first-generation students, who make up about 20% of the undergraduate student population. Among the lauded programs is a study abroad fellowship that sends students to the U.S.-Mexico border to examine the concept of “borderlands” as it relates to their own first-generation identities. continued

Lookout Scholars Briyete Garcia-Diaz, Sara Coello and Hannah Thompson examine a campus map during an orientation scavenger hunt.

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Darian Abernathy

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s junior Darian Abernathy stood at the United States-Mexico border listening to a presentation by a medic with Cruz Roja (the Mexican Red Cross), she was captivated by the seven principles emblazoned in red on the speaker’s white vest: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality. While visiting the border between the sister cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, students learned about the suffering witnessed at that space: injuries, illness, rape, hunger, human trafficking. When Abernathy asked the Red Cross medic if she could take a picture of his vest, he quietly took it off, then gave it to her to keep. “Tears started streaming down my face. I was so shocked but grateful. All I could do was say, ‘muchos gracias,’” said Abernathy, a native of Hickory, N.C., who is majoring in human development and family studies. “Kindness was a theme while we were there. Friends and even strangers would go out of their way to make us feel comfortable.” This was Abernathy’s second time at the border; for many students it was their first. She was a student leader this past summer for “Navigating Education in Borderlands,” a threecredit-hour study abroad course. The research-intensive, serviceoriented experience is a partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of Sonora in Hermosillo. This is the second year of the course; students are supported by the Cumpston Fellowship in the Lookout Scholars Program in the Office of Undergraduate Education. Seven rising sophomores, two returning student leaders and UNC instructors Carmen Gonzalez, Candice Powell and Carmen Huerta-Bapat spent three weeks in Arizona and Mexico examining the concept of “borderlands” as it relates to students’ first-generation identity. First-generation students make up about 20% of Carolina’s undergraduate student population. Both the scholars program and the fellowship are made possible thanks to philanthropic support. The Lookout Scholars Program, created two years ago with support from alumni Sunny and Lee Burrows through their Lookout Foundation, targets approximately 40 incoming

Donn Young

TOP LEFT: A medic with the Mexican Red Cross gave his vest to Darian Abernathy. TOP RIGHT: Lookout Scholars gather for an orientation presentation in Wilson Library. MIDDLE: Lookout Scholars Program Director Carmen Gonzalez addresses students. BOTTOM: The Lookout Scholars Program creates a shared community experience for first-generation students and helps them develop as citizen-leaders.

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“The students got a first-person view of the daily realities that are happening at the border. The depth and breadth of the issues they studied were impressive,” Cumpston said. “But the most impactful parts of the trip were the unexpected personal and emotional experiences they had with people who desperately want to pursue a safer and better life in the United States.”

Benton Fairchild

First-time study abroad

TOP, BOTTOM: First-generation graduates pose for pictures at the Carolina Firsts graduation and pinning ceremony. Carolina has received national recognition for its many programs that support first-generation students.

first-generation students each year, offering them a rich cohort experience designed to help them become citizen leaders during their four years at Carolina. They take several introductory classes together and have access to faculty, staff and peer mentors and activities that foster success. Gonzalez directs the program. Rusty Cumpston (mathematical sciences ’83), a firstgeneration alumnus from Havelock, N.C., was inspired by what was happening through Lookout Scholars. He and his wife, Christine, wanted to do something to help. He believes that providing immersive opportunities are essential to preparing students to solve “the significant problems that our state and country face now and in the future.” He met with some of the students after their first trip in summer 2018 and said he was “blown away by their experiences.”

For sophomore Cumpston Fellows Kwaji Bullock of Henderson and Alexandra Domrongchai of Indian Trail, this was the North Carolinians’ first time outside the country. Students engaged in fieldwork throughout the trip — conducting interviews, making presentations about what they were learning and writing a 10-page research paper reflecting on their experiences. One of the highlights for Bullock was visiting the Tohono O’odham Nation, a reservation of indigenous people native to Arizona and Mexico who live on both sides of the border. Students spent time at the San Miguel Gate border crossing. “Immigration laws prohibit people of the Tohono O’odham Nation from collecting and receiving goods, visiting their loved ones and other activities that are important to their culture,” said Bullock, who hopes to pursue a business major. “This gave me the indigenous people’s perspective of the U.S.-Mexico border, which is often overlooked.” Domrongchai said she was grateful for people sharing their stories, no matter how vulnerable it made them. “An important thing that will always stay with me is ‘without testimony, there can be no advocacy,’” said Domrongchai, a political science and English major. “This experience has helped me to open up more and be proud of the borders within my life and really tackle my own imposter syndrome.” Gonzalez added: “One of the biggest takeaways for the students is they start to conceive of borderlands not just as a physical space, but a theoretical idea of what it’s like to go through a transition in your life.”

National recognition for Carolina’s programs This past spring, Carolina was named a First Forward Advisory Institution by the Center for First-Generation Student Success. UNC was among only nine institutions tapped to serve in a leadership capacity for its long-standing commitment to supporting first-generation students. Although the Lookout Scholars and Cumpston Fellows programs are relatively new, Carolina has a rich history of supporting first-generation students. It was recognized specifically for Carolina Firsts, offered through the Office of Undergraduate Education in the College, and Carolina Grad Student F1RSTS, offered within The Graduate School’s Diversity and Student Success Program. Student Affairs and New Student and Family Programs are critical partners for the undergraduate Carolina Firsts. “It’s a rigorous application process, but Carolina was a nobrainer for us in terms of choosing it as an advisory institution,” said Sarah Whitley, senior director of the Center for First-

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Darian Abernathy

Generation Student Success. “It was top of the class.” Carolina Firsts was founded in 2008 to create a sense of community for first-generation undergraduates. Its programs support students through signature events such as a welcome back reception and a graduation recognition and pinning ceremony, as well as advocacy training for faculty and staff. The Carolina Firsts graduation ceremony last May featured the largest attendance yet — more than 200 graduates and their families filled the Great Hall in the Frank Porter Graham Student Union for the event. A first-generation student herself, Huerta-Bapat joined the program as a graduate assistant in 2012 while completing her doctorate in sociology, then became Carolina Firsts’ program director in 2015. She created the first collegiate honors program in the nation designed specifically for first-generation students; it was lauded by the national first-generation center in a report. Focused not just on GPA, it requires students to complete a number of experiential activities and write a reflective essay as they explore, connect and celebrate their first-generation and Carolina identities. Participating as instructors for the “Borderlands” course this year was bittersweet for Huerta-Bapat and Powell. Although both left the Office of Undergraduate Education at the end of the summer, they will continue to support first-generation students in new positions at the University. Huerta-Bapat became a teaching assistant professor in the global studies curriculum, and she’s leading a fall honors course called “The Migratory Experience.” Powell became the new director of the Carolina Covenant. Launched in 2004, the scholarship program provides eligible low-income students the opportunity to graduate from Carolina debt-free. “It’s so important to provide support to these students who are the first in their family to attend college,” said Abigail Panter, senior associate dean for undergraduate education. “We are proud that we are at the forefront among our peers in providing innovative, high-impact educational opportunities for them.”

Students supporting students Senior Viviana Gonzalez’s parents emigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Saxapahaw. N.C., when she was just a year old. From an early age, it became her dream to pursue higher education. Today Gonzalez, who is majoring in psychology and pursuing the Spanish for the professions minor, is president of the Carolina Firsts student organization. She hopes to go to medical school to become a pediatrician. Next May, she and her sister, Alejandra, a dental hygiene major, will become the first in their family to graduate from college. “I have fallen in love with Carolina so much. It has opened the door to a greater, broader world that I didn’t know existed,” Viviana said. “Because of my education at Carolina, and all of the skills I have acquired, I am becoming the well-rounded person I have always dreamed of becoming.”

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Kwaji Bullock

Morgan Teeters knows the odds are often stacked against firstgeneration students — “we’re not as likely to be retained for a second year; we aren’t as likely to graduate, and for some, college is an unattainable dream,” she said. The junior media and journalism major from Tellico Plains, Tenn., served as a returning student leader for the Cumpston Fellows trip this past summer. She looks forward to TOP: Summer 2019 Cumpston Fellows the opportunity to pause for a photo as they arrive at be an advocate for Tucson International Airport. people dealing with BOTTOM: Kwaji Bullock takes a selfie borders — real and with other Cumpston Fellows during metaphorical — in their border trip. all aspects of their lives. “Now I have the job of sharing what I’ve seen and learned. You can’t understand the idea of borderlands until you’ve been on both sides of that ‘wall’ yourself,” she said. “It’s the job of border-crossers to educate people about existence in both of those spaces.” ➤ Watch a video of the Cumpston Fellows’ 2018 trip at vimeo.com/283553763.

