Research News

Jason Black, chair of the Department of Communication Studies, in early 2020 received a Fulbright award in support of a cross-cultural study of the indigenous mascotting controversy in Canadian and U.S. cultures of sport. Black was based at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, when the COVID-19 pandemic cut his trip short. Yet, he’s stayed on track to publish his second book on mascotting issues.

Despite the critical nature of authorship to researchers, their institutions and the public, just 24% of U.S. doctoral-granting universities with very high or high research activity have published institutional authorship policies, UNC Charlotte researchers Lisa Rasmussen and George Banks and their colleagues have discovered.

As people react to the 2020 U.S. presidential election results, we have turned to the animal kingdom to see how animal societies make decisions and resolve conflict. We asked CLAS researchers to consider what we can learn from animal societies. Alan Rauch, an English professor, earned degrees in zoology and literature, and he studies and writes about dolphins. Stanley Schneider, a biologist, studies honey bees and their hive behavior. Anthropologist Lydia Light researches gibbons and other primates.

A mentoring program co-led by UNC Charlotte researcher Sandra Clinton that aims to retain undergraduate women in the geosciences is on the shortlist for the international Nature Research Awards for Inspiring and Innovating Science. The program also has received almost $3 million in new NSF funding.

A multi-discipline, multi-university project housed at UNC Charlotte and led by political scientist Jason Windett seeks to develop an easy-to-search hub of vast amounts of data on life-affecting issues, complete with analytical tools for easy visualization of the data.

As pandemic restrictions begin to lift and cities start to bustle, we take a closer look at UNC Charlotte research into urban intensification and its impact on forest birds. This study by UNC Charlotte landscape ecologist Sara Gagné with two alumni and a colleague suggests ways to help forest birds in cities.

Colleen Hammelman, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant to study population change and gentrification in urban foodscapes. Her five-year funding is expected to total $461,555.

Since 2012, the somewhat unusual research pairing of a geologist and mechanical engineer at UNC Charlotte has led to some important scientific results, and has recently earned recognition of their work with a top award for interdisciplinary research and publication.

As communities relax COVID-19 restrictions, a study by UNC Charlotte geographer Eric Delmelle and two of his former doctoral students could provide decision-makers with timely data about spikes in COVID-19 cases to help guide their decisions.

An interdisciplinary team from UNC Charlotte has received a $29,000 Research Grant in the Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the project “Arts-based social mobility: Exploring cultural capital in Charlotte, NC.” Sociology Associate Professor Vaughn Schmutz will lead the team, which includes faculty and staff from the College of Arts + Architecture.

UNC Charlotte’s Gerald G. Fox Master of Public Administration program and Clinical Health Psychology doctoral program in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have earned high marks in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings.

When the Jamil Niner Student Pantry opened on campus in 2014, professor Nicole Peterson decided to focus a research project on campus, working to determine the depths of the food insecurity problem on the UNC Charlotte campus.

Two infants unearthed in ancient burial mounds in Salango, Ecuador were buried wearing helmets crafted from the skulls of other children, in what researchers believe was a unique practice perhaps intended to protect the infants’ souls during their journey to the afterlife. The research team – composed of UNC Charlotte’s Juengst and Abigail Bythell and Richard Lunniss and Juan José Ortiz Aguilu of Universidad Técnica de Manabí in Ecuador – published their findings in November in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Unemployment significantly increases the odds of men entering jobs traditionally performed by women. Notably, some men find real job advantages as a result, a study published in the journal “Social Science Research” by Jill Yavorsky of UNC Charlotte and Janette Dill of the University of Minnesota finds.

A book by UNC Charlotte history professor Karen L. Cox about Confederate monuments is one of the first four books under contract in the newly created Marcie Cohen Ferris and William R. Ferris Imprint for high-profile, general-interest books about the American South. Authors chosen are considered among the nation’s leading authors.

Researchers digging at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s ongoing archaeological excavation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem have announced a second significant discovery from the 2019 season – clear evidence of the Babylonian conquest of the city from 587/586 BCE.

Finds at the UNC Charlotte-led archaeological dig on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion confirm previously unverified details from nearly thousand-year-old historical accounts of the First Crusade. This is history that had never been confirmed regarding the five-week siege, conquest, sack and massacre of the Fatimid (Muslim)-controlled city in July of 1099.

Being an informed citizen in a democracy necessitates understanding the people who make, and will be affected by, community decisions. The Civic Eats project seeks to help create a better informed Charlotte citizenry through a focus on the connective potential of foodways – or why we eat, what we eat, and what it means.