When Shekinah Elmore started medical school in 2010, she approached it with a mindset uncharacteristic of most first-year students: To do her best, and if her best wasn’t good enough, then that was okay. “I think the overachiever types who often go … Read more

For more than 10 years, the UNC Center for Galápagos Studies has been a hub of collaborative research activity spanning many disciplines, with the potential to impact the globe. Diego Riveros-Iregui and Amanda Thompson, the center’s new interim co-directors, strive … Read more

Upon discovering a series of political cartoons mocking artists in 18th– and 19th-century France in 2010, UNC-Chapel Hill art historian Kathryn Desplanque couldn’t stop searching for them. Now, she has amassed more than 500 and is using them to redefine … Read more

Most UNC-Chapel Hill PhD students oversee their own research projects for their dissertations. But Kriddie Whitmore did it in a foreign country — and with the added challenges of a language barrier, bad weather, and limited equipment. This past summer, … Read more

“They’re a little competitive when they play,” jokes Diane Youngstrom, who stands next to her sister Kay as they watch their parents from the porch of their family home in Chapel Hill. A snap sounds, and Eric leans over the … Read more

Through community radio and podcasts, Maria Gutierrez strives to preserve her ancestral language and identity — that of an indigenous people from Michoacán, Mexico, called the P’urhépecha. Maria Gutierrez is descended from the P’urhépecha, an indigenous group from a region along … Read more

Through study of a “new” Japanese religion called Tenrikyo and centuries of Japanese history, doctoral student Timothy Smith strives to understand how cultural shifts morph belief systems across generations. The bronze felt cold and gritty under Timothy Smith’s hand. He … Read more

Since 1984, over 100,000 Karen refugees have fled their homeland of Myanmar to escape civil war. Since then, more than 40,000 have resettled in the U.S., and more than 5,000 live in North Carolina. Such displacement greatly affects lives, and … Read more

With nearly 1 billion speakers, Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. That’s almost 15 percent of the global population — and why UNC Asian studies professor Yi Zhou has spent the past decade teaching advanced Mandarin … Read more

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