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A bounty of good poems Donn Young

Co-edited by a creative writing professor and an undergraduate student, a chapbook celebrates 25 years of Southern Cultures quarterly. BY LAURA J. TOLER ’76

hen Gabrielle Calvocoressi began co-editing the poetry collection Bounty Everlasting, created to celebrate 25 years of the quarterly Southern Cultures, she had some goals in mind for readers. “I hope they meet some new poets, and I hope their vision of the South is expanded,” she said. As she read over the approximately 100 poems that were printed in the publication’s pages over the years, she couldn’t believe the quality of work available for the Bounty chapbook, published last spring by UNC Press. “I was struck that some of the greatest poets in the history of American letters had been published on their pages,” said Calvocoressi, associate professor and Walker Percy Fellow in the English and comparative literature department’s creative writing program. Southern Cultures, a peer-reviewed quarterly of the history and cultures of the U.S. South that includes poetry as well as photo essays, memoirs and interviews, is published by UNC Press for the Center for the Study of the American South. The publication has about 1,000 print subscribers and thousands of online readers from more than 100 countries. It was founded by UNC sociologist John Shelton Reed and historian Harry Watson. Watson still serves as co-editor alongside American

Marina Greenfeld (left) and Gabrielle Calvocoressi pored over issues of Southern Cultures to select 16 poems for a celebratory chapbook.

studies scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris. As the poetry editor of Southern Cultures for two years, Calvocoressi co-edited Bounty with undergraduate Marina Greenfeld. Their initial plan was to choose 25 poems, one for each year. “Once we got together and compared notes, however, we had a lot of choices in common,” said Greenfeld, a senior. “The 16 that we both agreed on just came together naturally.” Greenfeld is starting her fourth year as an editorial assistant at Southern Cultures. Her contributions were so strong that the editorial team wanted to reward her with co-editorship of the proposed chapbook. “From the minute she began working with me, it became clear to me that we were equals in this project,” Calvocoressi said. Greenfeld, an English and Slavic languages double major with a minor in creative writing, has taken introductory, intermediate and advanced poetry writing classes and was the recipient of the Blanche Armfield Poetry Prize, awarded to the junior with the strongest application for honors poetry. She is now writing her senior thesis, a book-length collection of poetry. Calvocoressi wrote the poetry books The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Rocket Fantastic and Apocalyptic Swing;

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the latter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and won the 2001 prize for the best poem of more than 200 lines published in the Paris Review. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and elsewhere. Greenfeld called working with Calvocoressi “such a joy! Gaby was exceedingly generous with her time and expertise … and I feel so lucky that I got to have this introduction to what it means to build a book with her.” Poets featured in Bounty include Carolina creative writing faculty members Michael Chitwood, two-time winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and Michael McFee, recipient of the 2018 N.C. Award for Literature, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. For Greenfeld, “The chapbook aims to be a platform for diverse voices from the past, present and future of the South to commune with each other and be heard as a collective. I hope readers are both challenged by what they encounter and consoled by something that speaks to them.” ➤ For more on Bounty Everlasting, including how to purchase a copy, visit southerncultures.org/bounty-everlasting. UNC faculty, students and staff can access a copy for free via Project Muse.

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Carolina builds a new general education curriculum from the ground up, with a new emphasis on the first year, essential skills and experiential learning.

BY G E N E VA CO L L I N S

volutionary, revolutionary, whatever you call it, Carolina’s new general education curriculum is a new way of thinking about what today’s — and the next generation’s — students will need from their college degrees. The general education curriculum, overseen by the College of Arts & Sciences, refers to the core requirements that every student at any college or university needs to take regardless of major. The traditional approach has been to prescribe a certain number of courses in a range of academic fields, from English and history to science and math, ensuring that students are exposed to a breadth of subjects. That was the approach that UNC-Chapel Hill took when it approved the current general education curriculum, implemented in 2006. Last spring, UNC faculty formally adopted IDEAs in Action, a curriculum to be implemented starting in fall 2021. IDEA stands for Identify, Discover, Evaluate and Act, which is precisely what the new curriculum will ask students to do — think critically, collaborate with others, make reasoned judgments and approach problems with creativity. Gone are the prescribed X number of courses in X subjects. Instead, there’s a new emphasis on essential skills known as Focus Capacities [see sidebar]. The capacities aren’t limited to a single department. For example, “Engagement with the Human Past” could be fulfilled by taking a history,

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astronomy or religious studies course, as long as it teaches students to work with evidence and ideas specific to the human past. The new curriculum was three years in the making, with substantive input from faculty, students, alumni, staff and others. “IDEAs in Action will provide students the tools they need to use evidence and judgment in the workplace and to become fully engaged citizens and leaders,” said Andrew Perrin, a professor of sociology who chaired the Curriculum Coordinating Committee. (In July, Perrin became director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.) It also incorporates new pedagogy — instructional techniques that are based on a better understanding of how young adults learn. An emphasis on First Year Foundations is an essential new component. Research has shown that the first year is critical for student success in college, and all students, no matter how well prepared they are for the rigor of Carolina, can benefit from tools and techniques that help them discover how they learn best and expose them to the wide variety of opportunities available to them at UNC. Out of this grew three new required courses for first-year students: • First Year Thriving, which will introduce students to

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EDUCATING TO EMPOWER

Kristen Chavez

IDEAs in Action carries over a few core requirements from the last curriculum, including English 105: “Writing at the Research University,” a foreign language (or demonstrated proficiency) and Lifetime Fitness. A key goal of the curriculum planners was to provide more freedom for students, said Perrin. With fewer hours devoted to gen ed curriculum requirements, undergraduates can explore other academic interests or take more courses in their majors and minors. The third pillar of IDEAs in Action (the first two being First Year Foundations and Focus Capacities) is a series of courses and experiences called Reflection and Integration. In a Research and Discovery course, students will take on a research project that incorporates reflection and revision to produce original scholarship or creative work. High-Impact Experiences offer the LEFT: Psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson leads a class in “Health and opportunity to study abroad, do an internship Happiness,” an offering in a set of courses created for the new curriculum known or perform community service, among other as “Ideas, Information and Inquiry” — or Triple I for short. ABOVE: A study abroad options. Communication Beyond Carolina, fair showcases Carolina’s global programs. The IDEAs in Action curriculum typically taken in the junior or senior year, will emphasize global education and participation in experiential learning teaches students advanced communication opportunities such as study abroad. practices — learning to persuasively convey the research, resources and practical skills they need to thrive knowledge, ideas and information to distinct audiences. To help integrate students into the vibrant extracurricular offerings that at a major research university. Carolina provides, students will participate in Campus Life • Ideas, Information and Inquiry, nicknamed “Triple Experiences, such as lectures, workshops and performances. I,” are courses team-taught by faculty members across three “In designing this curriculum, we were asking ourselves: disciplines. The courses address broad themes such as “Death What will students remember from their Carolina education and Dying” and “The Idea of Race” and teach the power of 20 years from now?” said Kelly Hogan, associate dean of interdisciplinary thinking. They also expose students to a instructional innovation, a member of the Curriculum range of academic disciplines and foundational skills early in Coordinating Committee and a teaching professor in biology. their Carolina career. [Read more about Triple I at college.unc. “Students may not remember a specific fact or quote or formula edu/2019/03/triple-i]. 20 years out, but if they have learned to think analytically, • First Year Seminar/First Year Launch. First Year collaborate effectively and express themselves persuasively, Seminars have been a popular option at UNC for years, but these capacities will be useful in solving the problems they they (or a launch course) will now be required. These courses encounter along their future life paths.” explore diverse topics and hands-on, mentored research opportunities. First Year Launch courses are new; these courses introduce students to a discipline or field of study FOCUS CAPACITIES that directly relates to a major offered at UNC. They also have capped enrollment to keep class sizes small. • Aesthetic and Interpretive Analysis These courses were piloted this past year and received • Creative Expression, Practice and Production positive feedback. Student evaluations on the Thriving course • Engagement with the Human Past included comments such as “every major problem a college • Ethical and Civic Values student will have, they will show you how to deal with” • Global Understanding and Engagement and “TAKE IT OMG.” One student who took a Triple I class • Natural Scientific Investigation wrote, “This course is awesome. I think the concept of having • Power, Difference and Inequality three professors teach a topic together and incorporate their • Quantitative Reasoning different fields and ways of approaching the same ideas shows • Ways of Knowing a way of thinking that can be taken and applied to all aspects * One Focus Capacity course must include an Empirical of life and learning.” Investigation lab.

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CLIM CLIMATE

For thousands of years, the northern Andes Mountains have acted as a carbon sink,

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MATE S T O R Y A N D P H O T O S B Y A LY S S A L A F A R O

GAME-CHANGERS

preserving organic matter as thick soil. As the planet warms, what will happen to all that carbon? This past summer, Carolina undergraduates traveled to Ecuador to take a closer look.

From left, Maribel Herrera, Chloe Schneider and Nehemiah Stewart drop a sensor into a peatland pool to measure carbon levels. The peatlands are in the Cayambe Coca Ecological Reserve in Ecuadorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s northern Andes Mountains.

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oss-covered molehills pepper the landscape, each a different shade of autumn. Some are mustard yellow, others evergreen. Upon closer inspection, petite red buds can be seen peeping through the growth while spindly, fingerlike plants called lycophytes grow long and tall on the mounds’ surface. It’s as if a coral reef was scooped up from the ocean and plopped 14,000 feet on top of a mountain. Students leap from one mossy hump to another, occasionally overshooting their mark and slipping into the muddy waters in between. As the students stop to catch their breath, they drop a sensor into one of the pools to measure carbon. Between measurements, they look up to admire the dusty white peaks of Antisana, the fourth-highest volcano in Ecuador. Just behind it sits Cotopaxi, once thought to be the highest summit in the world and now one of South America’s most active volcanoes, having erupted more than 50 times since 1738. Home to 27 volcanoes, Ecuador has accumulated organic matter for thousands of years, as volcanic soils accumulate more carbon than any other ecosystem. Called a páramo, this type of landscape is found in the northern Andes. It’s a tropical environment, but because of the high elevation, the temperature remains low and the decomposition of organic matter slows. Scientists call locations like this carbon sinks — places of long-term carbon storage. “The carbon content per unit area of soil is among the highest on the planet in this area,” says Diego RiverosIregui, associate professor of geography in the College of Arts & Sciences. “While these high-elevation mountains occupy only a very small area of the Andes Mountains, they are carbonrich.” In the last three centuries, both natural and human-made carbon dioxide emissions have contributed more to climate change than any other greenhouse gas. As the planet

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continues to warm, carbon decomposition rates within the North Andean páramo will increase and release all that organic matter into the atmosphere, further heating the planet. Riveros-Iregui is using his 2019 National Science Foundation Early Career Award, a five-year grant that combines research and education, to TOP: Students hang out in Quito, Ecuador. It is just a better understand 20-minute taxi ride from the students’ home base in these processes. He Cumbaya. BOTTOM: Chloe Schneider and Megan Raisle test spent six weeks in their floating device for measuring C0₂ in the air as it offChapel Hill training gasses from a waterbody. five undergraduates and a Ph.D. student on in the North Andean páramo are very carbon measurement methods within important in the carbon cycle because water systems. This past summer, the they emit greenhouse gases like carbon team spent two months in Ecuador dioxide and methane at different times measuring the carbon in a watershed at of the year, depending on how much Cayambe Coca Ecological Reserve. This water is flowing downhill. is the first of three cohorts he will take “Given the elevation and mean to South America. annual temperature of these tropical Inland waters like those found

