News

Mary Jo Shepherd, public policy, and Jinglin Li, computing and informatics, are the 2016 recipients of the Graduate School Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. The award is presented annually in the categories corresponding to the national competition jointly sponsored by Council of Graduate Schools and ProQuest Dissertations Publishing​.

As Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, people worldwide converged around TVs to witness the devastation of an iconic city and government’s response to the storm. This catastrophic, life-altering event served as a pivotal point in UNC Charlotte researcher Cherie Maestas’ career.

The soil in the ancient Cyprus field is the color of parchment paper and packed hard. On an early summer day with temperatures that creep toward 100 degrees, UNC Charlotte researchers Steven Falconer and Pat Fall carefully dig through centuries of archaeological sediments, inch by painstaking inch.

Students in UNC Charlotte geologist William Garcia’s classes can imagine they have stepped back in time to the Mesozoic era, as they follow an interactive path of dinosaur footprints newly installed on the university campus. His students and others on campus are now able to step outside the customary lecture-based classroom setting and participate in a hands-on, kinesthetic learning experience.

In the fragile pages of recipe books from the early modern period, UNC Charlotte researcher Jennifer Munroe and her students find traces of life and death. They decipher the words and absorb the daily struggles and joys of the women who created these chronicles of life between 1550 and 1800. These books are much more than repositories for recipes. Through the process of transcription, scholars worldwide are digitizing images of each page of old books, transcribing the vocabulary and script and publishing the content in online databases for the world to study and share.

Five UNC Charlotte students are attending the two presidential nominating conventions this summer – one as an elected delegate and four through an academic program with The Washington Center. Four of the students are pursuing majors or minors in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, while the fifth is a finance major in the Belk College of Business.

Girls Rock Charlotte, a July summer camp that aims to amplify confidence and boost self-esteem through the power of rock music and leadership lessons, is giving young girls a positive voice. While the initiative is not a formal UNC Charlotte program, it draws many of its leaders and volunteers from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the university.

UNC Charlotte students are learning research and debate skills through their participation in the North Carolina Student Legislature. The statewide student legislature provides students a chance to participate in a model General Assembly. Through this process, the students gain valuable insight into how the state engages in policymaking. They also learn to express their own beliefs and ideas with confidence.

UNC Charlotte Professor Emeritus Ted Arrington has won third place in Common Cause’s second annual Gerrymander Standard Writing Competition. Arrington’s paper presented criteria for determining when districting arrangements so distort the process of translating votes into seats in a legislature that the process or the redistricting plan rises to a constitutional violation.

UNC Charlotte researcher Margaret M. Quinlan and colleagues received a regional Emmy® nomination for Creative Abundance, a film that explores how art can redefine vocational opportunities and expand the lives of people with developmental disabilities. Quinlan, an associate professor in Communication Studies and core faculty with the Interdisciplinary Health Psychology doctoral program, is a co-producer on the film.