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is the reality of conducting research at the reserve, located just west of the continental divide. Some days it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny; others, it’s 25 and sleeting. When humidity generated hundreds of miles away in the Amazon crashes into the Andes Mountains, it undergoes orographic lifting, which is when air is forced from lower to higher elevation, causing it to cool quickly and form precipitation. Today, a white mist settles over the mountain. It’s 36 degrees. The wind moves at about 10 mph. Visibility is 30 feet. Just 15 minutes away, toward town, the sky is blue and the sun is shining. But here, it’s like being trapped in a snow globe. Senior Chloe Schneider, an environmental science and geography major, heads down a steep wooded hill, grabbing handfuls of long grasses and shrubs to stay upright. She carries a homemade carbon dioxide monitoring station — a gray plastic box attached to two pieces of wood and containing a battery-powered datalogger. Senior Megan Raisle follows, wielding a piece of rebar that will secure it to the ground. After making their way to the slope’s bottom, they secure the monitoring station, running a wire from the box to a sensor placed inside a PVC pipe embedded in the streambed. Later in the day, Schneider and Raisle, an environmental studies and geography major, repeat this trek, a different instrument in tow. On top of measuring the CO2 present in the water, they also need to record what’s being emitted into the air. To do this, they’ve created

TOP: Chloe Schneider — well protected from the elements — preps a floating device for deployment. BOTTOM: Anayancy Estacio-Manning sets up a data collection program on her laptop. The only social scientist in the group, she said she valued her first time in the field.

environments, these would be sources of atmospheric carbon that are currently unaccounted for,” Riveros-Iregui explains. These tropical watersheds have never undergone consistent monitoring for this long, and the students involved

have never conducted fieldwork — a challenge that entices Riveros-Iregui.

Data deluge Knit hats. Face masks. Waterproof gloves. Winter jackets. Rainboots on top of three layers of socks. This

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floating sensors using large flowerpot saucers, with plumbing components wedged into the centers to hold the air collection chamber firmly in place. “Building the sensor housings and platforms feels like an exercise in critical thinking,” says geography Ph.D. student Andrew Murray, who designed the first iteration of these devices. Additional sensors — 18 in all — measure water flow, dissolved oxygen, solutes like chlorophyll, other forms of carbon and salt. During the entire two-month expedition, they remained in place, collectively recording nearly 2,000 environmental observations a day. “These measurements allow us to paint a broad picture of what happens to the carbon stored in these ecosystems every time it rains,” Riveros-Iregui says. Senior Maribel Herrera is wellversed in geography and environmental studies, her two majors, but she’s just beginning to learn the analysis aspect. “I’m comfortable with deploying the sensors,” she says. “But then when I get the data, I’m like, ‘Okay, how do I synthesize this and what do these numbers mean?’” Cue Murray. Not only did he create the blueprints for the sensor stations and oversee the project’s execution in Ecuador, but he also specializes in R — a high-level computer programming language for data management analysis — and he guided the students in that work. “Collecting good data is just one piece of the puzzle,” Murray says. “Knowing what to do with it and being able to work on it collaboratively with other people is essential to being a successful researcher.”

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TOP: Maribel Herrera and Nehemiah Stewart, also first-generation students, record water velocity, channel depth and width of one of their stream sites. BOTTOM: From left, Maribel Herrera, Anayancy Estacio-Manning, Megan Raisle, Chloe Schneider, Andrew Murray, associate professor Diego Riveros-Iregui and Nehemiah Stewart take a break from the fieldwork.

Path to the páramos Riveros-Iregui grew up in Fusagasugá, Colombia, which sits about 10 miles from the Sumapaz páramo. While these environments have long fascinated him, he didn’t begin studying them until the past decade.

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After finishing an undergraduate geoscience degree in Colombia in 2001, he traveled to the United States with the plan to enroll in graduate school. But he discovered that his English was insufficient, the cost more than expected and the U.S. education system confusing.

Despite spending more than a month in Chapel Hill prepping for the international fieldwork, Estacio-Manning felt lost at first. The other students, three of whom are studying geography and environmental science, would often discuss things like pH and dissolved oxygen levels with ease as they practiced setting up experiments. “I’d go back home and look up whatever it was they were talking about,” she said. But Riveros-Iregui encouraged her abilities, and now that she’s back in Chapel Hill, Estacio-Manning recognizes how far she’s come and has grown more confident. “Knowing the two, physical science and social science, makes me sort of bilingual. And so now I can be that translator.” This fall, Estacio-Manning and the four other students will use these new skills at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, where they will present on the work they performed in Ecuador to North Carolina families. Riveros-Iregui places special emphasis on teaching and mentorship, noting that he had few mentors during his college career. He navigated academia alone — a feat that draws him to students like Estacio-Manning, one of three first-generation students working on this project. “I want them to know that if I could do it, so can they,” Riveros-Iregui says. Beyond the field experience, the five students agree that one of the biggest benefits has been getting to know one another. “No one can take [away] this bond we have,” says junior Nehemiah Stewart, who is majoring in chemistry. “What we’ve formed here is something crazy. What we’ve formed is lifelong friendships.”

offered a teaching assistantship at the University of Minnesota, where he completed his master’s in geology. Stumbling over the graduate school process is far from unique, he says. “I come across so many students who want to go to graduate school, but don’t know how to go about it. With the right guidance TOP: Diego Riveros-Iregui (right) reviews the day’s plan and gaining with Maribel Herrera, Megan Raisle and Nehemiah Stewart some exposure to at a stream site. BOTTOM: These burgundy clubmosses, research during lycopodium crassum, look like something from the bottom their undergraduate of the sea, but they are native to the Andes Mountains. [career], students can become A neighbor suggested enrolling in competitive for graduate school a community college, even though he fellowships.” already had a four-year degree from a Colombian university. “It sounded Mentors and friends like a good idea,” Riveros-Iregui For junior Anayancy Estaciosays, laughing. “And I did not have a Manning, a global studies major, just plan B.” After earning an associate’s being out in the field is unfamiliar, let degree in computer science, he was alone being in an extreme environment.

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➤ Alyssa LaFaro is the editor of Endeavors magazine. Watch a video at magazine.college.unc.edu.

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SECOND From left, retired faculty members Jean DeSaix, Arturo Escobar and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall share a laugh in Hyde Hall, home of the Institute for the

Donn Young

Arts and Humanities.

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ACTS

B Y

P A T T Y

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( B . A . ’ 7 5 ,

P H O T O S

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Af te r r eti ri ng f r o m C a r o li n a , a b io lo g i s t , a h i s to ria n a n d a n a nth r o p o lo g i s t f i n d n ew c r e ati ve i n s p i r atio n a n d c o nti n u e to m e nto r s tu d e nt s , write b o o ks a n d c o n d u ct r e se a r c h .

etired faculty members seldom

actually retire — at least not in the feet-up, gone-fishin’ kind of way. Many are still actively engaged in academic pursuits, just a bit more selectively now. “We cherish the fact that our retired faculty are Tar Heels for life. We are so grateful that they continue to contribute to Carolina and the academy with their scholarly pursuits, support of students and service to the campus community and beyond,” said Terry Rhodes, interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. We recently chatted with three not-so-retired “retirees” to learn what they have been up to in their second acts. continued

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school applications, among other things. DeSaix describes their roles with the students simply as, “We love them.” Because she wasn’t ready to leave the classroom entirely, DeSaix, who had earned the title of teaching professor, the highest rank for fixed-term faculty, spent three years teaching half-time as a move toward retirement. That provided room for activities such as helping the College Board develop Advanced Placement courses and the Biology Major Field Test, which tests student mastery of key concepts. She also revised her online biology course and a course for incarcerated students, both offered through the Friday Center for Continuing Education. Two years ago, when DeSaix thought her deeply fulfilling classroom stint had ended, she had the opportunity to teach an honors biology course. Later, she joined a campus discussion about the need for a health professions adviser — a role DeSaix knew well — and the outcome was a new one-credit hour course. DeSaix worked with Abigail Panter, senior associate dean for undergraduate education, and Meg Zomorodi, clinical professor of nursing and assistant provost of interprofessional education, to develop “Pursuing Health Professions,” which explores various health care paths. When it was first offered last fall, 450 students registered within 72 hours, filling the 10-week course. While she will no longer teach that course, DeSaix plans to help secure upcoming speakers and work with the new instructor to ensure a smooth transition. In honor of DeSaix’s countless contributions through the years, the College established the Jean DeSaix Excellence in Teaching Fund. Now fully retired from the classroom, DeSaix will continue to mentor students in the Rural Medicine and Carolina Covenant programs. If she finds that she misses the classroom, she said, “I’m persuaded to think there will be a way for me to get back into it.”

Jean DeSaix

MAKING TIME TO MENTOR STUDENTS Ask Jean DeSaix what kept her at Carolina for 50 years and she replies without hesitation: her remarkable students. Through the years, she touched the lives of some 60,000 students in biology labs and classes large and small, consistently earning teaching accolades, including the prestigious Chapman Family Teaching Award and the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Outside the classroom, DeSaix served as mentor and adviser to a host of undergraduate programs, ranging from Habitat for Humanity to Undergraduate Rural Medicine Scholars. In 2012, she was recognized with UNC’s Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement. With her husband, Peter (also a retired biology faculty member), DeSaix has mentored hundreds of Carolina Covenant scholars, a program that helps eligible low-income students graduate from UNC debt-free. They have worked with dozens of students each year, opening their home for meals and camaraderie, helping with course registration and advising on graduate

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Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

BRINGING EARLY RESEARCH FULL CIRCLE Jacquelyn Dowd Hall published her latest book in May, five years after she retired from the history department. But in a sense, the seeds for Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (W.W. Norton and Company) were planted at the beginning of her career. The book was reviewed in June by The New York Times. The story of the three Lumpkin sisters has remained with Hall, the Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita, ever since she interviewed the two younger sisters, Katharine and Grace, in 1974 — just a year after she came to Carolina as the founding director of the Southern Oral History Program. Hall discovered the Lumpkin women while working on her dissertation. The sisters were born into a 19th-century slave-holding family and socialized into a staunch belief in white supremacy and the Confederacy. While the eldest, Elizabeth, held onto those beliefs, the younger sisters went on to become ardent supporters of Southern workers, black activists and women in post-suffrage America. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1970s enabled the

SOHP to undertake a project on “Southern Women after Suffrage.” “It focused on women who walked through the door that suffrage opened in the 1920s and became activists, professionals and intellectuals,” Hall said. As part of that project, Hall interviewed Katharine and Grace Lumpkin; Elizabeth had died some 10 years before. Hall stayed in close touch with Katharine, who ended up moving to Chapel Hill and, with Hall’s encouragement, left her papers to Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection. Because the women were such private people, Hall waited to write the Lumpkin sisters’ still-timely story until they died. “The dilemmas they faced are things that women and progressive Southerners are still dealing with,” Hall said. “History always has a bearing on the present.” She couldn’t predict, however, that the overarching theme of Confederate memorialization — and the controversies surrounding race now gripping the country — would be so salient. An award-winning teacher and scholar, Hall is a National Humanities Medal recipient and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her immediate agenda includes giving talks and readings focused on her latest publications, among them a piece about her mother for a book published earlier this year by UNC Press, Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South.

CREATING A NEW MODEL OF SUSTAINABILITY IN COLOMBIA Some 40 years ago, Arturo Escobar switched paths from chemical engineering and biochemistry to international nutrition and food science. He wanted to understand why hunger existed worldwide. As he quickly discovered, the

Valley in his native Colombia. The area encompasses a lovely 500-kilometer valley between two mountain chains in the northern Andes, which for the past century has been home to large-scale sugar cane plantations in the plains and large herds of cattle on the hillsides. As a result of overplanting sugar cane and cutting down forests to accommodate cattle, the soil has been eroded and the water exhausted, Escobar said. The solution, he explained, is to design a new model. He is part of a team of academics and activists from many different fields working together to create an ecological, social and economic transition for the Cauca River Valley. “We don’t know exactly what this new model is, but everyone has to contribute toward imagining a different way of being,” he said. The endeavor is expected to take the better part of a decade. “The goal of transition design is to heal the interconnected web of life,” Escobar said. Transition design focuses on a community’s unique needs to find ways to enhance social connections, respect plurality and foster autonomy. His work in the field is far from complete. His book on autonomous design theory, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press), was published just a few months before Escobar retired. He is also an ad hoc professor at the Universidad del Valle and the Universidad de Caldas, both in Colombia, where he continues to teach occasionally and lives for about five months a year. While he will continue his work in the Cauca River Valley, Escobar also wants to expand beyond academic writing to create a book for lay audiences that explains these ecological design principles. At this point, the only question is whether he will focus on writing primarily in Spanish or English.

Arturo Escobar

problem wasn’t a lack of food as much as control over food production. The issue was sociopolitical — based on a model in which corporations developed huge swaths of land and small food producers were shoved to the wayside. Decades of globalization and economic development have exacerbated this disparity. “Instead of having a system where people can actually grow food, they are pushed out to the cities under poverty conditions,” said Escobar, the Kenan Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. What’s more, the result has been immense damage to the environment, he noted. Finding ways to reverse that damage requires fundamentally changing the economic and political systems that created the problem in the first place. That has been Escobar’s academic focus for the past three decades, 18 of those years spent researching, writing and teaching at Carolina. Since Escobar retired in June 2018, he has directed much of his time toward designing a new model of sustainability for the Cauca River

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Donn Young

both a poisonous plant and a poisonous spider led to an early medical discharge, and she was left to wonder, “what next?” She moved back home to Illinois, earned a master’s in English from Southern Illinois University, then received a Royster Fellowship to pursue a doctorate in English at Carolina. “That extra level of financial support made the difference in my decision-making,” she said. Her love of fabrics and of storytelling would • Sarah George-Waterfield wore this button dress she crafted resurface and take for an innovative Ph.D. dissertation project to her May doctoral on greater meaning hooding ceremony. in her new home in Chapel Hill. In addition to her studies, George-Waterfield served A Ph.D. student’s innovative as editor of The Carolina Quarterly, a dissertation weaves together literary magazine, and helped create a scholarship, fabric and storytelling companion podcast. in an immersive art installation. When it came time to start thinking BY KIM WEAVER SPURR ’88 about dissertation topics, she initially planned to write a traditional academic Sarah George-Waterfield paper. But she came across a series of (Ph.D. ’19) fell in love with works that really spoke to her about the colorful West African fabrics nexus of textiles and the South: Ntozake while serving in the Peace Shange’s 1982 novel Sassafrass, Cypress Corps in Mali after receiving & Indigo, Jean Kwok’s 2011 novel Girl in her undergraduate degree Translation and Daisy Hernandez’s 2014 from Vanderbilt University in memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed. 2010. She wanted to represent what Working as an environmental she was learning in a more creative, extension agent, she “helped build visual way. Her adviser told her she women’s gardens, drank a lot of tea and could pursue, with the same intellectual made friends with goats.” rigor as a monograph, an alternative or But an unfortunate encounter with “innovative” dissertation. She had never

Text and textile

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done an art installation before, but for her 28th birthday, she asked her mother for a sewing machine and to teach her how to use it. Her large-scale art installation, “Text and Textile,” was exhibited this past spring at multiple locations that are steeped in North Carolina’s textile history, including Greensboro and Saxapahaw. It consisted of three spaces representing her analysis of each literary work, blending narrative and fabric in various iterations — from a dress made entirely of buttons to skirts made out of book pages to a tapestry woven with shreds of a novel and reclaimed fabric. In one room, a soundtrack of sewing machine sounds — all crowdsourced— played on a loop. In another was the sound of scissors clipping. A quilt in the foyer led visitors into the interactive exhibit; it was embroidered with metaphors relating to textile work, like “weaving a story” or “telling a yarn.” In her artist’s statement, she wrote: “I combine austere paper and vibrant fabric in unexpected ways … to convey the ways that memory and narrative reside in the warp and the weft, in the feel of the fabric on the fingers, in the taste of string in the mouth.” George-Waterfield, who calls her project a “labor of love and toil,” advises students who want to pursue an alternative dissertation to make sure they have a robust support system. She praised the insights of her dissertation committee. “Be open to the process,” she said. “Also, look at the types of jobs you are interested in — tenure track or not — and figure out what kinds of skills may be required and build those into your dissertation process, for example, arts advocacy or creating a website.” Much of the exhibit pieces have now been dissembled, but GeorgeWaterfield saved a few. She wore the button dress to her graduation.

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Non-binary code

A Chancellor’s Science Scholar is helping to diversify the computer industry by building a visible community of LGBTQ professionals in the coding world.

More than 300 LGBTQ students from universities across the South are expected to convene at Carolina in November 2020 for the nation’s first college hackathon for queer students in technology. Hackathons, in which students gather to code projects, learn programming skills and network, are key ways students get their start in technology-related fields. But they can be intimidating and unwelcoming, especially for queer students, said Kipp Williams, a junior computer science and public policy major. Williams is founder and executive director of queer_hack, the Carolina student group planning the event. The hackathon is one way Williams hopes to build a visible, networked and supportive community of LGBTQ people in technology who can help diversify the industry. Williams knows the value of support from his own experience. Although he loved math and science and attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, he assumed he would pursue public policy or political science in college. But three UNC programs — Chancellor’s Science Scholars, Honors Carolina and the Campus Y — as well as his studies in computer science and public policy have helped shape Williams’ broader path that includes science. “I’m really interested in the intersection of technology and social justice work,” Williams said. “I’m thinking about how we can solve social issues using science and math.” Williams’ pursuit of computer

Donn Young

BY CYNDY FALGOUT

• Chancellor’s Science Scholar Kipp Williams looks through a deconstructed computer in the Applied Engineering Lab in Sitterson Hall. He is interested in the intersection of technology and social justice work.

science resulted from his participation in Chancellor’s Science Scholars. Its requirement that scholars pursue a STEM major prompted Williams to sign up for a computer science course his first year. Thirty students were in his introductory honors course. The small class size gave Williams the comfort level he needed to speak up, ask lots of questions and interact more with the professor and his classmates. The final course project — a hackathon — sealed the deal for his new-found discipline. “I stayed up all night with my brandnew friends and tried to figure out how to code the project,” Williams recalled. “That experience was so amazing. It was the moment I figured out this is cool!” While Williams’ love of computer science was developing, so was his understanding of social justice. He’d heard about the Campus Y from his grandmother, a 1959 Carolina graduate. But a student member at UNC’s Week of Welcome sold him on joining. Williams applied for and was named a first-year member-at-large, learning as a member of the executive board about social justice, direct service, advocacy and activism. He served as director of membership and alumni relations his sophomore year and was elected co-president in March. “A former chancellor at UNC called

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the Campus Y the conscience of the university,” Williams said. “That resonated with me. My involvement in the Campus Y has allowed me to think critically about some of the issues in the tech industry.” The Campus Y is also providing seed funding and support for queer_hack through its CUBE social innovation incubator. Williams credits Chancellor’s Science Scholars in particular with providing a strong and supportive community as he struggled with a major life change. “I’m a transgender man. I came out right before college. So I entered UNC at a time when I was really nervous about life,” Williams said. The merit-based scholarship program promotes diversity and inclusion in science and technology fields through a combination of academic advising, connections to research opportunities and graduate studies, leadership training and community-building for its 40-member scholar cohorts each year. “CSS has been the backbone of support for me my whole time here at UNC,” Williams said. "My friends gave me the strength to be myself both in and outside of the classroom. My goal with queer_hack is to create a support system that empowers the queer students who come after me.”

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Courtesy of Ronit Freeman

Sarah Daniels

from static. From respiration of oxygen to generation of new cells, our bodies are in a state of constant, dynamic change. “We want to make materials from biological building blocks that can respond to the body as it grows and changes,” Freeman said. “And if we can use them to deliver cells derived from our own bodies, we’re less likely to reject them.” Revolutionizing medical stents is just one application of Freeman’s research. The work she is pioneering also contains great potential for disease diagnostics, drug delivery and • TOP: Scientist Ronit Freeman holds a 3D model of a protein her tissue regeneration. lab is mimicking. • BOTTOM: Freeman participates in a ballroom In the lab, Freeman dancing competition. and her colleagues use malleable sets of molecules, often DNA-peptide hybrids, to build biological structures that can support the repair of Ronit Freeman’s research crosses injured parts of the human body. Freeman, like her molecules, has interdisciplinary boundaries always been a master of adaptation. and has potential applications Born and raised just outside of Tel in diagnostics, drug delivery Aviv, Freeman joined the military when and more. she was 18, a requirement for all Israeli BY MARY LIDE PARKER ’10 citizens. Always up for a challenge, she For children and adults with decided to pursue additional courses and life-threatening respiratory training to become an army officer — a disorders, standard medical pivotal experience that shaped both her protocol often calls for confidence and leadership skills. inserting a metal stent into Just a few years later, when she was the lungs or airways. in her early 20s, Freeman was hit by a “These devices are durable, but cannot car. Her recovery was long and grueling, change shape — they are static,” said both physically and mentally. A passionate Ronit Freeman, an associate professor dancer since the age of 3, Freeman didn’t in the department of applied physical dance for years after the accident. “As sciences. I was going through college and grad The human body, of course, is far school, I really missed it,” she said. “It was

Master of adaptation

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like a piece of my soul was not satisfied.” Although she couldn’t return to ballet, Freeman decided, in the middle of her Ph.D. work, to try ballroom dancing. Within a year she became a semi-professional, attending dance competitions all over the country. She continues to compete (and teach dance) to this day. Freeman’s innate resilience has had a profound impact on her career — as a scientist, a teacher and a communicator. She knows that leading by example is critical for connecting with her students. Outside the lab, she finds creative ways to contextualize her research, ensuring that clinicians understand how her materials can potentially be used in the clinic. “I’m a huge believer in community and investment in people,” she said. “If you want to create a culture of innovation, you have to invest in the people first.” Her research partners include an interdisciplinary mix of chemists, engineers, biologists, nanotechnologists, surgeons and others. That mentality helped bring Freeman to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2018. After living in big cities all her life (from Tel Aviv to Chicago), she had some hesitation about moving to a small college town in the South. At UNC, however, Freeman has found a strong sense of community and an entrepreneurial environment in the department of applied physical sciences. “We all have excitement and new ideas, but it can fall on deaf ears if people are not receptive to change,” she said. “Especially when you tell a clinician, ‘I’m going to revolutionize the way you do medicine!’” Freeman is a fierce advocate for young women who are pursuing careers in science and engineering. “It’s demanding. It’s long hours. You’re constantly on and that’s challenging regardless of gender and race,” she said. “Being a woman in this field comes with its own challenges, but there are more of us now. Hang in there because it’s worth it.”

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homelessness into the best neighborhoods available,” Webb said. He created a map of high-opportunity neighborhoods for Xiao that turned out to be not so helpful. “It basically showed where rich people live in the county — and there’s not a lot of affordable housing in those neighborhoods,” Webb explained. After more discussion, Webb and Xiao teamed up with Bill Rohe, professor of city and regional planning and former director of CURS, to come up with a better solution to Xiao’s problem. “We put together the idea of having focus groups made up from different types of low-income residents — single mothers, the elderly, veterans, people exiting the homeless system — to ask them what they want in a neighborhood,” said Rohe. “We can customize opportunity metrics for different groups,” Webb added. “If you’re a single mom with kids, you probably really care about the schools. If you’re an elderly person, you might want to live closer to a hospital or clinic. If you’re a veteran, you might want to be near a veteran’s service center.” The feedback from the focus groups will be matched with local and national data to make customized maps of high-opportunity areas. The map will then be paired with affordable listings on NCHousingSearch. com, a service provided by Socialserve and the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency. The Housing Opportunity Finder will allow users to customize their definition of opportunity and identify the type of housing they want. It will then prioritize listings using those criteria. The app is expected to launch next summer. “We’re really hoping to leverage the Harvey Award funding to develop the best possible product,” Rohe said. “Sheryl Waddell and Judith Cone of Innovate Carolina have been great, especially in helping us think through the entrepreneurial side of the project. Hopefully, after our release of the web app, it can be replicated by other communities across the country.”

Voucher program, the Housing Opportunity Finder will compile affordable listings in North Carolina’s Durham and Orange counties. It will then prioritize listings that are located in “high-opportunity” neighborhoods, defined as having low crime, good schools,

• ABOVE: Scholars Bill Rohe, left, and Michael Webb won a Harvey Award for their affordable housing app. • RIGHT: A screenshot of the prototype Housing Opportunity Finder.

Affordable housing may be a click away

UNC scholars will develop an app to help low-income families find affordable homes in better neighborhoods. BY ANDY BERNER

Bill Rohe has 35 years of experience researching affordable housing; Michael Webb has worked with community organizations and led evaluations for more than 10 years. They have now teamed up with local housing leaders to develop a new tool to help people find homes in better neighborhoods. The tool is a web app called the Housing Opportunity Finder, which was chosen for a UNC-Chapel Hill C. Felix Harvey Award to Advance Institutional Priorities. The award supports the application of humanities and/or social sciences research to real-world challenges outside the University. Developed to assist low-income families, including those who qualify for the federal government’s Housing Choice

job opportunities and other attributes that support human development. Nationwide, 2.2 million families with vouchers struggle to find affordable housing, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods. In Durham County, the average voucher-qualified family spends 120 days searching for housing, and nearly a third of the vouchers expire before the families can find a home. Plus, only 5% of voucher families live in high-opportunity areas, while 18% of all affordable units are in those areas. The idea for the app started when Webb, senior research associate at the College of Arts & Sciences’ Center for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS), first met Janet Xiao, co-director of the Community Empowerment Fund. “Janet was interested in understanding where opportunity neighborhoods were in Durham County so she could steer people exiting

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• New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said the caliber of Carolina’s faculty made it an ideal place for his curiosity and intellectual ambition to take flight.

Unfettered curiosity

A native of White Plains, N.Y., and a Morehead Scholar, Bruni graduated Phi Beta Kappa, then got an M.S. in journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism before taking a job at the New York Post. Then, at the Detroit Free Press, Bruni covered the AIDS crisis, gay rights and the first Persian Gulf War. In 1993, he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his profile of a convicted child molester and co-wrote his first book, A Gospel of Shame, about child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church. Bruni was hired by the Times in 1995 as a religion writer but later moved to Washington, D.C., to cover politics and George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, which spawned his next book, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. From there, Bruni was off to Rome as its bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican and Greece. In 2004, he was named the Times’ chief restaurant critic. “It was a total adventure, it was absolutely a dream job, but it’s a job that if your interests are as varied and as fickle as mine, ultimately begins to feel a little bit confining,” Bruni said. During

A wide-ranging career began with a stint at The Daily Tar Heel. BY PAMELA BABCOCK

He’s been a war correspondent. He’s covered popes and presidents. He’s written about AIDS and sexual abuse. He made New York restaurateurs blanch as the food critic for The New York Times. It all began for Frank Bruni (English ’86) at The Daily Tar Heel, reviewing obscure rock albums and penning a personal column. Bruni’s peripatetic writing interests are highly unusual even for a journalist at a large newspaper, where rotating from one beat to another is common. But few reach the pinnacle Bruni has: anchoring one of the Times’ most important oped columns, covering politics, social education and culture. “I was always very fond of writing. It became my sort of social center of gravity,” he said. Bruni recalled recently about how he immersed himself in the campus newspaper, working his way up to associate editor.

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this time, he authored Born Round, a memoir of his family’s love of food and his struggles with overeating. Today, Bruni pens two columns each week as well as a weekly newsletter that’s emailed free to subscribers. Bruni said he prides himself on being able to write about topics that capture his desire to be nimble and “broad in my interests and surprising in what I write.” Recent favorites? “The Best Restaurant if You’re Over 50” and “Oh, to Be Ivanka!,” a humorous piece about Ivanka Trump. “What I try to do is span that sort of spectrum, to be different enough that readers don’t think, ‘Oh, here he goes again,’” Bruni said. Along the way, Bruni has also written and co-written other books, including a bestseller on the mania surrounding college admissions, Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be. Bruni said the caliber of Carolina’s faculty made it an ideal place for his curiosity and intellectual ambition to take flight. He has returned to campus to meet with Morehead-Cain Scholars and to speak on topics ranging from digital technology to the Balkanization of news, political polarization, popular culture, education reform and the future of LGBTQ rights. Last year, Bruni wrote a deeply personal column about an affliction causing him to lose vision in one eye and what it’s like to live with the fear that the other eye could be similarly affected at any time. His latest book will focus on the challenges of aging for his generation, including insights from his own health battle. Bruni continues to get emails from readers who share their own medical struggles and said their responses have helped him to be more empathetic. “It’s something I didn’t understand nearly as well two years ago and I’m glad I understand it now,” Bruni said. “Because, when in the span of a couple days you’re told you might go blind, you really think about your life in a different way.”

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Courtesy of Virginia Coleman

associate’s degree from Louisburg College, a two-year residential college in her hometown of Louisburg, N.C., and transferred to Carolina as a junior. She said she “never thought about going anywhere else.” Her sister, Sophia, was already there, working on a master’s degree in chemistry. She proved to be very helpful in getting Coleman through organic chemistry classes. Coleman worked hard at UNC, with lab every afternoon and shifts in the university’s dining hall serving tables from 6 to 9 p.m. “We got $1 and we got our dinner. I sometimes worked at the desk at the dormitory where I lived and I got paid 35 cents an hour for that.” • LEFT: Virginia Spivey Coleman, 96, has been a member of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club for over She also played on the tennis team 50 years. • RIGHT: She was featured in Denise Kiernan’s book about the female scientists who helped and remembers fondly the walks in develop the atomic bomb. Coker Arboretum. After the war, Coleman stayed on at Oak Ridge for nine years, working for She later switched to the lab of Clarence Dow Chemical. She met her future husband UNC alumna was among Larson, a senior chemist in the Y-12 plant, there, and they settled down and had a “The Girls of Atomic City” where she worked on analyzing how family. who worked on the development thoroughly the enriched uranium was Her career took a major shift when of the first atomic bomb. chlorinated. she decided to go back to the University BY KIM WEAVER SPURR ’88 She had no idea she was working of Tennessee for a master’s in social work, for the U.S. atomic weapons program on Virginia Spivey Coleman developing the first atomic bomb — which transitioning from what she calls “hard (chemistry ’44) remembers would eventually be dropped on Hiroshima science to soft science.” She worked for Child and Family Services on a federally vividly the day a recruiter from on Aug. 6, 1945. funded project to fight sexual abuse. She Oak Ridge National Laboratory Coleman and other female scientists later helped to create Healthy Start, a in Tennessee came to UNCwere featured in the 2013 book The Girls program modeled after one in Hawaii that Chapel Hill to tell her about of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the an exciting opportunity. Women Who Helped Win World War II by educated young mothers about preventing childhood abuse. “She described Oak Ridge as being Asheville writer Denise Kiernan. Coleman still lives in Oak Ridge, is in this 90-square-mile reservation with free Kiernan wrote in the introduction that two book clubs and has been a member buses and movies and everything staying because of the women of the Manhattan of the League of Women Voters and the open 24 hours a day,” said Coleman, now Project, “a new age was born that would Smoky Mountains Hiking Club for over 50 96. “I took a train for the first time for an change the world forever.” years. Despite suffering from lymphedema, interview [in December 1943], and on the Social life at Oak Ridge was she walks around the circle in her way back it snowed and the train was six wonderful, with “five males to every neighborhood as often as she can, using hours late arriving. It was jammed with female,” Coleman said, laughing. “They her hiking poles. soldiers on leave for Christmas.” had dancing on the tennis courts every She last visited the UNC campus Coleman ended up taking the job, Friday night and the largest pool in the arriving at what was called “the bullpen” United States, and a cafeteria right across about 10 years ago, where she admits she for about six weeks while she waited for from my dorm where you could get a cup was a bit lost because of all the changes. Still, she said, “I always loved Chapel a mix-up in her clearance to go through. of coffee and talk,” she added. Hill.” Her first position was in human resources. Coleman graduated with an

Secret science

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university, I met people from all over the world, as well as people from North Carolina with profoundly different backgrounds from mine,” said Parham, a political science major. Those experiences help inform Parham’s commitment to drive “change and innovation through diversity and inclusion.” Since September 2018, she has worked as the Diversity and Inclusion Business Partner for Tech at Uber, a multinational technology company. “Overall, I would broadly describe diversity and inclusion, which are very different things, as focused on increasing access and opportunities,” said Parham. She said that her shorthand working definition is that • Monica Parham says diversity can’t “stick” without diversity is the “who” and inclusion, which makes people feel engaged and valued inclusion is the “how.” and creates a sense of belonging. “Diversity needs to be looked at through a wide lens that includes not only race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, and differing abilities — but also social mobility, socio-economic Monica Parham ’90 leads background, geographic diversity diversity and inclusion efforts and ‘pedigree’ — for example, what at the multinational technology schools someone has attended, and the company based in San Francisco. intersections of these elements,” she said. BY MICHELE LYNN Diversity, in turn, can’t “stick” without inclusion, which makes people feel Interning for a summer in the engaged and valued and creates a sense British House of Commons. of belonging, Parham added. Swimming in a brilliant blue “Neither is about just celebrating lake during an Outward differences, as both involve driving Bound adventure. Shadowing organizational-level, systems-based a drug surveillance operation. change to ensure that the organization’s These are just a few of the diverse workforce, workplace and approach to Morehead Scholar experiences that the marketplace reflect core values of profoundly changed how Monica Parham equity, access and opportunity for all ’90 views the world. talent,” she said. “Being an only child from WinstonParham joined Uber because of her Salem and coming to this large state belief that the tech space provides an

Driving change at Uber

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avenue to have a notable impact. “I was attracted to this position because tech is driving change, and I was excited by the challenges and opportunities of ensuring that the broadest range of talent has the opportunity to participate in and indeed lead that change,” she said. Before joining Uber, Parham ran a consulting firm, focusing on topics including diversity and inclusion, talent, professional development and leadership development. But first, she spent more than 20 years working for Crowell & Moring, a D.C. firm she joined in 1994, a year after earning a law degree from Yale. “Working in corporate law, I was often the only woman in the room, usually the only person of color and almost always the only woman of color,” Parham said. “In 2004, I started thinking about human capital — who is working in an organization and the perspectives they bring — and realizing that if you don’t have the right mix, you can’t optimize outcomes.” Knowing of Parham’s interests, the law firm asked her to take six months to set up its diversity and inclusion approach. That six months became more than a decade. When Parham was deciding whether to leave law to take the leap full time into the then-new field of diversity and inclusion, she reached out to a UNC Morehead classmate who referred her to a colleague working on related issues for an investment bank. “I am grateful for the power of relationships from my time at Carolina, including some that stem from when I first stepped on campus,” Parham said. “I pull from those experiences all the time.” Parham has been on the advisory board for Honors Carolina since 2016. “My service is part of a real desire to give back to Carolina and to share the experiences that I’ve had,” she said. “I want to show students that opportunities don’t just go to the selected few, and that you should feel empowered to go after the things you want. Carolina taught me to see and seize opportunities.”

Excelling in STEM and beyond. The Chancellorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Science Scholars Program promotes diversity and inclusion in science and technology fields by nurturing and supporting students from every background in their pursuit of STEM degrees and careers. Support CSS today: college.unc.edu/supportCSS

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Courtesy of Savannah Baker

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research assistant for Donald H. Baucom, the Richard Lee Simpson Distinguished Professor of Psychology. While Hicks didn’t study abroad until he got to Yale Law School, he does credit his time at Carolina with exposing him to the importance of a global mindset. “There were always global speakers and lectures on campus,” • ABOVE: Michael-Bryant Hicks created a scholarship to support first-generation students of color; it’s named for his he said. “Carolina is son, Marleigh. • RIGHT: Scholarship recipient Savannah Baker participated in an Honors Carolina semester in London. a microcosm of the world, and it is important for students to seek out and access as Igniting a global spark in students many different backgrounds and cultures as they can.” BY MEREDITH TUNNEY Scholarship recipient Savannah Baker ’20 of Kenansville, N.C., was motivated to do just that. Baker, who is majoring in want to take away any number of fears that may prevent political science and philosophy and minoring in social and a student — who grew up like me — from studying abroad,” economic justice, participated in Honors Carolina’s semesterexplained Michael-Bryant Hicks ’96. long study abroad program in London. It was the first time she Hicks is doing just that through the Marleigh Desmond had traveled internationally. “I felt like a little fish in a big pond Hicks Study Abroad Scholarship Fund, which has provided at times,” she said. “However, by successfully navigating this stipends for seven undergraduates. The scholarship supports experience I was able to learn valuable networking skills and first-generation students of color as they participate in a meet a new community of people who still continue to support University study abroad program. me.” Hicks, a corporate lawyer and former Fulbright Scholar, Baker added that she now feels more confident in stepping explained that the most rewarding aspect of establishing the outside of her comfort zone. scholarship is spending time with students. “At an event last semester, I reached out to a speaker who I “It’s important to be visible to those students like me — was interested in working with over the summer,” she said. “That especially minority students coming from rural North Carolina who may be thinking that their challenges in accessing a college five-minute interaction turned into a three-month fellowship at the Carolina Justice Policy Center. I do not think I would have education are unique,” said Hicks, who has been a member since 2007 of the Chancellor’s Global Leadership Council, which been confident enough to network in that way without my is charged with expanding and deepening the University’s reach experience in London.” Besides fostering a global mindset, Hicks hopes that the to people and institutions around the world. Hicks cherishes the Marleigh Desmond Hicks Study Abroad Scholarship Fund is University and continues to challenge Carolina to become an “helping to ignite a spark in students — a spark that helps get even more inclusive environment for students of color. them on their way to pursuing experiences that may change the During a dinner with his scholarship recipients in fall 2018, course of their lives,” he said. he identified with a lot of the sentiments they shared —“no one Hicks’ passion for international experiences is something in my family has ever left the country” and “no one in my family that he is now passing on to his son, Marleigh, for whom the has a passport,” he said. scholarship is named. Marleigh is in sixth grade and fluent in Coming from rural Forsyth County just outside of Mandarin and Spanish. Winston-Salem, N.C., Hicks was the first in his family to “My son is growing up much differently than I did,” Hicks graduate college. While at UNC, he benefited from mentors said. “He’s had summers abroad in China and Ecuador, and I see who encouraged his participation in campus life. He became how valuable it is for him. I want all students who come from involved with several student organizations: the NC Fellows backgrounds like mine to have exposure to opportunities like Program, the Black Student Movement’s Gospel Choir and these.” Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. A psychology major, he served as a

“I

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inspired her philanthropy to UNC’s College of Arts & Sciences. At Carolina, Cowan was a member of Chi Omega sorority and Carolina Choir. In 2008, she co-led the campaign to establish the Chi Omega Distinguished Professorship; several years later, she funded a backstage green room in Hill Hall when it underwent a major renovation. Her continued generosity through the Cowan Family Foundation and campaign involvement led her to meet Karen Gil, then dean of the College, who inspired her to look for new ways to give back, which led to the Ann Rankin Cowan Lecture Series in her old department.

• ABOVE: Ann Rankin Cowan’s latest gift will establish a fund to support high-impact research. • RIGHT: Davie Hall, home to the department of psychology and neuroscience.

Seed funding will bolster innovative research projects in psychology BY ERIN KELLEY ’13

learning continue to inspire Ann Rankin Cowan (psychology ’75) to give back to Carolina. Cowan is an avid supporter of the arts and sciences and committed to passing down that tradition. Her most recent gift, supported through a planned gift and the Cowan Family Foundation, establishes the Ann Rankin Cowan Excellence Fund for High-Impact Research, which will help advance earlystage research projects in the department of psychology and neuroscience. The new fund will provide seed funding for scientists working in a variety of fields, including addiction, stress and mental and behavioral disorders. A Raleigh native, Cowan fell in love with Chapel Hill and UNC’s campus at an early age by going to basketball games and through the influence of a lineage of UNC faithful. In fact, 17 family members spanning three generations have graduated from Carolina. The Rankin clan holds an impressive 26 degrees from UNC and includes Morehead Scholars, editors for The Daily Tar Heel and a UNC Clef Hanger, a former president of the General Alumni Association and a former mayor of Chapel Hill. It was an abnormal psychology course during her sophomore year that led her to discover a passion for psychology. “Although I was always interested in the sciences, this course sparked my curiosity. To this day, I’m fascinated with human behavior and the why behind human behavior,” she said. However, it was her other passions as a student that first

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A family legacy of UNC alumni and a passion for lifelong

After the lecture’s immense success in bringing accomplished scholars to campus and hearing about their transformative research, Cowan knew she wanted to do more. Thus, the idea behind the Ann Rankin Cowan Excellence Fund for High-Impact Research was born. “I wanted to help get a project off the ground and then be able to ask, ‘what’s the next project?’ Five years from now, it could be something we’ve never heard of. To me, that’s what’s so exciting about this,” Cowan said. Cowan credits her late father, Edward Rankin Jr. ’40, with instilling in her a responsibility to give back. “He is my inspiration for all of this and encouraged me to give out of gratitude for the education and experience I received.” Cowan is a member of the Arts and Sciences Foundation Board of Directors, the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council and a proud parent of a 2012 graduate (also a psychology major and Chi Omega alumna). “Carolina opens your world, giving you a curiosity to go out and discover your passion and what you want to do with your life. How you choose to give back enriches your whole life and provides you with the platform to use your education and to continue it,” she said.

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Lifelong love of theater leads alumna to support PlayMakers’ artistic director BY MARY MOOREFIELD

Joanne Mills Garrett, who holds

Kristen Chavez

three degrees from Carolina, planned to write a Broadway play one day. Garrett received an undergraduate degree in dramatic art in 1969, a master’s in biostatistics in 1978 and a Ph.D. in epidemiology in 1990. She was born just outside New York City to an extended family that included authors, composers, performers and managers in theater, opera and ballet. She describes them as “ordinary people, sitting around the kitchen table laughing, gossiping and • Joanne Garrett and her husband, Peter, are longtime fans of PlayMakers Repertory Company. kvetching about life’s problems. Some of their first dates were to PlayMakers performances. They just also happened to be doing PlayMakers presented new plays each year. During Garrett’s extraordinary things in the arts.” junior year, they chose to perform a one-act play that she wrote. During her 30-year career with the UNC School of “Then, during my senior year, [Pulitzer prize-winning] Medicine, she never got around to writing that play, but she has playwright Paul Green wrote a play to celebrate the 50th found another way to make her mark in dramatic art. anniversary of PlayMakers and asked me to be the stage Garrett and her husband, Peter (Ph.D. ’92), have created manager,” she added. “What an experience to get to work with an endowment to fund the producing artistic director position such an amazing legend! … I graduated with the goal of one day for PlayMakers Repertory Company, a position currently held writing a successful Broadway play.” by Vivienne Benesch. The fund will also provide support Garrett also enjoyed math and science, so despite her for PlayMakers through the production of new works and passion for the arts, life took a different turn. educational programming for K-12 students. “The practical side of me brought me back to school for my Garrett’s family moved to Asheville when she was 5. two graduate degrees,” she said. “The best part was meeting my “Asheville couldn’t have been a more wonderful place to wonderful husband, Pete, a physician who also returned to school grow up,” she said. “We made trips back to New York to visit to get a Ph.D. Through the years, we attended almost every family. While there, we attended Broadway shows and other season of PlayMakers. In fact, some of our first dates were going performances. It was the best of both worlds.” to dinner and then to PlayMakers’ performances.” Garrett continued cultivating that love of theater as a Garrett said her “very fulfilling career as a researcher, teacher student at UNC. and mentor to future physician researchers” was enriched by her drama education: “I once had an undergraduate drama teacher “Perhaps I could help launch a budding playwright, help a troubled young person say that teaching was not that different from performing.” Garrett retired from the School of Medicine in spring 2018. learn how to express feelings though “For the first time, I began to consider how to spend the drama or establish opportunities for remaining phase of my life. Maybe it was too late to get that play creativity in a world that seems of late written, but I thought that I could still give back by leaving a to have forgotten the indispensable values legacy with PlayMakers,” she said. of humanities and the arts.” “Perhaps I could help launch a budding playwright, help a troubled young person learn how to express feelings though “I dabbled in many different courses,” she said. “Then I discovered PlayMakers. It was exactly what I needed — a smaller drama or establish opportunities for creativity in a world that seems of late to have forgotten the indispensable values of community of talented, creative, congenial people. I found a humanities and the arts.” whole new family.”

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# T h r o w b a c k O R A L H I S T O R Y F I E L D W O R K Students conduct interviews as part of the folklore curriculum in 1975. Christopher “Kip” Lornell (M.A. folklore ’77) is holding the boom mic for an interview with the last black medicine-show performer, Arthur “Peg Leg Sam” Jackson, who was featured in the documentary Born for Hard Luck. The curriculum in American studies began in 1967-68 and was one of the first interdisciplinary programs at UNC. It became a department in 2008. However, one of its concentrations, folklore, dates to 1940, when Carolina was the first institution in the nation to offer a graduate degree in that discipline. Do you have memories of your time in folklore, American studies or conducting oral history interviews? Email us your stories at college-news@unc.edu. (Photo courtesy of North Carolina Collection, University Libraries.)

What will be your Carolina legacy? Jewell Maye Mull never walked the tree-lined paths of the UNC campus— instead, she spent many years working in hosiery mills in Valdese, N.C., to provide a Carolina education for her only child, Joe Mull ’67. Before she died at the age of 83, she made sure that generations of college students would enjoy the kind of learning opportunities her son had by documenting a bequest to the College of Arts & Sciences. The Jewell Maye Mull Fund has supported some of the brightest minds at Carolina for nearly 20 years, including Katy Citrin ’17. Katy is working to advance the science on how blood vessels function, which has implications for treating cancer and other diseases.

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Two major awards for computer science faculty and Mohit Bansal have won prestigious awards for their research. Alterovitz, professor of computer science, was recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology. Alterovitz’s research focuses on robotics for medical applications. With support from the National Institutes of Health, Alterovitz and his research group are developing a new medical robot that can enable earlier, less invasive and more accurate diagnosis of lung cancer. Bansal, an assistant professor of computer science and director of the UNC-NLP lab, received a Google Focused Research Award in natural language

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Computer scientists Ron Alterovitz

• Ron Alterovitz won a presidential award for his research focusing on robotics for medical applications.

processing to fund exploration of spatial language understanding. The award will be split evenly between Bansal and a colleague at Cornell University. Through the Focused Research Awards program, Google supports a small number of multiyear research projects in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community.

• A new research center will better position UNC students to be discerning information consumers.

New UNC research center to address 21st-century digital media questions

For the first time, social media surpassed newspapers as a news source for Americans last year. Nine in 10 Americans say they get at least some of their news digitally, and U.S.

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Bansal also received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award. The CAREER program is among NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

consumers are expected to spend more time looking at their mobile devices than at their televisions by the end of the year. What does that mean for the way we make sense of the world? A new center at UNC-Chapel Hill will explore that issue. With $5 million in support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Carolina will establish the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Drawing on some of the world’s leading experts in information science, media and journalism, communication and law, CITAP will answer defining questions about the changing nature of society and politics in the digital age. An additional $750,000 contribution from Luminate and $600,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will expand the center’s impact and better position UNC students to be discerning information consumers. “We’re in a time where anyone can create information and put it out on the internet. Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors, fake news — these things are all rampant,” said Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and one of four faculty members leading the center. CITAP will combine a variety of disciplines and research methods to understand digital media’s impact on people, communities and social systems.

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Summer conference unites Jane Austen fans, scholars

Kristen Chavez

“There are ways in which certain avenues of BY KRISTEN CHAVEZ ’13 research have blossomed before my eyes and ane Austen’s works have inspired made me want to expand films and television shows, sequels and be more invested in and spin-offs, and even tabletop roleinterdisciplinary projects,” playing games. She and her beloved she said. novels have been celebrated annually One of her students, with the Jane Austen Summer Program, Brett Harris ’21, hadn’t read organized by English and comparative Pride and Prejudice before literature faculty and graduate students. this course, but he and his The conference, which celebrated its classmates were tasked with seventh year, covered the legacies of analyzing an adaptation. Austen’s works with this year’s theme of He chose Unmarriageable “Pride and Prejudice and its Afterlives.” by Soniah Kamal, one of JASP is part academic conference the conference’s invited and part fan convention, offering authors. screenings of popular adaptations and Knowing that the an evening Regency ball alongside author of the book he reposter presentations, teacher searched could walk by his workshops and plenary sessions. poster at any time created English and comparative literature an added layer of exhilaraassociate professor Inger Brodey, who tion and anticipation. Hearco-founded the conference with fellow ing from Kamal directly at professor James Thompson, appreciher author Q&A reaffirmed ates the atmosphere that JASP fosters. his analysis of her book. “I don't view it as just academics “The fact that I was bringing information to the public,” said somehow on the same Brodey. “I really think the public plays a wavelength with this huge role in bringing these things to life woman who wrote this for the academics. amazing book was mind“I think this is an embodiment of blowing,” Harris said. what public humanities should be.” Though the conference An undergraduate summer has explored all of Austen’s session course is taught alongside the novels, and now one novel’s conference. This was graduate student multitude of adaptations, Michele Robinson’s first time teaching JASP will continue to “Studies in Jane Austen.” Although explore the world and life • TOP: Soniah Kamal, who penned an Austen adaptation, was she has participated in some capacity of the author in 2020. The one of the authors invited to this year’s conference. She co-led a each year, including leading panels and conference’s existence creative writing workshop with UNC professor Randall Kenan. • performing in theatrical skits, teaching proves the longevity of MIDDLE: Undergraduate Brett Harris presented his research on gave her the opportunity to approach Austen and her work, Kamal’s work. • BOTTOM: Attendees are encouraged to dress Austen’s works in a multitude of ways, inviting fans and scholars in period clothing for the Regency Ball. she said. alike to return to her texts or Robinson, an English and create their own spins. a single book can resonate and be recomparative literature Ph.D. candidate During her Q&A, Kamal spoke of the imagined for people of different times who is also pursuing a women’s and universality of certain themes in Pride and and backgrounds. gender studies minor, believes JASP Prejudice that acted as an inspiration for “It really speaks to the power of reinvigorates her own research about her own adaptation. This was something adaptation.” how women are defined by spaces in Harris noted in his experiences with the ➤ Watch a video at magazine. Victorian literature. adaptations and remarked on the ways college.unc.edu. Kristen Chavez

Kristen Chavez

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Physician-entrepreneur to lead convergent science efforts

global entrepreneur, has been named executive director of convergent science. King, a Morehead Scholar and a Rhodes Scholar, has deep Carolina connections. He grew up in Chapel Hill as one of the children of long-time English professor Kimball King and served as adjunct faculty at the UNC School of Medicine from 2001 to 2002. He has an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. King spent 16 years with his family in Rwanda, serving with his wife, Louise Rambo King, also a UNC alumna (B.A. history ’88) and graduate of Harvard Medical School. When they arrived in 2003, they were the only doctors at a hospital serving over 300,000 people and that had been abandoned following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. After restoring the hospital and its affiliated health centers to a staff of over 500, King founded Amahoro Energy to provide renewable electricity to the growing Rwandan economy. He has been supported by the U.S. government’s Power Africa program and, more recently, founded Great Lakes Pipes, which uses U.S. technology to manufacture large diameter fiberglass pipes for East Africa. He has received millions of dollars in global grants to support his work. King will help develop the new Institute for Convergent

Louise Rambo King

Caleb Kimball King (B.A. chemistry ’82), a physician and

• Tar Heel Caleb King brings experience at the intersection of science and entrepreneurship to his new role.

Science, which will be a partnership of the College of Arts & Sciences, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovate Carolina. The Institute will enable Carolina’s brightest minds to tackle the world’s most complex problems across disciplines, speeding the application of new discoveries and the commercialization of technological breakthroughs. “So many of my life’s experiences have prepared me for this service to Carolina,” King said. “I’m looking forward to connecting with those at the forefront of their fields and being part of the work to keep building up the University and the state.”

PlayMakers’ Benesch is Broadway bound

Vivienne Benesch, producing artistic director

Alison Sheehy

of PlayMakers Repertory Company, will make her Broadway directorial debut next spring with the New York premiere of Noah Haidle’s play Birthday Candles. The play will star Debra Messing and begins preview performances on April 2, 2020, with opening night on April 21 at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre on Broadway. Birthday Candles follows Messing’s Ernestine Ashworth as she celebrates decades of birthdays surrounded by an evolving array of family members and a cake-in-progress. • Vivienne Benesch “I don’t know how I came to be the one to help bring this gorgeous, moving, funny, profound new play to life,” said Messing on Instagram, “But I am vibrating with joy. Birthday Candles by Noah Haidle, produced by the legendary Roundabout Theatre, directed by one of my oldest, dearest friends from NYU Grad, the extraordinarily talented Vivienne Benesch — and you’ve got the greatest gift I can imagine.” Messing’s enthusiasm is perhaps only matched by Benesch’s: “The fact that this production will reunite me with my graduate school classmate Debra Messing, in a role that suits her like a silk glove, is icing on-the-not-so-proverbial cake!”

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Mellon funding supports environmental humanities

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has

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awarded a $150,000 two-year grant to pilot a consortium of four research institutions and their public partners to study coasts, climates and the environmental humanities. The Coasts, Climates, the Humanities and the Environment Consortium (CCHEC) is a partnership of Louisiana State University, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia and UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as an alliance of regional stakeholders. “This opportunity to collaborate institutionally has the potential to transform individual partnerships into ongoing pipelines between our institutions and communities,” said Elizabeth Engelhardt, a co-principal investigator on the grant. She is interim senior associate dean for fine arts and humanities in the College. “Moreover, the issues we are discussing demand that we work to scale. The problems are large; our partnerships need to be equally ambitious. This effort promises to be.” Research into the diversity and complexity of coastal zones and cultures through the medium of environmental humanities approaches is growing rapidly in context of climate instability. CCHEC engages the sea and land grant missions of its member institutions via two initial clusters: “Coasts, Archives and Climates” and “Coastal Futures and the Public Humanities.” These clusters will engage diverse community groups, students and faculty in projects that study the environmental history and impacts of storms and tidal waters on a series of specific locations. Each cluster will integrate archival research with public engagement in order to create humanities-informed models of understanding for contemporary and emerging challenges.

New College initiatives tackle difficult topics

Under the leadership of Interim Dean Terry Rhodes, the College of

Arts & Sciences launched two new initiatives this fall designed to foster community and understanding. “Reckoning: Race, Memory and Reimagining the Public University” supports student learning and discussions about heritage, race, postconflict legacies, politics of remembrance and contemporary projects of reconciliation. Students enrolled in one of the 18 participating courses are examining Carolina’s complicated history in the context of U.S. and global histories. Courses include “Class, Race and Inequality in America,” “Race and Memory at UNC,” “Arabic Sources on American Slavery” and “Modern South Africa.” Although the courses have their own unique subject matter, all 800plus students in the initiative will read three selected texts and attend thematically linked lectures, films and other events. At semester’s end, students will present their research at a Reckoning forum. They will practice difficult conversations, gain a vocabulary for engaging in the moment and connect diverse fields of study to current issues. The second initiative is “Countering Hate: Overcoming Fear of Differences.” Like others across the country, the UNC community has experienced painful incidents of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The College will present programming, and in spring 2020, courses aimed at better understanding these troubling phenomena. “Countering Hate” kicks off with a signature event — a Nov. 7 lecture by Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College. The talk will be at 5:30 p.m. in the FedEx Global Education Center’s Nelson Mandela Auditorium. ➤ Learn more at college.unc. edu/reckoning and college.unc.edu/ counteringhate.

• RIGHT: Elizabeth Engelhardt

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to help one another in ways that transcend their differences. President Carter’s oped reinforced the stories I’ve seen in communities and countries all over the world when volunteers and homeowners • Rosalynn Carter, former President Jimmy Carter and Habitat CEO come together Jonathan Reckford answer questions during a 2018 Habitat build to make their project in Indiana. communities stronger,” said Reckford, who was Carolina’s 2019 Commencement speaker and BY COURTNEY MITCHELL ’01 has deep “When the waters rise, so do ties to Carolina. His father, Kenneth our better angels,” Jimmy Reckford, was a longtime faculty Carter, 39th president of the member in the classics department. United States, wrote following One of Reckford’s children is a Carolina Hurricane Harvey in 2017. graduate, and another is attending UNC“Pick a past disaster, and I’ll tell Chapel Hill this fall. you at least a dozen stories that stand In his new book, Our Better Angels: as living testaments to our collective Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change compassion, generosity — and unity.” Your Life and the World (Macmillan), Carter was referencing Abraham Reckford recounts many of those Lincoln’s first inaugural address, in stories, anchored by seven key virtues which he asked a divided nation to he’s seen embodied through Habitat: forget their differences in favor of “the kindness, community, empowerment, better angels of our nature.” Carter’s joy, respect, generosity and service. nod to this sentiment stuck with Habitat for Humanity was founded Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat in 1976 and exists in all 50 states and for Humanity International and a 1984 70 countries to help qualifying families political science graduate. He had built attain strength and stability through and repaired many homes with Carter, affordable housing. Selected families one of Habitat’s biggest champions complete hundreds of hours of “sweat and a close friend. Together they had equity” to build or renovate their traveled to disaster sites all over the homes, aided by local volunteers. Those world and had seen the compassionate families, in turn, often become long-term response that so quickly follows. volunteers for other builds. “After a storm, you immediately The UNC-Chapel Hill Habitat for find people who are making sacrifices Humanity chapter has helped to build

Seven life-changing virtues, from the CEO of Habitat for Humanity

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more than 45 homes in association with Orange County Habitat since 1994. In 2011, the chapter received Habitat’s Campus Chapter of the Year Award. The book, which features a foreword from Carter, offers a glimpse into how a Habitat build brings a community together. “These seven virtues are all elements of the kind of community we want to be part of, but we don’t always feel,” Reckford said. “I give examples small and large that show anyone can have an impact, and the call to action is this idea that everyone has something to give and something to gain, and it can change the world.” In one story, a woman turns the heartbreak of her financial struggles into a passion for helping others, volunteering with her children at a Habitat build even though her own family’s housing situation is dire. Eventually, she and her family work toward their own Habitat home and continue building others. In another story, Vietnam veterans return to that country to build homes with families impacted by the war, inspiring catharsis and connection amid shared sadness and pain. “All these pieces connect,” he said. “Underneath generosity is gratitude. And, when you have gratitude, it’s much easier to serve, respect, empower, build community, embrace others. At the heart of it all is the feeling of being in community with our neighbors that transforms our lives.” Reckford hopes readers will realize the possibility that lies in working with others on causes they love. “Habitat started from a small group in rural Georgia over 40 years ago, and it has brought 22 million people safe, decent housing over time. These are the things that can happen when people look outside themselves and embrace these virtues.” ➤ Find more books by College faculty and alumni at magazine.college. unc.edu.

Donn Young

FINALE

• ABOVE: JJ Bauer, teaching assistant professor in the department of art and art history, helps illuminate the stories behind Carolina’s buildings in a book on campus architecture. • RIGHT: This whimsical sketch by John Allcott of ballroom dancing in Smith Hall (now Playmakers Theatre) is featured in the book.

Places and spaces An updated version of art professor John Allcott’s seminal The Campus at Chapel Hill: Two Hundred Twenty-Five Years of Architecture was published this fall. The 1986 book is filled with historical photos, rare documents, Allcott’s whimsical sketches and stories of some of the people behind the buildings, which date back to 1793. An addendum by JJ Bauer, visual resources curator and teaching assistant professor in the department of art and art history, showcases seven significant building projects since 1986. Asked to sum up the look and feel of the University since then, Bauer responded, “Clearly tradition still has a stronghold.” “Even with as modern a building as the FedEx Global Education Center or the Genome Sciences Building, you recognize elements of tradition. The red brick, for instance, is

a constant. But on a philosophical level, one of the things that makes the campus so attractive is all of the open plazas and spaces for just hanging out,” she said. “This idea that it’s about making places and spaces is still very much a part of UNC-Chapel Hill.”

➤ The book is available through the Chapel Hill Historical Society and local bookstores.

NONPROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID UNC–CHAPEL HILL THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL CAMPUS BOX 3100 205 SOUTH BUILDING CHAPEL HILL, NC 27599-3100

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